- Lived:
- c. 580–650 CE · Prītikūṭa, a brahmin village on the Śoṇa (Son) river in what is now Bihar → the roads of northern India, then the court and marching camps of the emperor Harṣa
- Field:
- Sanskrit prose — court poet and biographer; author of the Harṣacarita, the first full-length biography of a living Indian king, and of the Kādambarī, Sanskrit's most celebrated novel
- The Big Idea:
- Biography — the shaped, truthful-enough story of one real, still-breathing human being — enters Indian literature with him; and the man who invented it opened his masterpiece by telling the worst stories about himself first.
- In their words:
- "My youth indeed was not without those follies which are not directly inconsistent with either world — so far I will not deny; and my heart on this point will confess a feeling of repentance." (the Harṣacarita, translated by E. B. Cowell and F. W. Thomas, 1897)
- If you remember one thing:
- Sanskrit says bāṇocchiṣṭaṃ jagat sarvam — "the whole world is Bāṇa's leftovers," because he described everything before anyone else could — and the poet who ate the world introduced himself, on page one, as an orphan who blew his inheritance running away with a travelling circus of poets, gamblers, monks and snake-doctors.