something about Vijay Tendulkar...

Vijay Tendulkar transcended the cultural boundaries of Maharashtra. There is no other Marathi literary icon today who is not only well known all over India, but is also respected among the elite. There is an establishment elite and an equally prestigious anti-establishment elite. Tendulkar moved from one to the other, with no one questioning his right to do so. But his heart was on the anti-establishment side. That showed in his themes as well as the way he crafted and presented his plays.
He was fastidious about the directorial details. He wanted to achieve a certain effect and he knew that it could not be achieved without the correct composition of lights and music, sets and costumes. He also wrote detailed notes on the script itself, on the movements and moods of the actors. Often the directors had to merely follow the script and those notes.
His modern themes and perfectionist approach impressed the metropolitan elite. In his famous and highly controversial play, Gidhare (The Vultures) Tendulkar explores the human relationships within a family, which turn explosive and violent to the extent that the father, brother, sister and the rest get into a murderous mood over a question of property. He wrote the play in 1972, when land prices were not skyrocketing like today and family incomes were not very high.
Yet the conflicts within families were turning vicious. Joint families were splitting up but nuclear families were not fully evolved. Property distribution, in a stagnant economy with low incomes, was turning hideous. Conventional playwrights would not dare to take up such themes. Romanticised and moralistic images of the family determined the predominant content of theatre. Tendulkar dared to expose the brutal reality with equally brutal language. That shocked audiences. There were protests and demands to ban the play. A young woman, forcibly aborting with blood oozing out on her saree, was too outrageous an image to be shown on the stage.
But the play was acclaimed by the liberal, cosmopolitan art and theatre world. It was existentialist and bore the European sensibilities of hyper-realism. Leading actors like Alyque Padamsee and Gerson da Cunha performed the play in English later.
It is difficult to understand how and from where Tendulkar acquired modernist and, later, post-modernist ideas. He had a very modest middle-class background, with little exposure to the European or American world of art and literature. He started writing at a very young age. His rebellious mood perhaps was a reflection of the times he lived in. Till Tendulkar arrived on the scene, theatre essentially meant entertainment and sometimes idealistic or moralistic evocation. It was not supposed to shock and certainly not devastate well-ensconced beliefs. He initially acquired notoriety before he began to get attention as a serious writer who was ready to confront and fight the status quo.
His plays, which came in succession, Ghashiram Kotwal and Sakharam Binder, were penetrating studies in violence. Actually, before these plays, he had been drawing the attention of theatre-goers and critics with plays like Shantata! Court Chalu Aahe. But he began to get national attention only in the early '70s and became an icon of the young.
All of us, the equivalent of the so-called Beatles Generation, enveloped by the ideas of protest and rebellion, by the anti-war movement, were his followers. For this generation, defending Tendulkar meant being anti-establishment. Marx and Che, Ho and Mao defined the ideological contours of the period. As for us, we had Tendulkar. Not that he was Marxist or Maoist. But he had his sympathies with them. He has never defended communism or the Soviet Union or Mao's Cultural Revolution. He never studied seriously the Marxist theories or the New Left versions. But he was familiar with the ideas and that was enough for him. He was not an intellectual nor an ideological polemicist. He was a creative writer and saw the world around him as a living theatre. He saw that violence ruled from Vietnam to Naxalbari, the JP movement to Emergency. He wanted to show the nexus between violence and power.
Later, he became more anti-establishmentarian, not only in theatre, but also on public issues. He became part of the movement for democratic rights and civil liberties, participated in the Narmada agitation, supported dalit movements. But by nature and creative instincts he was an artist, a playwright, and could not remain straitjacketed. He would write something that would go against the conventional Left or he would publicly say something that would hurt liberal sensibilities.
However, he never lost contact with the young and those experimenting with different forms. In hospital, in his last days, he asked a young admirer of his to read out to him Terry Eagleton's piece in The Times Literary Supplement. He was obviously tired as he turned 80 and could not bear the pain of the chronic muscle disorder, but he never thought of retiring. He was a colossus, and no one can take his place with that maverick style in confronting the establishment.
courtsey:http://in.news.yahoo.com/indianexpress/
20080520/r_t_ie_op_clm/top-the-many-worlds-of-vijay-tendulkar-7f368a9.html