This year marks the centenary of Mohan Rakesh who was one of the pioneers of the Nai Kahani ("New Story") literary movement in Hindi literature in the 1950s.
He wrote the first modern Hindi play, Ashadh Ka Ek Din (One Day in Aashad) (1958). He made significant contributions to Hindi literature through his novels, short stories, travelogues, criticism, memoirs and drama.
Rakesh wrote the first modern Hindi play Ashadh Ka Ek Din in 1958 that bagged the prize in a competition organized by the Sangeet Natak Academi and Mohan Rakesh was himself awarded the Sangeet Natak Academi Award in 1968.
Rangakarmee, Kolkata’s oldest Hindi-language group theatre, founded by the late Usha Ganguly around 50 years ago, is now carried forward by her younger pupils dedicated to the kind of theatre they inherited from their Guru and Mentor Usha Ganguli.
This time, this young, dedicated group headed by their young director Anirudh Sarkar, has brought to the theatre-crazy Kolkata audience, Mohan Rakesh’s Aadhe Adhure, a somewhat complex family drama which challenges the very concept of the “family” as we know it as well as putting up a play which was once directed and enacted in by Lilette Dubey way back in 2012, 13 years ago with stellar actor Mohan Agashe pitted against her. This play is available on YouTube for those interested in catching up.
That performance is one this critic had the good fortune to watch in 2012 and found it presenting a completely different perspective of the urban Indian, middle-class family than the one we had understood to be.
Watching it again after a long gap presented and performed by the young group of performers of Rangakarmee, reinstated the belief in the original idea which reflects the incompleteness of every human being, themselves quite unaware of.
They are perennially angry with themselves as much as they are with the others in the family and even ‘friends’ who step in and out of their lives now and then.
Rangakarmee’s young director Anirudh Sarkar says, “There are some plays that don’t just stay on stage, they stay with you. Aadhe Adhure is one of those plays. And there are some characters who stay alive in memory. One such character is Savitri, who I first encountered through my Guru Smt. Usha Ganguli who had portrayed her, during her time at Kala Sangam. The intensity and power of her performance has stayed with me.”
Aadhe Adhure is an apparently straightforward story of a middle-class family that is already broken up from within but trying to put up a brave and united front, thanks to the desperate attempts by Savitri (Neha Birari) to keep up appearances in spite of their pathetic transparencies.
The husband Mahendranath (Manoseej Biswas) cowers under her wrath and constant aggression of his domineering wife though he is not much better as master of the house.
As Sarkar reminds us, “The play explores themes of disillusionment, gender roles, and the false hope of fulfillment through external relationships. Every character appears incomplete, emotionally stunted, unable to communicate, and locked in cycles of blame.”
There is reason for Savitri’s aggression. One reason is that her husband has frittered away his life in meaningless pursuits. The other is that he has looked the other way when Savitri sought some kind of fulfillment from outer sources.
The roles of the husband and wife are neatly reversed. The husband is not happy about the situation at all nor is the wife Savitri happy to shoulder the responsibility of the entire family but they are trapped in their roles which does not give them any exit point, easy or difficult.
The three children, Ashok (Ankit Sharma), Binni (Megha Guha Roy) and Kinni(Anindita Pati) feel victimised by the circumstances of their parents’ failed marriage, constant quarrels and fights though they have themselves failed to bring any cohesive rhythm into their own lives.
At times, one sympathizes with them while at others, one feels that they use their parents’ squabbling as a convenient excuse for their personal failures. Which urban, middle-class family has parents who never squabble, tell me?
Ashok is a no-good young man who uses his kid sister Kinni as a sandbag. Kinni, still in school, is going through adolescence problems. She clearly shows her callousness about moral values. Binni, who has come back to her parents from a suspected abusive, runaway marriage and often comes home to her parents, says, “I did not run away with him, I wanted to run away from you,” though she is the only one who loves her parents dearly and tries her best to mend the decimated family with its decimated relationships.
The house and its cluttered ambience with clothes, books, belongings strung here and there, is perhaps the principal protagonist of the story as this is the central space where everything happens. It is also a physical example of their scattered and fractured lives.
Ashok with his old magazines and his sketchbook where his drawings and sketches remain ambivalent and unprofessional, Binni trapped in her uncertainties and Kinni sandwiched between her adolescent pangs and the punishment imposed on her by Ashok and Savitri are nothing more than incomplete human beings who have never known what “completeness” means.
How external forces can actually heighten schisms within intimate family relationships come across lucidly through the two outside characters, Jagmohan who Savtiri felt she was in love with before her marriage, and her current boss who tries to pretend he is more powerful than he really is and has a keen eye on Savitri.
Savitri’s husband and children misunderstand this for her roving eye but in reality, Savitri is desperate to induct her useless son in some kind of stable job through these two men.
Though in the original Lilette Dubey performance, Mohan Agashe played all the three adult men’s roles, - Mahesh, Jagmohan and Singhania, in this production, there are different actors because they are too young and too inexperienced to step into the shoes of a veteran doyen like Mohan Agashe.
But they perform their roles well. Agashe performing all the senior male roles suggest that even if the men were different, intrinsically, they may wear different faces and have different personalities, as men,they are all the same.
Jagmohan is very judgmental about Savitri’s choices and blames her squarely for the way the family finds itself in. But is she alone to blame? Don’t all of us live in halfway houses in some small way or another through the 1960s, through 2012 and till 2025?
Are we not trying to put up appearances we cannot match against our performances in real life?
Sometimes, the struggle is consciously done while at other times, we are not even aware of trying to bring about a happy marriage between what we are conscious of and what we are not?
The single set play (Subhas Biswas, Sirshendu Maity Pal, Prahalad Kumar) exudes a suffocating feeling of being cloistered – like prisoners caught in a time-space warp instead of members of an intimate family. Even the regulated hospitality with Binni walking in with the mandatory tea tray like a mechanically keyed reflex action is artificial, stripped of human sentiment.
Prahalad Kumar and Anindita Pati’s costume design is wonderfully appropriate. The sole point of confusion is that at times, the performances by all actors turn a bit too theatrical while the other actors in the same scene remain more or less expressionless and static.
Adhe Adhure’s timelessness is reflected within the spaces and the lack of spaces within the home bringing to vibrant and throbbing life Mohan Rakesh’s incisive documentation of an emotionally fragmented and financially marginalised family within the urban middle class set in the late 1960s relevant even in 2025, be it Mumbai, London or New York.