In the late 1980s, when Mahabharat brought India to a standstill every Sunday morning, director B R Chopra told its dialogue writer, Rahi Masoom Raza, that then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi wanted to meet him.

“Do the dialogues in the serial about janm and karm — birth and deeds — refer to me?” Gandhi asked. “The entire Bhagavad Gita is about janm and karma,” Rahi replied. Then, with characteristic deadpan humour, he added: “If you can guarantee my safety, I will write another Gita for you.” Gandhi smiled.

The brief Rajiv-Rahi encounter features in a dastan (a long oral tale in Persian, Turkic, and Urdu traditions) about the legendary poet and writer that theatre director Mahmood Farooqui has mounted as part of Rahi’s birth-centenary celebrations, which began August 1.

Nearly 35 years after his death, Rahi — who left behind 11 novels, seven collections of poetry and scripts, screenplays or dialogues for around 200 films — risks becoming a name remembered principally for Mahabharat. The centenary is an occasion to revisit the many worlds that made him, and the work through which he helped shape India’s cultural imagination.

Born in Gangauli, a village on the banks of the Ganga in eastern UP’s Ghazipur district, Rahi grew up amid the layered cultures of the Gangetic plains. That inheritance ran through his poetry, fiction and screenwriting. “Rahi writes that he had three mothers — his mother Nafisa Begum; the Ganga; and Aligarh Muslim University. His sensibilities were shaped by all three,” says Darain Shahidi, who wrote the dastan and performs it with Rajesh Kumar.

It was to the Ganga that Rahi turned when he faced one of the biggest predicaments of his professional life. He had initially declined B R Chopra’s offer to write the screenplay and dialogues for Mahabharat. But after Chopra announced his name, he was flooded with letters from Hindu zealots objecting to a Muslim being chosen to script the epic. Rahi changed his mind.

“I am a son of the Ganga,” he declared — and insisted that he, and no one else, would write it. “If Rahi could defend Mahabharat so confidently as an epic embodying our civilizational values, it was because of the forces that had shaped him,” says Farooqui.

What made Rahi’s Mahabharat memorable was not merely the force of its plot or the cadence of its dialogues. Those who performed his words felt that he inhabited the epic’s world.

“When we were shooting the serial, it seemed as if Rahi sahab had written it while watching the Mahabharata war at Kurukshetra,” says actor Surendra Pal Singh, who played Dronacharya.

Singh says he was the only actor Chopra selected without a screen test. But at 24, he was reluctant to play a character he imagined as an old man, fearing it would damage his prospects in Bollywood. It was during a visit to Chopra’s Juhu office that he met Rahi. “Young man, Dronacharya is not an old man. He is an army general. You will not regret playing him,” Rahi told him.

The words proved prophetic. “Even today, people at airports recognize me as Dronacharya from Mahabharat,” Singh says with a smile.

If Mahabharat took Rahi into millions of Indian homes, it was Gangauli that gave him his most enduring fictional landscape. The village and the Ganga form the backdrop to ‘Aadha Gaon (Half a Village)’, his best-known novel. “To him, Ghazipur was not just another town, nor Gangauli just another village. They shaped his imagination, prose and poetry,” says Ather Farooqui, general secretary of Anjuman Taraqqi Urdu (Hind).

With help from Rahi’s daughter, Maryam Moonis, the Delhi-based organisation has archived several of his original manuscripts, including those of ‘Aadha Gaon’ and Mahabharat. It now plans to publish his works, including Mahabharat, in Urdu.

Rahi’s native district is also joining in the centenary celebrations. Asif Azmi, director of the cultural organization Maati, plans to organise 100 programmes commemorating him. These include an event in Ghazipur that will bring together 100 prominent people from different fields. Jammu & Kashmir lieutenant-governor Manoj Sinha, himself a Ghazipur native, is among those Azmi plans to invite.

Anjuman’s announcement that it will publish ‘Aadha Gaon’ in Urdu has revived an old debate. Rahi was essentially an Urdu writer, yet the novel first appeared in Devanagari, or Hindi, in 1966.

‘Aadha Gaon’ was a landmark work: it brought Bhojpuri into the literary world of Urdu fiction and offered a rare portrayal of Shia life in the 1940s. Why, then, was it not originally published in the Urdu script?

Farooqui traces the answer to the politics of AMU’s Urdu department in the 1960s — and to the hostility Rahi faced over his marriage to Nayyar Jahan, a granddaughter of Sahebzada Aftab Ahmad Khan. She had previously been married to Lt Col Sahebzada Muhammad Yunus Khan and had three children.

The marriage unsettled sections of the entrenched elite on the otherwise quiet AMU campus. It is believed that a senior Urdu professor, who had earlier worked at a college owned by the nawab of Rampur, ensured that Rahi’s position as a lecturer was not confirmed.

Professor Shafey Kidwai, director of AMU’s Sir Syed Academy, offers a qualification. “It is true that Rahi’s marriage to Nayyar Jahan earned him considerable hostility on campus. But, sensing that the lecturer’s post would go to someone else, Rahi did not apply for it,” he says.

The rupture did not diminish AMU’s influence on Rahi. He earned his MA and PhD there, and the university became one of the ‘three mothers’ to whom he acknowledged his intellectual debt.

Filmmaker Muzaffar Ali first encountered Rahi at Aligarh. “Rahi had a magnetic pull for us. He was our main attraction in the Urdu department, where I spent hours even though I studied geology,” recalls the ‘Umrao Jaan’ director.

By 1967, however, Aligarh had become too difficult for Rahi. He moved to Bombay, where cinema embraced the prolific writer. Yet, Ali says, Rahi continued to feel “underutilised”.

His literary ambitions always stretched beyond the screen. Among his works was a long epic poem on the uprising of 1857, celebrating the heroes and rebels who rose against British rule. Ali now wants to build a ballet around it.

Rahi died in Mumbai in 1992, two years after Mahabharat completed its enormously successful run. He had wished to be buried near the Ganga, but was laid to rest in the Santacruz graveyard, not far from the Arabian Sea.