Friendship and the social life of merchants in South Asia: the articulation of homosocial intimacies in Banarasidas’ Ardhakathanaka

ABSTRACT This article explores the emotion of friendship among merchant communities in early modern South Asia. Based on the autobiography of a Jain merchant, Banarasidas, it argues that friendship as an emotion was invoked in multiple social contexts, sometimes to reinforce normative boundaries, and other times to subvert them. Even so, friendship was always multivalent, and extended beyond dyadic relationships. The social outreach of friendship was crucial in reinforcing community and kin ties. In the case of merchant communities, friendship played a crucial role in trade and business activities and very often it was the sentiment of friendship that sustained business partnerships. Friendship also ensured trust among merchants, enabling the free flow of goods and services in early modern South Asia. The autobiography of Banarasidas, Ardhakathanaka is written in versified Braj language. In exploring the text for emotion history, I have also looked at the relationship between language and emotions. Written in a vernacular language, the text combines literacy with performativity and this, I argue, imbues the text with a specific language of emotions that is intense, sensorial and embodied. At the same time, the choice of genre and its relations with emotions is no less significant. Within an autobiographical genre, emotions serve as indices to the constitution of selfhood. The articulation of friendship in Ardhakathanaka allows Banarasidas to situate his social self within a thick web of intimate relationships. Focusing on Ardhakathanaka, this paper looks at the entangled relationship between the choice of language, style and genre, and the articulation of specific emotions. Even as emotions are not entirely constituted in and through discourse, I still wish to suggest that language and emotions are co-dependent entities.

story but was actually produced in performance. My paper argues that in Banarasidas' Ardhakathanaka, the description of the self often becomes a means for articulating his emotions for friends, family and members of the community. In this context, any narration of the self becomes an emotional activity, for the author/narrator defines their selfhood in terms of dependencies, networks, agency and relationships.

Introducing the text and the author
Banarasidas' Ardhakathanaka is a story about the struggling life of a North Indian Jain merchant in Mughal India. Banarasidas does not provide us with a narrative of the social and political situation of the times, but he does give us a glimpse of a merchant's life, and an indication of his norms and values, in early modern South Asia. This makes the Ardhakathanaka important not only from the literary point of view but also as a historical record. The text is placed within the 'spaces of city bazaars, crooked streets and routes of trade and commerce', 13 giving the reader a rare glimpse into the life and work of a merchant living in Mughal cities. The text provides the reader with a detailed narrative on the ongoing and flourishing cloth and jewellery trade in medieval Jaunpur and Agra, the eventful and often dangerous journeys undertaken for purposes of business and the networks of alliances built in the process, the spiritually elevating experiences in the course of visiting pilgrimage sites, the working of the Mughal system of justice and the high handedness of petty officials are some of the significant descriptions, among others that we get from the text.
Banarasidas was fifty-five years old when he wrote his autobiography and called it the Ardhakathanaka, or 'Half a Tale'. According to an ancient Jain tradition, the total life span of an individual is one hundred and ten years and so at fifty-five years, Banarasidas thought that he had completed half of his total life span. Instead, he died two years after the completion of his 'Half a Tale' and so in a way Ardhakathanaka becomes almost the 'complete story' of his life. Banarasidas, as mentioned earlier, was a Jain merchant born in the enterprising clan of the Srimals. The Srimals were originally believed to be Rajputs, who after converting to Jainism, had given up their warriorlike ways and involved themselves in business and commerce. They were a large and prosperous community, with a visible dominance in most of the prominent towns and cities across the Mughal Empire. Some of these Srimals also held significant administrative positions in the Indo-Muslim courts. Banarasidas was a witness to the order and stability in the Mughal Empire under the rule of emperor Akbar. His childhood and adolescence were spent in Jaunpur, a town situated on the river Gomti and well known for its industrial and commercial activity. Banarasidas's father, Kharagsen had a thriving business in Jaunpur where he traded in gold, silver, pearls, rubies and the dust of precious stones. 14 Banarasidas had a close but difficult relationship with his father. Banarasidas' repeated failures in business and his inability to grasp the mechanisms of trade and commerce was always a huge source of disappointment for his father. However, despite the troubled relationship between them, Kharagsen remains a very significant character in the Ardhakathanaka, and this was probably because his representation allowed him to better articulate his identity and selfhood. As has been argued by Mana Kia, in her work on friendship in the Persian literary culture, 'the self is dependent on social relationships for actualization'. 15 If his relations with his father, as also with other members of his household, were discursive tropes that helped him articulate his subjectivity, so were his feelings for his friends. To the question, 'Can the Pre-modern Speak?', Taymiya Zaman argues that the genre of life-narratives in the Mughal period should actually be read within collective interpretive frameworks for it is within and through networks of relations that the subject finds meaning and agency. 16 In our text, Banarsidas repeatedly invokes, at crucial moments in his life, the strength of his bonds of friendship. The feeling of friendship is crucial to his self identification, and his meaning of life, virtue and purposeful existence.
In understanding the emotion of friendship, we also need to be attentive to the language of the text, in particular the choice of words and phrases, narratives of intimacies and literary allusions. As it is, Banarasidas had an eye for fine literature, and was trained in the formal discipline of poetry such as the art of rhetoric and metrics. His literary skills are evident from his commentaries and translations of several Jain philosophical texts like Samaysar Natak, Gommatsaar and Dhyanbattisi and Adhyatam ke Gita, among others. The narrative structure of his autobiography has an evolving character, in which, moving through phases of hedonism and excess, he arrives at a place of spiritual fulfilment and is drawn towards adhyatma, a kind of a 'protest movement' among the Jain community which rejected rituals, and emphasized the need to renounce material pleasures for spiritual growth. 17 It has been suggested by Eugene Vanina that for this change in his life, he might have been influenced by the Bhakti Movement, owing to the growing popularity of bhakti saints in the North Indian plains, the centre for Banrasidas' trading activities. While this seems a reasonably valid supposition, my interest here lies in the significance he assigns to his intimate relations, in particular his friendships, in leading him towards adhyatma. 18 This is important: his return to the spiritual path was not a result of self introspection, but a function of his friendships, a consequence of his intimate feelings for his friends.
Banarasidas' Ardhakathanaka is perhaps the first autobiography in India to have been written by a common man. The autobiographical tenor can be found in some earlier works as well but they all revolve around the lives of kings, nobles and aristocrats; far from the realities and struggles of ordinary life. On the contrary, Ardhakathanaka narrates the mundane travails and tribulations of everyday life and the efforts common people made to overcome them. Banarasidas 22 On the other hand, Chloe Martinez has examined Banarsidas' narrative style and argues that 'a close reading of the text reveals his inner spiritual conflicts and reflects some kind of a spiritual experimentation and quest.' 23 My effort here is to read the text to recover the emotional world of merchant communities in early modern South Asia. With a focus on the life-narrative of a Jain merchant, I look at the merchant community as a 'feeling community', and hope to examine their emotions in terms of the social history of the period. I rely here on Barbara Rosenwein's concept of 'feeling communities', 24 but I also borrow insights from work on emotion history that engages with emotions with a view to recover the nature and intensity of community identities. 25 We know from recent studies on the history of emotions that emotions are not just sensory responses, but emerge from experiences, which are in turn shaped by practices, episteme and memory. This is succinctly put by Margrit Pernau when she says: 'knowledge about how a society is organized, which categories matter for identification and self identification and how these categories overlap or are mutually exclusive shape social and political practices and bring about the reality in which they believe . . . emotions translate knowledge into actions and practices by providing the motivation and necessary drive.' 26 Of course friendship operated within an arena of diverse interactions and practices and it is for this very reason that scholars like Christian Bailey refers to friendship as a 'social emotion'. 27 The diverse vocabulary used to refer to a 'friend' and the notion of 'friendship' in the Hindi language alone is vast and diverse -yaar, dost, saathi, saheli, mitr, hamdard, bandhu, akka, etc. and reflects an interconnection between friendship and other social institutions and practices including kinship, romantic and erotic love, political alliances, etc. 28 In this context, it is actually irrelevant to ask if friendship for Banarsidas was a structure of feeling or a set of practices. There is actually no theoretically engaged discussion in the text on the merits of friendship, but the emotion of friendship emerges from concrete practices, in socially defined contexts and their linguistic articulation.
In the early modern period, argues Allison Busch, Hindi was not a standardized literary medium, and functioned as a fusion of several dialects, lacking the linguistic boundaries that define it today. 29 Since the standardizing imperatives of the modern nation-state were absent during the early modern period, the linguistic terrain of Hindi was populated by several languages and dialects. 30 Moreover, the literature composed within courtly settings had its own tradition bound norms, finer nuances and linguistic sophistication. Riti 31 poets, however, regardless of their birth place or native idiom, wrote their Hindi texts in a specific literary dialect, the Brajbhasha. In due course of time, Brajbhasha became so popular at the Mughal court that it became a medium of communication between the imperial Mughal centre and the diverse religious, cultural and mercantile communities. 32 The development of new genres and literary practices in the North Indian regional languages 33 not only created an alternative to the literary expression of the more 'classical' cosmopolitan language like Persian but also provided a platform to people beyond the court to express their ideas and worldviews. It is within this vibrant cultural economy of the period that one can place Banarasidas' work.

The emotion of friendship: terms, meanings, contexts
The notion of 'friendship' in the Indo-Islamic world was closely tied to the practice of alliancemaking in the political domain. Several attempts have been made by historians to place the language of friendship within the larger network of court practices -'gift-giving, 34 feast and fosterage, 35 grieving and commemoration in death, 36 letter writing' 37 and so on. My effort here is to look at the representation of friendship in a context removed from courtly cultures, and see what did a friend mean to a common man in the Mughal period. In doing so, I also hope to see if imperial courtly practices and discourses of friendships converged, or the extent to which they diverged from an ordinary merchant's perceptions of friendship. Lastly, I also hope to look at the range and reach of friendships in the text; in other words, are the friendships discussed by Banarasidas bivalent, operating as an exclusive closed loop, or are they multivalent, influencing a wide range of social relations.
Banarasidas discusses his relations with both men and women in a language that is invested with deep emotions. Even so, the representation of friendship is primarily seen as centred on homosocial spaces, and while there are intimacies that are attributed to heterosocial relations, they don't enjoy the status of friendships. Friendships in homosocial spaces are presented as sites of sociability that serve to reinforce intimate relations. Since these ties of friendship are articulated within the community more or less, they serve to reinforce community identities. At the same time, since Banarasidas was writing as a practicing Jain, ties of friendship also served to reinforce identities based on shared faith, as well. The important point here is that friendship as an emotion was crucially linked to the reproduction of social identities and community solidarities.
Banarasidas uses a diverse vocabulary for the emotion of friendship and for friends: saajhi 38 (companion), mitr 39 (friend), yaar 40 (friend) and even preet 41 (lover), and meet 42 (beloved). Similarly, words like hit sau, 43 paraspar pyaar 44 and neh 45 have been used to convey the relationship of friendship in the text. This multiplicity of terms represents a diverse semantic network contesting the fixity of emotions conveyed by the terms used for a friend or friendship. For instance, both meet and yaar are terms used for friend, but the latter is used for an elderly relative or for someone who is higher in social status. It rather highlights the fact that friendship was a relationship that infused a variety of emotions -affection, trust, pleasure, respect and love. The analytical advantage in trying to understand friendship as an emotion is that it unravels a range of human interactions that are sometimes obscured under the word 'friend'. It is evident that all friendships were not akin to each other, but they reflected a varied range of intimate/emotional responses; instantaneous affection, love, respect, warmth, sympathy etc. Once we pay a closer attention to the linguistic diversity in the text, we can distinguish between the various strains in the emotions of friendship: friendship as a relationship, friendship/friendliness as a feeling, and friendliness as a disposition. It is also worth reminding ourselves here that the emotion of friendship was entangled with a range of other intimate feelings, such as those of familial affect, eroticism and love. While disengaging the feeling of friendship from other intimate emotions may seem neat and tidy, it is historically erroneous. It is the complex entanglement of the emotion of friendship with familial affect that is, for example, suggested in Banarsidas when, in verse 161 of the text, he uses the word anaath, meaning an orphan, for someone who was without a friend: ' . . . . . . kou kahuki saran, kou kahu anaath' 46 ' . . . some found shelter with others, some were (alone and friendless like an) orphan.' 47 The emotions of friendship were elaborated in socially informed contexts, and here it is instructive to situate the Indian merchant's perception, as presented in Ardhakathanaka, with the early modern Persianate world. In this mobile and itinerant world, individuals drew on extensive socio-economic networks in search of knowledge, patronage, employment and wealth. It is clear that friendships were not essentially personal closed relationships between two individuals; rather friends were expected to help each other actively in their pursuit of education, mercantile opportunities, employment and patronage. They were solicited for advice, preferment, recommendations, introductions and contacts. Rather than an exclusive private relationship, therefore, friendship was an open-ended, potentially ever-expanding network. It should have served to demonstrate to potential allies and rivals, trading partners and agents the extent to which one was embedded within the web of alliances, allegiances and support networks. However, as argued earlier, friendship, while it might have these functional registers, was also intensely emotional. In a mercantile world that was 'arguably not organized through market principles, relations of trust, reputation and commitment were the very sinews of market life-the ways in which, to use the old economic anthropology, the economy was "experienced".' 48 Merchants forged economic relationships through distinctive languages of trust and sociability. As Flatt rightly points out, 'true friendship in this world was not merely a textual matter, but one that had to be lived and practiced through activities undertaken together.' 49 Business partnerships and mercantile ventures were some of the activities that served to initiate and reaffirm friendship alliances. The following section, therefore will try and emphasize the point that when read through the lens of emotional history, Ardhakathanaka reveals diverse emotions for different friends, for different occasions, covering different registers.

The world of Banarasidas and his friends
Banarasidas made many friends during his lifetime and depended on them a great deal both for companionship and partnership in trade. He had to remain away from his family for long periods of time to establish his business in towns like Agra etc. where his friends provided him support and company. During the final period of Banarasidas' life, when he wrote his autobiography, his closest companions were friends who shared with him his heterodox religious views. His closest, most intimate friend was Narottamdas Khobra, the grandson of Bainidas and also a merchant like him. Their association with each other began as a business partnership in the city of Agra but ended up in a close friendship. The interesting thing here is that both friends described their friendship by borrowing a vocabulary used to describe intimate relations in the household. Banarsidas described him as his 'brother' (bhai), and Narottam referred to Banarasidas as his family and his true father; ' . . . .tu bandhav tu taat.' 50 Business activities crucially depended on the strength of relations, and among the relations that mattered, friendships were perhaps the most significant, often indistinguishable from familial and household ties.
Both friends travelled together to many cities -Allahabad, Jaunpur, Benaras, etc. -to set up their business together. They also travelled together in shared spiritual journeys, 'offering puja at the temple of Lord Parshvanath in Benaras, and taking vows of fasting and abstinence. They vowed together to eat only twice a day, to give away half a paisa everyday for charity, to chant the namokar mantra at least once every day and to give up fifty kinds of green vegetables. They also took the oath of not marrying more than twice and not having relations with the wives of other men.' 51 This is a clear reflection of the fact that friendship was crucial in contributing towards an ethical selfcultivation. The ethical friend provided companionship and assisted the individual in sharpening his perception as well as in refining his character.
In studying the representation of the emotion of friendship in Ardhakathanaka we need to bear in mind the genre of the text, as well. 52 As David Arnold and Stuart Blackburn point out, 'life histories in India are a means for negotiating the irreducible dichotomy of the self-in-society; they are a narrative form for expressing and imagining an individual's existence, in terms of its associations with her/his community and caste groups, and household relations.' 53 Banarasidas'Ardhakathanaka too presents his life story as moving in a collectivity; with friendships and community relations not only shaping his material existence but also his thoughts, beliefs and worldviews. His work is 'bereft of an articulate individuality, in the sense of a presentation of the self that is in full control of his destiny.' 54 Banarasidas' story is an invaluable witness to the pervasiveness of friends and community in the life of an individual. His community had several intermingling dimensions; it was defined both by his merchant vocation and his religious beliefs, but most of all it was a closely knit network of related households. It was above all, to borrow Barbara Rosenwein's term, 'an emotional community', and as an emotional community, the emotions of friendship were crucial to the reproduction of community identity. It was indeed Banarasidas' mercantile and Jain background that dictated to a large extent his circle of friendships, and this explains the extreme sense of identification that he painfully seeks to emphasize, with his friends. For instance, Banarasidas writes the following verse for himself and for his two friends (Narottamdas and Thanmal Badaliya): 'teeno mitr bhaye ek deh. Din aur raat ekatthe rahe. Aap aapni batein kahe.' 55 The three friends became so close that it appeared as if they share a single body. They used to spend all their time together, be it day or night, and shared their experiences with each other. (translation mine) Narottamdas's father was against this friendship and he often used to use words like crooked, depraved (dushta), dishonest (kapati) and cunning (dhurta) for Banarasidas saying that he had entrapped his son with trickery and deceit. Despite this, Narottamdas not only continued his friendship with Banarasidas but the day his father insulted Banarasidas, Narottamdas fell at Banarasidas' feet calling him 'his family'(bandhav) and 'his true father'(taat). 56 From that day on Banarasidas felt so indebted and close to Narottamdas that he composed a verse in his praise which he says he would recite day and night like a bard. The verse gives us a hint about the qualities that Banarasidas appreciated in a friend: 'a believer in the supreme power of God', 'wise and learned (Didhgyan)', '(full of) beauty (roop), and (spiritual) wealth,' bearing 'no trace of conceit (abhiman rahit)' and 'a charitable disposition (daani).' 57

Navpad dhyan gun gan bhagwant ji ko Karat srijan didhgyan jag maniye Rom rom abhiram dharmalin aatho jam Roop dhan dham kam murti bakhaniye Tanko na abhiman sat khet det dan
Mahimandhan jake jasko bitan taniye Mahimanidhan pran pritam banarasi ko Chahupad aadi achharanh naam janiye. 58 'Navpad meditation, and praise of God, occupies this wise and learned man (Narottam); Acknowledge him as a man of steadfast knowledge. Religion occupies all eight watches of his day. He possesses immense beauty, and comeliness and wealth reside in him; Praise him as the very image of the god of love. No trace of conceit is there in him. Seven fields did he give away in charity; To the whole world, spread his fame. A man glorious and great, beloved as life to Banarasi-Make up his name using the first letter of each line.' 59 Interestingly, in the above verse, Banarasidas describes his friend, Narottam as 'pran pritam' ('my life's beloved') conveying his emotional bonding and a deep sense of attachment with Narottam. The word 'pritam' is commonly used for the beloved, and by using it for his friend, Banarasidas is trying to highlight the intensity of his emotions for his friend, Narottam. Furthermore, he blurs the distinction between the emotion of love or preet and that of friendship highlighting the fact that emotions cannot be compartmentalized, but should rather be seen as being closely inter-connected with each other.
Banarasidas composed another verse in praise of Narottamdas which he would recite 'day and night like a bard' which ended with the following sentence: 'A man, glorious and great, beloved as life to Banarasidas'. 60 Narottamdas not only helped Banarasidas in his hour of need but insisted that he stay with him in his house. Narottamdas considered Banarasidas to be his 'brother' (bhai), and they would eat together and 'were never separated from each other'. The word used for their friendship in verse 403 of the text is 'paraspar pyaar' 61 literally translated as mutual love/affection. Indeed, this reveals to us the intense attachment that often defined friendships, but what is particularly interesting is that Banarsidas describes his friend as his 'brother'. The way the figure of the friend is described as both a beloved (pritam) and a brother (bhai) indicates the range of emotions that friendships imbibed; at the same time, it reveals the malleability in emotions, and the extent of flexibility with which they were experienced for the merchant community in the period. Clearly, emotions emerging in the spaces of the household could be invoked to describe friendships, and this suggests that the feelings for a friend were also viewed as being tied to familial/household affect and feelings. One can then argue that the word 'friend' in the early modern period carried within it a range of human interactions and relationships.
Narottam and Banarasidas were rarely parted until Narottam's sudden and unexpected death in 1616. 62 Banarasidas describes his condition after his friend's, Narottam's death in the following words: Bahut bhati Banarasi, kiyo path mein sog Samujhave mane nahi, ghire aaye bahu log. 63 Banarasi expressed his grief loudly on the road for a long time, He was inconsolable and not ready to listen to anyone. Seeing him in this state, many people gathered around him. (translation mine) Thereafter, Banarasidas somehow tried to pull himself together to conduct his daily business. However, upon reaching home, he fell unconscious again. He wept for a long time, loudly lamenting his friend. Though Banarasidas's emotional collapse on the death of his dear friend seems natural, this emotional expression needs to be understood in its proper context. It was clearly not simply a biological reaction, but the reaction was based on experience and practice that reaffirmed the emotion of friendship. Relying on Bourdieu, Monique Scheer rightly points out that emotions need to be understood through 'the infusion of the physical body with social structure, both of which participate in the production of emotional experience.' 64 The important point that he makes is that, 'automatic behaviors, reflexes, spontaneous responses-categories to which emotions have traditionally belonged-are not " purely biological" or free of culture'. 65 Rather, they should be seen as 'emerging from where bodily capacities and cultural requirements meet. Individuals behave according to the patterns that their community (class, milieu, subculture) requires, but not just in the sense of deliberately learning rules of "appropriate" behaviour-as formulated in etiquette manuals-and "obeying" them'. 66 We are of course not interested in the truthfulness of his claims, but when Banarasidas claims to have fainted on hearing about the death of his friend, he is actually highlighting the social investment on feelings of friendship, and the expected bodily responses only serve to reflect how his community saw friends and practiced friendships.
Besides Narottamdas, the other friend that Banarasidas mentions in some details is Dharamdas. He was an Oswal 67 from Delhi and was doing a successful business in jewels and gems. He is described in the text as a degenerate (kaput); one with many vices and one who kept bad company (kusangati), spent money too freely and was addicted to opium (khove daam amal bahu khayi). 68 However, due to his successful business, a business partnership was formalized between Dharamdas and Banarasidas and they became friends (yaar). Banarasidas writes: Dou phire Agre maajh, karhi gast ghar aawahi saanjh. Lyawahin chuni manik mani, bechahi bahuri kharidahi ghani. 69 'The two would walk about the markets of Agra, Looking for deals all day, and return home only in the evening. They would buy the dust of precious stones, rubies and other gems, And run a brisk trade, buying and selling. ' 70 However, this business partnership only lasted for two years. Dharamdas' many vices like his addiction to opium, habit of wasting money and keeping bad company, 71 left Banarasidas dejected and dispirited (phir mann bhayo vishad) with his friend. 72 However, due to the good influence of Banarasidas' friendship on him, Dharamdas renounced his dissolute ways, and became a Jain recluse. This again reiterates the point made earlier that friendship enables individuals to lead a life of virtue and in becoming better human beings. There is also a suggestion here that good friendships take one to the path of self realization and moral uprightness. Indeed, friendship in Banarsidas' Ardhakathanaka has a moral quality, and enables individuals to lead a righteous and morally disciplined life.
Friends were crucial to his business ventures, and when he discusses the friends who helped him in his business, we get a clear sense of the socio-economic bonds and friendly alliances along with a sense of the multivalent and diffused nature of friendship in our period of study. Banarasidas was fond of poetry, and remembers with particular fondness the companionship of his friends in poetic assemblies. These friends like Pandit Devdutt 73 and Bhanchand 74 served to advance his literary and cultural tastes. They were the ones who were intensely disliked by the elders in his household and family. 75 They often used to warn Banarasidas by saying the following: Bahut padhe banbhan aru bhat, banikputra tou baithe haat. Bahut padhe sau maange bheekh, manahu put bade ki seekh. 76 It is only appropriate for Brahmins and bards to study so much while a merchant's son should sit in the marketplace A person who studies all the time will eventually go hungry. Son! Please listen to what your elders tell you. (translation mine) Despite the pressures of the community, Banarasidas did not pay heed to the advice of elders (mane nahi Banarasi) 77 and retained his passion for knowledge and learning throughout his life. This incident provides yet another instance of the educative, spiritually enriching and, above all, intense nature of friendship, for his interest in books was sustained by his friends. Though, as mentioned earlier, these friends were intensely disliked by his peers and elders in the family, but his relations with them still remained deep and strong. Clearly, the suggestion here is that friendship was stronger than community ties, and could withstand peer pressure. One of the things that is repeatedly indicated in our text is that friendship was a necessary resource in times of suffering and distress, and those who helped Banarsidas in difficult times, are often described as a friend. For instance, when Banarasidas became terribly sick and his body, like a 'leper' was covered with innumerable boils and blisters, a barber prescribed a cure and did not take a single rupee in return. After taking the barber's treatment, Banarasidas became well in two months. Thereafter, he gave the barber many gifts, and described him thus: tu mujhe mitr saman. 78 You are like a friend to me. (translation mine) This is an interesting piece of evidence; for Banarasidas here, forges friendship with someone outside his caste and/or occupational community. In all likelihood, this was simply a sign of his gratefulness for the barber. Even if his feelings were genuine, his vocabulary is very different; the terms that Banarasidas uses to describe such friendships in this case is very different from those he invokes, for instance, to discuss his relationship with Narottamdas Khobra who was a merchant like him, and functioned in similar socio-economic settings. For instance, as mentioned earlier in the paper, while he describes Narottamdas as his bhai, bandhu and taat, Banarasidas does not repeat these expressions for the barber. Since he was there for Banarasidas during his time of need, he was still his friend (mitr). Though the author's tone towards him remains compassionate and full of gratitude, but the usual emotional vocabulary he uses for his other friends is absent here. Banarasidas writes: Iss avsar nar napit koi Aukhad puri khbave soi . . . 79 'At this point a barber prescribed a cure He gave Banarasidas medicines to take.' 80 Nahai dhoi thhade bhaye, de nau kou daan . . . 81 'Banarasidas rose from his sickbed, bathed and dressed, and now fully recovered, Gave the barber many gifts.' 82 Napit bhayo prasann ati Gayo aapne dham . . . 83 'The barber was very pleased And returned home content. ' 84 In the above verses, Banarasidas never even once mentions the barber's name but only his profession. This probably suggests that friendship had hierarchies, based on caste and class differences. The barber did indeed become his friend, but not one who merited mention of his name in his autobiography. It can be deduced from the above examples that Banarasidas' response to particular friendships was determined by his background. Since he was a product of a society that was structurally hierarchized, his response to his friendships with people from within his caste/ community and profession was much more intimate and sincere. Therefore, social hierarchies defined the emotional limits of particular friendships.
In some versions of friendship in Ardhakathanaka, the relationship is represented as one in which friends hang out together and share each other's time and space. The affinity among them leads to the effacement of all differences, and a sense of absolute identification. This is how Banarasidas describes his relations with Narottamdas and Thanmal Badaliya in Agra. The three of them hang out together all the time, attending marriage celebrations, visiting temples, playing sports, etc. spending all their time in pleasure and amusement. Their friendship was so intense that they were like, 'three friends in one body' (teeno mitr bhaye ek deh). 85 Among the other friends who Banarasidas mentions in the Ardhakathanaka, one of the earliest is Bhagwatidas, in whose home in Fatehpur he stayed for a while sometime towards the end of 1598. Bhagwatidas was the son of Basu Sah, an Oswal and a member of the Adhyatma movement. His friendship drew Banarsidas towards the movement, and led him to renounce religious rituals. As he says: Karani kou ras miti gayo . . . 86 I lost all interest in religious rituals and practices . . . (translation mine) The discussion on the author's friendship with Bhagwatidas reflects an important attribute of friendship; it was supposed to lead to spiritual guidance and in the company of friends, one witnessed spiritual enlightenment. In order to understand how the 'self' is narrated into being through forms of friendship (as mentioned earlier in this paper) it is significant to understand the importance of the Adhyatma Movement for Banarasidas and for the various friendships he forged with people during this period of spiritual enlightenment. The final period of Banarasidas' life drew him to 'heterodox' beliefs as part of the Adhyatma Movement. This 'heterodoxy' was reflected in his break with his family and the rejection of set rituals and practices. The movement had a strong bearing on him and he regularly met friends belonging to this group in order to discuss matters of common spiritual importance. These spiritual friendships created a sort of a belief community for Banarasidas. The Ardhakathaknaka does not mention about these friends, where even Adhyatma has been merely touched upon. However, it is from Banarasidas' other work, Samayasaranataka (A doctrinal poem on Jain spiritual thought written in Agra a few years before Ardhakathanaka) that we get details about this shift in his religious beliefs. 87 These five friends of Banarasidas (Pandit Rupchand, Kanwarpal, Dharamdas, Bhagvatidas and Arathmal Dhor) shared the same spiritual views and often discussed Jain texts, doctrines and the innermost spiritual experiences. Banarasidas' first contact with Adhyatma occurred when he met Arathmal Dhor in Khairabad. Apart from Pandit Rupchand, who was a professional scholar, the other four friends of Banarasidas were all Jain businessmen like him. Banarasidas headed this group of Adhyatmis and he called it the Adhyatma Saili. 88 Clearly, in the community oriented frameworks for the articulation of faith, there was a category of friends that was seen as constituted by cotravellers in the road to shared ritual and spiritual practices. Banarasidas' heterodox views as part of the Adhyatma Movement created a belief community and he drew his friends from within this community, as well. Though this movement lasted only a century after Banarasidas' death, its precepts are still followed by the Terapanthis, a small sect of Digambar Jains. 89 Dhor gave Banarasidas many books to read on the spiritual and philosophical aspects of the movement which became a turning point in Banarasidas' life: 'He lost faith in rites and rituals, which no longer held any meaning for him. A desire for renunciation (vairag) began to arise within him. During this time, he composed the Gyanpachisi, in which he wrote about the meaning of knowledge and the Dhyanbatisi, where he pondered upon the path to meditation. He also composed songs of spiritual life and became so disillusioned with rituals that he would even eat the food placed as an offering to the gods.' 90 Thereafter, he composed many poetical tracts like the Suktimuktavali, Adhyatam Battisika among others as well as many ashtaks and songs. 91 Following his transformation, one gets a sense that Banarasidas increasingly saw as one of the objectives of friendship to inhere in the intensification of piety and devotion. In insisting on friends as sources of spiritual transformation, the text presents the body as a porous entity and the relation between friends is mutually infectious; if your friend is good, you also become good and virtuous. 92 Banarasidas in his text also repeatedly draws a distinction between a 'good' and a 'bad' friend; a good friend is one who draws his friend towards virtue and piety. Even in Persian moral philosophy, the term 'sadiq' is used to specifically refer to a sincere or a true friend in contrast to those with selfish motives for friendship. 93 This makes an argument for continuity of labour and role of friendship in ethical self-realization from the early modern to the modern periods. At the same time, devotional activity was a communal activity, and became a rewarding one in the company of genuine friends. There is therefore, a huge investment in friends as being integral to any kind of spiritual activity. The intensity with which the emotion of friendship is identified in the Ardhakathanaka with a kind of a spiritual activity indicates that Banarasidas considered friendship and spirituality as mutually constitutive.

Conclusion
In the concluding part of his work, Banarasidas enumerates his virtues and worthwhile attributes (gun), and this is followed by another list of what he sees to be his weaknesses and unworthy qualities (dosh). Among his good qualities, he specifically talks about him being a pleasant person to talk to and one who shows friendship towards all (Mithhbola sab hi sou preet). 94 Friendship was not just a relationship, but was also tied to norms of civility and appropriate behaviour. Based on my reading of Banarasidas' autobiography, I have argued that in early modern South Asia, friendship was not a closed dyadic relationship, but was an open-ended activity and was situated within a polyadic frame of reference. It co-existed with, and was never severed from, forms of social associations based in household and community ties. Even as friendship was seen as imbued with sincerity and selflessness, it was not seen as a relation that was averse to protection and promotion of mutual interests and aspirations. In several concrete contexts, apart from pious intentions, friendship was socially viewed as an interested activity, intending to serve and protect mutual interests and aspirations. At the same time, since the body was a porous entity, the influence that a friend potentially had over a person was considerable. It was therefore necessary to be careful in the choice of friends; a good friend could take you to heights of spiritual perfection, and one needed a friend for spiritual fulfilment, as well. The emotion of friendship was tied to emotions emerging from household spaces and intimacies, and so our text finds references where a friend is mentioned as a 'brother' or a 'father'. It was equally expressed in the language of erotic love, and we found references where Banarsidas describes his friend as his 'beloved'. The differences in the articulation of the feelings of friendship were a function of the varied socio-cultural contexts; they were also a result of the fact that the emotion of friendship emerged from practices. Friendship was not a structure of feelings, immobile and invariant; it was more appropriately a set of practices.