KAMALA: TRANSLATED BY JAYASHREE DESHMUKH

A leading contemporary playwright, screen and television writer, literary essayist, political journalist and social commentator, Vijay Tendulkar (1928-2008) was the most influential dramatist and theatre personality in Marathi for over five decades. His plays Kamala, Silence! The Court is in Session, Sakharam Binder, The Vultures, Encounter in Umbugland and Ghashiram Kotwal expose the basic hypocrisy and double standards of middle-class society. He was consciously and unconsciously, inspired by just about everything around him: real-life experiences, hearsay, news items, films, plays and literature and in general. Kamala was inspired by a real-life incident reported in the Indian Express by a journalist who actually bought a girl from a rural flesh market and paresented her at a press conference in New Delhi. At the centre of the play is a self-seeking journalist, Jaisingh Jadhav, who treats the woman he purchased in the flesh market as an object that can buy him promotion in his job and earn him professional reputation. He never stops to think what will happen to Kamala. The problem comes closer home when the bought woman is juxtaposed with the journalist's wife, and there is hardly any difference between the two. However, Jaisingh the journalist loses his job. Though all the other equations remain more or less the same, the denouement finds Tendulkar making a rare comment through his protagonist's plight.

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