Dhyana Battisi

Author(s): Jerome Petit
Publisher: Hindi Granth Karyalay

Page 5

Introduction
Banārasīdās (1586-1643) was a trader and a poet. He was born into a family of Śvetāmbara Śrīmāls in Jaunpur, a city near Varanasi that had its heyday under the Sharqi dynasty in the fifteenth century. Its militarily and cultural greatness was, at the end of the sixteenth century, overtaken by the dynamism of Agra which the Mughals had chosen as the capital of their empire. It was his grandmother and his father as a young boy who had found refuge in this city on the banks of the Gomati River after the death of the grandfather. The latter had been the supplier of a powerful warrior of Emperor Humayun, who confiscated all their belongings after his death. From Biholi, a village in the district of Rohtak (to the north-west of Delhi), mother and son went to Jaunpur where they met family. Here grew Kharagasen, Banārasīdās's father, here he learned to trade, here he married and
gave birth to our author.
Banārasīdās had an anti-conformist youth, which made the misfortune of a father
whose sense of duty was very strong. He spent most of his time immersed in his two passions, reading and love. He received the education of a basic middle class young man. He learned grammar, poetry, astronomy and arithmetic under the auspices of a Pandit and he learned trade directly on the stall market with his father. A Svetāmbara monk also taught him the principles of Jainism, which first made him a devout attached to the ritual. Because of his curious mind and thirst of knowledge, the challenge of this ritualized religion was not long coming and Banārasīdās turned first into a pseudo-Saivism, deceived by a false ascetic who promised everything as long as he would devote himself to the daily worship of a conch ... Seeing that nothing happened and instead accumulating misfortunes, he returned to the family religion and followed the Svetāmbara ritual with a renewed zeal.