Vijay Tendulkar’s Sakharam Binder: A Study of Male Domination and Violence

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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

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