Jain Journal 1982 04

Author(s): Jain Bhawan Publication
Publisher: Jain Bhawan Publication

Page 40

APRIL, 1982
173
he had no money even for his next meal, he used to play host every evening to a group of lively friends, singing love ballads and making light-hearted conversation. At the age of 55, as a committed religious leader among the Jains, one of the most solemn and ascetic of religious groups, he still had this irrepressible effervescence of character. "I often break into a dance when I am alone”, he confesses at the end of his tale, as he gives his readers a short resume of his present te adding that he loved to act the jester and could not resist telling tall tales when in the right company.
The Ardhakathānaka has been called the life of a common man, a man belonging to the middle class. And certainly Banarasi lived a life closer to the common lot than the other Mughal memoir writers with whom we are familiar. We get from him a rare flavour of how it must have been to live and work as a modest merchant in Mughal cities, travel on the adventurous Mughal roads, buy and sell in the precarious Mughal markets and suffer sudden, unwarranted persecution at the hands of corrupt Mughal officials or whimsical Mughal emperors.
...Banarasi's story is an invaluable witness to the pervasiveness of the community in the life of an individual. His community defined his manner of life as well as his interests, demarcating also the social
ena within which he had meaningful human relations. The people he loved and befriended, those from whom he learnt or those he taught, his partners in business, those amidst whom or with whom he worked and those with whom he had dealings, were all, with few exceptions, people of his community. Even his enemies and opponents, people with whom he fought with any zeal or against whom he harboured any passionate resentment, were fellowmen belonging to his community. The social world beyond was, in comparison, shadowy, uncertain, even uncanny. It was a world he had to come to terms with but which was outside the enclosed little universe to which he could respond with warmth, sensitivity and understanding. It tended often to shade into the senseless when it eluded his scheme of meaning and he could not quite fathom its workings. Twice during his life time, his community had to face severe and arbitrary persecution at the hands of the Mughal rulers.
llow clansmen and traders had to flee from Jaunpur with their lives, biding time till things returned to normal once again. Banarasi seems only half aware of the reasons for the sudden atrocities which were cruelly unleashed on his fellow merchants, nor did he really care to enquire. These were for him events as senseless as a natural calamity and to be borne as such with patience and fortitude