Imagination and Reality in Vijay Tendulkars Silence!

The Court is in Session I personally dont bother about people who havent seen life. They close their eyes at the sight of suffering as if it doesnt exist. The fact is that life is dark and cruel, its just that you dont care for the truth. You dont want to see it because it might make you uncomfortable. If escapism is your way of living then you will fail to see the truth. I have not written about hypothetical pain or created an imaginary world of sorrow. I am from a middle class family and I have seen the brutal ways of life by keeping my eyes open. My work has come from within an outcome of my observation of the world in which I live. -Tendulkar in an interview Vijay Tendulkar emerged as a rebel against the established orthodox society with the production of Silence! The Court is in Session. Tendulkars this play is based on the theme of power, its sources and manifestation. The characters fight for authority and power and try to trap each other through a metaphorical mock-court. The play oscillates between theatricalisation of private life and privatization of theatrical performance. Miss Leela Benare, the heroine of the play is presented as an extraordinary and crucial character in the play. She is a young middle class woman of 34 years who is working as a teacher to earn her livelihood. She was loved and appreciated by her students in the school. She loves life and is full of spirits. She is very proud of her performance as a teacher and feels that her life is her own and no one has got the right to interfere in it. She is a member of an amateur dramatic association which stages plays in different places to create public consciousness on some social or sociological issues. Currently the dramatic trope has taken up the issue of educating the people about procedures of a court of law and the charge against Leela is infanticide. The trope arrived on the spot quite early, thus they decided to have a rehearsal of mock court. Leela was reluctant to perform the role of an accused but this reluctance was ignored. The playwright endeavors to create a game-like non-serious atmosphere. But soon the imaginary charges led to personal dilemmas. Prisoner Miss Leela under section No. 302 of the Indian Penal Code, you are accused of the crime of Infanticide (foeticide). Are you guilty or not guilty of a fore mentioned crime? The play utilizes metatheatrical elements such as the play-within-a-play to objectively contemplate upon the predicament of Leela Benare. Vijay Tendulkar asserts:The coexistence of the observer and the happening makes the reality. Reality becomes reality only when it is seen. Leela is seen in a cheerful mood of flamboyance, but she gets her first blow, when Ponkshe, a scientist, says, "She runs after men too much." Karnik, one of the characters, says that Leela was in love with her maternal uncle but the affair ended in fiasco. He further "reveals' her past life by saying that she first roposed to Ponkshe and then tried to deceive Rokde, a young boy. For Benare, her attempts at seduction are a temporary mode of winning over the opposite sex- targeting the males weakness with regard to women. For her, this is her sweet revenge as she has continuously been taken advantage of, in the guise of love. At an immature age, she had been attracted to her maternal uncle, where her uncle took full advantage of her innocence. She had no knowledge of right and wrong. Nevertheless, she

is held responsible even at a tender age. She fell in love, yet again, with the intellectual Damle whom she adored. She worshipped that mans intellect. But all he understood was her body. It is obvious from the professors age that for her, it is no mere physical attraction. Yet for him, she was only a physical entity. She was an object to be experimented upon. She refers to this approach of adults as she opines: They scratch you till you bleed, then run away like cowards. Her primary reason for luring the other male characters in the play is that she desperately fishes for a father for the baby in her womb. She is denied any sort of control over her life as a bottle of tik-20 is pushed away by the others. They prefer torturing her alive, than awarding her with a euthanasia. That her thoughts and the mind-set of the society cannot co-exist is obvious. For, when she talks, only she is active, the others around become static. When the others talk, she freezes into silence. Just as man and woman cannot exist on an equal footing in reality; the whole theory of gender equality is reduced to a hypothesis. Leelas position within the game of the mock-trial is not steady; she oscillated between illusion and reality, the fancy and mundane. While performing her gender as a woman in the group, she transcends the limitation of verbal reasoning and tries to spy into the masculine psyche. The charges against Leela are confirmed by evidences of reality that mark out the boundaries of collective experience. Leela differs and tries to loose herself from this collective prejudice enslaving her; but she believes truth and reality are achieved on when reality is approached in the nakedness of mind without pre-conclusions. This understanding of emotions humanizes Leela. Mr. Kashikar, the judge should be free from the prejudice but he was just the opposite. He quoted the proverb: Janani Janama bhumischcha Svargadapi Gariyasi.(Silence30) This is a mockery on the judge who is talking about motherhood and innocence who himself does not follow what he says. The court allows Prof. Damle to enjoy his married life and does not accuse him to exploit and abuse the life of a woman. The irony-which is the cross between appearance and reality- of the mock trial, is that Leela is accused in the court without the presence of Prof. Damle. This depicts the condemnation on the Indian society and the prejudices it carries against women. Conventional morality is only an imaginary issue. There is also the conflict between philosophy and practice. The woman in Indian philosophy and ideology is always placed in a heavenly paradigm as she is referred to as the Rani/Devi/Laksmi. However, when it comes to practice, she is always treated as a doormat. When it comes to metting out justice to the accused, Woman is not for independence. However, during the course of arguments, there are rationalizations: Motherhood is pure. Sukhatme utters mechanically, says the text: Motherhood is a sacred thing. Their swearing on the English Oxford dictionary underlines the fact that whatever they utter hold only superficial meaning and no depth. Mother and The Motherland, Both are even Higher than heaven(79) Nevertheless, these are just theories that are never translated into practice as towards the end, she is commanded to kill the baby in her womb. What the court forgets is that the Mother is not only the one who gives birth to the baby the Mother is also the one who conceives the baby in the womb. The court, the conveyor of justice, insults the Mother in spite of preaching. Perpetual worship of her, by denying her, her very basic

identity, the state of being a mother. They hail the concept of motherliness asserting: She weaves a magic imaginary circle with her whole existence in order to protect and preserve her little one-(79)Nevertheless, the other characters in this play transform this magic circle into a vicious circle in which Leela is entangled and has no escape. Vijay Tendulkar presented the court by converting the accusation into the verdict. The court in any civil construct or system of living has the final say and imposes the final judgment, like the typical male in the Indian society. The mock-trial ends up with an interruption by a visitor reminding them of their being late in the show. This interruption brings them back from illusion to reality. But Leela remains in the same condition engrossed in thought for she is overtaken by the reality implied in the illusion. Her reality is different from others. Parrot in the play is a powerful symbol of illusion of her own self and sparrow represents her reality. Leelas monologue at the end is more a self-justification than an attack on society and highlights the vulnerability of women in our society (p.ix). At the end Leela breaks her silence and speaks passionately about conspiracy against her. Leela represents all the women in India who are suppressed, oppressed and are marginalized. She breaks down during the mock trail because the story of the character in the play she is performing at the mock trail is identical to her own. The last speech of Ms. Leela is skillfully constructed by Tendulkar. It echoes the irony (of illusion of justice in court while the reality is the predominance of orthodoxy), sorrow and lampoon present in Indian society. Bibliography http://www.isrj.net Illusion and Reality by Christopher Caudwell http://literarism.blogspot.in DEPICTION OF PSYCHOLOGICAL VIOLENCE IN VIJAY TENDULKARS PLAY SILENCE! THE COURT IS IN SESSION by Grishma Manikrao Khobragade The Playwright as a Social Critic: A Critical Study of Vijay Tendulkars Silence! The Court is in Session by Dr. S. John Peter Joseph, Tendulkar's Silence! The Court is in Session: Social Criticism and Individual Tragedy by Varun Gulat