Vijay Tendulkar is a leading contemporary Indian playwright, screen and television writer, literary essayist, political journalist, and social commentator. For the past four decades he has been the most influential dramatist and theater personality in Marathi, the principal language of the state of Maharashtra, which has had a continuous literary history since the end of the classical period in India and has nearly seventy-five million speakers today.

A lifelong resident of the city of Bombay, Mr Tendulkar (b. 1928) is the author of thirty full-length plays and twenty-three one-act plays, several of which have become classics of modern Indian theater. Among these are Shantata! court chalu ahe (Silence! The Court Is in Session, 1967), Sakharam binder (Sakharam the Book-Binder, 1972), Kamala (1981), and Kanyadan (The Gift of a Daughter, 1983). Ghashiram kotwal (Ghashiram the Constable, 1972), a musical combining Marathi folk performance styles and contemporary theatrical techniques, is one of the longest-running plays in the world, with over six thousand performances in India and abroad, in the original and in translation. Mr Tendulkar's output in Marathi also includes eleven 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 rendered nine novels and two biographies into the language, as well as five plays, among which are Mohan Rakesh's Adhe adhure (Hindi), Girish Karnad's Tughlaq (Kannada), and Tennessee William's A Streetcar Named Desire (English). He is the author of original stories and screenplays for eight films in Marathi, including Samana (Confrontation, 1975), Simhasan (Throne, 1979), and Umbartha (The Threshold, 1981), the last a groundbreaking feature film on women?s activism in India.

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