DRAMATIC TECHNIQUE IN VIJAY TENDULKAR’S SILENCE! THE COURT IS IN SESSION

The whole responsibility of morally upright behaviour is bulldozed on women. Men are by nature considered to be willful, wild, childish, innocent and mischievous. Their sins are no sins at all. The society has a very light parental and pampering sort of attitude when it comes to sexual offences of men. In case of women the iron rod gets hot and hotter. No punishment is actually enough for such a woman. There is no respite, no 44 shade and no soothing cushion for a sinning woman. She must be stained and abandoned. Her femininity, her needs, her very existence must be ignored or rather destroyed. She must be cornered and brutally killedboth in physical and psychological senses. This play is about the pathetic position of women in the male dominated Indian world.Silence! The court is in Session (1967), the first Tendulkar’s play to become part of the New Indian Drama phenomenon of the sixties and the first significant modern Indian play in any language to centre on woman as protagonist and victim. With its production Tendulkar became the center of a general controversy.