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New York hosts Vijay Tendulkar festival
Tendulkar will be the literary flavour of the month in October as New york hosts a festival dedicated to the influential dramatist.
Vijay Tendulkar will be the literary flavour of the month in New York in October as the city hosts a festival dedicated to the influential dramatist who has straddled India's literary world for four decades.
Play-readings, seminars, discussions, screenings and plays will be held throughout New York by several organisations throughout October. The 76-year-old will be present for discussions during several of the events.
The screening of three of his films and the staging of "Ghashiram Kotwal" will be capped by a month-long production of his famous "Sakharam Binder" from Oct 21 to Nov 21.
A lifelong resident of Mumbai, Tendulkar is the author of 30 full-length plays and 23 one-act plays, several of which have become classics of modern Indian theatre.
Among these are "Shantata! court chalu ahe" (Silence! the court is in session), "Sakharam Binder" (Sakharam the book binder) and "Kamala".
His "Ghashiram Kotwal" (Ghashiram the constable) written in 1972 is a musical combining Marathi folk performance styles and contemporary theatrical techniques. It is one of the longest-running plays in the world with over 6,000 performances in India and abroad in the original and in translation.
Tendulkar's output in Marathi also includes 11 plays for children, four collections of short stories, one novel and five volumes of literary essays and social criticism, all of which have contributed to a remarkable transformation of the modern literary landscape of Maharashtra and of India as a whole.
He is an important translator in Marathi, having translated nine novels and two biographies into the language, as well as five plays, including Mohan Rakesh's Hindi play "Adhe Adhure", Girish Karnad's Kannada work "Tughlaq" and Tennessee William's classic "A Streetcar Named Desire".
Besides, Tendulkar is the author of original stories and screenplays for eight films in Marathi, including "Samana" (Confrontation), "Simhasan" (Throne), and "Umbartha" (The Threshold), which was a groundbreaking film on women's activism in India.
