Early Hindi and Urdu Poetry.No. IV.

Extract

Banārsī dās of Jaunpūr belonged to the Jain community and was born in 1586. The following charming extracts are taken from his most famous work, Arddh Kathānak, an autobiography completed in 1641.

His wonderful power of word painting is exemplified in these passages. The first describes the commotion in Jaunpūr when the news of Akbar's death was received in 1605. We feel the spell of the description, and tremble with the frightened populace. This picture should be compared with Zaṭallī's account of the turmoil after the death of Aurangzeb. (See below.)

The second tells of the Black Death, bubonic plague, in Agra during 1616, the first time the city was visited by that pestilence. Anyone who has been in India during a plague epidemic will realize the force of his words, the rats dying, the spread of the disease among the people, the glandular swellings, the sudden deaths, the mortality among the physicians, the despair and flight of the townsfolk afraid even to partake of food.