Remembering Lakshminarayan Mishra
By Dr Mangal Murty
Kashi has been the very heart of Hindu spirituality and the centre of Hindu religious pilgrimage. It has also been the sacred seat of Indian classical scholarship and the fountainhead of Hindi literary tradition. Right from Kabir and Tulsi through Bharatendu, Prasad and Premchand down to Trilochan it has had a glorious and unbroken line of immortal creative geniuses, a line for which it is impossible to find a parallel in any single city of the world.
But Kashi (now Varanasi) is also the temple city of Lord Shiva, the Natraj. It must be His Tandava Dance in which lies the origin of drama. And Tulsi’s Ramcharitmanas has been the source of Hindi drama in the form of the Ramleela. Kashi has had a long tradition of religious drama culminating in the birth of modern Hindi drama in Bharatendu and the modern Hindi theatre in the shape of the Nagari Natak Mandali. Bharatendu himself records that the first Hindi play Janaki Mangal written by Sheetala Prasad Tripathi was staged in 1868 in the Benares Cantonment area. Unfortunately the advent of the Cinema greatly undermined the development of the theatre which in its turn had its debilitating influence on Hindi drama.
Drama is a unique literary genre. It had its origins in dance and song. No other art form organically necessitates a live performance for its full effect. From its earliest religious poetic origins to its modern secular prose form it is vitally linked to the stage. Delinked from the theatre, drama is like the soul without a body, invisible and abstract. The bane of Hindi drama has been the discontinuous and dispirited development of its theatre, in stark contrast to the Western dramatic tradition where theatre has had a continuous coexistence with drama.
Notwithstanding this serious impediment, modern Hindi drama in Kashi has had two great dramatists adorning its glorious dramatic heritage : Jayashankar Prasad and Lakshminarayan Mishra. In modern dramatic criticism they have often been presented as a study in contrast, though there are striking similarities at least in the development of their art. Both began as poets of the Chhayavad school and moved into the realm of prose drama. In age Prasad was 14 years older, but his first celebrated poetic volume Ansoo was published in the same year (1925) as Mishra’s first poetic creation Antarjagat. All important plays (about a dozen) of Prasad were published between 1921 and 1936., most of them on historical or mythological themes, and the two best of the group being Skandagupta(1928) and Chandragupta(1931). His magnum opus, the poetic epic Kamayani was published in 1936, a year before his death. Mishra ,too, published in 1956, an incomplete epical composition Kaljayee on which he had been working for more than a decade. But Mishra virtually relinquished his poetic pursuits in favour of drama of social realism in an overt reaction to Prasad’s historical and mythological plays. His most famous play in the genre of social realism is Sindoor ki Holi (1933) which deals with the contemporary psycho-moral predicaments of pre-Independence Indian society.
Lakshminarayan Mishra was a prolific writer and produced more than two dozen full length plays and an equal number of one-act plays. He brought the modern Western format of realism in drama to bear upon his plays, which he called ‘Problem Plays’, with Ibsen and Shaw as his models. He also translated Ibsen’s realistic plays Doll’s House and Enemy of the People into Hindi. All his plays have long prefaces like Shaw’s and the general structure of scenes and stagecraft also has obvious resemblance to plays by Ibsen and Shaw. But he refutes any charges of direct influence of modern Western drama, particularly of Bernard Shaw, when he says : “Shaw is impossible to imitate in the Indian context. His dry argumentative philosophy does not coalesce well with the spirituality of the Indian ethos”.
Mishra had strong views about contemporary Hindi drama, and was particularly critical of Prasad’s plays which he found to be far removed from the realities of life and reveling in sheer emotionalism. As he said : “ The realism of life has far more dramatic content in it than the impossible elements obtained in imagination”. About the characters in his plays, he asserts : “We need characters whose hearts pulsate in unison with ours, in whose joy and sorrow, grief and happiness, we may get what we want to or what we crave for and do not get anywhere….I put my characters on the road of life. They move forward through the labyrinth of their tendencies and circumstances, halting, stumbling, tired, yet forging their way ahead. I merely keep following them inquisitively”. But as one drama critic, Birendra Narayan, has observed in his book Hindi Drama and Stage (1981), Mishra, in his realistic plays, creates “certain pegs of characters on which [he] hangs his thoughts”. The famous critic, Dr Nagendra, commenting on the intellectual content of his prefaces and plays, observes: “Ibsen, Shaw, Romain Rolland, Virginia Woolf of Europe and the Upanishad, Gandhi and Sarat of India appear to be packed pell-mell in one mind”.
However, the sheer amplitude of Mishra’s dramatic oeuvre, the contemporaneity and topicality of his themes, the experimentality of his stagecraft, all taken together make him the progenitor of serious realistic drama in Hindi creating footprints followed by subsequent dramatists like Uday Shankar Bhatt, Ramkumar Verma, Jagdish Chandra Mathur and Upendranath Ashq.
Lakshminarayan Mishra died in Varanasi on 19 August,1987. Paying tributes then to his memory, Dr Machwe said : “ Mishraji provided a turning-point to Hindi drama. He may have owed his craft to Western drama, but his themes were taken from the storehouse of classical wisdom of India. He laid the foundation stone of modern Hindi drama; regrettably we tend to forget this fact”.
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