आषाढ़ का एक दिन

In the early 70s, television had come to Delhi but not our homes. Our parents went over to the club for desultory drinks and chatter and once in a while wandered over to the room where the television held pride of place. Though transmission started in the evenings, it held little interest. As children we on the whole were innocent of the pleasures of cinema, yet some memories remain strong and indelible. And so it is that one of my few memories of television from that time is the telecast of Mohan Rakesh's Ashad ka ek Din. It was probably an NSD play, in any event I saw only a part of it but still remember the rained out woodland hamlet where Mallika’s story was played out in all it’s B&W glory. Mallika herself was one of those strong looking, make-up less lasses in the Smita Patil mould, declaiming away in excellent Hindi. I had no idea how the play ended but it was fairly certain then that at some point in my life I would read the play.

Mohan Rakesh, the author of the story, was of course well-known and part of a new generation of Hindi writers. We did a few pieces of his in school, his plays were popular with a certain crowd (I recollect my mother going to see Adhe Adhure which starred Naseeruddin Shah, Amrish Puri and Om Puri before their brush with stardom). Ashad surfaced as a brief section in “Bharat ek Khoj” but lacked the romance of the play I had seen on television. Yet all these years it remained unread. Then I chanced on the book in its original Hindi on a visit to India. A few months ago I got around to reading the play.

Ashad ka ek Din (loosely translated “A Rainy Day”) is a fictional version of events in the life of Kalidasa, possibly the most famous of Indian playwrights. The story is the familiar trope of local prodigy makes good in the city but forgets his roots. But the play’s principal character is the fictional Mallika, a local girl who is Kalidas' first love and muse and whose story pretty much follows the arc of the sacrificing lover whose fortunes plunge as her lover’s ascend. Completing the triangle is Vilom, the local bad boy who wants Mallika but will never possess her. At the start, Rakesh has us immersed in the idylls of the poet and also establishes Mallika’s unconventionality in choosing this romantic attachment to both the poet and his poetry. Then Kalidasa leaves – with Mallika’s permission - for the prodigy cannot be contained by the tiny hamlet and has attracted the attention of the King. Predictably – and echoing the dramatist’s Shakuntala (Bharat ek Khoj’s brief episode nicely ties the two together) – he forgets his muse. Mallika remains in the half suspended state of the painful reality of loss and the hope that things will be as they once were even as her meagre circumstances become more meagre. Until Kalidasa, by now famous and a luminary of the court married to a princess, passes by and neglects to meet her. This begins Mallika’s decline and the play ends with her in a dubious relationship with Vilom and an illegitimate child. As for Kalidasa, the poet has exhausted the literary possibilities of his youth and cannot now reclaim it by reclaiming Mallika.

Reading the play in middle age and recognising that my girlhood crush on the play had less to do with its nuances and more to do with its romanticism*, I felt ambiguously about the play. On the one hand, Rakesh’s grasp of his material is certain and sure. It is not Kalidasa the genius he is interested in as much as the failed and perhaps selfish creative who let’s down the person who matters most. In his day it is likely the dismantling of heroes to reveal them as mortals with feet of clay had cachet. In our time it remains a familiar theme i.e. that the private lives of public luminaries are invariably flawed. Mallika on the other hand, seems from another time, a heroine of a Victorian morality tale where unconventional women find themselves crushed by societal norms. Perhaps this was what was most disappointing to me though for the 50s Mallika was likely a modern heroine. Mallika is, to use a cliché, a child of nature. It would perhaps have been more apt if her end was not so abject and paralleled that of another heroine identified with the earth, Sita, who is annihilated and yet triumphant. And oddly enough, though Vilom is a failed and flawed character, he comes across in a sympathetic vein.

Still Ashad ka ek Din is a thrilling piece, inflected with the enthusiasms and intellectual concerns of a post Independence writer examining our history and our heroes in a modern context. And I retain my affection for the half-glimpsed play I saw so many years ago.

*truly, a woodland hamlet still appeals to me!

Update: The episode of Bharat Ek Khoj based in part on the play is on youtube.