Vastupal Tejpal: The Marble at Dilwara and the Scandal That Made It

If you have stood inside the Luna Vasahi at Dilwara, you already know the problem the guides have. There is no useful vocabulary for it. The ceiling of the rangamandapa is white marble cut so thin the light comes through it, a lotus pendant hanging out of the dome in concentric rings of figures, and every account of it eventually gives up and reaches for the word impossible. The temple was consecrated in 1230 CE and dedicated to Neminatha, the twenty-second Tirthankara. It was paid for by a minister named Tejapala, for the merit of his family, and it is named for his son Lunasimha. His elder brother Vastupala built at Girnar and Shatrunjaya. Between them they left Gujarat a body of work that has outlasted every dynasty that has governed the state since.

Ideas Unlimited's Vastupal Tejpal, which opened at Yashwantrao Chavan Pratishthan on the evening of 31 May 2009, is about how two men came to be in a position to do that. It was written by Dineshbhai Modi, directed by Manoj Shah, presented by Kaustubh Trivedi, and commissioned by the Jain Adhyatma Studies Circle Federation, of which Modi was lifetime chairman. Mumbai Theatre Guide previewed it with the shape of the story intact: two brothers historically famous for the Delvada temple of 1230, born to advantage, stripped of it, holding on to their integrity, rebuilding through honest trade until they were among the foremost merchants in Gujarat, and then raised to ministerial office, where they went after the corruption in the administration they had inherited.

That is the arc most people would have written. What makes Modi's script worth reading is that he refuses to start there.

The play opens a full generation before either brother is born, and it opens on a scandal. Kumardevi, daughter of Abhu Sheth, was married in her twelfth year and widowed two months later. She is back in her father's house. The Acharya Haribhadrasuri, passing through the town, has read her palm during a discourse and says her widowhood will not hold; the guardian deity Shasandevi has appeared to him and told him that from Kumardevi will come two sons of extraordinary lustre, and that he is to arrange the marriage. The man proposed is Asaraj, son of Som, minister of Patan, who has already been a guest in Abhu Sheth's house without anyone knowing what he was there for.

The scene that follows is the best-built thing in the script, and it is a domestic argument. Abhu Sheth paces his haveli, has not eaten, has not slept, and cannot get the words out. His wife tells him she has borne his moods for a lifetime and can absorb a shock. When he finally says it, her reaction is not horror — she says the news brought her a pleasant surprise. His is not horror either. He wants his daughter's happiness; he says so plainly, that there is no father alive who does not. What stops him is one sentence: widow remarriage, what will society say. And his wife's answer, which the play clearly endorses, is that society can be set aside, that a daughter's remarriage is itself the instruction of dharma, and that he should send for the musicians, fix the date and open the treasury.

The historical record is less tidy and more interesting for it. The standard account gives Vastupala and Tejapala's parents as Ashvaraja and Kumaradevi, daughter of Abhu, a Pragvata vanika and a commander by profession — the same Abhu Sheth who paces the stage in the first ten minutes of the play. Kumaradevi was, by the tradition the Jain prabandhas preserve, a widow when she married Ashvaraja. Scholars have disputed it. The play does not, and it is easy to see why a commission from a Jain study circle would want the claim kept: a tradition that has held on to this story for eight hundred years is telling you something about itself. The temples at Dilwara, in this telling, are downstream of a marriage the community was not supposed to permit.

Vastupala and Tejapala served the Vaghela court — Vastupala as minister to Viradhavala and his successor Visaladeva, governing Cambay, running the ports, and, in the pauses, writing. He was a Sanskrit poet of real standing, author of the mahakavya Naranarayanananda and the patron of a circle of scholars who wrote about him at length while he was alive. This is the part of the story that made it attractive for the stage. These are not donors whose names survive on a plaque. They are administrators, merchants, soldiers and writers, and they are documented by people who knew them.

Manoj Shah staged it as a full-dress historical, which is not the register he is best known for. Prasad Walavalkar built a stone palace, jali screens and carved pilasters and a flight of steps up to a throne, that stands up as architecture and gives the court scenes somewhere to happen. Rajiv Bhatt put the company in silk — the yellow and magenta the two brothers wear in the production stills are the play's signature image. Bhotesh Vyas lit it. Suresh Joshi wrote the score, and the recorded voice work was laid down by Dharmendra Gohil, Rinku Patel and Darshan Pandya, with Sanat Vyas narrating and Janam Shah designing the sound. Huseini Dawawala assisted the direction; Vimal Upadhyay managed the production and acted in it.

The company ran to sixteen actors, which for a Gujarati commercial production in 2009 is a large stage to fill. Ashok Parmar, Nishchay Rana, Kalpana Shah, Dharmesh Vyas, Paurav Shah, Sagar Raval, Pratik Dave, Trupti Thakkar, Shinjuni Raval, Jigar Buch, Naimish Dave, Alpesh Dhakan, Aakash Nayak and Lokesh Verma carried it with Upadhyay.

One name in that list reads differently now. Malhar Thakar was in this company in 2009. He spent roughly nine years working on the Gujarati stage before his first film, and Vastupal Tejpal sits in the middle of that apprenticeship — six years before Chhello Divas: A New Beginning opened in 2015 and turned him into one of the faces of the new Gujarati cinema, seven before Thai Jashe! won him a Transmedia award for best actor, eight before Love Ni Bhavai ran for a hundred days. The archive of a repertory company is full of entries like this, and they are the argument for keeping one.

The advertising is its own small record of how Gujarati theatre was sold in 2009. The campaign ran in Bombay Samachar and Gujarat Samachar in the last week of May, a ten-centimetre double-column block, publicity by Kajal Ads, press handled by Manhar Gadhia, booking from Wednesday, ten to six. The tagline on every version of the poster was four words: parishram ane parmarth. Toil and selfless giving. It is a fair summary of the play and an unusually honest piece of copy, because it promises the audience the first half as well as the second.

That pairing is the reason the story has lasted. The temples are the famous part, and they are what the brothers are remembered for, but a temple is only the second half of the sentence. The first half is thirty years of trade, administration, port revenue and the unglamorous work of removing corrupt officers from a bureaucracy. Modi's play spends most of its length in that first half, which is a structurally brave decision for a devotional commission, and it earns the marble at the end.

It also, quietly, makes a claim about where the marble came from. Not from piety alone, and not from wealth alone, but from a household that once decided a widowed daughter's happiness outweighed what the neighbours would say. Eight hundred years later the ceiling at Dilwara is still there, and the guides still cannot find the word for it.