Tendulkar’s Kanyadaan: A Critical Representation of Caste, Class and Gender

Abstract

One can see the primary difference between man and woman on the basis of their gender. This biasness depicts the biased mentality of men and their dominating society. It is seen in Indian English Drama that Gender consciousness is one of the most burning and dominating issue that Indian dramatists aim to reflect in their plays. After six decades of post - colonial account of Indian English fiction, we get that a wide-ranging range of playwrights have emerged concentrating consciousness on a huge figure of marvelous concerns whether economic, political, spiritual, and social. These playwrights confronted three corresponding periods of human experience. As we know that there is a large number of playwrights who emerged and focused on the burning issues of India. Among those Vijay Dhondopant Tendulkar is such a playwrights who not only see the social evils but also depicted on literary canvas as it should be. Tendulkar (1928 - 2008) is a foremost and televisio’s prominent Indian playwright. He wrote for movie and television. Besides these, he is a legendary essayist, radical columnist, and social interpreter too, chiefly in Marathi language. As we have mentioned earlier that Tendulakar has experienced the problem, need and necessities of Indian society. In this way it can’t be argued that the most of Tendulkar’s plays derived motivation from real - life happenings or social disorders which helped him to provide a clear estimate of the punitive genuineness.

Introduction

I. INTRODUCTION

‘Caste and Gender’ are the two most burning issue of not only India but also of the whole world. These are such issues that have been conveying essential variations in all kinds of conceptualizations of life in customary terms. It is seen that the term ‘gender’ has been castoff so commonly in women’s framework that we take for constricted what it does not essentially mean. In fact, the meaning of gender is likely to differ reliant on the context but mentioning the word gender usually refers to gender concerns, and the idiom ‘gender concerns’ refers to gender discrimination against womenfolk. It is noticeable that the term ‘gender’ is not to be confused with another term ‘sex’ as sex denotes mainly to a structural dissimilarity between male and female made at birth. On the other hand, gender denotes to communal and social explanation that turns sexual alteration into more than only an organic dissimilarity. In a very simple way, sex has social consequences only because of gender: It is on the base of the latter, that the worlds and activities of womenfolk, as conflicting to those of men, have been humiliated. Consequently, gender arises to be connected with a set of detached features, isolating this whole world into distinct but inadequate provinces. Women, in general, are accepted from situations of control and supremacy. Such a classification established on disparity has deceptively been authorized and accepted by society and authority becomes the power of male dominance.

Kanyadaan is one of the remarkable play of Tendulkar which can be discussed with the philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir. It is undeniable that Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949) is a landmark to condemn caste and gender. One can see that this book focuses on the gender and gender issues along with caste as it has been mentioned in this book, “Marriage is the destiny traditionally offered to women in society. It is still true that most women are married, or have been, or plan to be or suffer from not being. The celibate woman is to be explained and defined with reference to marriage whether she is frustrated, rebellious, or even indifferent to that institution”. (Beauvoir 405)

The notion of caste and gender has been very beautifully depicted in Kanyadaan. It is the best work that mirrors caste and gender at a broader level. Its story involved the society of Maharashtra, an Indian state that had early on marked the cause of the Dalits. In this regard, K. C. Das, in his authentic book Indian Dalits: Voices, Visions, and Politics (2004) has correctly states that ‘Maharashtra has been the site of the most radical Dalit assertions. From the turn of the present century, Dalits here have shown signs of awakening and protest’ (Das xviii). Here it is important to say that one may get that Kanyadaan does not portray the societal surroundings of the Dalits but portrays the inefficiency of idealist Gandhian philosophies within the contemporary Indian social structure.

In the play Nath       Devalikar, is a socialist who practiced Gandhian philosophies in his family and inspired his two children with his idealism. As a party-political idealistic, he desires to produce an ardent world established on Gandhian philosophy. Nevertheless, it is seen that the play hints on the voyage of Mr. Nath from being the epitome of pride in the idealist Gandhian perspective to a state of disagreeable dissatisfaction about the social certainty. When we come to the end of the play we see that Nath’s impracticality melts as he has to disclose the reality that societal uprising in India is unbearable to accomplish through his essential perspectives.

Through this remarkable play Kanyadaan, Tendulkar have a tendency to uncover the deep- rooted       malaise of casteism and class disunion of our society. As a campaigner, Tendulkar proposes to association the bay between the upper and lower caste by encouraging inter - caste marriages. Casteism is embedded in the blood of the two castes so much so that neither of the ‘Savarna’ nor ‘Shudra’ accepts each other. Nath Devlalikar and his daughter Jyoti were influenced by the Gandhian philosophy of casteless society and in order to bring rectification in the society, Jyoti decided to marry a Dalit boy Arun. Jyoti supposed and thought that Arun will change into a better person keeping aside his vent against all the upper caste people who strokes out coldhearted conduct upon Dalits from time timeworn. Jyoti enthused by her father’s impracticality opinions the marriage with the Dalit boy as a chance to be a promoter in creating a casteless society.

In this way like numerous campaigners, Jyoti and her father were disenchanted by the philosophy of casteless society by the end of the play. Her parents recommended her to get a separation from her Dalits husband. She has been used as a tool in her father’s trial of generating a casteless society and for her Dalit husband Arun. She is the demonstrative of all the upper caste people who demoralized and labored his lineages. In this play, Tendulkar exemplifies the datum that whatever may be the situation of a female, she is liable to to ferocity and oppression. It is seen that Jyoti’s determination on penetrating to her pronouncement and philosophy to marry the Dalit boy and be with him left nonentity for her but regret for a lifetime. In this way notwithstanding being a Brahmin girl, she agonizes impenetrably in the hands of her Dalit husband, Arun. It can be seen that she befitted a prey of her own philosophy and optimal which produces such a circumstances that she cannot emission and agonizes by being a situational oppressed. In this way, we see that an analysis of the particular plays of Vijay Tendulkar divulges that the marginal awareness of Tendulkar is chastised upon casteism, class realization, gender discrimination, dissimilarity which cripple the post - liberated Indian society. Tendulkar has left no stone unturned to bring to the fore the social inequalities, discrimination based on class consciousness and casteism, and the mayhems imposed upon womenfolk by male on the one hand and gender domination on the other throughout his plays. In this way, the person who reads get a snitch peek of his subaltern prophecy in his plays and it seems to be more adjusted to the downgraded situation of womenfolk in modern Indian society. It is accurately the intention why Tendulkar’s theatrical quantity has no possibility for illustration of male subaltern at least in the plays under conversation. His shiny compassion for the abandoned and downgraded womenfolk of current society is distressingly articulated through the dilemma and sorrows of feminine charms such as Sarita and Jyoti who can be critically acclaimed from the standpoint of ‘gendered subaltern’.

One may see that the spirit of Kanyadaan is internal ferocity which signifies caste and gender evidently because the play unwraps and ends with it for the fierce desire of Arun. In his very first get - together with Jyoti’s parents, he shows his desire for internal fierceness. He clutches Jyoti’s arm and tresses it due to it she cries in anguish and efforts to blow upon the arm to decline the pain. When Jyoti returns to her parent’s family after her wedding with Arun, her father’s eye falls on the mark on her arm. When he enquires how she grown it, she tries to hide the arm. She overwhelms everyone by tight-fitting that she has left Arun. This shows the appetite for which domestic violence is done. He mentions his ‘fucking’ hands with which he blows Jyoti and proceeds a knife out of pocket to cut them off. When Seva states to him that wife - thrashing is viciousness, he confesses that he is cruel by birth and will always continue so. He saw how his father cruelly hit his mother. After Jyoti comes back with Arun, he does not restore his ways. He remains to smash her and even buzzes her so much that Seva has to admit her in a dealing home because of hemorrhage from an inside wound. Seva calls Arun a barefaced organism living on her daughter’s blood (though in his absence). When Nath says that Arun is taking vengeance for the harassment done by the upper caste people on the Dalits for centuries it is Jay Prakash who comes and puts it emblematically that people who are sufferers just the once are gratified if they dominate others when they get a casual later just as the Jews having tormented enormously at the hands of Hitler took the chance of disbursing the same coins back to the Palestinians. The play comes to conclusion with Jyoti’s determination to live with Arun for good or for bad and cuts off her relations with her parents. She picks to optimistically experience internal vehemence which Arun may tenacity to levy on her.

In this way, we come to conclusion and want to say that caste and gender are two important issues that Tendulkar beautifully depicted in his Kanyadaan. In his play Kanyadaan, it is seen that Jyoti’ssituation vicissitudes from being a female of the upper - caste to that of a wife of a Dalit. On account of caste variety and gender discernment, she overpowers a further lower rank in the people and her spouse is now positioned higher than her.

In this regards, it is very important to quote Gayatri Chakraborty Spivak who in her essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1985) correctly declares that ‘the womenfolk in the Third World nations are doubly overloaded by expansionism and patriarchy’ (Das 143). One may see that in the end, Tendulkar displays Jyoti as confessing her individualism as a Dalit woman, as equipped to toe the line to the Dalit communal through her wedding, and eager to seek social housing and self - emancipation within that public by sorting out herself from her maternal family, viewpoint, and influence. In this way the title of the research paper is also justified. In this regard, inspecting the communal implication of Kanyadaan, Samik Bandyopadhyay determines that in this play, ‘Tendulkar has focused on a problem that there is no bridge between the various sections of society and that the attempt to overcome a taboo often leads to greater pitfalls than one can handle’ (Bandyopadhyay 597).

References

[1] Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. Routledge, 1994. Pdf. [2] Chatterjee, Partha. “Caste and Subaltern Consciousness” Editor Ranajit Guha. Subaltern Studies VI: Writings on South Asian History and Society, Oxford University Press, 1989, pp.169 - 209. Pdf. [3] Das, K. C. “Indian Dalits: Voices, Visions, and Politics” (2004) Pdf. [4] De Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex. Knopf, 1972. print [5] Said, Edward. Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient. Penguin Books, 2003. Print. [6] Spivak, GayatriChakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. University of Illinois Press, 1988. Pp.271 - 313. Print [7] Tendulkar, Vijay. “Kanyadaan.” Collected Plays in Translation. Trans. Gowri Ramnarayan. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004. pp.495 - 566. Print. [8] Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. 1929. Print.

Copyright

Copyright © 2024 Dr. Santosh Kumar. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.