Indian playwright Vijay Tendulkar, 80
Posted: Tuesday, June 10th, 2008 1:51 pmJanuary 6, 1928 - May 19, 2008
Vijay Tendulkar endured having one of his plays howled off the stage by an unappreciative audience; another about man-woman relationships in South Asia was banned by the Indian Government; and he was once lashed by a furious theatregoer with a bamboo rod. Such were the passions aroused by one of India’s most influential dramatists.
He went on, nevertheless, to win a host of awards and to write one of the longest-running plays in the world, Ghasiram Kotwal (Ghasiram the Constable), which was performed 6,000 times in India and abroad in the original Marathi and in translation. He wrote 30 full-length plays, collections of short stories and film scripts, although he never took up offers to write screenplays for mainstream popular cinema. That, he asserted, was work for hacks.
The dominant theme of his writings was violence, a subject that fascinated and repelled him. … Read full obituary
