In the death of Vijay Tendulkar India has lost, arguably, its foremost playwright of the last fifty years.
A school dropout and almost entirely self-taught as a writer, Tendulkar worked his way up and into
the murky Marathi literary world of the 1950s where popular taste had no room for the finer nuances
of more artistically ambitious writing.
Tendulkar had nothing but his pen to support himself. Journalism became his bread and butter profession.
However, he carved a niche for himself in both literature and journalism and focused on writing plays, as
theatre was his first love.
In the event, he wrote more than thirty full-length plays and several one-act plays that fed newly emerging
theatre groups and non-commercial repertories. On the side, he wrote short stories as well. When Tendulkar turned
to writing screenplays for art house cinema, another aspect of his creativity unfolded.
His output was indeed prolific but he crafted his work with diligence and even his newspaper columns were never
the kind of disposable verbiage that we are used to.
Tendulkar was always associated with unpopular, provocative, and controversial writing that hurt the Marathi
middle-class in some of its tenderest spots. It is hard to imagine today that his now classic plays such as
as Sakharam Binder and Ghashiram Kotwal were once targeted by the militant Shiv Sena and later
banned by the Maharashtra government.
Tendulkar, who knew he was dying, had expressed the wish to be cremated without any ceremony or fuss. One was
shocked to see the electronic media mocking at his sentiments by showing details of his mourners—a veritable
who’s who in Marathi theatre, cinema and literature.
Two of the top Marathi television channels competed with each other by showing interviews, video and film clips,
and even inviting viewers to participate through phone-in messages. It became almost obscene after a while and one
wonders whether Tendulkar would have approved of such pornography of mourning and the platitudes that were mouthed.
There are better ways of mourning a cultural loss.
New Quest recently carried the full text of Tendulkar’s recently published memoirs in Marathi, translated into
English by Dr M.S. Gore. We would invite theatre, film and literary critics to contribute articles assessing his
wider impact.
