Contents · 3 sections · 2 min
Rakesh in Three Ideas
the essentialsThe artist and the one left behind
In Āṣāṛh kā Ek Din, Kālidāsa leaves his village and his beloved Mallikā for fame at the court — and returns to find their world gone.
The incomplete human being
“Ādhe Adhūre” — halfway, unfinished: every man and woman searching for a completeness no one person can give.
A language for the stage
He created a natural, poetic spoken Hindi for theatre, between Sanskritised literary prose and Bombay film speech.
Mohan Rakesh is the father of modern Hindi drama and one of the leading writers of the Nayī Kahānī. His three plays — Āṣāṛh kā Ek Din (“One Day in Ashadha”, 1958), Laharõ ke Rājhaṁs (“The Royal Swans of the Waves”, 1963) and Ādhe Adhūre (“Halfway House”, 1969) — gave Hindi theatre a modern, psychologically searching drama and a natural yet poetic stage language, and remain among the most performed plays in India. His stories (“Malbe kā Mālik”, “Miss Pāl”) and novels (Andhere Band Kamre, “Closed Dark Rooms”, 1961) explore loneliness, failed relationships and the urban middle class.
Life
Born Madan Mohan Guglani on 8 January 1925 in Amritsar, he studied Sanskrit and Hindi in Lahore, taught in Bombay, Shimla, Jalandhar and Delhi, briefly edited the Hindi magazine Sārikā, and then lived as a freelance writer — one of the first in Hindi to do so. His personal life, with two broken marriages, informed his treatment of love and marriage. He received the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award (1968). He died in Delhi on 3 December 1972, aged forty-seven.
The plays
Āṣāṛh kā Ek Din imagines the life of Kālidāsa, the greatest Sanskrit poet. In a Himalayan village, on a rainy day in the month of Āṣāṛh, the young, unknown Kālidāsa loves Mallikā, who believes in his genius and sacrifices her reputation for him; her mother Ambikā despairs. Summoned to the court of Ujjayinī, Kālidāsa leaves — and becomes famous, marries a princess, and is sent to govern Kashmir. Years later, disillusioned, he returns to the village on another rainy day; Mallikā, impoverished, married to a man she does not love, with a child, has kept every page he wrote in a blank book she made for him. He realises what he has lost and leaves again into the rain. The play is a meditation on art, ambition, love and the cost of greatness.
Laharõ ke Rājhaṁs, about the Buddha’s half-brother Nanda torn between his beautiful wife Sundarī and the call of renunciation, explores the conflict between desire and spiritual longing.
Ādhe Adhūre, set in a cramped middle-class Delhi flat, is a devastating portrait of a disintegrating family: Savitri, a working wife who supports the household, despises her unemployed husband Mahendranath and turns to other men in search of the completeness her husband lacks — only to find each of them equally “half, incomplete”. In a celebrated device, one actor plays all the men in her life. Its frankness about marriage, money and sex made it a landmark of Indian theatre.
In conversation
- “Ādhe adhūre” — incomplete people searching for completeness in each other.
- Mallikā’s blank book — the love that waits while genius goes to court.
- Āṣāṛh kā ek din — the rainy day of first love, and of return.
Curiosities
did you know?- His real name was Madan Mohan Guglani.
- Āṣāṛh kā Ek Din (1958) is often called the first modern Hindi play; Mani Kaul filmed it in 1971.
- He died suddenly at forty-seven, leaving the play Pair Tale kī Zamīn unfinished.
Questions to Argue About
debate club →- Must the artist abandon those who love him to fulfil his gift?
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