Collected Plays in Translation

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I am a writer.

On this your immediate reaction will be: 'We all know that. Please proceed further and make your point.'

The point is, more than a playwright I consider myself to be a writer-meaning I love to indulge in the physical process of writing. I enjoy this process even when there is nothing to be said. Give me a piece of paper, any paper, and a pen and I shall write as naturally as a bird flies or a fish swims. Left to myself I scribble. And I never get tired of writing. I mean the physical process of writing. Lately I have learnt to work on a word processor. But I still prefer to write with my hand. Especially when I write in my mother-language, i.e., Marathi. Writing gives me a pleasure which has no substitute. However tired I am, physically or mentally, the moment I pick up the pen and begin running it on a paper-any piece of paper-1 feel good. I feel refreshed. I feel as if I am born again. Writing by itself is a luxury for me. When I write I forget myself. I forget my anxieties. I do not care what is around me. For the last forty-five years I have been writing sitting in newspaper offices, in the road-side restaurants, on the crowded running local trains, and when my living space did not allow me to be by myself and write, I have written sitting in the bathroom.

*Taken from Sri Ram Memorial Lecture, 'The Play is the Thing'. Lecture 1, 1997.

And I have written on the sick bed in the hospital in spite of my doctor's advice not to tax myself. He did not know and would not accept that writing was not taxing to me at all. On the contrary it was soothing. It was great relief. It was joy.

It would not be an exaggeration if I say that I have survived-and not only economically-by writing. I say this here at such length because it makes sense in the context.

of the subject I will be speaking on. Let me state it once again: I am first a writer and then a playwright. And then a film writer and whatever if that matters in this context.

I have been writing in different 'roles'. I was a journalist for many years and even today feel inspired to start a daily newspaper column when approached. I did it as recently as in 1993 during and after the destruction of the Babri Masjid. I wrote that column for six months and enjoyed every minute of that writing. I did not write anything else during those six tumultuous months. Not a play in any case. I did not even think of writing a play. I have written journalistically with the same joy of writing for the theatre or for a film. That is why I said that any writing rejuvenates me. The form does not make any difference. I have written many short stories at one time. There are three collections of my short stories in Marathi. That was before I finally accepted myself as playwright.

A strong ethical concern exploring and critiquing the relations of power in all their complex ramifications is the hub around which Tendulkar's major plays evolve. Power (what Michel Foucault defines as 'the relationship in which one wishes to direct the behaviour of another') and violence as the natural instrumentality that power brings into play provide the general space in which these plays are played out. As a matter of fact, he chose 'the emerging patterns of violence' as his theme for a project when he was awarded the Nehru Fellowship. In an interview soon after the completion of the project, he said that for two years he had 'moved around the country alone, trying to look into situations ranging from individual violence to political movement;' covering 'criminality, the functioning of the police force, the judiciary, jails, and the political aspect of violence'. At the end of it he was left with a curiosity about violence-not as something that exists in isolation, but as a part of the human milieu, human behaviour, human mind. It has become an obsession. At a very sensitive level, violence can be 'Michel Foucault, interviewed by Raul Fornet-Betancourt, Helmut Becker, Alfredo Gomez-Miller, The ethic of care for the self as a practice of freedom', In James Bernaner and David Rasmussen, eds. The Final Foucault, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 1988.