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I met Vijay Tendulkar about the time Satyadev Dubey and Govind Nihalani had jointly made their maiden film ‘Shantata Court Chalu Ahe’ (Silence—The Court is in Session), based on Tendulkar’s play of the same name. Soon after, I saw Dubey’s brilliant stage interpretation of ‘Sakharam Binder’ with Amrish Puri. Suddenly, Tendulkar became part of one’s consciousness not in an easy and facile way but with a great sense of discomfort. It would be more appropriate to say that he stuck in your throat like a chicken bone. Tendulkar’s plays made you uncomfortable, forcing you to rethink on quotidian subjects that you either took for granted, or held a view that you considered rational. He didn’t write to make you feel that all was well with the world. The world he presented was unvarnished, with every blemish showing.
When I met Tendulkar, he was much more than the ‘enfant terrible’ of Marathi Theatre. He was like an X-ray camera that saw through the smug certainties of the urban middle class. His work was brilliant, his criticism trenchant, his views sharp and his comments rapier-like on the social mores of contemporary urban society. At the time he was also toying with the idea of involving himself with the Cinema. Since I was embarking on ‘Ankur’, and had the subject of ‘Nishant’ in mind for my second film, I asked him if he’d be interested in writing the screenplay for ‘Nishant’. While agreeing to do it, he felt that he needed to look at how films were actually made—in fact, more specifically, how I went about making a film. He joined me on location in Hyderabad for a couple of weeks or more. He made himself as invisible as he could, observing, making mental notes and occasionally making a suggestion. The suggestions he made were invariably useful. I was tearing my hair out trying to find an actress to play the 16-year-old wife of the young landlord, played by Anant Nag.
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One day, during the lunch break, he said that he had a daughter about that age who had just finished school in Bombay. She could easily come if asked. He also made it clear that if I didn’t find her suitable, there was no obligation on my part—not even to pay her train fare between Bombay and Hyderabad. It so happened that Priya turned out to be perfect for the part. It also led to a tumultuous and stormy romance, and eventual marriage and divorce between Anant and Priya, both highly talented and equally high- strung individuals.
Tendulkar was doing research on violence during that period—he had just been awarded the Nehru Fellowship. I remember the day he returned after watching the execution by hanging of some tribals in Mushirabad Jail. They were sentenced to death for killing a landlord at the instance of yet another landlord. His description of the way those young men went to meet their deaths left an indelible impression on my mind.
To do research on ‘Nishant’, Tendulkar went to the village where the incident which is central to the film took place—a peasant uprising against the feudal landlord; one of the seminal events that led to the raging fires of the Telangana Movement. What struck me most about Tendulkar then, and has remained with me all these years and several scripts later including mine, was his discipline.
Once we had discussed the subject in detail with the narrative pattern I had in mind, Tendulkar went away and a few weeks later he'd be back with the script and dialogue (he made a concession to me by writing in English) neatly
handwritten in a ruled notebook. Most people find it difficult to believe that I never had him do a second draft because there was no need for one. He was totally focussed and precise in the way he worked. It was not as though he was unwilling to do further drafts. He had both the confidence and humility to work until the outcome was totally satisfactory both to the director and himself. In my case, both the scripts that he wrote for me did not need to go beyond the first draft. There were some minor disagreements, though. He was not totally convinced by the final climax I’d chosen for ‘Nishant’. I cannot now recollect what it was he was not comfortable with in the way I chose to end the film.
Although Tendulkar wrote no other film script for me after the two celebrated ones—Nishant and Manthan—I’d often consult him on the scripts of some of my later films: ‘Bhumika’ and ‘Kalyug’, for instance. In fact, the Bhumika script has him sharing the credits with Girish Karnad, Satyadev Dubey and myself.
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Tendulkar was a rationalist grappling with a world that never seemed to function with reason. He was sceptical to the point of seeming cynical, which in fact he was not. He valued decency and honesty, and always stood up for the underdog, not because the underdog was in any way virtuous, but simply because he was being oppressed and exploited. He felt that life was beyond any kind of schemata, even when it appeared to be rational. Having attained maturity in Nehruvian India, he was both a socialist and humanist but not in any doctrinaire sense. Although he did not subscribe to any specific ideology, his thinking would be closer to ideas that emerged from the Enlightenment, such as human rights and so on.
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His idealism had the fervour of free thinkers, more in the line of Bakunin and the anarchists. He would have been surprised to hear this about himself, but having observed him over the years, I felt that the ideal society for him would be one that would be voluntary, convivial, cooperative, decentralised and federal.
I drifted away from Tendulkar many, many years ago and only read his writings, saw his television work and met on rare occasions when he was being felicitated. In recent years life dealt him several tragic blows in quick succession: the multiple tragedies of losing two of his children and his wife made him go through an agonised contemplation on the nature of death and loss. I’m told that he was writing a book on the subject when he passed away. His ailment, myasthenia gravis, tired him easily. True to his nature, he wanted no fuss, no religious service, no elaborate ceremony--and no mourning at his funeral. All he wanted was the quick disposal of his mortal remains.
I would like to remember Tendulkar as a person forever searching for answers to life’s conundrums, and fulminating at the injustices of man and perhaps his own contradictions. He was that rare breed: a genuine idealist.
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