Kalidas, in the rain

‘If you’re given an honour, accept it. Otherwise, what’s poetry worth?’ Poetry’s worth and the price of patronage: that dilemma which persists today, prizes and recognition notwithstanding. On it spins noted Hindi writer Mohan Rakesh’s seminal 1958 play, Ashadh Ka Ek Din or One Day in the Season of Rain, as it came to be called in the accessible English translation of this Hindi theatre pioneer, authorised by the writer’s estate. How to live and write in this India, how to reconcile city and hometown? The title is derived from the opening of the great Sanskrit poet-playwright Kalidas’ play Meghaduta, and in his incarnation in this play, Kalidas is a very real, fallible man, yet remains aloof. This is part of the lasting appeal—also the source of controversy, around this unusual depiction of weaknesses, if fictional, in a man we look up to.

Winning the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award for best play in 1959, this landmark in Indian theatre was staged by leading directors such as Ebrahim Alkazi, Satyadev Dubey and Amal Allana, and adapted into an award-winning film directed by Mani Kaul (1971). It took its place alongside other great theatrical works such as Dharamvir Bharati’s Andha Yug and Girish Karnad’s Kannada classic Tughlaq, and Rakesh’s other plays (Laharon Ke Rajhans or The Royal Swans of the Waves and Adhe Adhure or Half Formed, Half Unfinished) appeared in the 60s, expanding on the postcolonial urban present.

A lot of the literary acclaim comes from its recognition as the first modern Hindi play (critics such as Nemichandra Jain, who described it as ‘in a true sense the beginning of modern Hindi drama’, and Namvar Singh who declared that Rakesh had ‘proved for the first time that drama is an art worth taking seriously’, are cited in the Preface).

And what makes it so modern? Critics like Aparna Dharwadker, who collaborated with co-author Vinay on this scholarly translation, argue that the newness is in the play’s unprecedented moves to depict the new Indian reality through innovations of form, language and stagecraft; marking it as ‘a radical postcolonial intervention in the multiple Indian and European discourses that had developed during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries around the authorial figure of Kalidas, classical Sanskrit literature, and the ostensible power of a past “golden age” to shape a national literary and cultural renaissance in the present’. What greatness, and to what end, asks this timeless work.

For, the three acts of this neat, symmetrical drama all begin in the humble abode of Kalidas’ muse Mallika and her mother Ambika, in what the translators believe to be the fifth century. Its walls made of wood and plastered with clay, Hindu swastika symbols painted ‘here and there’, the house has simple rooms and a small, wood-burning clay stove, reed mats and clay jars relieved only by a wooden seat with a tiger skin draped over it. One can’t think of a more classical setting for the enactment of turmoil, providing the perfect arena for the clash between hearth and court. That we see Mallika first enjoying the monsoon in abandon, drenched in rain, is a wonderful bridge to the 50s. And so it begins.

Living an idyllic if overly idealistic life in the foothills of a Himalayan town, the proud poet is in love with beauteous Mallika, a virtuous maiden who is as indivisible from this land as he once thought he was. Now, the stubborn bard must choose between bucolic obscurity and considerable recognition in the court of the king, in urban Ujjayini.

“Opportunity doesn’t wait for anybody,” his friend Nikshep reminds Mallika, when the courtiers come calling. “If Kalidas doesn’t leave this place, the court won’t lose anything. The office of court poet won’t remain vacant. But, for the rest of his life, Kalidas will remain what he is today—a local poet! Even the people who’re praising A Gathering of Seasons today will forget him in a short while.” Sound familiar?

Though the two central figures are sweethearts, things are more complicated than they seem: Kalidas has sworn not to marry and there has already been much talk. Ambika and Kalidas’ dark alter-ego, Vilom, try to plead with them to follow convention, but like Kalidas, Mallika is adamant about the purity of what they have. “I’ve followed an impulse and chosen one emotion out of many. For me, that one bond is greater than all other bonds. I’m really in love with my emotion—which is pure, tender, eternal.” This is the book’s other ultimate concern: the realm of true feeling, and that of logic and practicality. I can’t think of anything more pressing and real, and that the playwright should discuss this in relation to a man whose life’s work, ironically, is putting down the human experience is particularly valuable; we are too often accustomed to the hypocrisy of artists.

Unwilling to be bought but aware that he must not ignore such an honour, try as he might, Kalidas is torn—so Mallika, unable to leave her natural home and knowing he does not want to wed, is forced to make his choice for him. What she does not reckon for is the inevitable worldliness of the new Kalidas, who emerges in Act 2 as Matrugupta, wedded to a princess. Or her slow slide into penury and melancholy, punctuated by the periodic appearances of Kalidas’ works every few years, delivered by travellers.

Mallika is heroic, annoyingly so, perhaps as befits her time, though her tenacity is uncommon even for the virtuous woman. Even she, however, is forced to exclaim at her misfortune, at last: “You once wrote that a single flaw hides itself in a crowd of virtues, just as the moon’s blemish hides itself in a multitude of rays—but destitution can’t hide itself. It can’t hide itself even in a hundred good qualities. Not only can it not hide, it overshadows a hundred good qualities— destroys them, one by one.” These are the kinds of truths Rakesh offers within his story of love and impossible ideals.

For, our hero forgets Mallika, does not visit her even when he returns to plunder his homeland and take everything from its deer to stones with him to Kashmir, where he must rule. The stuff that once made up his lifeblood is now rendered exotic, to be simulated by strangers as he is commodified by fame; his land can be immortalised only in his exile.

When a chastened Kalidas returns to Mallika eventually, it is predictable that it is in some sense too late: ‘time cannot wait’, he realises. The blank palimpsest presented by Mallika—who now belongs to someone else but remained faithful to their ideals—is keen evidence of the unavoidable messiness of life, however. That is some small satisfaction. Gazing at the worn pages on which he should have written his greatest work, Kalidas proclaims: ‘An epic has already been composed on them—an epic with an infinite number of cantos.’

The tale itself is beautifully simple, refreshingly non-stylised and even possessed of comic relief—visiting aesthetes Rangini and Sangini discover that their rural counterparts are not sufficiently different, and officials who spend half an hour analysing the conditions of a living room change exactly nothing. In this edition, the Dharwadkers (who first translated the play for performance in 2009) have put together an exhaustive context to its existence. A map shows us the classical and modern geography of Ashadh, a detailed chronology of Rakesh’s life and work, diary entries, pertinent letters, dramaturgical notes, and a thoughtful introduction and foreword. For Rakesh enthusiasts, there is more on the writer, who also translated major works like Shudraka’s Mrichchhakatika (The Little Clay Cart) and Kalidas’ Abhijnana-shakuntala (Shakuntala), and published novels—Andhere Band Kamare (Dark Sealed Rooms), Na Aane Wala Kal (The Tomorrow That Never Arrives) and Antaral (Interval)—and short stories.

This is one of the works he has left for posterity. ‘Ashadh is the only original dramatic work in the twentieth century that is a full-scale imaginative exploration of a classical writer’s life and texts—an experimental, theatrical equivalent of a Künstlerroman,’ says Aparna in her introduction, lamenting how this work was forgotten, in the interstices of the Hindi-English divide. ‘Ashadh, in this context, is a master work of auchitya (propriety), aimed against the existential and postcolonial “disorder of things” sprawling all around it,’ says Vinay Dharwadker in his afterword. This text is no less mean a feat, in putting a valuable Hindi text within our grasp with all of its trappings. The casual reader might never look at this solemn volume, encased as it is in contemporary theatre mythology, but they can go straight to its heart, which beats hard and fast.

About The Author

Rajni George

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