A FEMININE JOURNEY FROM IDEALISM TO REALISM IN VIJAY TENDULKAR’S KANYADAAN

Abstract

Vijay Tendulkar’s the most controversial work, Kanyadaan is a naturalistic play based on the obnoxious man-woman relationship in a domestic cultural world. The play which stands as a glaring example of vindication of women explores the problems of casteism and the playwright shows that it is almost an incurable malady even in a progressive modern society. He illustrates dramatically that inter-caste marriage can never be a solution for a casteless society and obliquely hints at the suffering predicament of the women in a patriarchal society. The female protagonist of the play completes her odyssey of innocence to experience through the sacrosanct institution of marriage rendering a new meaning and significance in her life. The Hindu marriage system that makes a woman ‘diasporic’ leads to loss of her identity in the marital world. She remains in a flux in the so-called social ‘production’ where hardly she is given space to vent forth her feelings and have a voice of her own. My article focuses on the fact that his female ‘other’ undergoes a host of changes, experiences different emotions and sentiments, but she never gives in, creates her individual identity and thus gives birth to a new poetics in Tendulkar’s theatre world. The underlying dictum of my critique in general is that women are not inevitably destined to be the ‘other’ in the hierarchical power structure of the society.