When I shifted to Mumbai as Director of the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) I had little contact with any Marathi littérateurs. I was born and brought up in Hubli, (Karnataka) and while I was schooled in Marathi for my primary education and we spoke Marathi at home I had no chance of getting to know any Marathi writers or playwrights as individuals. We were all fond of Marathi theatre and saw the plays of the Gandharva Natak Mandali and other companies whenever they visited Hubli. My parental family subscribed to Marathi magazines, and we had the whole set of the Marathi Dnyanakosh edited by Dr. Ketkar. I had retained Marathi as one of my subjects of study until Inter Arts. Later I chose the All English stream for my B.A. But the atmosphere at the Tata Institute was such that we mostly used English for communication among students except occasionally when some Marathi students or colleagues spoke to me in Marathi. At home I spoke to my wife and my children in Hindi or English and occasionally in Marathi. Neither my son nor daughter understand spoken Marathi; they communicate in Marathi only when they’re with my relatives. They also cannot read or write Marathi.

Since we lived in Chembur we had to make a special effort to visit Dadar if we wanted to see any plays or films. I could speak conversational Marathi but I’d avoid speaking in Marathi in public. We hardly went to see any Marathi plays or films. We remained content with whatever we could see in Chembur. Commuting between Chembur and Dadar or downtown was something we avoided except for specific work or occasional shopping. Going to see plays in Dadar was always a problem. One had to go to the theatres first to book the seats and then go there again to see the film or play. We tended to avoid these visits.

This changed somewhat after I got to know Vijay Tendulkar. This happened when both of us worked as members of the Planning Team for the planning of New Bombay. I had not known him earlier but we got to know each other well during those two-odd years when the Planning Committee met once or twice every week. I used to go to the meetings in the Fort area in my office car. After the meetings Tendulkar and I often travelled together up to Dadar where he caught the local train for Vile Parle and I drove on to Chembur. These meetings gave us the chance to meet and speak with each other during the meetings as also when we drove back to Dadar. We liked each other’s company though we had otherwise very little in common. I knew he was a well-known playwright but I hadn’t seen any of his plays till then. I told him that I found it too much of an effort to travel twice from Chembur to Dadar to see a play or a film. He then made it a practice to tell the person at the ticket window to reserve four tickets for me and my family every time one of his plays was being enacted for the first time. My wife was fond of the theatre because she herself had acted in many plays during her college days. We were only too glad to benefit by this opportunity and duly attended most of Tendulkar’s plays by buying the tickets which were kept reserved for us at the theatre. This encouraged us to also see some of the other plays written by Vasant Kanetkar – especially those in which Kashinath Ghanekar acted. I also remember watching a couple of musical plays other than those of Tendulkar’s Ghashiram Kotwal. Once while visiting my sister in Vile Parle we were able to see the play Swayamwar enacted by the Shiledar family in which Keerti Shiledar had played the role of Rukmini. My wife was fascinated by this traditional mode of play. She had interest in plays because she had herself acted in several plays during her college days in Lahore. But those were mostly plays of Shakespeare and lacked the lavish scenery and the music of the traditional Marathi plays.

Occasionally Tendulkar and I got to talk about his plays and I asked him why his plays were always so violent. This was after I had seen his play Gidhade. I had found even his Shantata Court Chalu Ahe, somewhat violent in the way the various characters and the lawyer attacked and pecked at the female lead, Benare, played by Ms. Deshpande. Tendulkar’s reply was that there was in fact much explicit and implicit violence in social life though we often failed to see it. I was still un-persuaded. He told me to see his play Ashi Pakhare Yeti.

I got to see it much later when he gave me a CD of that play along with another CD of a soliloquy by Sant Tukaram’s younger brother. I think Tendulkar had written the script for that soliloquy.

Tendulkar received the Nehru Fellowship and he decided to study violence in society by making a study of individuals who had been found been convicted of murder and were now in prison. He photographed the faces of these individuals and collected details of their life background and the reason for the crime that each of them had committed.

Soon after he had finished his fellowship project some of the students who knew Tendulkar approached me and said that we should arrange an illustrated lecture by Tendulkar at the Institute. I agreed and a function was arranged in the Conference Room of the Institute where he projected on screen the picture of each of the criminals he had talked to and spoke about the discussions he had with them. Many of the students found the presentation very useful in their understanding of social strife. Some of them were students of the Department of Criminology at the Institute.

After the lecture I invited him to go with me to my residence on the campus and discussed the impact of lectures where photographs are used to bring home the reality. I said it would be useful if we could begin at the Institute a section or department which specialized in presenting worthwhile social work projects on crime, village development, industrial strife, etc. We had no one on the faculty who could produce such audio-visual projects on social work themes. He said that he might be willing to work on such a project. I was somewhat surprised because I didn’t expect him to be able to give time to such a project. I told him that we had no special provision in the budget of that financial year but still might be able to find some funds by reallocation. I told him what the salary of an academic would be and wondered whether that would meet his expectations. He seemed willing to consider the proposal. I requested him to send me his bio-data, so that I could have the idea examined by the Academic Council and the Governing Board of the Institute.

He agreed to do so and promptly sent me a one-line biodata of his academic back ground the very next day. I knew of course of his national reputation as a playwright, but I was not aware that he had no formal education of any type. He had not even completed his High School studies. I was in a bit of a quandary. I knew his reputation and the fact that he had been awarded the Nehru Fellowship but appointing someone who had not even completed his High School Studies seemed a difficult proposition.

I consulted my senior colleagues and then also formally obtained the consent of the Academic Council of the Institute. We were all willing to go along with the project but thought it wise to consult the U.G.C. to which we were in a sense accountable. The University Grants Commission’s prompt. response was that it was a matter best decided upon by the Academic bodies of the Institute. I then consulted the Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Institute. He gave his consent on the basis that it would be one-time project that we could experiment with.

I decided that we would invite him to help us as a Visiting Professor on a salary of a full Professor of the Institute for the period of one year in the first instance. He agreed to accept the offer. When we met again I explained to him that I did not expect him to report for work to the Institute every day though he was welcome to do so. His commitment would be to prepare an audiovisual project on the work of a social work agency working among some disadvantaged group. He would be free to choose the specific agency whose work he would present in an audio-visual project. I also told him that he would have to start with selecting and obtaining for the Institute the necessary photographic and projecting equipment. He was free to make it a cinematic project or a project based on still photographs. I requested him find out what the cost of such equipment would be so I could make the funds available.

In less than a week he had found the necessary equipment and also a young photographer who would be his assistant who would help him with the photographic work and also in other general ways. Fortunately I found that we had the funds if I were to reallocate them from other heads to this new experiment. As I recall this was in the year 1980 or 1981. I had only another year before I would retire from my position at the Institute. As it turned out I stayed at the Institute till the end of the academic year 1981-82. Tendulkar continued to work as a Visiting Professor during that period and even later with my successor on a voluntary basis for a couple of years. He had made many friends among the teaching faculty and also among students who loved to meet and discuss his work as a playwright and other matters of social concern. His office was located in a carrel in the Institute’s library. It was a pleasant spot from where he could look out on the greenery of the Institute. He used that office whenever he was not out in the field for his work. It was here that I met two of his daughters—Priya and Sushma—when they had just dropped in to see where their father worked. I think it was Priya who asked me whether she could study at the Institute. I told her that if she was a graduate she could apply when the new academic year started. She said she was not a graduate in any subject. I told her then that she could not be a regular student at the Institute though she could attend any individual course that interested her with the permission of the teacher. We did allow interested young people to audit individual courses, but the students wouldn’t obtain any qualification on that basis. Earlier when the Institute was not yet deemed a University we did occasionally enroll undergraduate students but they were not given the Diploma of the Institute. They were given a certificate of having completed their particular courses.

I used to drop in at Tendulkar’s corner in the Library from time to time when I passed through the library on my way home. That was my usual route .from office to home and back during lunch. I tried several times to persuade Tendulkar to visit my house and have lunch with us. But he studiously declined my invitation and never came home when he was at the Institute for his work. He used to bring with him a small box from home containing his lunch.

In the summer of 1981 I happened to visit our family home in Hubli. My younger brother is a physician and has specialized in cardiology. He made a routine check on my heart condition and found that I had a marginal ischemic condition. He asked me to take leave for a few months and rest. I told him that that wouldn’t be possible especially when I was now soon to retire from service. So he advised me that I could at least obtain permission to work only half a day every day for the following semester. I agreed and the Chairman of our Governing Board readily agreed to my request for being allowed to work on a half day basis.

I soon realized how boring it could be spending time by my self with nothing to do for half the working day. I once stopped at Tendulkar’s desk and asked him if there was anything I could read from among the Marathi books in the library. He first gave me D.B. Mokashi’s book on the Pandharpur Pilgrimage. Incidentally I found that that Tendulkar thought very highly of Mokashi and of that particular book. I read through the book but could not really get interested in it. So I told Tendulkar about it and he took out another book from the library shelf. It was a collection of some stories by G.A.Kulkarni entitled Pingalawale. I read the first few stories – one of which was based on the Greek mythological story of Orpheus. Another was a story which dealt with the life of Cervantes’s Knight and his Squire after they had returned home from their journey of fantasy.

I immensely liked the stories and felt I could translate them into English. This was my first step in my exercise of translations from Marathi into English. I found I enjoyed this exercise and then went on doing several other stories and thereafter, by now, several books including the novels of Sharadbabu.

When I had finished Orpheus and The Pilgrim – stories from G.A. Kulkarni’s collection, I showed them to Tendulkar and he liked my translation of those stories. He suggested that I might send a copy of these translations to G.A.Kulkarni, the original author of the stories. I did not know him, nor did I know his address. But one of my colleagues at the Institute, Professor Muttagi, who came from Dharwar, knew his address and I sent the two stories to Mr. Kulkarni with a request to say whether they were faithful translations and generally conveyed the mood and the spirit of the original. Neither my colleague nor Mr.Tendulkar was sure whether I would receive any reply from G.A. Kulkarni. He had obviously a reputation for being non-communicative. But surprisingly in less than a week after I had sent him the translations I received a longish letter in Marathi which he had dictated to a friend of his since he was having some problems with his eyes. He had generally liked my translations and had got through them sufficiently closely to point out an error in one of my sentences in the translation of the story Orpheus. Then Tendulkar encouraged me to send the translation to New Quest and see if it would get published. It did get published and several other stories in later months. I remember I received a rare letter from P.L.Deshpande complimenting me on the faithfulness of my translation of the story The Pilgrim (Yatrik) which still maintained the beauty of the original.

That was the beginning of my literary adventure under Tendulkar’s guidance. This was however not to last for long at that particular point of time. I retired from my position as Director of the Tata Institute of Social Sciences where I had worked for a full twenty years. Our children were now married and had left for Singapore and Toronto where they are now settled. I had somehow managed to pay for a small house in New Bombay and that is where I was going to move. I had been offered a fellowship by the Homi Bhabha Foundation and I accepted it with the idea that I would study the problem of the Backward Classes in Maharashtra. Dr. S. D. Karnik, who was then Director of the Western Regional Centre of the ICSSR asked me why I could not go and live in the Hostel established by the ICSSR on the Kalina campus of Bombay University. It could provide me accommodation while I worked on the Fellowship. They had a small apartment which they could make available to me. I accepted the offer and went to live in Kalina with my wife. That was a good chance for me to live on an academic campus where there was the University library available for me to consult. I had barely begun my initial background reading on my subject when I was offered the position of the Vice-Chancellor of Bombay University by the then Chancellor, Mr. Latif. After consulting my seniors in the Tata Offices since I was on a Homi Bhabha Fellowship, I decided to accept the offer. The moment my appointment was announced in the press, Tendulkar phoned me and invited me to his house for a meal with his family. I met for the first time all the members of his family. His son was then trying to set up some business in association with a friend of his. I think Priya was at home but I have no clear memory. As we sat talking after the meal Tendulkar asked me why I had thought of accepting the Vice-Chancellorship of the University. He somehow did not feel I would be comfortable working in the bureaucratic and politicized atmosphere of the University and its various authorities. I had no answer to the question. In fact, J. R. D. Tata had himself wondered why I should interrupt my work on the Bhabha Fellowship and take up this assignment. Only Nani Palkhiwala supported the idea and said that we needed to have some persons with integrity in the University. The fact is that I had not given serious thought to the subject and had thought of accepting the offer after my initial discussion with the Governor, Mr. Latif, who was then the Chancellor of the University. I had formed a good opinion of him as a person and he had promised every support in my work at the University. I also needed to extend the period of bringing home some income regularly since I had little savings in my Provident Fund account after paying for my children’s fares to go abroad. The Vice-Chancellorship would extend the period of my being employed still leaving me time to work for the Fellowship after my term at the University would be over.

Dr. M.S.Adisheshayya, who had been a member of the Governing Council of the TISS, knew about my economic stringency from the Provident Fund that I was paid on my retirement from the Institute. Dr. Adisheshayya informally asked me to send whatever money I had in cash in my bank. I told him it was not very substantial. He asked me to send it to him anyway and he invested it in purchasing shares in The Readers’ Digest magazine where he was one of the Directors. This investment became the arc that has seen me through all these years between 1982 to the present. When The Reader’s Digest broke up as private company and was taken over by the Titan Watch Company I was given a substantial lump sum compensation in repayment of my small investment.

Tendulkar’s fears and doubts about my suitability for working in a highly politicized atmosphere proved right and I had to resign because of my differences with the Members of the Executive Council and the new Governor who had in the meanwhile replaced Mr. Latif. But I had spent over thirty months as a Vice-Chancellor by then (1983 – 1986).

After my resignation from the University I had little contact with Tendulkar because I shifted to my house in Vashi, New Bombay. We met occasionally at the TISS where my successor had offered me the facility of an office to work on my Fellowship project. But that was only an occasional meeting.

In March 2003, my wife passed away after a prolonged illness and I decided to wind up my home in Vashi and go at least for some weeks to Singapore to spend time with my son and daughter in law. While I was in Hubli before going to Singapore, my younger brother invited me to stay with him. His daughters were all married by then and his wife and he were the only two living in the big house. I went to Singapore for a brief stay with my son and daughter in law and then came back to Hubli for a long term stay.

Between 2003 and the present I have made visits to the houses of my son in Singapore and my daughter in Canada. But other wise I have lived in Hubli. While I was on my way to Singapore on one occasion I had to spend two days at a hotel in Andheri waiting for my son to complete his work there. It just occurred to me to see if I could reestablish contact with Tendulkar and see him. I learnt that he had now moved out of Vile Parle and had bought a flat in Andheri. He lived alone there with one of his daughters and a housekeeper. I went and met him there and had discussions about what he was doing then and told him what I was doing. I had returned to doing translations of Marathi stories to occupy my idle time. This must have been sometime in 2004. I visited him again in 2005 or 2006, again on my way back from Singapore. This time he asked me whether I would be willing to translate the four collections of short stories by his daughter, Priya. I readily agreed and he entrusted the four slim volumes to me and also gave me CDs of some plays and two of his own collections of stories and some of his autobiographical essays. He hadn’t expected me to translate his own work. He was however very keen that I translate Priya’s stories.

I finished translating Priya’s stories in a fairly short time and sent Tendulkar my translations. He was happy with my translations and decided to approach some well-known publisher to get them published. I know that two of the collections had been accepted by the National Book Trust. I don’t know who agreed to publish the other two collections. As of today I haven’t seen any of the collections in published form, though I was in touch with the editor who was working on one of the collections for the Book Trust.

Around that time, Makarand Sathe was trying to bring out an omnibus volume in English of selected essays, stories and plays by Tendulkar. A publisher from Delhi had undertaken to publish the volume. Mr. Sathe asked me to translate four of Tendulkar’s stories and also an extract of about 40 pages from Kadambari (Novel) No.1. The four stories that I had translated did get published in the volume along with some other stories translated by Shanta Gokhale. I hadn’t known till then that Tendulkar had written stories and two novels apart from his well-known plays. I later translated all of his stories that had been put together in a volume. I sent a copy of each of the translations of his work that I did to Tendulkar. He seemed to be satisfied with my efforts. The last time I met him he had already developed the muscular problem which made him move to Pune for treatment. I had checked the prognosis for that disease on the Internet and found that it was a serious condition difficult to treat successfully. Tendulkar and I remained in fairly close contact with each other by email until he moved to Pune.

Temperamentally I think, neither of us was very communicative , though we communicated fairly easily and frequently in the e-mail format. Once I was amused that he asked me translate a brief publisher’s blurb on one of his books from Marathi into English. It was hardly a hundred words and I wondered why he couldn’t do it himself. But I did not ask him anything about it. I just translated the small passage and returned it to him by email. He acknowledged receipt of the translation and thanked me profusely.

Once he moved to Pune I had no further communication with him though I continued to learn from the newspapers of the serious condition in which he was and the improbability of his recovery from it.

Though we knew each other for over twenty years we differed a great deal in our approach to understanding the life around us. His was a creative mind which went straight to the core of a problem as he saw it and presented it in a creative and explosive manner. A person who did not know him might think that it was a trick of his trade as a dramatist. But I think it went far deeper. He had seen the underlying ‘violence’ in human nature and it was not only violence as it expressed itself in overt acts of physical attack and murders, but also the underlying ‘violence’ which often expresses itself in familial or other inter-human relationships in terms of pettiness, in the need to subjugate the other and exercise power over him. This may not be a universal characteristic but it manifests more in some than in others and it may manifest itself in some relationships more than in others.

When I saw him last in his Andheri residence he had just been awarded another Fellowship – I believe it was the Nehru Fellowship. I asked him routinely what he was going to work on for the Fellowship. We spoke on the topic for a few moments and I told him of my paper on how changes had come over in family life over the past fifty odd years. When I said I could send him a copy he said that he would be glad to read it, but he was not going to adopt a social scientific approach for his project. He was just going to fall back on his own experiences and observations and examine how the texture of relationships had changed. I was not surprised. My approach to life was more analytical in terms of a particular discipline with which I was familiar. He was a creative writer and responded to the world around him in terms of how this change affected him as an individual and affected people generally at the level of their emotional, subjective consciousness.

Tendulkar and I remained good friends to the end of his life but we did not experience a community of sentiments or approaches in our understanding of social issues, though I am still not able to put my finger on what the differences were. Perhaps I was more middle class in my approach, more sentimental in my understanding of human relations than he was, though I was the social scientist and he the creative writer. His response to social situations was spontaneously more cautious and questioning. He could be quite objective when writing about his own life experiences but I had seen him becoming sentimental when he spoke about his son and about Priya both of whom he had tragically lost. He loved Priya as his favourite daughter but even more as a fellow spirit among all his children. His relationships with his son, I felt, was more of concern about his future. He was grief-stricken when his son died a premature death. He also suffered a great deal when Priya was fighting with cancer.

I admired Tendulkar as a writer, but equally as a friend and a person of great sensitivity. I suspect that he felt a measure of gratitude toward me for the Visiting Professorship that I had been able to arrange at a critical phase in his life. But that was not how our friendship began. We knew each other well before then, ever since we had served as members of the Planning Team for New Bombay; and our friendship grew during the year that he spent at the TISS before I retired from my position as Director of the Institute. I remain grateful to him for encouraging me to begin translating creative Marathi literature into English. That has given me the sense of being indirectly creative.

When I read Tendulkar's essay on Kamlakar Sarang when he passed away I realized what closeness of feeling he had with some of his friends. I don’t think I can claim that kind of friendship ever existed between Tendulkar and myself.

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M.S. Gore, born in Hubli, Karnataka, was a Director of the Tata Institute of Social Sciences for many years. He has translated into English nearly all the Bangla novels of Sharat Chandra Chattopadhyay from Warerkar's Marathi translation. In addition, he has translated a collection of stories, and a book of memoirs by Vijay Tendulkar. These memoirs have recently appeared in New Quest.