A TRIBUTE TO VIJAY TENDULKAR

The many worlds of 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...

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

Kumar Ketkar