I RAKESH'S HALFWAY HOUSE

1b.0 Objectives

1b. 1 Introduction

118.2 A View of Mohan Rakesh's Shon Fiction and the Issue of Marriage

1
18.3 Representation of Reality in Short and Long Fiction as Distinct from that in
Drama

18.4 Drama and the Socio- Cultural Environment

18.5 Huljiuay House as Drama of Family in Middle Class Surroundings

18.6 Concreteness of Haljivay House as Theatre

8.7 One .4ctor as Playing Five Roles in Haljivay House

18.8 Let IJs Sum Up

8.9 Exercise

8.10 Suggested Readings

18.0 OBJECTIVES
kou will read in this unit an argument about the importance and role of drama as a
iterary form. The discussion will focus upon the direct contact drama has with
iving people in surroundings that are a combination of market, neighbourhood and
he closed Jlall or a room. Thus, words or text are not of seminal significance in
drama, since drama is not be merely read but seen and watched. More, the words,
dialopues arid gestures used in drama are independent of the author in a sense they
$re 11ot in the case of novel or poem, for instance.

8 . INTRODUCTION
e plan to interpret here Mohan Rakesh's Halfway House as a dramatic
epresentation of life in India in the post-Independence period. For us, drama in tlie
ontext would cover aspects of enactment, characterization, visualization of that
which is fore-grounded and that other part which (since hidden somewhere in the
background) is suggested through pauses, absences, etc. At the same time, we shall
also view the broader picture of representations through other forms such as fiction.
This attempt is to let the student and young scholar know that Mohan Rakesh used
the fictional mode in his writing quite extensively and there was indeed a significant
interaction between his novel Andhere Band Kamre, a number of short stories and
other prose accounts that contained important biographical details on the one halid
and the plays he wrote on tlie other. All this of course happened against a backdrop
that constituted cultural and ideological life-segment of great magnitude. The present
unit will provide a comprehensive view of these literary-social aspects in their
combination and integrity, rooted in the belief that ideas and experiences as well as
specific human responses always remaill intertwined.
Halfway House
18.2 A VIEW OF MOHAN RAKESH9SSHORT
FICTION AND THE ISSUE OF MARRIAGE
The short fiction in Hindi explored diverse processes that had eiiierged in urban
India around the time Mohan Rakesh took to writing. In the period following
Independence, industrialization became a priority project in the country with most
resources spared for the productive economic sector. Thus. the direction of
development in free India had become clear as rural India looked touards tlie city
for progress aid growth. Necessitating shift in population from the village to tlie city
shook the very foundations of rural India where people had lived since times
irnrnernorial along an established life-pattern. Not only were relations within in the
family redefined generally, but actual bonds between men and women as husband
and wife or parent arid child underwent radical change. Man and woman remained
no longer interdependent in the old way, as the one active in the outside world and
the other managing the household exclusively - this, as we knou, being the custom
in the orthodox household. A new sense of equality, togetherness and companionship
became the call of the times. Was it not a welcoine development? Ordinarilj; it
would seem so. However, in the times we are talking about, this was merely a
vision, a projected idea of the emerging India that offered a new life-paradigm to
men and women of the nineteen fifties. That there would be complexities, stalemates
and crises was only expected since the existing scenario was too vague and
amorphous to make possible and sustain visions of egalitarian libring. Rakesh grappled
with this issue as time passed and struggled to articulate his response to tlie
difficulties this reality posed to him. For his achieving his objective, he would
experiment with a number of prose forms in literature, fiction and drama being the
dominant ones among them.
Let us take up this issue at tlie level of form in life. There is, for instance, a form in
the household according to which segregation between males and females appears
not just natural but also a feasible and useful thing. With males organizing production
outside the family and women taking care of rearing children and carrying out
domestic chores works out quite efficiently as the two groups seldoni meet and
discuss things of common interest. Boundaries remain clearly demarcated and
neither party expects much from the other. Consider this form of social existence in
the region of drama and you would realize that a curtain is necessary on the stage
to keep the area sharply divided and 'un-intruded upon'. This form stood questioned
in the nineteen fifties since a sizeable part of the female population was exposed to
a changed set of priorities. In the family, an area called the living room enable Inen
and women of the household to sit together and welcoine guests that also included
women. Visualize this in the context of Mohan Rakesh's short stories and his play
HaIJivay House arid see whether this disturbs the old arrangement and creates
tensions among members of the family as well as the group of family friends.
Mohan Rakesh struggled to understand and capture this new form in his fictional
works and plays. Let us first see this happenings in one of his well-known short
stories.
This point in the specific context of Mohan Rakesh takes us to his short story 'Ek
Aur Zindagi' ('One More Life') in which the stasis as a consequence of the said
change in the urban middle class existence was depicted with compelling effect.
Similar to Adhe Adhure, Ek Aur Zindagi' devoted itself to the emergence of a new
form of relationships within the institution of marriage in tlie nineteen fifties. The
reigning emotion of this story being inertia and the ensuing frustration, Rakesli's
name was at the time more or less synonymous with that aspect of the 'Nai
Kahani' (New Short Story) trend i11 Hindi that stressed in negative terms the
mechanical and repetitive ways of living in big cities. Under this trend, sensitive
individuals got married with stars in their eyes, so to say, since they thought that
 iage in their case would become a basis of raising norms of a higher value than Dramatic Form in Mohan
Rakesh's HalJivay Houre
ne pre\/alent at the time. The activism that such individuals envisaged through
age would not straightforwardly critique their environment ('paiivesh') in
tical 01 ideological terms but have a bearing on the conditions around them
flect critically on the attitudes of those others who passively mowed with the
The passion of these 'sensitive individuals' out to realize themselves through
rent kind of marriage was such that they remained skeptical about every
f man-woman relationship under traditional principles of matrimony.
ould such a marriage meet their imagined goals of happiness arid fulfillment was
question that lurked somewhere at the back of their minds. The form we are
ussing lic~re~nanifestedquite differently in short fiction and drama writing. Let
to understand the specific nature of each.

ON AS DISTINCT FROM

'.'he critical distance from, if not antagonisni to the environment I mention in the
case of educated middle class individuals was bereft of the Romantic notion of
rejecting the real world for an imaginary one; it took the alternative paradigm of
ndividual-based matrimony literally. What is rneant is that the individuals concerned
:shunned crttiquing their world; instead they sought to live with things as they
existed. In the event of failure coming their way, these individuals would be filled
with bitterness, blaming the times in which they were born and iridulging in self-pity.
Mohan Raltesli particularly took up the case of fulfillment in marriage in new
surroi~ndirigsand combined the relationship with love, mutuality, honest dealing and
self-assertion. only to realize in the prccess of living that another set of circumstances
with different priorities in sight would solve the problem. In 'Ek Aur Zindagi', he
dealt with rhese issues step by step and came to the conclusion. worked out through
lived experience in the enviroiis of art. that things in this enclosed circle remained
static. But what was this 'lived experience'? The title of the short story in question
pointed towards the principle of social typicality - such a marriage in Rakesh's
opinion was the sole reality of the educated middle class in urban India. No wonder
that the assumed heroism of the individual sacrificing oneself on tlie altar of self-
created 'idealism' immediately appealed to many of those who felt devoid of worth
in their day-to-day life. In 'Ek Aur Zindagi', this heroism belonged to the male
protagonist. What about 'Adhe Adhure'? Under criticism from fellow writers and
theatre persons that 'Adlie Adhure' let the male bias control the proceedings in the
play, as the director Rajinder Nath has written, Mohan Rakesh consciously planned
to do just:ce to the female Savitri in the play and gave her the long speech that we
read in tlie later revised draft that constituted the final text of the play.
Around tl~esame time as 'Adhe Adhure' formed itself in the mind of the author, the
novel 'Arrdhere Bandh Karnre' ('The Dark Closed Rooms') had also been published.
Mohan Rakesh gave in this novel the kind of picture of the household one saw in
'Adhe Atlhure' and 'Ek Aur Zindagi' - young men and women with plans, such as
educating children and helping them settle in jobs, to execute and the belief that they
could indeed realize their long-held ambitions sooner or later. A temperament relying
on hard work and commitment was common to these sensibilities that were scattered
over the length and breadth of what was called 'New Fiction' - 'New Hindi Short
Story' and tlie 'New Hindi Novel'. Rakes11 seems to have been particularly obsessed
with such characters in his own writing that were so typically present in these
fictional trends of the time. Like 'Ek Aur Zindagi', for instance, 'Andhere Bandh
Kamre' clearly hinted at a world that enclosed individual Inen and women within its
rigid boundaries and prevented them from realizing their potential in life. Also, the
Harfway House novel went into the minute details of particular efforts and tactics that young
aspiring individuals normally employ to reach their goals, only to see eventually that
failure was inevitably in store for them. Was it not because the men and wornetl
involved in such struggles failed to see beyond their narrow world of honie or
house? It would have been a ditTerent case if the wider world outside home
became socially equipped to handle issues of progress and development. This would
entail socio-economic development in the vast rural space. This was not happeni~lg
and the urban middle class could only focus upon their individual lives and conditions.

18.4 DRAMA AND THE SOCIO-CULTURAL

ENVIRONMENT
Looked at from the socio-ideological angle of the ethos prevalent at the time, these
three works of Mohan Rakesh comprised an integrated artistic unit that projected,
with an incredible authenticity, the picture of the life of tlle niiddle class in Northern
urban India. 1 stress this to tell that 'Adhe Adhure' can be properly understood only
when we recognize the author's serious engagement \\it11 a social trend that was
new, attractive and challenging, howsoever present-centered or regressive it may
have been. Rakesh seems to have given so much iniaginati\c thought to this aspect
of contemporary social life that through tlre motions of the different characters in
'Adhe Adhure', he provides vital clues to the unfoldi~lg'n~eaning'(thewords 'arth',
'arthavatta', 'sarthakta', etc, fornied an important part of the critical vocabulary of
the period) of life in the new circumstance. In this respect. Mahendranath and
Savitri seem constantly to refer ( for the reader) to the three children - The Bo?,
The Older Girl and The Younger Girl - as their natural extensions. as persons that
later in life would face the same predicament that the parents do now. Why? kfj
answer is that the author meant to create through them an imaginary presence of a
stifling structure, the one that lie had faced at the level of imaginative re-creation in
the other two works mentioned above.
Mohan Rakesh shared with his contemporaries the way society was to be looked
at, examined and interpreted. This is to suggest that the post-independence generation
in India had no view of history and that the Indian National Movement of the
previous decades meant little to them. The young scarcely saw any appeal in the
idealism pursued by their elders whose inspiring examples %eresuch national figures
as Gandhi, Nehru, Bose and Bhagat Singh. The Hindi writing of the fifties on the
other hand resisted idealism as an abstract principle that people talked of but seldom
practiced. Was there any reason why such a standpoint had emerged in the nineteen
fifties? The question takes us back to the Partition in 1947 and cornmir~ialriots that
told a different and highly depressing story of the nationalist struggle. Cornniunal
riots of the Partition days distorted the vision of the Indian middle classes ~ h sa4:.
o
in tlie new phenomenon of the nineteen fifiies a perspective of individual fulfillment.
A young man in the nineteen fifties. Rakesh conte~ldedwith this develop~~ie~lt with a
mixed feeling of happy expectation that Independence had produced and pain (he
does not seem to have gone into the reasons of the phenomenon) that the society
stood divided along religious-communal lines.

18.5 HALFWAYHOUSE AS DRAMA OF FAMILY

IN MIDDLE CLASS SURROUNDINGS
Isn't the family an i~nportantarea of life where personal, social and political facets
of reality interact with each other? In the light of this question, we can further take
up the points dealt with in the discussion above. What did the said antagonism
between the notion of a united nationhood and the politics of religious intolerance
signify? In answer, we could say that tlie basic motivation infonning human behaviour
in such a case was indeed ani~iialisticsince llurnan beings were essentially driven
 instinctive urges in those circumstances. The implicit clash is felt in Adhe Dramatic Forrn in Mohan
ure in the depiction of not just Mahendranath and Savitri but their son and the Rakesh's Halfway House

and the mother (The Woman Savitri). To quote:

The Woman: Sit down. Tell me the truth. Is there anything ... ?
The Older Girl: No. Nothing and yet ... everything!
The Woman: For instance?
The Older Girl: For instance ... everything!
The Woman: So you mean?
The Older Girl: 1 mean ... that .. . before I hot married 1 thought 1 knew
Manoj very well. But now ...
The Woman: Hmm. Is he unfaithful?
The Older Girl: No.
The Woman: Bad-tempered?
The Older Girl: No.
The Woman: Then what is it?
The Older Girl: That's just what I can't understand. I don't know what is

The Woman: Is he short.of money?

The Older Girl: No.

The Older Girl: It's ... it's just the air we breathe ...

The Woman: Well?

The Older Girl: That the longer two people live together, breathe the same air,
... the more estranged they become from one another.

The Woman: Then there must be a reaso.1 ...

The Older Girl: What reason? A cup of tea spilt from his hand or a short delay
when he returns from work? These little things are not really reasons; they become
reasons. A strange sort of feeling mounts up within me and speaks like poison
through my whole being. Everything I touch or see or hear becomes distorted and I
stand helpless and fearful under the spell of a destructive fate. But mama, I don't
know why,. .. 1 just can't see why! It happens unasked, unforeseen. It . .. it ...
tortures me till 1 think I am going mad. And in the end? In the end, he too turns
against me and says ...

The Woman: What does he say?

The Older ~ i ~~ l h: ,,.~it's tfrom this house 1 have taken something with me which
pre~rentsme from being natural. (4)
discussed here by the mother and daughter is linked with the
The because of
essential nature of marriage, the way marriage turns into its
Halfway House something that the two partners in it are unable to understand. In this dialogue, The
Woman, being 'woman', knows more about the phenolnenon but at the given
moment she uses the rational discourse of economic difficulties, equality, compatibility
and mutual understanding - this is what is reflected in the questions she has posed
to the 'girl', a novice in the business. Also, the positioning ofthe Woman in this
situation is that of a well-meaning questioner who has taken upon herself to resolve
the contentious issue of 'making' or 'preserving' the 'home' of her daughter. On
the stage, this issue is visualized as two happenings that go parallel to each otller
and render the significance of each other null and void.

18.6 CONCRETENESS OF HALFWAY HOUSE AS

THEATRE
It is a theatrical scene in the true sense of the word - there is an interlocutor and
judge in the form of the mother, the 'party' with a grievance in the form of the
daughter and an audience on stage in the person of The First Man, who in fact is
literally forced by the 'judge' to keep shut during the interrogation. Good theatre this
since the bigger audience in the hall watch the 'action' of characters caught in the
situation as well as another audience in its peculiar role of trying to intervene in the
matter every now and then but not allowed to do so. Wouldn't the 'real' audience,
too, feel the need to participate in the 'discussion"happening on the stage? Yet, they,
too, are to merely watch the proceedings. The theatrical 'doubling' of the audience
first and then of 'actors' in the scene (as The Woman and The Older Girl are
married and discussing marriage, so would the audience wish to take an active part
in the 'session') is so well conceived and executed that for once we entirely accept
The Older Girl's version of marriage - ''I stand helpless and fearful under the spell
of a destructive fate". Interestingly, Halfiay House has deployed the technique of
democratic exchange between two or more parties but actually put one i n the seat
of authority and the other in that of helpless listeners or speakers who are not
supposed to be taken seriously.

What one finds hard to accept in this scene is the steamrolling of the active
consciousness of the characters involved. Being drama and theatre, Adhe Adhure
is supposed to produce a clash of interests as well as exchange of views that take
the characters and the audience into the wider world of marriages, divorces,
relationships, struggles involved in being single in a vast patriarchal set up, etc.
Something is being done at the expense of the dramatic form - a riddle is presented
not through dialogue but through a series of stoppages, silences, stammerings - all
merely struggles of an individual who has seen and known it all. We also note that
use of the 'poetic' and the 'philosophical' - the way it has been made to serve the
purpose of eliminating the 'dialogue' - may be appropriate for representation in
other literary forms, but not in drama that is supposed to recognize and stress
dichotomies, antagonisms and conflicts in actual life. If that does not happen, the
world away from the theatre would lose out on its democratic ways of difference-
oriented pluralism; the actual world (in which characters represented by actors and
the audience live) would either stand negated or reduced to 'inaction' through
authoritarian/ fascist handlings of uncomfortable developments. When the Older
Girl says: "What reason? A cup of tea spilt from his hand or a short delay when he
returns from work? These little things are not really reasons; they become reasons.
A strange sort of feeling mounts up within me and spreads like poison through my
whole being", she becomes an excuse in the hands of the writer to launch an attack
on 'reason' ("reason", "not really reasons", "become reasons" - the changing
meaning of the word through punning reinforces the point I make) and also state
 differ with the view being presented on the stage. The use of 'theatre', life-like Dramatic Form in
Rakesh's ,Halfivq
fumblings, the build-up througll stoppages and interruptions work here under the
logic of rhetoric that can be largely seen as 'anti-drama'. There is rhetoric in almost
every other situation in the play because of which the effect of this scene and the
play as a whole is nothing but overwhelming, indeed 'stunning' (6).

Is the rhetoric we notice in the situations of the play integral to the text, the
captured totality of the phenomenon? To answer this question, the earlier reference
to the fictional works of Mohan Rakesh might help. Again, this is a question of
form. The aesthetic of the short story or novel has a continuity that is equivalent to
a flow, an ongoing movement from one end of the text to the other. There are, of
course, instances where the direction of the fictional work with respect to its
movement is deliberately changed and its pri~~ciple of 'ongoing' process violated.
I But such violations are done to problematize the literary effort and reveal the
unpredictability of the 'action' sought to be represented in the text. The form of
fiction, it its twentieth century1 modernist manifestation, however, imposes a discipline
on the writer to 'depict', tell or 'narrate' (these are Georg Lukacs's words) so that
I a sort of lyricism, highly subjective and forceful, asserts itself in the literary work.
(7) This was particularly noticed in the short and long fiction of Mohan Rakesh
where lie insistently brought out that part of the modern-day living which had
I reached a dead end - a point in history that refused to look ahead (or back) and
move. Marriages, individl~alfriendships, living alo~ieby artists to lead bohemian
lives, etc. became significant points of reference in the new situation. All fiction of
Mohan Rakesh bears testimony to the precise working out of this aesthetic principle
in social existence. However, when the said aesthetic (of the 'dead end' situation)
was used for dramatic representation in Adhe Adhure, it left little scope for testing,
questioning self-questioning or placing the imagined situations in their relation with
the ones actually present in the society of the time.
The descriptive aesthetic of modern1 modernist fiction disallowed any 'dialogic' or
dramatic projection of the chose11 situations. E. Alkazi has drawn attention to this
aesthetic (appreciatively though) while commenting on the stage-effect in Adhe
Adhure of a certain scene where we are faced with, as he says, "a heap of broken
furniture, moth-eaten files, pieces of wood and iron, tom magazines and stinking
cups and saucers." For Alkazi, these details ''intensify the atmosphere of suffocation
and loneliness and become symbols of disintegrated life"(8). This in my opinion is a
part of the rhetoric that drowns the submerged attitudes and counter-voices as well
as difkrences, since the 'bsuffocation"is built up in the scene so assertively. Another
way to deal with the issue may have been to let the clashing perspectives come out
in the open and use their own dramatic1 theatrical space to address the audience. In
such a situation, twistings of form and excessive use of silences could be usefully
done away with for capturing tones and colours of actual life evolving in the
specific conditions of the nineteen fifties.

ONE ACTOR AS PLAYING FIVE ROLES IN

HALFWAY HOUSE
Is the employment of the technique of one actor playing all the five male roles not
symptomatic of Adhe Adhure presenting a larger-than-necessary generalization of
the marriage situation and what has been called 'House' in the English title Halfwq
House? Om Shivpuri, who enacted the multiple roles in Adhe Adhures first production
in 1969 had this to say on the issue: "At one level, this play is a manifestation of
similarity of the human experience in spite of the many individual shades found in it.
To this end, the dramatist has relied upon the interesting experiment of making one
single actor essay five different roles. If Mahendranath is replaced by Jagmohan or
Jagmollan by Juneja, no radical difference would occur, for the reason that the
Halfway House mould of specific situation compels the individual to follow the same path as any
other person would. To emphasize this, a few stage-productions began with a
spotlight that was focused on a mask" (9) Coming as it does from a renowned actor
and director of plays, it gives the interpretation that many in the world of Hindi
theatre accept and some have contested - quite sharply. Nemichandra Jain thought,
for instance, that a narrow segment of experience was blown out of proportion to
erroneously make the play's theme representative of the entire humanity. He dwelt
on the point further by saying that "barring perhaps Mahendranath," no character in
the play has raised the question "Who am I" in the world that slhe inhabits. This,
says Jain, is in spite of the fact that the play raises the issue of identity in a big way
and aims to apply universally to all men in all times(l0). A bit severe, the comment
does take the reader to the important question of outlook on social1 human life. Jain
has also made the pertinent point that the theory or ideology of sameness in
different situations may be sociologically interesting, but it does not go far in making
the viewer conscious about the nature of relationships that one actually confronts in
life. (A11 page numbers in the above discussion refer to Jain, Nemichandra, ed.
Sampoorna Natak).
The difficulty, however, lies in considering the 'five-roles-one-actor' idea in the play
to be a matter of technique alone. More than technique, this idea provides to the
play a peculiar structure that controls all happenings and changes as well as
differences marking the play. It strengthens the basic argument of this paper that
the aesthetic of the rhetoric of modernist fiction stands as a wall between the
understandability of human1 social life in its process of change and the stalemate
that human existence is supposed to have reached in the contemporary world.
Given such an aesthetic, the 'powerful' speech of Savitri stands easily countered by
her final admission later in the play that she cannot exist without Mahendranath. In
any case, it does not seem to matter whether she is married to Mahendranath or
makes a working liaison with another of the five males in the play. Worth noting in
this context is the following comment by Dilip Basu:
I think the play Adhe-Adhure hesitates, structurally, between the naturalistic
and the absurdist.
When the same actor is seen performing in four different roles. there is in the
auditorium a sense of watching a delightful game, and a positive expectation
that the actor will be good enough to portray the difference in these four
persons. The delight in the game subdues to a degree the claustrophobic
feeling of watching a set of people within the four walls of a home where
happiness, mutual relations and communication have rotted almost beyond
recovery. Looking for the difference in the presentation of the four persons
by one actor works in direct contradiction to a search for the essential
likeness of the four men encouraged at the outset by The Man in A Black
Suit. This 'likeness' is 'recognized' through our seeing the same actor
continuing to perform; the recognition does not register from any similitude
amongst the four men dramatically emerging from the script with any clarity.
The four variations of 'Man' presented in the play do not combine to give a
powerful impression of 'Everyman' systematically revealed, though The
Prologue together with the naming of the characters as The First Man, The
Second Man, etc. - all to be played by the sanie actor - do encourage such
a search (The implied understanding of 'Man' in Rakesh's play, of course. is
one belonging to Indian middle-class; there is some hesitation -to which we
shall very soon have to respond - as to whether it is a male human being or
any human being belonging to this group). (126-7).
Here, Basu has talked of 'four' (or five) roles that the actor is supposed to play and
termed the different roles in Halfiay House as "variatio~is'~ of 'Man'. Basu has
rightly raised the issue of male and female in the context of Indian middle class and
suggested that females do not belong to the category of middle class with Dramatic Form in Mohan
Rakesh's Halfivay House
adequate authority: there being "hesitation" on the writer's part about an integral
I nk (even within the educated middle class) between the sexes. Thus the gendered
constructs remain fixed and separate in the play and only a secondary place is
~ssignedto the fernale protagonist. At the level of form, too, whereas the mat, has
i number of "variations", the female is confined to the category of a single individual
wone to making one misjudgment after another. Basu is justified in assessing the
imited wotth of Savitri under the pattern that Haljivay House has captured and
~rojected.

18.8 LET US SUM UP

Mohan Rakesh has used the drama form in Halfway House quite earnestly. Foremost
among the techniques used by the writer is the assigning of five male roles to one
actor. Then, even as all other characters have individual names in the body of the
text (the names of characters get mentioned in the middle of the dialogues), they
are referred to as man, boy, older girl, younger girl, etc. consistently. Dialogues, too,
have a naturalistic air about them - close to what we come across in short or long
fiction. When we keep these things in mind, an entirely different version of the
depicted incidents and situations comes forth through drama perceived as theatre.
Also as a result of this, the play gains in resonance and widening of appeal.

18.9 EXERCISE
1. Explain the difference between Drama and theatre keeping in mind Mohan
Rakes11's Halfivay House.
2. What is the significance of an actor playing five roles in Ha1Jit.a~ House?
3. Ha!fivay House ends at the same point where it began. Comment

18.10 SUGGESTED READINGS

1. Basu, Dilip Kumar, ed., Mohan Rakesh, Halfivay House, (Delhi: Worldview),

2. Jain, Nemichandra, ed., Mohan Rukesh Ke Sampoorna Natak, (Del hi: Rajpal),

3. Rakesh, Mohan, Adhe Adhure, (New Delhi: Radhakrishna), 1976. Nemichandra

4. Chitre, Dilip, ed., Tender Ironies, New Delhi: Manohar, 1994.

5. Nutrang (Mohan Rakesh Memorial Number), No. 2 1, 1973.
6. Agrawal, Pratibha, Mohan Rakesh, New Delhi: Sahitya, 1987.
7. Taneja, Jaidev, iMohan Rakesh: Rangu, Shilpa aur Pradarshan, New Delhi:
Radhakrishna, 1996.
8. George, K. M., ed., Modern Indian Literature: An Anthology, Vol - Three,
Plays and Prose, New Delhi: Sahitya, 1994.
9. l'adav, Rajendra, ed., Ek L)uniya Samanantar, New Delhi: Radhakrishna,