Gathering the Threads

Abstract

This article investigates autobiography as an improvisatory mode of religious speech in pre-colonial South Asia, arguing (i) that autobiographical writing in early South Asia is marked by great spontaneity and invention of form in the absence of a proper literary genre; (ii) that we can discern distinctly South Asian ways of speaking autobiographically, ways that predate and differ from modern European understandings of autobiography and (iii) that autobiographical speech is used as a powerful technique for religious polemic in South Asia and appears in particular at moments of heightened religio-political competition and contestation. Along with a number of examples, two texts will be explored in greater detail: autobiographies by a seventeenth-century Jain merchant and religious reformer Banarasidas and a nineteenth-century Christian priest and convert from Islam, ‘Imad ud-din.