Vijay Tendulkar (1928-2008) was one of the famous Indian playwrights. His famous play, Shantata! Court Chalu Aahe (Silence! The Court Is in Session) was s a Marathi play and first performed in 1968. In the course of the play, we see, “a straightforward school teacher Miss Leela Benare.” She is cross-examined in the court with full mockery. She is charged with infanticide and having illicit relations with a married person Professor Damle. Tendulkar's play was based on a 1956 short-story, Die Panne (Traps) by Swiss playwright Friedrich Dürrenmatt.
Tendulkar has strongly expressed the socio-political conditions in his play. He has represented the dilemma of a young woman who is betrayed by the male-dominated society. A traditional male-dominated society cannot surrender its paralysed traditions and customs. The society resists the change to come. It is a sour satire against the social ills and an attempt to condemn the follies that exist in our society.
In the play, “Silence! The court is in session” with three acts Tendulkar initiates a theatre group called “The Sonar Moti Tenement (Bombay) Progressive Association”. In it we get a group of teachers who were preparing to stage a play in a village. It so turned out that one of the members of the cast didn’t shown. A local stagehand was asked to change him. A practice was set and a mock trial was performed on the stage to make him understand the procedure of the court. A mock accuse of infanticide was
leveled against Miss. Benare one of the members of the show. Then the imagine play abruptly turned into a gloomy charge and it
emerged from the witness that Miss. Benare did kill an unlawful child by Prof. Damle, the missing member of the cast.
Miss. Leela Benare, the heroine character of
the play is an educated woman of about 34 years old and by profession she is school teacher. She loves life and is full of feelings.
She believes that her life is her own and nobody has got the right to obstruct with it – “My life is my own. I haven’t sold it to
anyone for a job.” Miss. Benare has spent through a very complicated stage in her life. She exposes the insincerity of some men
who pulled up her plant of life. She tells how she was deflowered by her own maternal uncle at the age of fourteen years: “Why, I
was barely fourteen! I did not know what offense was – I swear by my mother, I didn’t! I insisted on marriage. So I could live my
beautiful, lovely dreams openly. Like others! But all of them including my mother – were opposite to it.
In the course of the play, After this hurtful experience, she wanted to kill herself by any way but she didn’t. She looked for an identity of her own in an exclusively unfavorable society where men have little love for women; where men are more excited and hungry for the physical pleasures of women. Despite her previous mistake, again she falls in love with Prof. Damle, whom she worships as a Lord. But he too used her body for physical pleasure and turns his back to her. This dissertation and embarrassment is insufferable to a abandoned woman.
Benare’s mother turns a deaf ear to her while Mrs. Kashikar, one of the members of the play carried out physical violence to pull her to the dock. She has negative views against her and does not hesitate to say that this young unmarried girl gets everything without marrying. She demonstrates her doubt, how can Benare stay without marriage at the age of thirty-four?” It is interesting that Mrs. Kashikar reflects here a traditional housewife who has no concern with the progressive and contemporary attitude of a young girl in the
modern societal. According to her, her whole life is the family in which she is brought up and for which happiness she had to go
ahead a future life.
To conclude, Tendulkar in his creation ‘Silence! The court is in session’ chooses a term of the legal register as the title of his play to make an influential command on society with a weighty patriarchal bias that makes justice unfeasible. A court is supposed to be a seat of justice, significance and respectability. All through this play, He also makes an assessment of the today’s court procedures, and finds out the problem of the ruinness of the court. The judgement itself seems more ridiculous. Mr. Kashikar says to Benare : “The crime you have committed are most dreadful. There is no pardon for them … no momento of your offense should remain for next generations. Hence this court hereby sentences that you shall live. But the child in your womb shall be smashed".
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