Page 38 - Seniorstoday December 2022 Issue

Spotlight
Ghashiram Kotwal –
an iconoclastic play about
an iron-fisted chief
Vijay Tendulkar’s Ghashiram Kotwal has stood the test of time, and that it
still hailed among the list of Indian theatre masterpieces after fifty years is
no mean achievement, writes Deepa Gahlot
The play was written half a century ago. It
is rare for a work of theatre to be a perfect
combination of style, content, historical
relevance, contemporary value, social
comment, political satire; Vijay Tendulkar’s
Ghashiram Kotwal ticked all those boxes.
Which is why it still stands the test of time,
and fifty years of being among the list of
Indian theatre masterpieces is no mean
achievement.
A play comes to life when it is staged, and
Ghashiram Kotwal, was first performed by
the Progressive Dramatic Association (PDA)
in 1972, but the 1973 production by Pune’s
Theatre Academy (a breakaway group from
the PDA), directed by Dr.Jabbar Patel, with
Mohan Agashe and Ramesh Tilekar in the
lead, remains a landmark.
By the time he wrote Ghashiram Kotwal, the
iconoclastic playwright had already broken
through the clutter of popular Marathi plays
38
https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/ Courtsey: Play Image: Umakant and Shriram Shirodkar;
(musicals, mythologies, family dramas) of
the time, with jolting plays like Gidhade
(1961) Shantata! Court Chalu Aahe (1967)
and Sakharam Binder (1972), among others,
and earned a reputation for violence, taboo-
smashing and disturbing realism. He was one
of the heralds of what came to be known as
the experimental theatre movement in India,
a brave new world of thought and form. Still,
when Ghashiram Kotwal hit the stage, the
audience—and the political establishment—
were gobsmacked.
Not written in his usual style that portrayed
brute reality with colloquial dialogue, this
historical musical-cum-political satire was
set in the 18th century, building on the real-
life character of a tyrannical police chief who
was unleashed on Pune by the hedonistic
Nana Phadnavis, an important minister in
the court of the Peshwa. Ghashiram would
probably have remained a footnote of history