The Marathi headline reads: Natak Navhe, Mareez Cha Jivankavya — Not a Play, Mareez Is a Life-Poem. And that is precisely what this production is. Manoj Shah has not directed a biography. He has directed a ghazal.
Abbas Abdul Ali Vasi, known by his pen name Mareez, was born in 1917 in the Pathanwada area of Surat. He was a Dawoodi Bohra Muslim who dropped out of school after the second grade, yet went on to compose poetry that earned him the title 'The Ghalib of Gujarat.' He wrote ghazals of such intensity that tea-house audiences in Mumbai memorised them word for word, even as the literary establishment dismissed him.
The play, adapted by Vinit Shukla from Raeesh Maniar's biography, does not follow chronological order. It moves between hallucination and memory, between Mareez at fourteen composing his first verse and Mareez at sixty-six lying in a hospital after being struck by an auto-rickshaw. The structure is deliberate. A poet's life does not follow chronology. It follows feeling.
Dharmendra Gohil's performance is extraordinary. Over the course of the play, he transforms from a charismatic young man burning with creative fire to a broken alcoholic selling his ghazals to wealthy men for five rupees — men who publish them under their own names. The critic Utpal Bhayani wrote that 'Mareez was in his veins,' and watching Gohil, you understand why. This is not impersonation. It is possession.
Kumkum Das as Sona, Mareez's wife, provides what every great theatrical performance needs: a still point in the chaos. Where Gohil spirals and burns, Das endures. Her silence speaks as loudly as his poetry.
The visual design is remarkable. Six paintings by Gulam Mohammed Sheikh — the Padma Bhushan-awarded artist from Vadodara — serve not as decoration but as architecture. The actors move within and against these paintings, which depict the streets and mehfils of Surat and Mumbai. Uday Mazumdar's music — composed by a tabla player trained under Ravi Shankar — provides the sonic landscape.
The play uses the Bohri Gujarati dialect, enriched with Urdu inflections, which gives the language a musical quality that standard Gujarati theatre rarely achieves. Mareez wrote in a melange of registers — Gujarati, Urdu, occasionally Hindi and English — and the play honours this linguistic richness.
What makes this production endure — two hundred performances since 2004, continuously at Prithvi Theatre — is not the story itself, which is familiar to anyone who has loved a poet. It is the refusal to sentimentalise. Mareez was not a romantic figure. He was an addict, a failed husband, a man who sold his art because he could not feed himself. The play does not redeem him. It simply shows him, in all his contradictory brilliance, and lets the poetry speak for itself.