Author: Vijay Tendulkar
Publisher: Permanent Black
Year: 2001
Language: English
Pages: 251
ISBN/UPC (if available): 8178240181
Description
This book contains Vijay Tendulkar's two film-scripts, which can be read as plays or novels. In their dramatic verve and imaginative engagement with the violence of modern India they are important additions to the corpus of Indian writing in English.
Vijay Tendulkar is renowned as one of India's most adventurous and important playwrights. Few however know he is responsible for the screen-plays of landmark films like Aakrosh, Nishant and Ardhasatya. This book contains two of his film-scripts.
THE LAST DAYS OF SARDAR PATEL is the original film-script for Ketan Mehta's film Sardar. Tendulkar provides a unique perspective on the man now mistakenly regarded as a communalist who wanted India to be a Hindu state. Problem between Nehru and Patel, and between the Muslim League and the Congress, are dramatized against the frail, saddened figure of a marginalized Gandhi. Past and present slip intriguingly into each other as the script searches out the nuances of the ideals behind nationalism.
THE MIME PLAYERS tells a chillingly surreal tale of violence, evil and exploitation. A novelist, Chitrarth, accompanies a mime troupe and its master Ishwar to villages in remote parts of Bengal. In a rundown bungalow with only the silent chalk-faced mime players and the hard-drinking, brutal Ishwar for company, Chitrarth, increasingly baffled by the events that unfold, begins to wonder if he will ever see Calcutta against.
COMMENT:
Readers of this volume should be warned that Tendulkar never guarantees a good bedtime read, not even when dealing with 'dead' history. He never fails to make you feel that you have entered a dentist's chamber with an undiagnosed abscess in the molars.
- Ashis Nandy
Contents
Preface
Breakfast with Evil by Ashis Nandy
THE LAST DAYS OF SARDAR PATEL
Foreword by Madhu Limaye
Author's Introduction
Text of the Screen-play
THE TIME PLAYERS
Text of the Screen-play
'The Mime Players', the short story by Dibyendu Palit