But the play was acclaimed by the liberal, cosmopolitan art and theatre world. It was existentialist and bore the European sensibilities of hyper-realism. Leading actors like Alyque Padamsee and Gerson da Cunha performed the play in English later.

It is difficult to understand how and from where Tendulkar acquired modernist and, later, post-modernist ideas. He had a very modest middle-class background, with little exposure to the European or American world of art and literature. He started writing at a very young age. His rebellious mood perhaps was a reflection of the times he lived in. Till Tendulkar arrived on the scene, theatre essentially meant entertainment and sometimes idealistic or moralistic evocation. It was not supposed to shock and certainly not devastate well-ensconced beliefs. He initially acquired notoriety before he began to get attention as a serious writer who was ready to confront and fight the status quo.

His plays, which came in succession, Ghashiram Kotwal and Sakharam Binder, were penetrating studies in violence. Actually, before these plays, he had been drawing the attention of theatre-goers and critics with plays like Shantata! Court Chalu Aahe. But he began to get national attention only in the early ’70s and became an icon of the young.

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.

... contd.