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Reminiscences

Photo: Vivek Bendre

No use for unnecessary politeness: Vijay Tendulkar.

For someone like me who came of age in the 80s, the scripts Tendulkar wrote for Shyam Benegal (“Nishant”, “Manthan”) and Govind Nihalani (“Aakrosh”, “Ardha Satya”) were lessons in radical consciousness. The students at the National School of Drama would regularly perform plays like “Sakharam Binder” and “Ghashiram Kotwal”. It was impossible to witness Tendulkar’s work without being witness to the violence of a stripping. Nakedness being put on display. But this was not a striptease. It was an angry stripping away of the illusions hiding something that was both oppressive and hideous. Instead of being titillated, you were touched by the spirit of rebellion.

I was 16 or 17 when I watched the performance of “Giddh”, a Hindi adaptation of Tendulkar’s play “Gidhade” (The Vultures). The abuse that I saw being exchanged between a father and his sons was shocking. So was the naked language of the marketplace, and even the brothel, being used to describe human relations. It was like a slap on the face of all genteel pretensions that I had so far associated with theatre. Drama was no longer about putting make-up and delivering romantic lines. Tendulkar showed me for the first time that real drama was dirty.

But the unique mix of feudal violence, impotence, and rage that has always for me characterised Tendulkar’s work acquired a critical force on celluloid. In Benegal’s “Nishant” and then, even more powerfully, in Nihalani’s “Aakrosh” and “Ardha Satya”, Tendulkar’s anger flowered into a thing of terrible beauty.

If realism was your religion, Tendulkar would always be one of your gods. When I was working on my last book, a novel about a Bihari journalist named Binod who was writing a film-script, I imagined a scene that had my protagonist paying tribute to Tendulkar’s searing vision. This was about three years ago. And then, six months later, one January day, I happened to be in Mumbai. I called up Tendulkar.

He had been unwell and although it was warm in his flat he didn’t want to use a fan. We sat in his bedroom with its yellow walls that had discoloured patches because of rain or leaking water. There was a TV in the corner and closer to where I sat a laptop with pictures of Tendulkar’s daughters as screensavers. He had put on a freshly ironed blue print kurta and an orange dhoti. There was a large dog, a German Shepherd, in the house. I was curious about its name but didn’t ask. In our email exchanges, Tendulkar had signed his name “Ten,” which was also the name that Tennessee Williams went by, someone whose work Tendulkar had been influenced by and whom he had translated.

In response to a question I asked him about his making as an artist, Tendulkar told me that when he was 40, he had been awarded a two-year Nehru Fellowship to research what he had titled “Emerging Patterns of Violence and its Impact on Literature.” He went everywhere in India, especially Bihar, my home State. Equipped with a tape-recorder and two cameras, Tendulkar tried to get a sense of ordinary life. He spent time with tribals. He roamed in rural areas as well as mofussil towns. He travelled to the border. He would visit jails and attended trials. He didn’t write a single word toward his thesis. But, he said, every bit of creative writing that he did afterward had “a genuine complexity of experienced reality.”

He said that after the Bhagalpur blinding case, Govind Nihalani had come to him. Nihalani wanted to make a film about police brutality. Tendulkar told the film director that they couldn’t “isolate the police” from the larger social context. The point was not simply to condemn. He said, “Whatever has happened to the police has also happened to all of us.” The result was the sympathetic but shattering portrait of the police officer, played by Om Puri, in the justly-celebrated “Ardha Satya”.

I had lunch with Tendulkar in the small space outside his room, next to the kitchen. We were being served by a young man who seemed to be the only other occupant in the flat. The food was simple, roti, dal, and cauliflower. There was lemon pickle. Tendulkar began to tell me of that time when Raj Kapoor, toward the end of his life, watched a tape of “Ardha Satya” one night. He was so affected that he woke up the members of his household and made them watch the movie.

The next day, Tendulkar said, he was summoned to the Kapoor house. He was asked if it would be possible for Tendulkar to insert a “political section” in the film “Ram Teri Ganga Maili” that Kapoor was working on at that time. Tendulkar said no. But before he could leave, a promise was extracted from him that he would write a screenplay for the next RK Studio production.

Kapoor already knew what he wanted. The script would be about a man from a village, the son of a school-teacher, who becomes the Prime Minister of India. Like anyone else in power, this man is very corrupt. One day, his father, the school-teacher, sits in the third-class compartment of a train and travels to Delhi. At the PM’s bungalow, he fights his way in and begins to beat his son. “You shameless man, is this why I brought you into this world?”

I left after lunch and went to a newspaper office in Mahalaxmi. When I checked my email there, there was already a message from Tendulkar. It began, “This is to say that I felt used by someone free of charge after you left.”

The message shocked me. Tendulkar had written that I had shown “professional behaviour” and “a measured warmth”. But nevertheless, or maybe because of it, he said I had left behind a feeling “in the mind of the host of giving without receiving.”

But what did I have to give him? I could give him only my apologies. That was a start. Later, I pressed him to explain how I had given offence. He wrote back to say that he had expected a dialogue between us. “You are still a stranger to me despite your being with me for some time that morning.” He said that the things he had told me, he had said hundreds of times before. He ended by saying bitterly that he sometimes thought that he should even charge for his time.

I felt bad, of course. It so happened that during our conversation that day, when I asked him a question, Tendulkar would ask me to repeat what I had said. He was 78 and it seemed he was hard of hearing. As I’ve mentioned, it was warm inside, even stifling. I felt uncomfortable raising my voice, I thought it was rude, and so I avoided speaking at all. I had gone there to meet the writer and to find out how he had found his stories. And, truth be told, I was happy to listen while someone I had long idolised shared with me, sometimes at length, his experiences with his art.

I sent Tendulkar a second apology and mentioned that a dialogue would have taken place when he saw what I had written in the novel I was researching. Once again, his response was quick and direct. His message simply said, “Please do not send the book.”

Tendulkar was a difficult man. A stubborn man. He had little use for politeness. Even in his art it is easy to see where he was being rigid or doctrinaire. All this was not only a part of who he was, it was also a part of his work. It gave strength to his anger and made him the extraordinary artist that he was.

Amitava Kumar is the author of a novel, Home Products, and several other books.

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