IJRREST: International Journal of Research Review in Engineering Science and Technology (ISSN 2278- 6643) | Volume-1 Issue-1, June-2012
THEME OF PROTEST IN THE PLAYS OF VIJAY TENDULKAR
*Komal Preet Virk
*Research Scholar, CMJ University, Shillong, Meghalaya, India
ABSTRACT
Most of the plays deal with the theme of love, sex
and violence. They reveal anger and frustration of
the post-1960 generation in the Indian context.
The ideas implicit in the themes are revolutionary.
They are opposed to the conventional norms and
established values. The emphasis here is on
human nature and its complexities. In projecting
the revolt of the plays’ protagonists against
conventionality, Tendulkar displays his love of
humanity and his commitment to human values.
The psychological study explores shifts and
changes that have taken place in the modes of
human thinking, feeling, and behaving with
regard to Tendulkar’s characters among which
we see highly typified as well as individualized
men and women.
Keywords: Marginalised, Conceptualised.
1. INTRODUCTION
Vijay Tendulkar, once journalist by profession, is
considered a controversial playwright for his plays
such as Ghashiram Kotwal, Sakbaratn Binder,
Silence! The Court is in Session, The Vultures, etc.,
as they have created a storm and an intellectual
debate in society. At the same time, he has won the
highest award in the field of dramatics on all India
level for his play Silence! The Court is in Session.
Tendulkar’s plays deal with agonies, anxieties, and
tensions of the urban, white-collar, middle-class
people, his provocative socio-political plays which
relentlessly and ruthlessly explore the human psyche
and society never fail to raise a storm. They focus on
the conflict and confrontation between individual and
society. The angry and frustrated protagonists of his
plays are actually the victims of harsh circumstances
in life in the so-called modern, cultured society. The
anger and frustration of these young men and women
is expressed in their rejection of the conventional or
traditional values and norms. So, the cruelty of some
protagonists is a kind of perverted humanity and their
desire to inflict miseries on others is a kind of
revenge sought against society. They offer the world
a set of social attitudes that are anti-establishment,
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anti-cultural, and even anti-humanitarian in the
existential sense as opposed to the established,
cultural, and humanitarian values. However, the
world fails to recognize their struggle for existence,
their bravery, and their sense of humanity.
2. THE PROBLEM
While projecting the wrath of the young generation,
Tendulkar explores human mind and its complexities
in all depth and variety. He presents man-woman
relationship in terms of sensuality and violence rather
than love and affection. An anti-romantic playwright
as Tendulkar is, he projects not love but its
perversion, not sex but its degradation.
While pursuing his study as a part of Nehru
fellowship, he has won, Tendulkar was left feeling a
psychological curiosity about violenc--not as
something that exists in isolation, but as a part of the
human milieu, human behaviour, human mind. It has
become an obsession. At a very sensitive level,
violence can be described as consciously hurting
someone, whether it is physical violence or
psychological violence....Violence is something
which has to be accepted as fact. It’s no use
describing it as good or bad. Projection 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. 1
3. SCOPE
It is with the presentation of The Vultures that
Tendulkar’s name has become associated with sex,
violence, and sensationalism. However, these
elements were there in his earlier plays too, but have,
now come to be noticed in more glaring light.
Tendulkar, who has been witnessed as the angry
young dramatist of the Marathi theatre, rebels against
1
Vijay Tendulkar, interviewed by Elizabeth Roy, in
Indian Review of Books, Vol. 2, No. 7, April-May,
1993. Quoted by Samik Bandyopadhyay,
Introduction, Collected Plays in Translation, New
Delhi: OUP, 2002, xii-xiii.
 IJRREST: International Journal of Research Review in Engineering Science and Technology (ISSN 2278- 6643) | Volume-1 Issue-1, June-2012
the established, conventional ideas and values of the
society from the presentation of the play Silence! The
Court is in Session onwards. The play places him
among the leading Indian playwrights and sets him
apart from the previous generation of the Marathi
playwrights. Thus, he is one who at once belongs to
the tradition and establishes himself as an individual
talent, a pioneering figure of the Contemporary
Marathi Theatre.
For Silence! The Court is in Session, Tendulkar got
inspiration from a real-life incident. He met an
amateur group that was on its way to stage a mock
trial in Vile-parle, a suburb of Mumbai. While
overhearing their conversation, the outline of the play
began to take shape in his mind, and the ultimate
result of it was the birth and creation of the play. The
original Marathi play was written for the Rangayan at
the instance of Arvind and Sulabha Deshpande in
1967, and was first performed in its English version
in 1971, in Chennai, and was directed by Ammu
Mathew.
The play is a social satire with the tragedy of an
individual victimized by society. The brief outline of
the story goes thus: A group of artists goes to a town
to perform a play. A rehearsal of the play in which
there is a mock-trial is arranged. In this mock-trial,
the private life of Leela Benare, the play’s
protagonist is revealed and publicly discussed. Here,
Tendulkar presents a world apparently dominated by
male chauvinists. However, the dramatic action
revolves round the character of Leela Benare.
Tendulkar, though not a self-acknowledged feminist,
treats the character of Benare with great compassion
and understanding while pitting her against the men
who are selfish, hypocritical, and brutally ambitious.
Leela Benare, who is rebellious and assertive, is a
school teacher. She performs her duty, as a teacher
very sincerely and commands love and respect of her
pupils. She is also an enlightened artist. So, she
accepts the membership of the amateur theatre group.
The other members of the group are the Kashikars,
Balu Rokde, Sukhatme, Ponkshe, Karnik, Prof.
Damle, and Rawte who belong to the urban middle
class of Mumbai.
All the characters except Leela Benare are the
representatives of the fundamentally orthodox
society. The theatre group is a “miniscule cross-
section of middle-class society, the members
representative of its different sub-strata. Their
characters, dialogues, gestures, and even mannerisms
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reflect their petty, circumscribed existences.” 2
Frustrated and angry as they are in their individual
lives, they go to the extent of maligning their
companion also, for they are malicious and jealous in
attitude towards their fellow-being.
Leela Benare, with her zeal and zest for life, is totally
different from them. She wants to share her happiness
with others but hardly succeeds in doing so. Her
companions fail to appreciate her jovial, generous
nature.
Benare, who is far different from others, is isolated.
The co-actors cunningly arrange a cruel game in the
form of a mock-trial. Benare becomes a target of
their gossip and falls a victim ultimately to character
assassination at their instance. During the
proceedings of the mock-court, her companions
deliberately reveal her illicit love affair with Prof.
Damle, a married man. The love affair ultimately
results in her pregnancy. Prof. Damle, however, is
significantly absent at the time of trial. His absence
denotes his total withdrawal from responsibility,
either social or moral. At the time of rehearsal, the
remarks in the book read by Samant, which are
supposed to be Damle’s addressed to Benare,
implicitly throw light on the culprit’s escapist
tendency: “Where you should go is entirely your
problem. I feel great sympathy for you. But I can do
nothing. I must protect my reputation.” (92).
The play The Vultures, published in 1971, stands
apart from the other plays of Tendulkar in that it is a
play, which displays the unmitigated violence arising
from selfishness, greed, and sinfulness. On its first
production on the stage, there was a great storm in
the society around. The conservative Maharashtrian
people were stunned to observe the vulgar reality of
their lives presented through the sexual relations and
the scenes of violence in the play. It is for this reason
that Girish Karnad says: “The staging of Gidhade
could be compared with the blasting of bomb.”3 The
play was bitterly criticized by the theatre-going
public. The censor-board, too, felt that it was obscene
and suspended its public performance for the time
being. The play is a ruthless dissection of human
nature as it depicts violence, avarice, selfishness,
sensuality, and sheer wickedness inherent in man’s
life. The title of the play The Vultures itself indicates
the unpleasant subject-matter of the play.
2
Arundhati Banerjee, Introduction, Five Plays of
Vijay Tendulkar, Bombay: OUP, 1992, viii.
3
Arundhati Banerjee, Introduction, Five Plays of
Vijay Tendulkar, Bombay: OUP, 1992, xii.
 IJRREST: International Journal of Research Review in Engineering Science and Technology (ISSN 2278- 6643) | Volume-1 Issue-1, June-2012
The play Ghashiratn Kotwal makes room for
Tendulkar in the galaxy of international playwrights.
It proves to be a landmark in the history of the Indian
theatre. Using the historical incident in the Peshwa
regime, the playwright exposes violence, treachery,
sensuality, and immorality latent in contemporary
politics and reveals the fact that hypocrisy, greed, and
brutality characterize power politics.
The two important characters in the play are
Ghashiram Savaldas and Nana Phadnavis. It is
through their depiction that Tendulkar exhibits the
way in which power operates. Towards the end of the
play, Ghashiram is killed at the behest of Nana who
continues to thrive. The end of the play thus
symbolically suggests that, in power politics, one
evil-doer meets punishment but the other goes scot-
free. The characters here are types rather than
individuals. Ghashiram is the representative of those
people in society who pursue their goal
unquestionably. Nana is the representative of those
people in politics who use the needy people as their
pawns and destroy them when they are no longer
useful for them.
In the play Kamala, Tendulkar attacks the institution
of marriage, exposes selfish hypocrisy of the success-
oriented modern youths, and projects the evils in the
field of journalism. The theme is discussed through
the triangular relationship of Sarita-Jaisingh-Kamala.
The event depicted is based on a real-life incident.
Jaisingh Jadhav, the protagonist of the play, fetches
Kamala from a rural flesh market and presents her at
the press conference. However, his main objective is
not to expose the inhuman flesh market, but to
achieve name, fame, and position. For him, Kamala
is not a human being, but a marketable commodity
that can bring him reputation in his professional
career and promotion in his job. Thus, the real-life
incident of the flesh market exhibits the violence
practised and enjoyed by the present-day generation,
particularly the careerist young ones.
4. CONCLUSION
Thus, all the plays describe violence, power,
repression, and frustration that exist in the
contemporary Indian society. Violence is noticed
everywhere in Tendulkar’s dramatic world— in the
cruel, cunning game in the form of a mock-trial in
Silence! The Court is in Session, in an over-ambitious
young journalist’s craze for money and fame in
Kamala, in excessive sexual lust of the protagonist in
Sakharam Binder, in the rude, brutal interactions of
the family members in The Vultures, in Ghashiram’s
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revenge on the Brahmins of Poona and vice versa in
Ghashiram Kotwal, in a young Dalit’s brutal
treatment of his pregnant wife in Kanyadan, and
finally, in Mitra’s relationship to Nama in A Friend’s
Story. Therefore, all these plays are, in fact,
spectacles of violence, overt or covert.
5. REFERENCES
[1] Abrams, M.H. A Glossary of Literary Terms.
Bangalore: Prism, 1993.
[2] Banerjee, Arundhati. “Introduction”. Five Plays
of Vijay Tendulkar. Bombay: OUP, 2005.
[3] Bentley, Eric. The Theatre of Commitments.
London: Mathew and Company, 1968.
[4] Bhabha, Homi. Nation and Narration. London:
Rutledge, 1990.
[5] Brandon, James R. Cambridge Guide to Asian
Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1975.
[6] Dharan, N. S. The Plays of Vijay Tendulkar.
New Delhi: Creative Books, 2006.
[7] Esslin, Martin. Theatre of the Absurd. London:
Penguin, 2003.
[8] Gaskell, Ronald. Drama and Reality. London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1999.
[9] MacRae, John. Collected Plays. Mumbai: Metro
Publishers, 2005.
[10] Mee, Erin B. “Mahesh Dattani’s Invisible
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[11] Drama Contemporary. New Delhi: OUP, 2002.
[12] Shivdasani, Arun. “Three Playwrights.”
Amarpali. New Delhi: Maya Books, 1998.
[13] Sonalkar, Sudhir. “Vijay Tendulkar and
Metaphor of Violence.” The Illustrated Weekly.
20 Nov., 2005.
[14] Walia, Reema. “Fear of AIDS Victims.” Hi-
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