Virayan
Gatha Prabhu Veer Ni
Magadha, in the lifetime of Mahavir. King Shrenik has just read a letter from his dying nagarsheth — a man who spent a whole life enlarging a trade across countries and never found an hour for his wife, his sons or his God, and who writes at the end to say so. Shrenik puts the letter down 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 regret, he wants to walk out among them. What the king finds on that walk is the first half of the play. A young man pays a vegetable seller five gold mohar for a mohar's worth of brinjals, because three and a half dokda were left owing in that lane by his father years earlier and he had promised to clear them. Two merchants who have competed all their lives sit together, and the one with money offers to pay for the other's daughter's wedding. A farmer sends the year's surplus grain to the royal granary because three people do not need it. Nobody sermonises. This is simply what people do under a king who is trying to live well, and it is the ground the rest of the play stands on. Then the figures Jain literature has carried for twenty-five centuries come on, and Shrenik stays as sutradhar — the audience's way in. Mahavir's household is here: his brother Nandivardhan, his wife Yashoda and his daughter Priyadarshana, the people a renunciation is walked away from and who then have to go on living. So are his disciples — Sudharmaswami; Indrabhuti Gautam, the Vedic scholar who arrives to defeat him in debate and leaves as his first ganadhar; and Goshalak, the follower who breaks away, turns on his teacher and hurls the tejoleshya at him. At the end Shrenik himself is in a cell, imprisoned by his own son Kunik, calling on the master he had spent the play introducing. Written by Satya Mehta and directed by Manoj Shah, Virayan sets all of it on the plainest Jain proposition there is: karma. Not doctrine handed down from a dais, but the thing that quietly settles what becomes of each of these people. Kanhaiya wrote a fifty-four-cue score, sung by Parthiv Gohil, Suresh Joshi and Uday Mazumdar, and Huseini Dawawala lit the two acts and assisted the direction. It was presented by Ajaramar Youths and played at the Zaverben Sabhagruh in Hingwala, Ghatkopar, on the morning of 6 October 2018, to a hall that held the monks and nuns of the Shri Vardhman Sthanakvasi Jain Shravak Sangh along with its lay members.
Commissioned By
Ajaramar Youths
Presented by Ajaramar Youths and hosted by the Shri Vardhman Sthanakvasi Jain Shravak Sangh at Hingwala, Ghatkopar (East), with the blessings of Gachchhadhipati Acharya Bhagwant Shri Bhavchandraji Swami. The single 6 October 2018 performance began at nine in the morning.
The People
Behind
the Play
Also Worth
Seeing
Bhav Prapanch
The Soul's Journey Through Worldly Illusion
Based on the Upamitibhavaprapancha Katha by Siddharshi Gani — a 10th-century Sanskrit text that Hermann Jacobi called the first allegorical novel in Indian literature, predating Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress by seven centuries. The play follows Dramak, an ordinary soul trapped in the city of Adrishyamool Paryant — a place that stands for the world as we know it, governed by greed, attachment, illusion, and desire. Dramak lives a bestial existence, wasting his time in futile efforts to preserve his meagre possessions. Caught in the bonds of attachment and illusion, believing the worldly illusion around him to be truth, he accumulates infinite karma and moves further from liberation with each birth and death. But there exists a Maharaja's royal temple — maintained with skill and devotion by servants who guide souls toward spiritual liberation through dharma, renunciation, compassion, and mercy. Their hands are always extended. The question is whether Dramak will take hold. The concept was distilled from Siddharshi's 16,000-verse original by Dr. Jitendra B. Shah, Director of the L.D. Institute of Indology, and dramatised by Prathang Dave and Raju Dave. Kabir Thakore designed the sets and Kanhaiya composed the music. The tagline reads: the end of sorrow is the beginning of peaceful happiness.
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.
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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.