Post independence, the 50s and 60s were decades when a new India was being built. Every field was moving towards change. Marathi theatre too, which was hitherto trapped in melodrama and mediocrity, was moving towards this change. Veterans like Bhau Padhyay, Jayavant Dalvi and Vijay Tendulkar, among many more brought about this change. Journalist turned playwright, novelist, short story writer and screenplay writer, Vijay Tendulkar was known for his portrayal of that real, ugly face of the Indian middle class which most people found uncomfortable to deal with.
This portrayal of reality drew him into many controversies. He battled bans and censor boards to take his message across to his audience. Tendulkar was known to be a playwright who was much ahead of his times.
During the 60s and the 70s, i.e. when Tendulkar’s plays began getting staged, our society was largely an optimistic one, comfortable in its own shell. It was a society that was hopeful for change, but at the same time, it was unwelcoming of the realities Tendulkar was addressing through his works.
Tendulkar’s works revolved around various themes like revenge, hypocrisy, patriarchy and violence. His works are timeless and, though around fifty years old, they are as relevant today as they were then. Tendulkar’s plays were aimed at the middle class, and he always managed to unknowingly shock the middle class. He showed them, through his plays, that ugly side of them which they preferred to hide. He realistically portrayed the complex relation between the common man and society.
He did not take a moral stand in his plays.
He attempted to find realistic solutions to the violence and hypocrisy without being too naïve and simplistic. The central theme of his plays was ‘situations make men behave like animals towards other men’, and he effectively brought this out through his works. Vijay Tendulkar was the first playwright who took Marathi theatre outside Maharashtra. His works, Shantata! Court Chalu Aahe, Kamla, Kanyadaan, Sakharam Binder, Ghashiram Kotwal, Gidhade, Baby and Ashi Paakhre Yeti, among many others created ripples across Maharashtra and elsewhere. The timelessness of his works, the multiple layers to each story, the amoral stand taken by most of his leading characters make Vijay Tendulkar one of the greatest Indian playwrights of all times.
Shantata! Court Chalu Aahe
Shantata! Court Chalu Aahe is the story of a young, single, independent actress and school teacher, Leela Benare. The setup of the play is a mock trial where her fellow actors accuse her of infanticide. What starts as a s joke, ends up in a revelation that Leela Benare is actually guilty of aborting her illegitimate child with a married man. The play takes the audiences through Leele Benare, first as a playful, happy young woman and then as someone who uses her playful, jovial nature as a defense mechanism to save her from society and reality. Tendulkar exposes the hypocrisy and double standards of the middle class, thus making a comment on how morals play such an important role in society. Benare is victimized to immense mental trauma by her fellows Sukhatame, Karnik and Mr. and Mrs. Kashikar. How an independent, urban educated woman is treated and looked down upon in a patriarchy is the central theme of this play.
Benare is ganged up against by society for what she does in her personal life. The play ends with Benare passing out because of the immense psychological trauma she is subjected to and Mrs. Kashikar trying to comfort her. As Satyadev Dubey and Vijaya Mehta put it, Shantata! Court Chalu Aahe is probably Tendulkar’s most important work. Shantata depicts immense psychological violence. It shows the double standards present in the middle class society. Satyadev Dubey adds that the middle class does not find this play violent because they are unaware of the violence that is present within them. Shantata! Court Chalu Aahe was first staged in 1968, but the play is relevant even today. In our patriarchy, even today, an educated independent woman is considered a threat. Even today in our society, sex is a taboo and promiscuity, a sin. The moral double standards Tendulkar points out through his characters are present in society even today.
Tendulkar talks about the interfering nature of society. Benare is forced to disclose her personal life to a group of people, who instead of helping her out of her problems, will only judge her character, and even perhaps mock her. This is not unknown in society today. We are always interested in knowing what is happening in the lives of others. Nothing can explain this better than the popularity of TV shows and newspapers that carry celebrity ‘gossip’. Taking this a step further, I would even like to relate this to how the media sensationalizes issues at the cost of the privacy of certain people.
The play does not have a happy ending. Benare’s passing out symbolizes the victory of society over an individual. This holds true even today. In almost all walks of life, society with all its hypocrisy and dirtiness is considered to be above the individual: be it the banning of an artist because of how society responded to his/her art was way more important than his/her right to express what he/she wanted or the arrest of individuals because whatever they said was supposedly interpreted by society as being provocative.
Sakharam Binder
Sakharam Binder is the story of Sakharam, Laxmi and Champa. Sakharam is a bookbinder who lives by the belief that he can disregard society and live life by his terms as long as he is truthful. He picks up women discarded by other men and uses them as sexual partners and domestic servants. Sakharam believes that he is doing a favor to these women and thus society and that gives him the right to treat these women however he wants. Laxmi is his seventh ‘temporary wife’ who is shown as absolutely timid, caring and submissive. Champa, on the other hand is a loud, foul mouthed, violent woman who replaces Laxmi from Sakharam’s life and house. This triangle relationship causes Laxmi to go to extreme measures to persuade Sakharam to kill Champa, who she considers competition in the eyes of Sakharam. Tendulkar uses his craft of showing two extreme sides of every character convincingly in Sakharam Binder. Laxmi who is initially seen as the victim to Sakharam’s violence and humiliation goes on to become his master by making him do exactly what she wants him to.
Champa who is initially loathed by the audiences, who develop a soft corner for Laxmi’s soft spoken behavior by the time Champa enters the scene, later goes on to make a place for herself in the hearts of the audiences after she is brutally murdered by Sakharam. Sakharam is shown as someone who gets easily carried away. First Laxmi transforms the rough, macho Sakharam into a God fearing, ‘civilized’ man. This is later changed by Champa, who converts this ‘civilized’ Sakharam into a frustrated alcoholic. Sakharam though violent by nature finds himself helpless in front of Champa. He is a slave to his own sexual needs. Though, this appears to be a violent play, violence is not seen as a central theme. It is a kind of violence that comes to the characters naturally, keeping in mind their backgrounds and the situations they face. Again, through Sakharam Binder and the violence involved in it, Tendulkar managed to scar the white collared middle class with the kind of raw, vulgar filthiness present in society. He portrays violence through sex, this time.
He shows the relation between Sakharam and Laxmi and Sakharam and Champa as one of sensuality and violence rather than that of love and affection. Sakharam Binder as I see it today is the story of a man whose weakness and frustration leads him on to explore those sides of himself that he is originally unaware of. Sakharam, who is initially loathed by the audiences, then becomes an object of pity for the audience. Sakharam Binder is a timeless play because of Tendulkar’s study and portrayal of human nature. Sakharam, Laxmi and Champa are the victims of circumstances. The theme of the play, certain situations lead individuals to behave like animals with each other, holds true even today.
Ghashiram Kotwal
Ghashiram Kotwal is a play, starkly different from the other works of Vijay Tendulkar. While all other works of his were set in the middle class society, Ghashiram Kotwal was a political period drama set in Pune in the times of the Peshwa rule. The main characters of the story are Ghashiram Savaldas, a Brahmin from Kanauj and Nana Phadanavis, the chief minister of the Peshwa. The story goes as to how Ghashiram, who is ill-treated in Pune and vows to teach Pune a lesson. He goes on to barter his daughter with Nana Phadanavis for the post of the chief of police of Kotwal. On becoming the Kotwal, he takes his revenge. He changes the face of Pune, tortures innocent Brahmins. The play ends with Nana Phadanavis sending orders to kill Ghashiram. The theme of the play happens to be the ugly face of sexual, power and revenge politics. As Tendulkar puts it, he wanted to tell the story of how the symbolic Nana Phadanavis and the symbolic Ghashiram Savaldas are dependent on each other, wherever there is a Nana, there will be a Ghashiram, and vica-versa. Set against a periodic backdrop, the play holds an equal relevance even today. Tendulkar used the historic character of Nana Phadanavis and built a fictional story around it.
The play was written in 1972, when Tendulkar was making a comment on the rise of the Shiv Sena and the Congress allowing the rise of the Sena. The way Nana gave Ghashiram an upper hand to grow to the extent that he became a menace to Nana, and then got rid of him; can be loosely related to how the Congress let the Sena grow in Bombay until it became a nuisance to the Congress itself. This is a situation that has relevance even to the politics of today. Osama Bin Laden, who was uncontrollably allowed to grow and then later brutally destroyed by America, is exactly what Tendulkar tried to show in Ghashiram Kotwal. Again, through Ghashiram Kotwal, Tendulkar portrays violence.
And again, it is not the main theme of the story; it just gels in with the plot of the story. In this case, it is physical violence and exploitation that comes along as a result of power. There are instances in the play where Ghashiram, high on power and revenge, induces innumerable atrocities on the Brahmins of Pune. There is also Lalita Gauri, Ghashiram’s daughter who faces immense injustice as a result of Ghashiram’s hunger for revenge. Tendulkar, through this barter between Ghashiram and Nana, points out the use of women and sex in power politics.
He points out the role of the woman to be involved in the entire struggle for power but only as someone who sacrifices. Ghashiram gives away his young daughter to Nana, who impregnates her. Lalita Gauri eventually dies during childbirth. Thus, the woman in the story is nothing more than a sex object who sacrifices her youth to an old man for the sake of her father’s revenge. Ghashiram Kotwal, written and performed as a musical, is much more than the entertaining comedy it seems to be at first. The play has multiple layers that go deeper and deeper in depicting the dark and ugly face of revenge.
Tendulkar and feminism
Vijay Tendulkar, in Vijaya Mehta’s opinion, was a chauvinist. Though it may appear at the face of it that his plays revolved around women characters, be it Leela Benare, Laxmi, Champa or even Lalita Gauri, that was not really the case. The main characters in his plays were always society at large. The women in his plays were always at the receiving end. He definitely was a writer much ahead of his times and had a progressive thought process, which is why he did not morally judge any of his female characters for being either promiscuous or foul mouthed or even submissive. He depicted reality. His idea of feminism was, probably reality. He showed that an independent woman is not accepted by society. He showed that women were nothing but sex objects.
He showed that at the end of the day, a woman is going to go back to her man irrespective of the way he treats her, because the woman has accepted him with all his flaws and knows that he is all she has; there is nowhere else she can go. He brings out patriarchy in all his plays. He made his audiences feel for the woman in the play. However the society, which is along with her in her story, only sees her through the patriarchal set up. The woman never won in his plays, she never succeeded in making a respectable place for herself in society. But she did, in the minds of the audiences. This, in my opinion, was Tendulkar’s role as a feminist. He made the audiences realize that it is society: men and also other women, which looks down upon a woman and judges her morally. He showed the audiences the ugly side of their own faces that they would otherwise avoid flaunting.
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