When we talk about postcolonial Indian drama and theatre we cannot forget the name of Vijay Tendulkar who was one of India’s most impactful and compelling playwrights such as Girish Karnad, Habib Tanvir, and Badal Sircar who flourished the Indian drama by providing a new literary vision of postcolonial Indian theatre which keeps the contemporary concerns and subjects at its focal point in an unique, innovative and creative manner. Tendulkar’s prolific endeavor reigned over an extensive span of five decades. There are thirty plays, seven one act plays, four short stories, two novels, six collections of children’s plays and seventeen film scripts to his credit. Without any misgiving he is a creative leviathan in postmodern Indian era of drama both in terms of quality and quantity. He is a subterranean observer of Indian socio-cultural reality, a humanist, a ground-breaking playwright who incessantly experimented with form and structure. He has got the reputation of an astute designer of multi dimensional and multi-layered characters whose angst is analyzed within the ambit social quandary of the society. The central part of his works is his profound concern for human life within socio-cultural reality of post-colonial India. His inexorable literary output and social activism was a human response of a highly sensitive artist to the festered, wretched and pathetic social conditions of India. Until his death, he was devoted to this human cause, seeking justice for the marginalized, deprived and afflicted section of society. Unlike the makers of the confrontational theater of the late 1980s, he did not believe that an evening at the theater would change the society, but he was always hopeful that a good play could raise public awarenes...
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...India a: A wounded Civilization, New York: Penguin, 1980 , p.20.
8. Dharan N.S., “ Sakharam Binder: The Impotent fury of a Male Masochist”, The Plays of Vijay Tendulkar, Creative Books, New Delhi, 1999, p.67.
9. Burman, I. Man- woman Relationship in the Sakharam Binder, AtlanticPublishers, New- Delhi. 2006 p. 167.
10. Ibid p.164.
11. Tendulkar, Vijay. Interview. Elizabeth Roy. Indian Review of Books. Vol.2, no.7, April-May, 1993. Quoted by Samik Bandyopadhyay. Introduction. Vijay Tendulkar’s Collected Plays in Translation. New Delhi: OUP, 2002, xli-xlii.
12. Banerjee, Arundhati. Introduction. Five Plays of Vijay Tendulkar. Bombay: OUP, 1992, xv.
13. Jonathan Kalb, "An Indian Father Courage, Using and Losing Women." New York Times, November 3, 2004.
Note: All the lines of text are quoted from Vijay Tendulkar,Five Plays, Oxford University Press, New Delhi1992
During the time in the 1950’s, the escalation of mass media with the use of television shows had greatly emphasized the idealist family standards: a white nuclear family standard of living within conventional gender roles that stresses on family hierarchy that became a societal norm as a “perfect family” today. In Gary Soto’s “Looking for Work” and Roger Jack’s “An Indian Story”, bother short stories contest against familial customs. Soto describes how the media shapes the idea of a “family” to the young narrator that inspires him to push his family and himself to assimilate into the while culture. Roger conveys a story of a young Indian boy defying against both his Indian and familial ethics. Together, these stories share a common theme. Both
Both authors create strong concepts which could be considered as controversial today and which contrast each other greatly, however both leave us to examine the fact that there are indeed many similarities in the ways that the relationships between men and women formed and were perceived.
Alexie, S. (2009). The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. New York, NY: Little, Brown and Company.
Alexie, Sherman. The Absolute True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. New York: Hachette Book Group, 2007. Print.
Tannen, Deborah Talk in the Intimate Relationship His and Hers HarperCollins Publishers 1986 P 133-151
Hess, Linda. Rejecting Sita: Indian Responses to the Ideal Man's Cruel Treatment of His Ideal Wife. Vol. 67. New York: Oxford UP, 1999. Print.
Throughout the story, the husband struggles in America to maintain the traditional Indian lifestyle he envisions for himself. The western idea of equality and respect for women is something the husband cannot comprehend and is unwilling to do so. His domineering and self-regarding behavior, valued in his culture, causes stresses in his life, yet he holds steadfast to his cultural belief regarding his superiority over his wife. Ill equipped to cope with change; the husband’s character remains static through the end of the story, a victim of his actions.
Varma, Rahul, et al. "Change the World, One Play at a Time: Teesri Duniya Theatre and the Aesthetics of Social Action." Canadian Theatre Review 125 (Winter 2006): 69-74. EBSCOhost,
Nanda, Serena. Neither Man nor Woman: The Hijras of India. 2nd ed. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Pub., 1990. Print.
The corruption in hospitals, where “doctors can keep their government salary and work in private hospitals”, sees people like Balram’s father die of horrible deaths every day. Dismayed by the lack of respect of the government for its dying citizens, Balram is corrupted by the fact that in the “darkness”, there is no service, not even in death. Balram also claims that “the schoolteacher had stolen our lunch money”, which was for a government funded lunch program. However, Balram doesn’t blame him, which justifies that Balram, from such a young age gives into the idea of corruption saying that “...you can’t expect a man in a dung heap to smell sweet”. In addition to his father and the school teacher, Balram is corrupted by his childhood hero Vijay. Growing up, Balram idolises Vijay for having escaped “the darkness”. However what he is ignorant of is that even though Vijay is in “the light” he is still corrupted by “the darkness”. Balram explains that “Vijay and a policemen beat another men to death”, yet he doesn’t see it as a problem, because he understand that one cannot become successful in such a corrupt system without becoming as corrupt as the system itself. It is here that Adiga asks the question of how are impoverished Indians are expected to refuse to engage in corruption when they live in such poor conditions. Thus, the reader is able to sympathize with Balram’s corruption,
Literature is the analytical, critical, emotional and psychological expression of human life which is nothing but a bouquet of multi-coloured relationships like filial relationship, conjugal relationship and sibling relationship. Though all the relationships are important part of life yet man-woman relationship is considered the most pervading human relationship. Emphasizing the importance and value of the man-woman relationship, D.H. Lawrence, a great English novelist, points out in ‘Morality and the Novel’, “The great relationship for humanity will always be the relation between man and woman. The relation between man and man, woman and woman, parent and child will always be subsidiary.” (1972: l30)
Gairola, Rahul. “Burning with Shame: Desire and South Asian Patriarchy, from Gayatri Spivak’s ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ to Deepa Mehta’s Fire.” Comparative Literature 54:4 (Fall 2002). 307-324. EBSCOhost.
In the present play Vijay Tendulkar chooses a term of judicial register as the title of his play to make a powerful comment on a society with a heavy patriarchal bias that makes justice impossible and that converts the august judicial system into an instrument of oppression of women and the vulnerable. Ideally justice can be provided only if the judge and the judicial system are objectively detached. But the same objective detachment can become the face of a very repressive and dehumanized system if the persons involved in the process of justice are themselves devoid of human value and compassion.
Swann, Darius L. "Indian and Greek Drama: Two Definitions." Comparative Drama 3.2 (1969): 110-9. Web. 5 Apr. 2014.
This total idea of challenging and creating a new identity may seem quite a utopian concept, but it is not so impossible. The present paper will illustrate the writings of Mridula Garg and Arundhati Roy. The characters in their work are not extraordinary and utopian, but ordinary people like us whom we can come across in our day to day life. Here for the purpose of analysis, Garg’s three short stories have been chosen. They are: Hari Bindi, Sath Saal, Ki Aurat and Wo Dusri.