Column

There goes another year. And what a terrible year it was! Burnt and bruised by terrorist attacks in Mumbai, Delhi, Ahmedabad, Jaipur, Bangalore and Ajmer, left gasping by the Bihar floods that devastated more than 30 million lives, recoiling from the global recession, sickened by the shameless killing of Christians in Orissa, 2008 was a year of grieving. For people we loved, people we knew, people we admired, people we had never met.

A year of grieving for our nation, for ourselves. Many of us lost someone we knew in one of the many terror attacks. And the deaths of public figures like Baba Amte, VP Singh, Harkishen Singh Surjeet and Nirmala Deshpande eroded further our rather denuded collective principles. We mourned the passing of Edmund Hillary, Mahesh Yogi, Sam Manekshaw, BR Chopra and Paul Newman, among others. The literary world lost some of its stalwarts last year. Like Arthur C Clarke, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Vijay Tendulkar, Michael Crichton, Harold Pinter, Urdu poet Ahmed Faraz, Tamil writer Sujatha and Marathi writer Gangadhar Gadgil.

I had the privilege of knowing Tendulkar, who passed away last May, and, to a lesser extent, Pinter, who died this Christmas Eve. And found the two cult playwrights to be remarkably similar - the same passion for justice, the same anger, similar ideologies, similar tools for expressing all that. Both Tendulkar and Pinter ripped off the veil of non-violence to expose a violent, power-hungry society festering with ruthless self-interest. Their plays were marked by an impertinent exploration of the individual's role in a morally bankrupt society. They examined violence as a tool of power in political, personal, sexual and other contexts. Ashis Nandy called Tendulkar "one of the most distinguished social theorists of violence". And the Nobel committee, while awarding Pinter the Nobel Prize for literature, particularly lauded Pinter's "comedy of menace", as "a genre where the writer allows us to eavesdrop on the play of domination and submission hidden in the most mundane of conversations."

Tendulkar was not blessed by the Nobel, and Pinter may not have been either, if it was not for his vocal opposition to American foreign policy and his human rights agenda during the Kosovo war. Tendulkar's real prize was his art, which changed the very ethos of Indian theatre - not easy while writing in Marathi, which has a limited audience compared to the pan-Indian (though still limited) appeal of English or Hindi. Pinter had a similar effect on British theatre that changed British kitchen-sink drama forever to make it officially 'Pinteresque'.

Both Tendulkar and Pinter were enthusiastic stage actors. Both also wrote screenplays for films. And both transformed regular homes into menacing battlefields where ordinary lives are revealed to be extraordinarily complex. Both were extremely political, their hopes for a better world clear in their plays and essays.

In person, both had the same ramrod-straight bearing, the haughty look, the measured speech that cut to the chase but burst into animated conversation if the subject really appealed. But there was one very striking difference between the two. Tendulkar had very kind eyes, spoke softly, didn't get annoyed like his characters. Pinter had piercing eyes that changed moods as swiftly as the autumn sky, eyes that twinkled with laughter, looked deep into you or looked right through you as his mood changed. He could inspire fear exactly like his characters.

It seems uncanny that both these playwrights -- two creative 'social theorists of violence' - passed away in a year marked by extraordinary violence. Hopefully, the year of grieving -- personal, public and political -- is genuinely over.

Hopefully, we will be able to contain terrorism and recession this year. As of now, 2009 spells hope. Have a safe, peaceful and happy new year.

Antara Dev Sen is the Editor of The Little Magazine. Email: sen@littlemag.com