Vasant Sarwate वसंत सरवटे acknowledges the contribution of Tendulkar brothers- Vijay and his elder brother Raghunath- shaping his vision and art.
Apart from Sarwate, Tendulkar was very fond of the art of young cartoonist Abhimanyu Kulkarni अभिमन्यु कुलकर्णी. In a Marathi letter to Abhimanyu, he wrote :”…the way a good bowler bowls six good balls in an over, sometimes your cartoons are in an issue of Lokprabha लोकप्रभा…”
Like Durga Bhagwat दुर्गा भागवत, Tendulkar liked the work of Natyachhatakar Diwakar नाट्यछटाकार दिवाकर, the most under rated writer in Marathi.
I like a lot of what Tendulkar wrote but his play “Kanyadan” कन्यादान and his essays on Raj Kapoor, Baba Amte बाबा आमटे, his own father, the theatre of the absurd and the death row inmates remain my favourite.
In “Kanyadan” (Giving away of daughter in marriage), he exposes hypocrisy of upper-caste Maharashtrian middle-class.
Tendulkar was fearless the way he took on Bal Thackeray बाळ ठाकरे and other politicians without batting an eyelid. See a related post here.
I will miss you Tendulkar-sir because…
"...पोटावरच्या बेंबीचा बिनबाहुलीचा डोळा म्हणून उपयोग करत पोट पोसत-वाढवत मुरादाड आयुष्य न काढता खरे डोळे चेहर्यावर असतात याचे तुम्ही भान ठेवलेत..."
"...Instead of using bellybutton on stomach as pupil-less eye to grow-inflate tummy and lead insensitive life, you were always conscious that the real eyes were attached to the face..."
(जी ए कुलकर्णी G A Kulkarni यात्रिक (A Pilgrim) पिंगळावेळ (Owl-time) Popular Prakashan 1977).
There must be a commotion wherever Vijay Tendulkar now has gone …
Artist: Ronald Searle The New Yorker 12 November 1966
This picture has no caption. If I were to give one...
"She like Vijay Tendulkar is so beautiful but watch out for her claws!"
Interestingly, my take from Kanyadan was different from yours. Of course, it exposes upper caste Maharashtrian hypocrisy. However, for me, the bigger take from the play was that it highlighted the complexities of solving sociological problems through a progressive framework.
ReplyDeleteThe venture of 'engineering' a society and shaping its values so that a moral order compatible with the times can be established is every thinking person's dream. But attempting to accomplish that by disbanding or trying to alter an olden cultural framework such as ban on marriage between different castes, does lead to loss of knowledge accumulated by that olden culture, however corrupt it may have been, and also results in an indeterminable risk for the person who is a victim/guinea pig for such an experiment because of the exposure to an alien knowledge frame with no prior documentation and acculatarisation to the solution of the problems that such ventures may generate.
I thought the play illustrated this conundrum perfectly without ever taking sides. The upper caste family tried to solve/diffuse the problems through their historical knowledge frame about drinking and violent behaviour while the Dalit youth tried to approach issues in marriage through his learnt/observed behaviour or cultural framework from his impoverished childhood. Since both families had no recourse to a third knowledge framework to solve, mitigate, issues arising out of an inter-caste marriage, apart from a feel good, 'everyone is equal' kind of socialist framework of the father, which might sound great as rhetoric but never gives a concrete path to resolve the problems that crop up for the unfortunate guinea pig in such experiements.
The play, I thought, tried to highlight these complexities and I always am fascinated by Tendulkar's ability to go far beyond the typical Maharashtrian upper-caste acculturisation that he himself must have underwent and write stories so raw and visceral that one would have expected from someone like Namdeo Dhasal who probably has borne the violence that Tendulkar explores so unnervingly in his plays.
Well said.
ReplyDeleteI agree by and large.
I will return to this sometime later.
well.... very nice....
ReplyDeleteby
regards
Villu stills,songs