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INDO-AMERICAN ARTS
COUNCIL Sundaram Tagore Gallery, 137 Greene
St., Houston, NYC. 212 677 4520. Vijay Tendulkar is a leading contemporary Indian playwright, screen and television svnter, literary essayist, political journalist, and social commentator. For the past four decades he has been the most influentjal dramatist and theater personality in Marathi, the principal language of the state of Máharashtra, 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 fizll-length plays and twenty-three one-act plays, several of which have become classics of modern Indian theater Among these are Shantatal court chalu alas (Silencel The Court Is in Session, 1967), .Saldtaram binder (Sakharam the Book-Binder, 1972), Kamahz (1981), and Kwpad2n (The (JiflofaDaugbter, 1983). Ghashiram kawal (Ghashiram the Constabfr, 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 Maratlii 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 modem literary landscape of Maharashtra and of India as a whole, lie 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), Giiish l4Larnad's Tughlaq (Kannada), and Tennessee Williams' A Slreetcar Named Desire (English). He is the author of original stories and screenplays for eight films in Màratbi, including Swnana (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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