Vijay Tendulkar: 1928-2008
Many years ago, watching a performance of Sakharam Binder in Calcutta, I heard someone in the audience say, “What kind of play is this? The language is so plain, the characters are so vulgar — where is the upliftment?”
“Where is the upliftment”: indeed, that was often how the Indian establishment greeted a new work from Vijay Tendulkar, the great Marathi writer who died yesterday after many years of fighting myasthenia gravis. His plays were often heralded by clashes with the censor, or greeted with horror by the more conservative.
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But Sakharam Binder is still watched; Tendulkar’s portrayal of a man who could be benefactor and abuser, who makes his bargains openly with the women he simultaneously rescues and uses, remains one of the most intricate and compelling character studies in Indian theatre. And it was that “plain” language, those ordinary, “vulgar” characters who struck a chord with audiences across five decades; we recognised something of ourselves in all of Tendulkar’s plays, even if we didn’t always like that recognition.
His play, Gidhade (The Vultures), featured a woman character wearing a sari that had a large red dot in front. The symbolism of the dot was considered shocking, even vulgar; in one production of the play, Satyadev Dubey switched the colour of the dot to black — and then urged the audience to imagine that it was red, in accordance with Tendulkar’s wishes.
One of his most searing and best-known plays, Ghashiram Kotwal, was written by Tendulkar as he witnessed the rise of the Shiv Sena in Mumbai. His portrayal of Nana Phadnavis was considered scandalous in more conservative quarters, and for a while, every performance of the play had to be preceded by the ludicrous announcement that “Nana Phadnavis was a great Peshwa leader”. He couldn’t have written better black farce himself — and he was one of our best mordant writers.
There are few Indians who don’t know at least some of Tendulkar’s plays — Ghashiram Kotwal, Sakharam Binder and Silence! The Court is in Session (Shantata Court Chalu Aahe)— have been staples of the theatre circuit for years. What made him such a great writer was that he couldn’t be easily slotted. He dealt in ambiguity and ambivalence, he bore witness to his times, but he understood the complexity of human beings, and he had no tolerance for hypocrisy.
He spoke once of the environment he had grown up in — a Mumbai chawl, the father who ran a small publishing business, books and literature threading through what outsiders might assume was only middle-class poverty. He loved this environment. His father often took him to see plays, and he liked going backstage, watching the transformation as the men who played women’s roles sat back in their costumes and smoked beedis. He was precocious, writing his first play at the age of 11 — he also produced, directed and acted in it.
Many years later, when he worked on screenplays for films such as Manthan, Ardh Satya and Aakrosh, he sought out the directors who shared a certain sensibility, a way of looking at the world without flinching and with honesty — Shyam Benegal, Govind Nihalani, Saeed Mirza. (He didn’t do a screenplay for Mirza, but he wrote the dialogue for Arvind Desai ki Ajeeb Dastan.)
The best of his work has a timeless quality about it; plays that he wrote in response to a particular event, a moment caught in time, remain just as relevant and arresting today. His plays, screenplays and short stories have a clarity about them — his directions in his screenplays are crisp and vivid, he preferred short, pithy sentences, and he listened, really listened to the way ordinary people spoke, catching the rhythms of their language perfectly.
This made him an easy writer to read in translation — the Marathi of the original writing slides fluidly into English, or indeed into most other languages. The plays he translated, in turn, demonstrate the range of theatre he loved, from the historical to the deeply personal — Girish Karnad’s epic Tughlaq on one hand and Tennessee William’s gripping, haunting A Streetcar Named Desire on the other.
“My writing has always been honest,” he often said. “I don’t know any other way to write except to look at life, to really look, without prejudices or blinkers, and then to write what I see as honestly as I can.” His friends, and they were many, in the literary world will miss him; the rest of us have the consolation of knowing that we will always have Vijay Tendulkar’s work with us.