Vijay Tendulkar was one of South Asia’s finest playwrights. He also wrote screenplays. Last year he passed away.
Read the review of the one play performed during the Tendulkar Festival held in New York in 2004.
Sakharam Binder
By Gabrielle Mitchell-Marrell
Sakharam Binder has a well-developed system: By taking in women cast off by their husbands and unable to return to their families for the shame they would face, he gains a temporary housewife and bedmate. In the societal parameters of the town where this penetrating work by prominent Indian playwright Vijay Tendulkar is set, these castoffs are more like slaves than kept women, with the author suggesting that any other option would offer an even worse fate.
Binder (Bernard White) is a bookbinder who prides himself on his lack of regard for cultural dictates. He sees himself as progressive: smoking, drinking and laughing off the mockery and disgust of the villagers as they watch him lead these tainted wives to his home, a new one on the heels of each former woman’s departure.
The play opens with seventh wife, Laxmi (Anna George), following Binder to his door. He informs the dainty, suffering woman of the rules of the house, and of his requirements. It almost seems he is bluffing when he animatedly warns in his practiced orientation speech that he is hotheaded and likely to revert to violence.
“Maybe I’m a rascal, a womanizer, a pauper. Why maybe? I am all that. And I drink. But I must be respected in my own house. I’m the master here,” Binder tells Laxmi. And he ends with one final requirement: “You’ll have to be a wife to me, and anyone with a little sense will know what to make of that.”
To his credit, Binder is forthright in his self-portrait and doesn’t leave anything out, and we witness him doing unto the poor woman all that is promised and warned. But this is our antihero, and as cruel and crude as we watch him be, Binder as inhabited by the transfixing White is our master as well.