The clashes between greed and honesty, ambition and morals were seen in an Urdu play Begum Ka Takiya. The play was staged on the third day of the Urdu Theatre Festival at Ravindra Bhawan Auditorium, here on Sunday.
Directed by a distinguished and a renowned theatre personality of the city Balendra Singh, the play is adapted from a Hindi novel by Pandit Anand Kumar. The play was splendidly performed and staged by the artists of Hum Theatre Group, Bhopal. Begum Ka Takiya is the tale of two brothers who share the same blood, the same bread and the same roof. But wealth and women create a chasm between them.
The elder is greedy and dishonest; the younger one is honest and follows a high moral code in his life. The elder brother prospers and the younger suffers. Even in the face of misery and misfortune, the latter never compromises with his high principles.
Elder brother Meera becomes rich after surreptitiously having grabbed the buried treasure and then disappears. He comes back with Begum, who claims to belong to high society, and her relatives. The younger brother, Peera, sinks into poverty though he has the money given to him by Dariya Shah to build a shelter for travelers. He is at liberty to use this money for his personal needs but a morally conscious Peera considers himself in charge of the money and cannot breach the trust.
Peera's wife is a simple woman who retaliates when the wife of the older brother, who is a notch girl in the garb of a high-society woman, and her relatives insult her husband. The centre of discord between the two brothers is that the elder brother wants to make a palatial building at the behest of his wife on the land whose rightful owner is Dariya Shah, while the younger brother is determined to stop his brother from usurping the land of a holy man who wants to have a shelter for travelers on this land.
The situations that take place in the play in the shows the mirror of the society that how a person runs behind money and greed. The characters wonderfully managed to capture the attention of the audience.