Jaina Darsana and Manoj Shah’s Theatre: It’s All Apoorav Khela, a Wonderful Play

Way back in 1993, I had an opportunity to see one of Gujarati theatre’s leading playwright, theatre-director and scholars Govardhan Panchal’s Jaina play in Sanskrit Prabuddha Rauhineya in Mumbai, and critically review it in the daily Independent, published by The Times of India.

What is attention-grabbing is the fact that Manoj Shah has a fabulous repertoire of four full-length plays dealing with Jaina themes around historical personalities, and by their very intrinsic nature they become non-ritualistic and secular in a meta-sense of the terms. What remains as a challenge, so to say, is pure histrionics and stage craft, which essentially does not exclude abhinaya or acting.

Playwright-director-producer Manoj Shah’s four plays dealing with Jainism include Apoorva Avsar (about life and times of Srimad Rajchandra; premiered in 2007), Vastupal Tejpal (two brothers who built the Dilwara Temple; 2008), Siddhahem (about the great Jaina grammarian-scholar Acharya Hemchandracharya; 2010) and Apoorav Khela (about Jaina saint-poet Anandghan; 2012).

Of these plays, I found Apurva Avsar theatrically significant for its use of space (theatre is a highly spatial art unlike cinema which is temporal) and the use of whiteness — through white cotton fabric. This enduringly imaginative whiteness, I thought, made the play austere and meditative, not just as a prop.

Apoorav Khela had, I suppose, the biggest challenge in enlivening the character of Anandghan about whom barely any information is available. Again the challenge was to invoke the meditative aspect of the play and how to transfer the experience on to the audiences — all through the proscenium space and within that space the human bodies acting, the character of Anandghan in the crucial centre.

The great ascetic Anandghan becomes significant in our times (or in all times) because he is a cliché-breaker, he is the one who could cross boundaries and accept religious wisdoms from anywhere else, he is the one who is against narrow and parochial sectism, he is the one who could embrace poetry and music so easily and with lightness of being. He is a spontaneous poet who wrote padas and could interpret āgamas. To bring Anandghan on stage in itself is a challengingly courageous act, I would believe.

All said and done, perhaps first time in the history of Gujarati theatre, there is such a strong body of work that articulates Jainism through proscenium theatre in its different facets. I only wish that such body of work reaches non-Jaina audiences (including scholars) in some way or the other.