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  • Silence ! The Court Is in Session

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    Vijay Tendulkar's play "Silence! The Court Is In Session" was inspired by a 1956 short story called "Die Panne" by Swiss author Friedrich Durrenmatt. Durrenmatt's story was translated to English as "Traps" and explored experiences from World War II. Tendulkar's play in Marathi was based on this story but was set in the context of post-independent India, exploring the social changes and tensions of the time. The play belongs to the genre of drama and has had both theatrical productions and a film adaptation.

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    “SILENCE ! THE COURT IS IN SESSION”

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    Vijay Tendulkar's play "Silence! The Court Is In Session" was inspired by a 1956 short story called "Die Panne" by Swiss author Friedrich Durrenmatt. Durrenmatt's story was translated to English as "Traps" and explored experiences from World War II. Tendulkar's play in Marathi was based on this story but was set in the context of post-independent India, exploring the social changes and tensions of the time. The play belongs to the genre of drama and has had both theatrical productions and a film adaptation.

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    © All Rights Reserved
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    36 views2 pages

    Silence ! The Court Is in Session

    Uploaded by

    Paranji Creation
    Vijay Tendulkar's play "Silence! The Court Is In Session" was inspired by a 1956 short story called "Die Panne" by Swiss author Friedrich Durrenmatt. Durrenmatt's story was translated to English as "Traps" and explored experiences from World War II. Tendulkar's play in Marathi was based on this story but was set in the context of post-independent India, exploring the social changes and tensions of the time. The play belongs to the genre of drama and has had both theatrical productions and a film adaptation.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Flag for inappropriate content
    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
    of 2

    "SILENCE !

    THE COURT IS IN SESSION"


    The play "Silence ! The Court Is In Session" is an English translation of
    a play written in marathi in the year 1967 by Vijay Tendulkar. The title
    of this play in Marathi is "Shantata! Court Chalu Aahe!"

    Where did the germ of an idea that inspired Tendulkar to write this play
    come from?

    The play is based on a short story by Friedrich Drrenmatt(1921-1990).


    The short story "Die Panne" written in 1956 is available in an English
    translation titled "Traps." Durrenmatt was a Swiss author and playwright
    whose work reflected the experiences of World War II. This detail allows
    us to see how powerful the impact of creative writing is. It also
    documents for us the fact that human beings are easily influenced by
    ideas and that these ideas can have their origins in any eclectic source.
    Suddenly the commonalities of language make us register the common bonds
    that link us with people around the world. Where ever a writer is
    located, the fact that he is speaking about human experiences always
    enables others to connect to the shared universality of human experience.
    See if you can locate Friedrich Durrenmatt's story. It might just be fun
    to track down this story and see how a reading enlarges your own
    understanding of Tendulkar's play.

    Tendulkar's "Silence !The Court Is In Session" belongs to the genre of


    drama. Tendulkar's play, "Sh?ntat?! Court Ch?lu Aahe" ("Silence! The
    Court Is In Session") was first staged in 1967 and is acknowledged to be
    one of his mature works. A movie was made on this play in 1971 by Satya
    Dev Dubey for which Tendulkar wrote the screenplay. It might be a good
    idea for those of you who are interested in the genre of film to look for
    a video of this production, Those of you who are interested in theatre
    could check at the National School of Drama, near Mandi House, New Delhi.
    They might have a recording of the play, which has a rich stage history,
    in their archives.

    We have now looked at two significant aspects of the play. First, we


    know that Vijay Tendulkar was inspired by a short story, written in
    German by a Swiss writer which was translated in English. We also know
    that he wrote the play in Marathi. Yet another significant dimension of
    the play is that it is located in an Indian context. The play draws upon
    an older Indian tradition of drama at the same time, it is located in the
    India of the 1950s and does to some extent document the lives, mores and
    perspectives of people in this period. Necessarily, the play therefore
    draws upon situations that would be typical of the lives of men and women
    in the newly independent Indian state, undergoing rapid changes as it
    sought to assimilate modern ideas and incorporate these while trying to
    break free of the stranglehold of older constricting patterns and
    thought processes.

    Notions Of Genre

    This brings me to yet another important aspect that you need to


    consider. The course in literature that you are studying deals with a
    large range consists of forms. These are also described as genres.
    Poetry, prose, short story, epic, fiction and drama are some of the
    popular genres in which writers have expressed themselves through the
    ages. What are the various genres you are familiar with? Is there any
    genre that appeals to you more than the others? Did you know that if we
    were to look at the history of literature in any period, we would find
    that at any given time some genres have always been more popular than the
    others? One of the good things about being readers and students of
    literature in English in the Twenty-First Century is that we are
    introduced to a very large repertoire of genres and authors

    You could explore the distinguishing features in the different genres


    that you are studying. The epic quite often uses poetic meters. So do a
    lot of plays. In fact, a later play by Tendulkar, Ghasiram Kotwal (1972)
    made dramatic history by its use of older and more popular folk
    traditions of dance and music. Even "Silence! The Court Is In Session
    introduces nursery rhymes and poems, through its characters. So you see
    while terms like poetry and prose are general indicators, a work of
    literature can quite often successfully use both poetry and prose , such
    as the Mahabharata, which often intersperses poetic and prosaic forms. A
    drama thus is shaped not only by the thinking of the playwright, it also
    draws from the long history, social and cultural of the place it is
    located in.

    Let us then look quickly at some of the aspects of drama, both in the
    context of India and the world. As you are probably aware ours is an old
    civilization with a a rich and diverse tradition of drama and spectacle
    and we have a fairly old tradition of ancient Sanskrit drama.
    Eventually Sanskrit drama was slowly replaced by drama in regional
    languages and when we move closer to recent drama in modern times, we
    find drama in regional languages being translated into English, which is
    one of the newest languages on the Indian subcontinent.

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