Curtain falls on an epic life

Playwright Vijay Tendulkar’s death in Pune yesterday marks the passing of a golden age of Marathi and Indian theatre

Vijay Dhondopant Tendulkar had a boundless curiosity and fascination for the phenomenon of human violence, cruelty, and perversion. He was also drawn intensely to explore the relationships between power and violence and between man and woman. Each of his plays, every short story he wrote, the film scripts he crafted and socio-political or biographical essays he penned, are shadowed by this curiosity and fascination.

Tendulkar worked hard to answer the troubling questions he asked himself. He combed prisons, talked to hangmen and murder convicts, observed the lives of prostitutes and the destitute, and interviewed men in power or out of it. It was because of his minute observation of human life that his obitural sketches of politicians and writers were sometimes so profound as to acquire promethean proportions. Unfortunately, they are in Marathi and remain untranslated.

Tendulkar was in the business of translation in early life, rendering American novels into Marathi with prodigious speed. He was a self-made man with little formal education. He learnt English on his own and did translations for survival.

Though female characters subtly dominate most of his plays, Tendulkar hardly dealt with the gender matrix blatantly. The domination is in respect of power play within a family, within a marriage, within a sexual relationship. It is only after the play has sunk in that one becomes aware of a more powerful subterranean aftershock. That is how the gender question is handled, almost unconsciously. 

After repeated perusal of his plays, one might ask a fundamental question: why did the creator make this discrimination, this unjust distribution of the duty of procreation, not only among the human species, but  also in all living beings?

Tendulkar's Sakharam Binder subtly builds on the ancient Indian concept of Adishakti, the female power far superior to the frail, incomplete male. His Ghashiram Kotwal, described by many as a complete theatre experience, delineates the relationship between power and violence in the modern context.

But, despite its antiseptic canvas, or on account of it, the play brutally underlines the indignity of being a woman in male-dominated society.

Tendulkar’s plays or scripts acquire a pitiless, grim, gloomy texture, occasionally interspersed with black humour. The architectural construct and visual presentation of his major plays have superb aesthetic sense. But it is discomforting entertainment, which leaves you exquisitely dissatisfied. He invited charges of nihilism and defeatism on that account. But he may be pardoned that tendency. Some might say his nihilism borders on the spiritual. Because, in spite of his own seemingly negative mental frame, his characters exude an enjoyable zest for life. Be it Shantata! Court Chalu Aahe, Ghashiram Kotwal, or Sakharam Binder, the main characters are steeped in the pleasures of life.

And there are his short stories, sweet and enjoyable, which celebrate life itself. For example, there is this story where a death in the neighbourhood rejuvenates the bond between a couple close to breaking up.

Tendulkar hobnobbed with Marxism and was close to a radical group named Navjeevan Sanghatana, later named Lal Nishan (Red Flag), in the 1940s. But he remained above ideology and always anti-establishment, making him dear to several rebellious youth groups.

Tendulkar was among those inveterate rebels who never accepted the positive role of the establishment in the survival of human society. That may have had a connection with the hard life he lived, facing many tragedies with amazing fortitude.

Tendulkar was a master story-teller. His plays hid many layers and his characters refused to be uni-dimensional as was the wont in Marathi theatre. His plays and views gave rise to many bitter controversies. But they have only enriched India’s liberal literary ambience.

The writer is a veteran journalist and writer.