Mohan Rakesh’s Nai Kahani

Born a hundred years ago in Amritsar as Madan Mohan Guglani in a middle-class Sindhi family, Mohan Rakesh was an outstanding writer who tried his hand at creating narratives in multiple genres — stories, novels, plays, translations, travelogues, criticism and personal diaries — and excelled particularly in the realms of stories and plays.

Receiving his early education in Amritsar, he went on to obtain degrees in English, Hindi and Sanskrit. Proficiency in these languages came in very handy when Mohan Rakesh began to pursue his creative muse. For instance, the themes of two of his plays — ‘Ashaadh ka Ek Din’ and ‘Lehron ke Rajhans’ — are based on his knowledge of Sanskrit. As for his felicity in English, the seeds of many of his creative ventures, detailed notes, etc, were written initially in English, to be transferred to Hindi when fleshing them out in full-fledged discourses.

Rakesh had a chequered personal life, beginning with the death of his father when he was very young. The father, who was a lawyer, had migrated to Amritsar from Sindh decades before the tragic happenings of Partition. After his education, Rakesh began his professional career as a postman but soon shifted to teaching, first in various schools and finally ending up as a lecturer in Hindi at a Jalandhar college. Very briefly, he also edited the renowned Hindi story journal ‘Sarika’, which was the prima donna of the Nai Kahani Movement publications.

His married life, too, was unstable, having married thrice. While little is known about his earlier two marriages, his third one — to Anita Aulakh — lasted until his sudden death at the age of 47. By his own confession, married life was his third priority, the first two being writing and addebaazi with friends.

Born in 1925, Mohan Rakesh must have been, while growing up, witness to the freedom struggle and its culmination in the traumatising events of Partition. However, these do not find much mention in his writings, both creative and biographical.

On the literary front, the Progressive Writers’ Movement began in the early 1930s when Rakesh was still a child and was past its prime after Independence when he attained adulthood. Although the historical events relating to the freedom struggle — both militant and passive resistance — and tragic events associated with Partition continued to inspire many writers, Rakesh moved away, carving a niche for himself with stories of a different theme, as evidenced in his first collection published in 1950.

Issues of nation-building and their impact on the lives of people brought challenges of a newer way of life which was radically different — both socially and economically — from the sleepy traditional life of an agrarian economy. Large-scale urbanisation with the establishment of townships, cities and the creation of jobs in which everyone — women included — had to participate led to a hitherto unknown societal environment coping with which was, for everyone, stressful not just physically, but psychologically as well. It is in this new environment that a newer kind of storytelling — both in theme and manner of narration — was born and the first generation of those who penned this Nai Kahani included Mohan Rakesh, Kamleshwar, Ramesh Bakshi, Mannu Bhandari and Rajendra Yadav.

They broke with the traditional form and content of the Premchand mode, which had a beginning, middle and an end. They problematised the mindscape as much as, if not more, the physical landscape of the characters and speculated on an umbilical relationship between the two. Mohan Rakesh’s stories like ‘Miss Pal’, ‘Aardra’, ‘Paanchve Male ka Flat’ and ‘Janwar aur Janwar’ represent such narratives, focusing on the emerging middle class and their newer lived reality. Even a Partition-related story like ‘Malbe ka Malik’ has this newer approach.

Although one of the founder members of the Nai Kahani Movement, Mohan Rakesh is better known as a playwright. It is these — ‘Ashaadh ka Ek Din’, ‘Aadhe Adhoore’ and ‘Lehron ke Rajhans’, among others — that have outlasted his stories and some have even been canonised, becoming a part of the teaching-learning curricula.

‘Aadhe Adhoore’, which I saw being staged in a Rajendranath production in Delhi in the early 1970s, continues with the theme of strained personal relationships in middle-class families that dominated his stories. The play introduced a newer technique wherein five different roles were played by a single male character, creating a distinct impact. Add to this Rakesh’s felicity of diction — concise, crisp, memorable dialogues — and you have the recipe of a great play. Rakesh wrote detailed descriptions of the physical spread of the scene, which showed his mastery over its dramatic effect. A rereading of its text shows its continued relevance to contemporary Indian life, transcending the barriers of time and space.

Renowned Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o observed that every writer was a writer in politics and the only question was what and whose politics. By politics, he meant the devolution of power within various sections of the society and not partisan party politics. It is in his play ‘Ashaadh ka Ek Din’ that Mohan Rakesh’s politics becomes more pronounced. By invoking the character of poet-playwright Kalidas and by creating the character of his beloved Mallika, he explores the theme of relationship between literature and politics, as also the relations between a writer and the State. Again, its contemporary relevance cannot be lost on anyone when you include journalists in the category of writers.

Rakesh’s politics also shows in his delineation of women characters in family situations. The characteristic of dependency dominates such relations between the wife, Savitri, and her family in ‘Aadhe Adhoore’, impacting adversely the psyche of all and also the relations between Kalidas and Mallika in ‘Ashaadh ka Ek Din’, creating once again warped personalities of both Kalidas and Mallika. The relationship is never one of relative equality between sexes even in other similar discourses.

While Mohan Rakesh will live on in the annals of literary universe as a brilliant playwright although he wrote stories too, another writer, who, by coincidence, was also brought up in Amritsar, became a great story writer although he wrote radio plays as well. His name: Saadat Hasan Manto. And both attained so much literary fame before dying young — Manto at 43 and Mohan Rakesh at 47.

— The writer is a former professor of English at Jawaharlal Nehru University