Vijay Tendulkar Biography (Part 2)

“There are times when one’s life appears to be a stage. People come, people go. They come to go and go with no intention of return. When they return, they return as one’s past. A past that would make you feel that the present is false.” – Vijay Tendulkar.

• I am very curious to know, who were Tendulakar Sahab’s influencers? I am asking this because I was reading, Manus Navache Bait (Man is An Island), one of his first plays, was remarkable. People had never heard such dialogues before. Theatre at that time used very stylized acting and long sentences with very flowery language; it was distanced from reality. Something similar to which you spoke in Episode 29 about Samuel Beckett and other playwrights trying to bring courtroom dramas to dining rooms. So do you have any insights into what made him start this way?
• What was happening from 1960 to 1990s that Tendulkar wanted to express his thoughts through violence; because according to my limited knowledge, he said, that he lived in a simple middle-class family which was doing fine.
• What do you think; what made Vijay Tendulkar show violence to create awareness about violence, rather than showing something morally good or ethically sound? What is this style of showing real? Where does this form stem from?
• What was his trajectory of him expressing violence throughout his plays? Did it increase due to ongoing unrest or it decreased? From Gidhade to Kamala?
• Some of his plays were censored. What made him write so boldly in his new plays, despite being censored?
• What is the one thing which the young generation playwrights should learn from Tendulkar and what is that one should avoid considering the current times?
• I hope we have piqued your interest in the plays of Vijay Tendulkar. His Marathi plays have been translated into Hindi and English and Kannada and Bengali.

You can follow Ramu on @BoodhuRamu on Twitter and me @audiogyan. I have added a few links in the show notes for further reading on Vijay Tendulkar.