Virayan: The King Who Introduces the Teacher

A play about Mahavir has an obvious problem, and Virayan solves it in its first two minutes by refusing to be a play about Mahavir. It opens instead on a king with a letter in his hand.

The king is Shrenik of Magadha — Bimbisara in the Buddhist and Puranic records, Shrenik in the Jain ones — and Magadha in his reign was the richest state in the subcontinent, its capital at Rajgruha, its gaushalas famous, grain and ghee moving through it in quantities the play's opening voiceover lingers on. Into that abundance comes a letter from the city's leading merchant, written in the last hours of his life. He had spent it building a trade across countries. He had not sat with his wife or his sons. He had never once made time for God. He is writing, he says, to record the regret.

Shrenik reads it and sends for his minister. “Samay ja samay nu kaam kare,” he says — time does time's own work. Before his subjects sleep their way to the same end, the king wants to walk out among them and see how they are living. That walk is the play's structure, and it is also the reason the play can afford to be patient.

What the walk finds, for the whole of the first stretch, is not doctrine. It is a sequence of small domestic scenes that Satya Mehta's script plays completely straight. A young man stops at a vegetable seller's basket, buys two ser of brinjals and a ratal of gourd, and hands over five gold mohar for a purchase worth one mohar and a dokdo. When she protests, he explains: three and a half dokda were left owing in this lane by his father, years ago, when the family moved away in a hurry, and his father had asked him to clear it whenever he returned. The woman selling the vegetables turns out to be the daughter of the woman his father used to buy from.

Two merchants who have competed in the same market all their lives sit together, and one, whose own money is tied up, is offered the cost of his daughter's wedding by the other — not as a loan against future business but because, as the line has it, let me have that much merit. A farmer walks in from the field with the first grain of the season and tells his wife he has already sent the surplus to the royal granary with their son, because three people do not need that much. She agrees before he finishes the sentence.

None of these people mention karma. That is the point of putting them first. By the time the play reaches the figures Jain literature has carried for twenty-five centuries, the audience has already watched the doctrine working at the scale of a vegetable basket, and the big scenes do not have to argue for it.

Shrenik stays on as sutradhar, which is the production's sharpest structural decision. A narrator who is himself inside the story, and whose own fate the play has not yet disclosed, is a very different instrument from a neutral voice. Every introduction he makes is also a step toward his own last scene.

The household comes first — and Virayan gives it more room than most tellings do. Nandivardhan, the elder brother. Yashoda, the wife. Priyadarshana, the daughter. These are the people a renunciation is walked away from, and who then have to go on living in the house it left. Jain tradition records them and then moves briskly past them. The play does not. There is a scene built entirely around Yashoda, and a music cue written for Priyadarshana, and the effect is to make the great departure cost something visible.

Then the disciples. Sudharmaswami, the one who would carry the teaching forward and through whom much of the canon is transmitted. Indrabhuti Gautam, the formidable Vedic scholar who arrives at the samavasaran to defeat Mahavir in debate, is asked about the nature of the soul, and leaves as the first of the eleven ganadharas. And Goshalak — the follower who spent years alongside Mahavir, broke from him, claimed the teaching as his own, and finally turned and hurled the tejolesh­ya, the fire-power, at his former teacher. Goshalak gets a run of five music cues to himself in the score. He is the play's most theatrical presence, and its argument about what a right intention is worth.

The last movement returns to the king. Shrenik, who has narrated the whole evening from the comfort of his own court, ends it imprisoned by his son Kunik — Ajatashatru in the other chronicles — and it is from that cell that he calls on the teacher he has spent two acts introducing to everyone else. The play's final cues are titled Maro Nath Mahavir and Aanand Bhayo. A story about karma that let its narrator off would not have been much of a story about karma.

Manoj Shah directed; Kanhaiya wrote the score, fifty-four cues deep, sung by Parthiv Gohil, Suresh Joshi and Uday Mazumdar; Huseini Dawawala lit it and assisted the direction; Janam Shah produced. The cast — Keyuri Shah, Parth Rawal, Yash Varan, Kiran Pandya, Rishab Kamdar, Naman Sheth, Malhar Desai, Dipti Patel, Jay Dave and Jay Upadhyay — was drawn largely from the young company Ideas Unlimited had built up over the preceding years, several of whom had been on stage together at the Nehru Centre nine months earlier in Rang Gurjari.

Virayan sits in a long line of Jain work from this company: Bhav Prapanch, from Siddharshi Gani's tenth-century allegory Upamitibhavaprapancha Katha; Apurva Avsar, on Shrimad Rajchandra; Apoorav Khela, on the poet Anandghan; Bhamasha, on the merchant who emptied his treasury for Rana Pratap; and later Maitribhaav, on Muni Chitrabhanu. What distinguishes Virayan within that line is how little of it is spent on the saint.

It was presented by Ajaramar Youths, with the blessings of Gachchhadhipati Acharya Bhagwant Shri Bhavchandraji Swami, and played at the Zaverben Sabhagruh in Hingwala, Ghatkopar, on the morning of 6 October 2018. The photographs from that day show a hall in which rows of Sthanakvasi monks and nuns in white, mouth-cloths tied, sit watching a stage lit in deep blue. It is not an ordinary house to play to. A production that had opened by arguing its case through a vegetable seller's change had, by then, earned the right to it.