Siddha Hem
The Man Who Gave Gujarati Its Grammar
Motichand Girdharlal Kapadia, serving a sentence as a political prisoner during India's freedom struggle, picks up a book about Acharya Hemchandracharya to make good use of his time in jail. He gets so far inside it that he steps out of his own century and becomes the Sutradhar of the story he is reading. That is where Siddha Hem begins — and, in the company's own phrase for the play, where it starts "reintroducing you to yourself". Hemchandra was born in 1089 CE and lived eighty-four years. The figures for his output vary wildly by source — the company's own synopsis credits him with thirty million shlokas, the contemporary American press with three and a half million — but the list of works does not: the Siddha-Hem Shabdanushasan, the first grammar of the language that became Gujarati; the Yogashastra; the Trishashti Shalaka Purusha Charitra; the Abhidhana Chintamani; the Dwayashraya; treatises on prosody and on poetics, in Sanskrit and in Prakrit. Known as Kalikal Sarvagna, the omniscient one of the Kali age, he argued against alcohol and animal sacrifice and for ahimsa in the eleventh century. It is not really possible to imagine Gujarati without him, which is exactly why almost nobody can name him. The play moves through the dramatic episodes of that life. A thief's soul purified by hearing Mahavir preach, out of the old Sanskrit play Prabuddha Rauhineya. Chachiga the merchant coming home from a voyage to find his son Changdev given away to the order, and Udayan Mantri explaining to him what the boy is going to become — while Pahini Devi, the mother, is left holding the cost of the sacrifice. King Siddharaj Jaisingh back from the conquest of Malwa and disgusted with his own victory, because Malwa was so rich in language and heritage that its people had barely noticed the change of ruler; he wants a grammar of his own, and Hemchandra gives him one. The eight great treatises fetched from Kashmir, the Siddha-Hem finished, and the manuscript carried through the kingdom on the king's favourite elephant. Brahmin resistance to a Jain monk at court, and Hemchandra walking into the Mahadev temple to say "Brahma ho, Mahadev ho, Vishnu ho ke Jin ho, temne namaskar thao". Kumarpal named heir against the king's wishes. Animal sacrifice banned, and the seizure of widows' property with it. And at the close, George Bühler and Albert Einstein turning up in Motichand's vision — Bühler on the non-violence he put into his German book on Hemchandra, Einstein on Syadvada and its likeness to relativity and probability — before Pahini Devi arrives nine hundred years late, looking for her son and afraid the world has forgotten him. Its cast of characters ran from Hemchandra's parents and his guru Devchandra through Siddharaj Jaisingh, Kumarpal, Udayan Mantri, Vagbhatt and Ramchandra to Max Müller, Peterson, Sir William Jones, Lokmanya Tilak and the philologist Harivallabh Bhayani. The script used five languages — Gujarati, Hindi, Prakrit, Sanskrit and German — and the company travelled eleven strong. Manoj Shah directed. Johny Shah wrote it after combing Khambhat, where Hemchandra was initiated and did much of his life's work, and seeking out every scholar who could tell him anything about the Acharya. Siddha Hem had its world premiere on 3 July 2009 at the 15th JAINA Convention, in the Jain Bhavan of the Jain Center of Southern California at Buena Park in greater Los Angeles — the first time a major Gujarati play produced in India by an Indian company opened in the United States before playing a single show at home. The conveners had billed it in the souvenir as the convention's unique play. The audience began queueing at five in the afternoon for a half-past-seven performance, and the hall filled so far past capacity that the organisers ran a live telecast on the upper floor of the cultural complex. It closed to a standing ovation, and more than eight American Jain centres invited the company on the spot. The tour that followed ran to 15 August: Chicago on 11 July, San Francisco on 18 July, Boston on 25 July, and New Jersey after that.
Commissioned By
JAINA — Federation of Jain Associations in North America
Made for the 15th Biennial JAINA Convention in Los Angeles and toured across the United States under JAINA's promotion through the summer of 2009. The performance agreement between JAINA and Ideas Unlimited was signed on 24 April 2009 and ran to 15 August. The company's US visas came through only days before the premiere, after JAINA's president wrote to the American Consulate General in Mumbai asking for an earlier interview slot than the one it had been given — 14 July, ten days after the play was due to open.
The People
Behind
the Play
Press &
Reviews
The South Asian Times
2009 JAINA Convention Focuses on Ecology — The Jain Way
A Gujarati play SIDDH HEM was the most eagerly awaited item at the convention. It was a world premiere of the play. Also a historic moment for Gujarati Rangbhoomi that a major Gujarati play produced in India by an Indian team performed in USA before any show in India.
11 July 2009
Chitralekha (Ketan Mistry)
Live Report from the 15th JAINA Convention
The audience's eagerness to see the play was such that they queued to enter the auditorium from five in the evening for a half-past-seven performance. The rush was so great that a live telecast had to be arranged on the upper floor of the cultural complex.
3 August 2009
JAINA Convention 2009 Souvenir (Jain Quantum archive)
JAINA Convention 2009 Souvenir — Message from the Conveners
We have a unique play — “SIDDH-HEM” — the world premiere of the play based on the life and works of Acharya Hemachandracharya (by the Apoorva Avsar team).
2 July 2009
Also Worth
Seeing
Apurva Avsar
The Spiritual Mentor of Mahatma Gandhi
Apurva Avsar — meaning 'a rare occasion' — is a Gujarati biographical drama based on the life and teachings of Shrimad Rajchandra (1867–1901), the Jain philosopher, poet, mystic, and social reformer whom Mahatma Gandhi called his spiritual guide and refuge in moments of crisis. Born in Vavaniya, a small village near Morbi in Gujarat, Rajchandra recalled his past lives at the age of seven. He became a master of poetry, Shatavadhana (the feat of simultaneously tracking a hundred different tasks), and astrology. His fame spread across the country — yet he renounced it all, concentrating on self-restraint and the pursuit of liberation from the cycle of births and deaths. Against his own will, he married and entered business, which flourished across India and beyond, but his hours remained consumed by spiritual inquiry. Wanderers and seekers visited him constantly. The play brings together three towering figures of Jain spiritual history on a single stage — Acharya Hemchandra (11th century), Avdhut Anand Ghanji (17th century), and Shrimad Rajchandra (19th century) — tracing 2,500 years of a living philosophical tradition. Three actors perform fifteen characters in a theatrical challenge that moves from Rajchandra's childhood visions through his meetings with Gandhi in Mumbai in 1891, their searching correspondence while Gandhi was in South Africa, and Rajchandra's final renunciation. Dramatized by Raju Dave and Manoj Shah after a year and a half of research, the play premiered at Prithvi Theatre, Mumbai on 28 February 2007. It has since been performed across India and in the United States, including at the Jain Center of Southern California. A Hindi adaptation by Prayas Dave followed the same year. The subject matter is drawn from the everyday texture of society — the treatment is realistic, so that any common person can relate to how Jain culture has shaped Indian heritage, religion, language, literature, and philosophy in ways both visible and profound.
Maitribhaav
One Man's Path to Enlightenment
A solo play on the life of Gurudev Shree Chitrabhanu — the Jain monk who gave up twenty-nine years of monkhood to carry Jain philosophy to the West. Written by Abhimanyu Acharya, conceived and directed by Manoj Shah, scored by Amit Bhavsar and enacted by Dharmendra Gohil. He was born Rup-Rajendra Shah in 1922 in Takhatgarh, in the Pali district of Rajasthan. He lost his mother as a boy and his sister soon after, and at twenty he took diksha at Palitana, on the slopes of Shatrunjaya. For the next twenty-nine years he was Muni Chandraprabh Sagar, walking barefoot across India. Then, in 1970, he accepted an invitation to address the Spiritual Summit Conference in Geneva — and in 1972, Harvard Divinity School. Jain monks do not travel overseas. He went anyway, becoming the first Jain monk to do so, and surrendered his monkhood for it. He founded the Jain Meditation International Center in Manhattan in 1973 and died in Mumbai in 2019, aged ninety-six. Maitribhaav stages that life as a first-person reckoning, delivered on the rhythms of music — thirty-five cues moving between Jain history, painting, literature, Western philosophy and Chitrabhanu's own memory. It works through detachment and attachment, grief and redemption, and keeps returning to the questions underneath: what is identity, what is existence, what is any of this finally for. JAINA's own newsletter called it “that rare, uncanny mixture of spiritual preaching, personal narrative, philosophical lecture, and stand-up comedy — all rolled into one.” The play was made for the JAINA Convention 2023 in Lakeland, Florida, and premiered there on Sunday, 2 July 2023, marking the centenary of Chitrabhanu's birth. It exists in full Gujarati and Hindi versions, and closes with the audience singing the Maitri Bhaav together — the Jain prayer of universal friendship that gives the play its name.
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Bhamasha
The Warrior Who Funded Freedom
The story of Bhamashah — born 1547, Jain Shravak of the Oswal community, warrior, strategist, and the man who bankrolled Maharana Pratap's war against the Mughal empire. Little is known about him beyond the legend of his donation, but this play recovers the full arc of his life: his father Bharmal's service as fort commander of Ranthambore, his own rise as Diwan of Mewar, his raids on Mughal camps, and the moment at the village of Chulia when he presented twenty lakh gold coins and two-and-a-half crore silver rupees to a king with no kingdom left. Ideas Unlimited — known for dramatising biographies in Gujarati — chose to tell this story in Hindi, bringing it to the Tata Theatre at NCPA on Republic Day 2013. The story was conceived by Dr. Bipin Doshi and dramatised by Mihir Bhuta. Dayashankar Pandey, who had appeared in Lagaan and Swades, took on the title role, working on the Rajasthani dialect to inhabit a man who proved that ahimsa does not mean cowardice. Om Puri lent his voice as narrator. Chugge Khan and his ensemble of Manganiar folk musicians from Rajasthan performed the Marwari folk score live, transporting the audience four centuries into the past. Bhamasha is a play about a question most histories ignore: who pays for freedom? Not the king on the battlefield, but the man behind him — the merchant, the strategist, the Jain who believed that protecting his land was as sacred as any vow of non-violence.