(Published in the Times of India, November 12 2026)
Autobiographies are not for everyone. George Bernard Shaw famously called them “deliberate lies”. Others sniff that the form is, ultimately, a tissue of selective memory and gossip—and if it tells truths, those truths are probably about other people. Why and when autobiographies are written is also an intriguing question. To “tell all”? Or because one is reduced to a “has been” whose only remaining capital is the claim to an eventful past? Then there are the titles: some are sarkari variants by dull, sarkari authors; others are bombastic self-acclamations, driven more by pomposity than any sense of proportion. For all that, autobiographies are an exceedingly attractive, powerful form of writing. Which is why, now and then, in a surplus of banal offerings, there appears a good, truly sparkling life story—a story worth telling.
Historically, human beings have always felt an urge to explain why they did what they did. You will spot this impulse in Ashoka’s millennia old edicts, and you’ll also see it in Sonia Gandhi’s recently released memoirs. But it isn’t just “important” people. Take bhakti literature: poetry by Janabai is devotional, yes, but her expression of said devotion takes a personal route, telling us also about her frustrations as a kitchen maid in the 14th century. Then there is Bahinabai, a contemporary of Chhatrapati Shivaji. His kingly deeds were extolled by court poets. But this ordinary woman’s ordinary life—with a violent husband, questions about sexism and bodily autonomy, and a critique of caste—comes to us via autobiographical verses in her own 17th-century Marathi writing.
That said, even with the great and glorious, autobiographies are a reminder of how, all said, they too were just people. Our textbooks speak, for instance, of Babur as emperor, warrior, and more in that vein. It is in his Baburnama, however, that we also see the person behind the roles—a young man who grew besotted with a boy; a head-of-the-household not immune to scoldings by mummy; and someone who was astonished to discover that women too enjoyed alcohol. His descendant Jahangir’s Jahangirnama covers wars, politics, and the usual, but also the emperor’s prodigious appetite for drinking, very familiar paternal grumblings about children, alongside a propensity for colourful language (a lot of folk Jahangir dislikes appear to have gone “to hell”).
To be clear, few write with the raw, cutting frankness that sets new standards for the form itself. Instead, autobiographies often carry a calculated, performative quality. Just read (or don’t) a standard presidential autobiography in the United States, or most Indian business leaders’ accounts of their lives. This does not mean that these books are devoid of value. For sometimes it is not what is in the text that matters but where the silences lie. Even in boastful, celebratory narratives, you’d be able to track anxieties, fears, and gaps in the fairytale. For future historians, in fact, self-congratulatory writings, judged against a wider arc of sources, are hugely useful—they outline how powerful people wished to be remembered, and what they preferred forgotten.
But there is also an enlivening quality autobiographies can bring to notions of the past. Take, for example, a seemingly sedate topic like Namboodiri Brahmin women’s lives in Kerala. There is no dearth of official sources: census reports, gazetteers, surveys, and so on, which tell us about their existence in purdah, with little education, and few choices. Yet these social pressures could also be subverted. Most Namboodiri women were not, for instance, permitted to read papers, magazines, and novels. Yet as Devaki Nilayamgode would write, they managed to do precisely this. How? By devouring all the contraband when secluded during their periods. Deemed “impure, and kept away from the gaze of male relations, for a few days these women were able to flout the rules in peace.
It is a small detail, but proof of agency at the heart of a patriarchal set up. And this fascinating nugget would have slipped through the formal archives were it not for a Namboodiri woman’s autobiography. Some, it is true, will dismiss this kind of writing as one-sided and frivolous. And autobiographies can certainly be both. Yet, in telling one’s life story, one also tells the world something about navigating it—and how perhaps others too could find their way. This is why as much as autobiographies have traditionally fixated on success, increasingly what moves readers is reflection, and a willingness to show vulnerability. The world is a tough place for everyone, and somewhere, learning about other people’s travails prepares us to persevere, nonetheless.
At the end of the day, though, autobiographies are all curated, potted accounts of oneself—no matter which period one examines, this has typically been the case. The question to ask, then, is what sets apart the better type of autobiography from the mediocre sort. It is not the extent of minutiae or quantum of detail, though these have value. It is not how comprehensive the book is, or if it is newsy. Instead, the mark of a good autobiography—centuries ago and today—is its willingness to be honest. Not just before the reader, not just in the eyes of posterity, but also to oneself. And it is to satisfy this yearning for honesty that most of us keep reading the form, even when often what makes it to the shelves is the same old thing once again.
