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It is easy to misunderstand Vijay Tendulkar’s plays. They feature much violence, physical, psychological and linguistic. They can all be read as testaments of protest, and partisans can fight among themselves over what the protest is all about. This violence can be raised to a sublime category of post-modernist theory, which Samik Bandopadhyay does in the introduction. He invokes, quite predictably the dubious French intellectual icon of the 1960s and 1970s, Michel Foucault, and makes a plausible connection with the theme of violence in Tendulkar’s plays. Bandopadhyay writes: “A strong ethical concern exploring and critiquing the relations of power in all their complex ramifications is the hub around which Tendulkar’s major plays revolve. Power (which Foucault calls ‘the relationship in which one wishes to direct the behaviour of another’) and violence as the natural instrumentality that power brings into play provide the space in which these plays are played out.”
Bandopadhyay buttresses his case by quoting Tendulkar, who chose to study violence for his Nehru Fellowship project, from an interview: “Violence has to be accepted as fact. It’s no use describing it as good or bad. Projections 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.” Bandopadhyay goes on to conclude: “In the eight plays collected in this volume, Tendulkar studies power and violence in spaces institutionally defined, the specificities more often than not serving to camouflage the violence in the exercise of power.” To get the true measure of Tendulkar’s plays it, would be necessary to treat the views of the critics and the playwright himself as mere distractions, and read the plays without much such props.
Though the plays are not presented in chronological order, and there is little information about how they were initially received, it can be seen that Tendulkar has written compelling plays, which can be read with great attention. They evoke in the reader considerable pity and terror, as tragic spectacles are wont to do. And like any true writer or playwright, Tendulkar also brings in echoes of other writers and playwrights. It is this resonance of the familiar that makes reading Tendulkar pleasurable.
Towards the end of Kamala, Sarita, wife of the journalist Jaisingh, who buys the woman Kamala as part of his investigate reporting but continues to treat his wife with scant respect, tells her uncle: “But a day will come, Kakasaheb, when I will stop being a slave. I’ll no longer be an object to be used and thrown away. I’ll do what I wish, and no one will rule over me. That day has to come. And I’ll pay whatever price I have to pay for it.” It is hard not to recall Nora’s words at the end of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. Tendulkar may or may not have read Ibsen. But as a good playwright, he was writing with Ibsen in his bones.
In the absurd play, Silence! The Court is in Session, the woman, Benare, who faces the mock charge of infanticide in the mock-rehearsal of a play, and whose affair with professor Damle is exposed by her fellow-players, reminds us, in her gentle defiance, of Mrs. Alving in Ibsen’s Ghosts. In a monologue that we learn Tendulkar had added for the sake of stretching the play to the required performance time—it was entered for a competition—Benare declaims: “Yes I have a lot to say… For so many years, I haven’t said a word. Chances came, and chances went. Storms raged one after another about my throat. And there was a wail-like death in my heart. But each time I shut my lips tight. I thought no one will understand! When great waves of words came and beat against my lips, how stupid everyone around me, how childish, how silly, they all seemed. Even the man I call my own. I thought I should just laugh and laugh till I burst. At all of them… that’s all—just laugh and laugh. And I used to cry my guts out. I used to wish my heart would break! My life was a burden to me…But when you can’t loose it, you realize the value of it. You realize the value of living. You see what happiness means… Life seems to sing for you. There’s great joy in a suicide that failed. It’s greater even than the pain of living.” It’s a ringing re-affirmation of life and happiness in a play with its dark and bizarre undertones.
Sakharam Binder, one of his most famous plays, carries memories of another play, and another novella, completely unrelated to each other. Again, it is quite possible that Tendulkar does not know of the existence of either. The protagonist, Sakharam Binder, resembles in his deliberate rebelliousness John Osborne’s Jimmy Porter in Look Back in Anger. What makes Sakharam Binder complex is the characterization of Laxmi, the abandoned woman he brings home and who remains his housekeeper and official wife for a year before he throws her out, and that of Champa, the woman who abandons her impotent policeman husband, Fouzdar Shinde. While Laxmi bears the brunt of Sakharam’s verbal and physical violence with the characteristic passivity of a traditional and fatalistic Indian woman, Champa is as rebellious as Sakharam, and equally violent. At the end of the play, it is the passive Laxmi who tames Sakharam and incites him to kill her rival, Champa. Laxmi displays an amazing coming which she camouflages beneath her religiosity. It is this flip-flop in the fortunes of the two women and the man in Sakharam Binder which brings in memories of Edith Wharton’s psychological novella, Ethan Fromme. Zeena, the invalid wife of Ethan Fromme, is somewhat like Laxmi. Though the sprightly Mattie Silver, Zeena’s cousin whom Ethan Fromme loves, is as not as aggressive as Champa, she is alive. In the end, Zeena dominates the scene and Mattie ends up an invalid. Sakharam Binder, caught between the two women, is enslaved, as it were, by the apparently brittle Laxmi. The echoes of Osborne and Wharton only add to the charm of the play.
Tendulkar’s plays are captivating for the characterization, which breaks through class and gender moulds and makes the human heart vile and beautiful in turn. So it would be futile to pigeonhole him as a protest playwright out to expose the exploitative structures of a traditional, bourgeous society. Like any good playwright, Tendulkar presents a convincing picture of human beings of flesh and blood, and he is not worried as to which side of the class and gender divide they stand.
This does not mean that the plays do not pose questions and problems, and that these relate not so much to human nature and social conditions as to the substance of the plays. Tendulkar relentlessly deals with unhappy people trapped in the prison of poverty or indigence. It is not so much their inability to break down economic barriers that makes Tendulkar’s characters miserable, but it is their inner demons, which they can neither identify nor control. This is starkly portrayed in The Vultures, where members of the Pitale family carp constantly and go out of their way to each other. Rama, the daughter-in-law, and Rajninath, the illegitimate son, are the only characters with redeeming human qualities. But they, too, are doomed in the play. It can be interpreted as the damning of a middle class family whose survival depends on the sharing of inheritance. But the evil they suffer from is deeper than that, though the quarrel is all about money. What is played out in the confines of a ruined home in The Vultures finds a social setting in Ghashiram Kotwal, set in the Peshwas’19th century Poona. Though Ghashiram Kotwal can be seen as an anti-fascist play—and Tendulkar himself confessed that he had written the play keeping in mind the emergence of the right-wing Shiv Sena—what it really reflects is political decay, even as The Vultures shows the family in decay. Though there is a certain vitality in the musical element that is intrinsic to Ghashiram Kotwal, it marks a dead end in terms of understanding the human situation.
Tendulkar’s obsession with violence, which may appear novel and clinical to start with, turns out to be a trap for the playwright. Forced to follow the inherent logic of violence, his plays sometimes fall short of the Aristotelian criterion of catharsis, though there is enough terror and considerable pity in the portrayal of his characters. This is evident both in A Friend’s Story, the story, told by a man, of ruthless lesbian who tries to dominate another woman, and in Kanyadaan, where a socialist Brahmin politician’s daughter marries a Dalit, and she is forced to accept the dark violence of his nature.
And unlike Greek tragedy, which derives its dark sublimity from its capricious divine link, modern tragedy is often forced to be limited to the mundane. So not all of Tendulkar’s plays reveal the bigger stage on which the human drama is played out as beautifully as Benare’s poetic monologue in Silence! The Court is in Session does. It is the claustrophobic social context that makes Tendulkar’s tragedies- and they are all tragedies in the venerable tradition of Ibsen, Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller- difficult plays to go back to. His plays explore existentialist dilemmas in a narrow ambit, without the existentialist belief in the absolute value of human life and the ultimate happiness of freedom, however fleeting it may be. In spite of which, Tendulkar remains one of the greatest playwrights of contemporary India, and even in translation, this collection of his plays tells us why.
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*Reproduced, with permission, from The Little Magazine (Vol IV, issue 1, “Crime” issue, 2003).
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