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IJRREST: International Journal of Research Review in Engineering Science and Technology (ISSN 2278- 6643) | Volume-1 Issue-1, June-2012

THEME OF PROTEST IN THE PLAYS OF VIJAY TENDULKAR *Komal Preet Virk *Research Scholar, CMJ University, Shillong, Meghalaya, India

ABSTRACT Most of the plays deal with the theme of love, sex and violence. They reveal anger and frustration of the post-1960 generation in the Indian context. The ideas implicit in the themes are revolutionary. They are opposed to the conventional norms and established values. The emphasis here is on human nature and its complexities. In projecting the revolt of the plays’ protagonists against conventionality, Tendulkar displays his love of humanity and his commitment to human values. The psychological study explores shifts and changes that have taken place in the modes of human thinking, feeling, and behaving with regard to Tendulkar’s characters among which we see highly typified as well as individualized men and women. Keywords: Marginalised, Conceptualised.

1. INTRODUCTION Vijay Tendulkar, once journalist by profession, is considered a controversial playwright for his plays such as Ghashiram Kotwal, Sakbaratn Binder, Silence! The Court is in Session, The Vultures, etc., as they have created a storm and an intellectual debate in society. At the same time, he has won the highest award in the field of dramatics on all India level for his play Silence! The Court is in Session. Tendulkar’s plays deal with agonies, anxieties, and tensions of the urban, white-collar, middle-class people, his provocative socio-political plays which relentlessly and ruthlessly explore the human psyche and society never fail to raise a storm. They focus on the conflict and confrontation between individual and society. The angry and frustrated protagonists of his plays are actually the victims of harsh circumstances in life in the so-called modern, cultured society. The anger and frustration of these young men and women is expressed in their rejection of the conventional or traditional values and norms. So, the cruelty of some protagonists is a kind of perverted humanity and their desire to inflict miseries on others is a kind of revenge sought against society. They offer the world a set of social attitudes that are anti-establishment,

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anti-cultural, and even anti-humanitarian in the existential sense as opposed to the established, cultural, and humanitarian values. However, the world fails to recognize their struggle for existence, their bravery, and their sense of humanity.

2. THE PROBLEM While projecting the wrath of the young generation, Tendulkar explores human mind and its complexities in all depth and variety. He presents man-woman relationship in terms of sensuality and violence rather than love and affection. An anti-romantic playwright as Tendulkar is, he projects not love but its perversion, not sex but its degradation. While pursuing his study as a part of Nehru fellowship, he has won, Tendulkar was left feeling a psychological curiosity about violenc--not as something that exists in isolation, but as a part of the human milieu, human behaviour, human mind. It has become an obsession. At a very sensitive level, violence can be described as consciously hurting someone, whether it is physical violence or psychological violence....Violence is something which has to be accepted as fact. It’s no use describing it as good or bad. Projection of it can be good or bad. And violence, when turned into something else, can certainly be defined as vitality, which can be very useful, very constructive. So, it depends on how you utilize it or curb it at times. 1

3. SCOPE It is with the presentation of The Vultures that Tendulkar’s name has become associated with sex, violence, and sensationalism. However, these elements were there in his earlier plays too, but have, now come to be noticed in more glaring light. Tendulkar, who has been witnessed as the angry young dramatist of the Marathi theatre, rebels against 1

Vijay Tendulkar, interviewed by Elizabeth Roy, in Indian Review of Books, Vol. 2, No. 7, April-May, 1993. Quoted by Samik Bandyopadhyay, Introduction, Collected Plays in Translation, New Delhi: OUP, 2002, xii-xiii.

IJRREST: International Journal of Research Review in Engineering Science and Technology (ISSN 2278- 6643) | Volume-1 Issue-1, June-2012

the established, conventional ideas and values of the society from the presentation of the play Silence! The Court is in Session onwards. The play places him among the leading Indian playwrights and sets him apart from the previous generation of the Marathi playwrights. Thus, he is one who at once belongs to the tradition and establishes himself as an individual talent, a pioneering figure of the Contemporary Marathi Theatre. For Silence! The Court is in Session, Tendulkar got inspiration from a real-life incident. He met an amateur group that was on its way to stage a mock trial in Vile-parle, a suburb of Mumbai. While overhearing their conversation, the outline of the play began to take shape in his mind, and the ultimate result of it was the birth and creation of the play. The original Marathi play was written for the Rangayan at the instance of Arvind and Sulabha Deshpande in 1967, and was first performed in its English version in 1971, in Chennai, and was directed by Ammu Mathew. The play is a social satire with the tragedy of an individual victimized by society. The brief outline of the story goes thus: A group of artists goes to a town to perform a play. A rehearsal of the play in which there is a mock-trial is arranged. In this mock-trial, the private life of Leela Benare, the play’s protagonist is revealed and publicly discussed. Here, Tendulkar presents a world apparently dominated by male chauvinists. However, the dramatic action revolves round the character of Leela Benare. Tendulkar, though not a self-acknowledged feminist, treats the character of Benare with great compassion and understanding while pitting her against the men who are selfish, hypocritical, and brutally ambitious. Leela Benare, who is rebellious and assertive, is a school teacher. She performs her duty, as a teacher very sincerely and commands love and respect of her pupils. She is also an enlightened artist. So, she accepts the membership of the amateur theatre group. The other members of the group are the Kashikars, Balu Rokde, Sukhatme, Ponkshe, Karnik, Prof. Damle, and Rawte who belong to the urban middle class of Mumbai. All the characters except Leela Benare are the representatives of the fundamentally orthodox society. The theatre group is a “miniscule crosssection of middle-class society, the members representative of its different sub-strata. Their characters, dialogues, gestures, and even mannerisms

reflect their petty, circumscribed existences.” 2 Frustrated and angry as they are in their individual lives, they go to the extent of maligning their companion also, for they are malicious and jealous in attitude towards their fellow-being. Leela Benare, with her zeal and zest for life, is totally different from them. She wants to share her happiness with others but hardly succeeds in doing so. Her companions fail to appreciate her jovial, generous nature. Benare, who is far different from others, is isolated. The co-actors cunningly arrange a cruel game in the form of a mock-trial. Benare becomes a target of their gossip and falls a victim ultimately to character assassination at their instance. During the proceedings of the mock-court, her companions deliberately reveal her illicit love affair with Prof. Damle, a married man. The love affair ultimately results in her pregnancy. Prof. Damle, however, is significantly absent at the time of trial. His absence denotes his total withdrawal from responsibility, either social or moral. At the time of rehearsal, the remarks in the book read by Samant, which are supposed to be Damle’s addressed to Benare, implicitly throw light on the culprit’s escapist tendency: “Where you should go is entirely your problem. I feel great sympathy for you. But I can do nothing. I must protect my reputation.” (92). The play The Vultures, published in 1971, stands apart from the other plays of Tendulkar in that it is a play, which displays the unmitigated violence arising from selfishness, greed, and sinfulness. On its first production on the stage, there was a great storm in the society around. The conservative Maharashtrian people were stunned to observe the vulgar reality of their lives presented through the sexual relations and the scenes of violence in the play. It is for this reason that Girish Karnad says: “The staging of Gidhade could be compared with the blasting of bomb.”3 The play was bitterly criticized by the theatre-going public. The censor-board, too, felt that it was obscene and suspended its public performance for the time being. The play is a ruthless dissection of human nature as it depicts violence, avarice, selfishness, sensuality, and sheer wickedness inherent in man’s life. The title of the play The Vultures itself indicates the unpleasant subject-matter of the play.

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Arundhati Banerjee, Introduction, Five Plays of Vijay Tendulkar, Bombay: OUP, 1992, viii. Arundhati Banerjee, Introduction, Five Plays of Vijay Tendulkar, Bombay: OUP, 1992, xii.

IJRREST: International Journal of Research Review in Engineering Science and Technology (ISSN 2278- 6643) | Volume-1 Issue-1, June-2012

The play Ghashiratn Kotwal makes room for Tendulkar in the galaxy of international playwrights. It proves to be a landmark in the history of the Indian theatre. Using the historical incident in the Peshwa regime, the playwright exposes violence, treachery, sensuality, and immorality latent in contemporary politics and reveals the fact that hypocrisy, greed, and brutality characterize power politics.

revenge on the Brahmins of Poona and vice versa in Ghashiram Kotwal, in a young Dalit’s brutal treatment of his pregnant wife in Kanyadan, and finally, in Mitra’s relationship to Nama in A Friend’s Story. Therefore, all these plays are, in fact, spectacles of violence, overt or covert.

The two important characters in the play are Ghashiram Savaldas and Nana Phadnavis. It is through their depiction that Tendulkar exhibits the way in which power operates. Towards the end of the play, Ghashiram is killed at the behest of Nana who continues to thrive. The end of the play thus symbolically suggests that, in power politics, one evil-doer meets punishment but the other goes scotfree. The characters here are types rather than individuals. Ghashiram is the representative of those people in society who pursue their goal unquestionably. Nana is the representative of those people in politics who use the needy people as their pawns and destroy them when they are no longer useful for them.

[1] Abrams, M.H. A Glossary of Literary Terms. Bangalore: Prism, 1993. [2] Banerjee, Arundhati. “Introduction”. Five Plays of Vijay Tendulkar. Bombay: OUP, 2005. [3] Bentley, Eric. The Theatre of Commitments. London: Mathew and Company, 1968. [4] Bhabha, Homi. Nation and Narration. London: Rutledge, 1990. [5] Brandon, James R. Cambridge Guide to Asian Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975. [6] Dharan, N. S. The Plays of Vijay Tendulkar. New Delhi: Creative Books, 2006. [7] Esslin, Martin. Theatre of the Absurd. London: Penguin, 2003. [8] Gaskell, Ronald. Drama and Reality. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1999. [9] MacRae, John. Collected Plays. Mumbai: Metro Publishers, 2005. [10] Mee, Erin B. “Mahesh Dattani’s Invisible Issues.” Performing Arts Journal 55 (2000): 1215. [11] Drama Contemporary. New Delhi: OUP, 2002. [12] Shivdasani, Arun. “Three Playwrights.” Amarpali. New Delhi: Maya Books, 1998. [13] Sonalkar, Sudhir. “Vijay Tendulkar and Metaphor of Violence.” The Illustrated Weekly. 20 Nov., 2005. [14] Walia, Reema. “Fear of AIDS Victims.” HiSociety 11.4 (2003): 21-24 .

In the play Kamala, Tendulkar attacks the institution of marriage, exposes selfish hypocrisy of the successoriented modern youths, and projects the evils in the field of journalism. The theme is discussed through the triangular relationship of Sarita-Jaisingh-Kamala. The event depicted is based on a real-life incident. Jaisingh Jadhav, the protagonist of the play, fetches Kamala from a rural flesh market and presents her at the press conference. However, his main objective is not to expose the inhuman flesh market, but to achieve name, fame, and position. For him, Kamala is not a human being, but a marketable commodity that can bring him reputation in his professional career and promotion in his job. Thus, the real-life incident of the flesh market exhibits the violence practised and enjoyed by the present-day generation, particularly the careerist young ones.

4. CONCLUSION Thus, all the plays describe violence, power, repression, and frustration that exist in the contemporary Indian society. Violence is noticed everywhere in Tendulkar’s dramatic world— in the cruel, cunning game in the form of a mock-trial in Silence! The Court is in Session, in an over-ambitious young journalist’s craze for money and fame in Kamala, in excessive sexual lust of the protagonist in Sakharam Binder, in the rude, brutal interactions of the family members in The Vultures, in Ghashiram’s

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5. REFERENCES