Marathi Literature 235 original play, Tujhe ahe Tujapashi (1957), presents two contrasting worldviews,
indulgence of Kakaji and Gandhian idealism of Acharya. The younger characters attracted to the
Gandhian message of simple life are finally converted to a life of comfort and enjoyment. The play has
proved extremely popular with urban, educated audiences. Its message helped them to repulse
Gandhian ideals for their hypocrisy and idiosyncracies. It was a variant of Nehruvian repudiation of
Gandhism as inappropriate for the modern world. Durga Bhagwat (1910) symbolizes the conscience of
intellectuals and intellectual traditions in contemporary Maharashtra. A noted anthropologist and
folklorist, she has made a mark on Marathi literature through her creative and critical work. Her
Rutuchakra (1956), Bhava Mudra (1960), Vyasaparva (1962), Ruparanga (1967), and Pais (1970) well
represent her creative contributions, and Lokasahityachi Ruparekha and Ketakari Kadambari (1967)
represent her critical works. She writes in a remarkably simple and informal style (Kulkarni 1988, 426).
Her Rutuchakra is unique in Marathi literature for its sensitive and informed description of nature in
different seasons, its influence on, and relation to, human lives, folklore, and customs. She has brought
her scholarship and mature understanding to explore many new subjects; for example, Aswal (1982) is a
study of Indian bears. She was elected the president of Marathi Sahitya Sammelan (an annual
conference of Marathi writers) at Karad in 1975 during the emergency. From her position, she spoke out
against the censorship and restraints on freedom of speech imposed on writers. Mukta (1977) is a
collection of her speeches on many topics germane to writers. This collection reflects her dedication and
unequivocal commitment to freedom of expression. Drama Vijay Tendulkar (1928) has remained the
preeminent dramatist in Marathi for the last three decades. With his plays translated and staged in
other regional languages, he has gained wider recognition and reputation. Both Tendulkar and other
younger playwrights wanted to give theater ‘‘a new form’’ and experiment with all aspects of it,
including content, acting, decor, and audience communication (Nadkarni 1990, 9). He started writing
plays in the 1950s, but they remained within the experimental and theater groups. Here the term
‘‘experimental theater’’ can be interpreted as a synonym for ‘‘modern’’ and ‘‘Western.’’ In his early one-
act plays, he used the techniques common in contemporary European and American theater. His
Shrimant (1955) deals with the familiar theme of the conflict between the rich and the poor in a
capitalist society. It also explores the predicament of a lower-middle-class family with the problem of
premarital pregnancy. Both Shrimant and the subsequent Gharate Amuche Chhan deal with the corrupt,
money-driven, and selfish lives of the rich who are morally vacuous. Many of his early plays are fairly
conventional in dramatic form and style, but in his later ones he has experimented with both, but not in
a contrived fashion. Gangadhar Gadgil (1980, 48– 78) divides Tendulkar’s work in two periods, 236
Twentieth-Century Literatures of India 1953– 68 and 1968– 80, for convenience of analysis. The plays
included in the first period are Shrimant, Manus Nawache Bet, Ashi Pakhare Yeti, Saree Ga Saree, Mi
Jinkalo, Mi Haralo, Shantata, Court Chalu Ahe, and Madhalya Bhinti. The plays written during the first
period focus on the lives and concerns of lower-middle-class characters: financial strains, specter of
joblessness, inadequate income of those with jobs, problems of housing and high rent, marriage and
oppression of women, and so on. The stark realism of his work is accentuated by his use of humor and
satire, with telling effect. He has an uncanny ability to develop a complete image of the characters with
relative ease through few but cogent details. In Shantata and Court Chalu Ahe, he has interwoven the
rehearsal of a play and a real life story to produce intense dramatic encounters where reality and fiction
become difficult to separate. The plays in the second period break away from the milieu of the middle
class and probe the sociopolitical and historical realm. Gidhade (1971), Sakharam Binder (1972),
Ghashiram Kotwal (1973), Bhalyakaka (1974), Bhau Murarrao (1975), and Bebi (1975) are, in Gadgil’s
judgment, better conceived compared to some of the first period. Ghashiram Kotwal, his most popular
play, was published in 1973, but it was performed in December 1972. This play, a dance and musical
spectacle, on one level, is a biting commentary on the hypocrisy of the dominant castes/classes in
society, on another level. Its characters are historical figures, and it is set in the Peshwa period, but it is
not a historical play. It is a fictional account of the social circumstances that can create characters like
Ghashiram. The theme of the play, the debauchery of the orthodox Brahmans of Pune and impoverished
Ghashiram’s willingness to offer his daughter to the demands of lecherous Nana Phadanavis, created a
storm of social protest in Pune. Tendulkar’s play makes use of chorus as well as kirtan, a folk music form
used primarily to narrate religiomythical stories, with incisive effect. Barve (1990, 22– 25) has argued
that Tendulkar ‘‘can rejoice in the beauty and nobility in the world but he is not blind to the ugly and
ignoble in it.... [H]is literary tendency is of realistic, soft but poignant expression.’’ Gadgil (1980) has
argued that Tendulkar’s work is wanting in many ways by literary standards when compared to his
reputation and popularity. Barve (1990, 23), on the other hand, asserts that Tendulkar is interested in
‘‘individual identity of man and his social existence.’’ Tendulkar’s work may not seem to carry the
‘‘burden of intellectual speculation,’’ but it offers ‘‘something, beyond words.’’ There is little doubt that
Tendulkar’s work has taken Marathi theater away from the cliche ´ d and contrived work of earlier
generations. Anil Barve (1948– 84) was a political activist in the Naxalite movement in Andhra Pradesh
and other parts of India. His journalistic reports brought him to prominence. His first novel, Thank You,
Mr. Glad (1975), is a story of an encounter between Virbhushan Patnaik, a Naxalite prisoner, and Mr.
Glad, the British superintendent of the jail. Patnaik is awaiting his execution in the Rajmahendry jail for
his political activities. The conversion of the autocratic jailer, who shoots his ward at his request and
takes his place in the cell, is riveting.
Marathi Literature 237 He adapted the play in 1977 with success. His other novels, Dongar Mhatara
Jhala (1977) and Akara Koti Gallon Panee (1978), deal with tensions between an aging communist and a
retired army officer and between a corrupt mine owner and a decent engineer, respectively. His play
Hamidabaichi Kothi (1979) is a tale of a prostitute, Hamidabai, whose kothi (brothel) has fallen on lean
days. The play captures the suffering of the woman and her attempts to escape the brothel life. Barve
goes beyond the transient emotional or subjective elements to focus on the social origins of the tragedy.
Barve has brought realism with all the starkness back to the Marathi novel and drama (Manohar 1988,
399– 400). Mahesh Elkunchwar (1939) and Satish Alekar (1949) represent the new generation of
playwrights who followed, like Tendulkar, the path away from the professional Marathi theater.
Elkunchwar’s plays have drawn social criticism throughout his career. He has shown willingness to take
on topics that go against middle-class moral values and orthodox social norms. His plays have been
translated into English and Hindi. He has been publishing plays since 1970, and his plays have been
staged by prominent producers (Machwe 1988, 1160). His first play, Sultan, was followed by Garbo
(1973), Rudravarsha (1974), Vasanakand (1975), Yatanaghar (1977), Party (1981), and Wada Chirebandi
(1987). In his quest to explore interaction between human relationships and the morality that
supposedly holds society together, he projects the conflictual outcome. His oneact plays, starting with
Sultan, brought new intensity to the genre in Marathi. Critics have faulted him for focusing on sex and
violence to attract audiences (Kanadey 1991, 28– 29) or for openly discussing social taboos like the
incestual relationship between brother and sister in his Vasanakand. Others have praised him for
bringing to light the practices that society does not want its members to discuss or practice and thus
pushing the limits of social discourse. Satish Alekar also has stayed primarily with experimental theater.
His plays Micky ani Memsaheb and Mahanirvan (1974) established him as a promising young playwright.
His other plays include Mahapur (1977), Begum Barve (1979), and Shaniwar, Raviwar (1982). His
Mahanirvan is a satire of the practices and morality of the urban, lower-middle-class Brahmans. The
death of a tenement dweller provides a platform to launch his black comedy, which alternates between
a farce and tragedy. SUMMING UP The economy, polity, and society of Maharashtra were influenced by
the British colonial rule, as was the literature. The relative impact varied in different periods in the past,
depending on the larger forces at work. Throughout the period, the label ‘‘Marathi’’ was predominantly
defined by the Brahman, educated, and middle class, which subsumed many divergent, congruent, and
contradictory social structures and relations. Orthodoxy, progressive groups, revivalism, and reformist
forces have contributed to this discourse, but nonBrahman groups were treated as marginal to this
process.
Natarajan, Nalini, ed. Handbook of Twentieth-Century Literatures of India. Westport, CT, USA:
Greenwood Press, 1996. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 8 February 2016.
Copyright © 1996. Greenwood Press. All rights reserved.
Realism and the Edicce of Home 277 an interview room, an o´ce, a park) in addition to a home, the
dialectical thrust of the action is still mainly against the constraints of domesticity. Indrajit acquires a
precarious individuality in opposition to the interchangeable Amal, Vimal, and Kamal by not marrying
Manasi, leaving Calcutta for such unfamiliar places as Madras and London, and allowing the Writer to
create a buid identity that di,erentiates him from the discontented, homogenized male selves fashioned
at the “Institute of Bettermanship.” Rakesh’s Adhe adhure, the acknowledged classic of the collapse of
the nuclear family in the modern metropolis, establishes an intimate connection between economic
decline, emotional disintegration, and the space of home. The decrepit all-purpose room in which the
entire action takes place is a representative segment of “a house that has slid from a middle-class to a
lower-middle class level” (SN, 243), and the visible presence of remnants from an earlier life in this
space is more intolerable than their absence would have been. In such an environment Mahendranath,
Savitri, and their three children can neither break the cycle of constant mutual recrimination nor escape
each other (cg. 12). Most recently, the upper-class urban tragicomedy of Mahesh Dattani has
reenergized the drama of poisoned relationships in the challenging medium of English, although the
playwright’s penchant for plot-driven coups de theatre inserts a measure of supercciality and
sensationalism into an otherwise accomplished oeuvre. As John McRae notes, Dattani “takes the family
unit and the family setting— again and again he uses the family home as his locale— and fragments
them. As relationships fall apart, so, in a way, does the visual setting. Not for him the single room set.
Rather, he experiments, with great technical daring, using split sets, ‘hidden’ rooms, interior and
exterior: he stretches the space and clls it in every available direction, even out front, playing with the
audience and its expectations” (Dattani, Final Solutions, 7). In this inventive dramaturgy, the stage either
represents several domestic spaces simultaneously, or several spaces among which home is central. In
the plays Dattani has published so far, home is again a place of resentment, neurosis, confrontation, and
barely suppressed violence, until a last-minute reversal exposes some guilty secret from the past that
has fueled the mundane family antagonisms. Vijay Tendulkar’s drama of ideas represents perhaps the
most substantial exploration of the symbolism of home because his customary method is to translate
social and political conbicts into personal dilemmas and resituate them within the domestic sphere. The
material-visual “look” of a home in his plays is always replete with the signs of class, Realism and the
Edicce of Home 277 an interview room, an o´ce, a park) in addition to a home, the dialectical thrust of
the action is still mainly against the constraints of domesticity. Indrajit acquires a precarious individuality
in opposition to the interchangeable Amal, Vimal, and Kamal by not marrying Manasi, leaving Calcutta
for such unfamiliar places as Madras and London, and allowing the Writer to create a buid identity that
di,erentiates him from the discontented, homogenized male selves fashioned at the “Institute of
Bettermanship.” Rakesh’s Adhe adhure, the acknowledged classic of the collapse of the nuclear family in
the modern metropolis, establishes an intimate connection between economic decline, emotional
disintegration, and the space of home. The decrepit all-purpose room in which the entire action takes
place is a representative segment of “a house that has slid from a middle-class to a lower-middle class
level” (SN, 243), and the visible presence of remnants from an earlier life in this space is more
intolerable than their absence would have been. In such an environment Mahendranath, Savitri, and
their three children can neither break the cycle of constant mutual recrimination nor escape each other
(cg. 12). Most recently, the upper-class urban tragicomedy of Mahesh Dattani has reenergized the
drama of poisoned relationships in the challenging medium of English, although the playwright’s
penchant for plot-driven coups de theatre inserts a measure of supercciality and sensationalism into an
otherwise accomplished oeuvre. As John McRae notes, Dattani “takes the family unit and the family
setting— again and again he uses the family home as his locale— and fragments them. As relationships
fall apart, so, in a way, does the visual setting. Not for him the single room set. Rather, he experiments,
with great technical daring, using split sets, ‘hidden’ rooms, interior and exterior: he stretches the space
and clls it in every available direction, even out front, playing with the audience and its expectations”
(Dattani, Final Solutions, 7). In this inventive dramaturgy, the stage either represents several domestic
spaces simultaneously, or several spaces among which home is central. In the plays Dattani has
published so far, home is again a place of resentment, neurosis, confrontation, and barely suppressed
violence, until a last-minute reversal exposes some guilty secret from the past that has fueled the
mundane family antagonisms. Vijay Tendulkar’s drama of ideas represents perhaps the most substantial
exploration of the symbolism of home because his customary method is to translate social and political
conbicts into personal dilemmas and resituate them within the domestic sphere. The material-visual
“look” of a home in his plays is always replete with the signs of class, 278 Genres in Context ideology,
and cultural positioning; home is the domain of private experience, but the social consciousness of its
inhabitants is entangled in the problems of caste, class, gender, community, marriage, and the family.
This involvement threatens every one of the relationships on which the family is founded, especially
those of husband and wife, parent and child, brother and sister. The main stage setting in Gidhade is
“the interior for a house . . . that reminds you of the hollow of a tree”—an apt visual and tactile symbol
for a family that has clled the void created by its loss of economic status with uncontrolled emotional
and physical violence (Tendulkar, Collected Plays in Translation, 201; hereafter cited as CPT ). The living
room of the house is the scene of incessant and grotesque confrontations between Pappa and his three
adult children (Ramakant, Umakant, and Manik); a room above the garage (also visible on stage) is the
sanctuary where Rama, an innocent married to Ramakant, tries to cnd temporary solace in a
relationship with her husband’s illegitimate brother, Rajaninath. Sakharam binder uncovers the same
propensity for male violence at the opposite end of the economic spectrum.
Realism and the Edicce of Home 279 “old red-tiled house, the sort one cnds in the alleys of a small
district town” (CPT, 125) is the laboratory where he conducts his eccentric social experiments in the
subversion of Brahmanism and the institution of marriage. The two simultaneously visible rooms within
the house also come to represent Sakharam’s fatal suspension between radically opposed forms of
femininity— the unabashed sexuality of Champa and the timid but manipulative chastity of Laxmi. In
Kamala, Jaisingh Jadav’s “small bungalow in the fashionable New Delhi neighbourhood of Neeti Bagh”
(CPT, 3) is an appropriate setting for his callow careerism as an investigative journalist and the spatial
expression of a sense of proprietorship that turns Jaisingh’s upper-class wife, Sarita, into the same kind
of commodiced object as the tribal woman, Kamala, he has bought in a besh market to “expose” the
continuing tra´c in women. In perhaps the most resonant example of the intersection of private and
public spheres, the middle-class Brahman home of the Deolalikar family in Kanyadaan becomes the site
of a cerce battle when Nath, an idealistic politician, tries to bring his progressive caste politics into his
home by encouraging his young daughter to marry an unemployed writer from the Dalit (formerly
“untouchable”) community. The invasion of home by the politics of the world in the work of a “social”
playwright like Tendulkar is counterbalanced by the signiccance of home in the politics of the world in
the work of “political” playwrights, such as G. P. Deshpande and Mahasweta Devi. In Deshpande’s
Uddhwasta dharmashala, the university o´ce that is the scene of an inquiry into Sridhar Vishwanath
Kulkarni’s radical politics (cg. 13) alternates with his home, the scene of his failed marriage to the
ideologically rigid and partyoriented Saraswati, his redemptive intimacy with a younger actress,
Madhavi, and his soul-searching conversations with a son who is boundering. It is in the privacy of his
study rather than in the turmoil of the outside world that Sridhar Vishwanath fashions himself as both
public and private man— rebellious party member, uncompromising intellectual, husband, lover, and
father. Deshpande’s Ek vajoon gela ahe celebrates Nana, a larger-than-life left-wing intellectual, entirely
within the occasional context of a seventy-cfth birthday party arranged by his children. Once again, the
family gathering brings political as well as emotional tensions to the fore, culminating in the unexpected
visit of an estranged activist son, Uddhav, who dismisses his family as a group of armchair
revolutionaries and rejects their politics. In Mahasweta Devi’s best-known play, Hajar churashir ma
(based, like her other plays, on her own cction) the bond between Brati, a young revolutionary, and his
ailing mother, Sujata, gives280 Genres in Context an intimately human quality to the Naxalite movement
in Bengal. After Brati’s death in a police encounter, deeply embarrasing to his upper-class bureaucratic
family, Sujata begins a process of education and discovery through which she comes to understand
oppression, resistance, and her son’s true nature for the crst time. The cnal grouping within the tradition
of realistic urban drama involves a collapse of the edicce of home. Home in these plays is not merely the
testing ground for various familial, social, and political processes, but a long-standing material and
symbolic structure that itself succumbs to the stresses of the present. The image of the “house of
politics” as a ruined sanctuary (uddhwasta dharmashala) in G. P. Deshpande’s play suggests vividly how
a material construct may symbolize the ideological crisis in the life of an individual and a nation.
Similarly, at the end of Tendulkar’s Kanyadaan, as Nath Deolalikar confronts the human cost of his
ambitious sociopolitical experiments, “the sounds of huge edicces crashing down begins . . . everything
around him is collapsing . . . the roar of collapsing structures has risen to a terrifying pitch” (64). In
contrast with this largely metaphoric disintegration, home is a cgure of literal Realism and the Edicce of
Home 281 as well as psychological-social collapse in Elkunchwar’s W ada chirebandi (1985) and Cyrus
Mistry’s Doongaji House (1978). In Elkunchwar’s play, the “ancient and respectable but dilapidated
mansion” of an upper-caste village family is a visible symbol of its socioeconomic slide from a privileged
past to an intolerable present. Mistry’s Doongaji House transplants the same tensions to a metropolitan
setting and the context of a di,erent community. The three-story structure of the title is again marked by
“alarming signs of age and degeneration,” but its Zoroastrian (Parsi) inhabitants confront speciccally
urban forms of ethnic alienation, failure, and violence. In both plays there is nothing to sustain the
present but the ghosts of “old times,” and the cnal collapse is due as much to the imperatives of
progress and the problems of cultural di,erence as to the dissolution of family bonds, making the
crumbling structure of home a cgure for the postcolonial nation itself. Home, Modernity, Migrancy This
thematic preoccupation with home as the measure of historical, familial, and sociopolitical relations
connects contemporary realist theatre in India in unusual ways to two dominant but antithetical
formations in modern writing and experience— the ambivalence about home in realist and modernist
literature, where it denotes identity, rootedness, and belonging, as well as conbict, constriction, and
loss; and the converse sentimentalization of home as the symbol of homeland, nation, and a “lost past”
in the discourse of transnational diaspora. Writing about modern drama in general, Una Chaudhuri uses
the term “geopathology” to designate “the problem of place” that erupts in realist theatre of the late
nineteenth century and “unfolds as an incessant dialogue between belonging and exile, home and
homelessness” (15). With the family home as its privileged setting, modern drama at crst employs, as
one of its foundational discourses, a vague, culturally determined symbology of home, replete with all
those powerful and empowering associations to space as are organized by the notion of belonging. The
dramatic discourse of home is articulated through two main principles, which structure the plot as well
as the plays’ accounts of subjectivity and identity: a victimage of location and a heroism of departure.
The former principle decnes place as the protagonist’s fundamental problem, leading her or him to a
recognition of the need for (if not an actual enactment of ) the latter. (Una Chaudhuri, xii)
Dharwadker, Aparna Bhargava. Theatres of Independence : Drama, Theory, and Urban Performance in
India since 1947. Iowa City, IA, USA: University of Iowa Press, 2005. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 8 February
2016.
Copyright © 2005. University of Iowa Press. All rights reserved.
Dharwadker, Aparna Bhargava. Theatres of Independence : Drama, Theory, and Urban Performance in
India since 1947. Iowa City, IA, USA: University of Iowa Press, 2005. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 8 February
2016.
Copyright © 2005. University of Iowa Press. All rights reserved.
Dharwadker, Aparna Bhargava. Theatres of Independence : Drama, Theory, and Urban Performance in
India since 1947. Iowa City, IA, USA: University of Iowa Press, 2005. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 8 February
2016.
Copyright © 2005. University of Iowa Press. All rights reserved.
Dharwadker, Aparna Bhargava. Theatres of Independence : Drama, Theory, and Urban Performance in
India since 1947. Iowa City, IA, USA: University of Iowa Press, 2005. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 8 February
2016.
Copyright © 2005. University of Iowa Press. All rights reserved.
Dharwadker, Aparna Bhargava. Theatres of Independence : Drama, Theory, and Urban Performance in
India since 1947. Iowa City, IA, USA: University of Iowa Press, 2005. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 8 February
2016.
Copyright © 2005. University of Iowa Press. All rights reserved.
Dharwadker, Aparna Bhargava. Theatres of Independence : Drama, Theory, and Urban Performance in
India since 1947. Iowa City, IA, USA: University of Iowa Press, 2005. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 8 February
2016.
Copyright © 2005. University of Iowa Press. All rights reserved.
Natarajan, Nalini, ed. Handbook of Twentieth-Century Literatures of India. Westport, CT, USA:
Greenwood Press, 1996. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 8 February 2016.
Copyright © 1996. Greenwood Press. All rights reserved.
Natarajan, Nalini, ed. Handbook of Twentieth-Century Literatures of India. Westport, CT, USA:
Greenwood Press, 1996. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 8 February 2016.
Copyright © 1996. Greenwood Press. All rights reserved.
