Mulshankar Mulani

He was born on 1 November 1867 in Chavand[1] (now in Amreli district, Gujarat, India) to the religious Prashnora Nagar Brahmin family of Harinand Dayanad and Mankunwar.

[2] He was a descendant of Mula Bhatt who had served as a minister of Nawanagar State before 10 or 12 generations.

[2] Mulani started a job as a village development officer in Dhari, for a salary of ten rupees, but subsequently left to go to Bombay (now Mumbai).

After a period of struggles, he joined a weekly Satyavakta as a proofreader for a salary of twenty rupees.

[3][4] Mulani met Prabhurai Popatlal, who offered him a job as a play editor in the Mumbai Gujarati Natak Mandali, a theatre company, for a salary of five rupees.

After studying Shakespeare and Kalidasa, he wrote Barrister (1897), which was a play about a youth who was devastated due to his attraction to the western world.

He subsequently founded the Kathiyawadi Natak Mandali in 1906 in the name of his son-in-law, Vishwanath Madhavji Bhatt.

[3] He rejoined Mumbai Gujarati Natak Mandali when Nathuram Shukla requested him to rewrite Saubhagyasundari, which had failed to impress the owners and the director of the company.

The pairing of Bapulal Nayak and Jaishankar Sundari became popular with the audience and they starred together in many plays later on.

[2] Kathiyawadi Natak Mandali produced his Krishnacharitra (1906) which brought Krishna, for the first time, on the Gujarati stage.

[3] Devotional in nature, it was based on stories from the Bhagavata, depicting the relationship between Krishna and Gopi.

[5] His Ek Ja Bhool (1919), written for Royal Natak Mandali, had a discussion on a drone in its script.