The Last Days of Sardar Patel and The Mime Players: Two Screen Plays

Vijay Tendulkar is renowned as one of India’s most adventurous and important playwrights. Few however know he is responsible for the screen-plays of landmark films like Aakrosh, Nishant and Ardhasatya. This book contains two of his film-scripts. The Last Days of Sardar Patel is the original film-script for Ketan Mehta’s film, Sardar. Tendulkar provides a unique perspective on the man now mistakenly regarded as a communalist who wanted India to be a Hindu state. Problems between Nehru and Patel, and between the Muslim League and the Congress, are dramatised against the frail, saddened figure of a marginalised Gandhi. Past and present slip intriguingly into each other as the script searches out the nuances of the ideals behind nationalism. The Mime Players tells a chillingly surreal tale of violence, evil and exploitation. A novelist, Chitrarth, accompanies a mime troupe and its master Ishwar to villages in remote parts of Bengal. In a rundown bungalow with only the silent chalk-faced mime players and the hard-drinking, brutal Ishwar for company, Chitrarth, increasingly baffled by the events that unfold, begins to wonder if he will ever see Calcutta again. These superb film-scripts can be read as plays or novels. In their dramatic verve and imaginative engagement with the violence of modern India they are important additions to the corpus of Indian writing in English.