This critical anthology of the plays of Tendulkar examines his amazing craft and concerns. It revaluates his overlapping naturalism and humanism, his innovative use of language, structures and forms, his employment of Western techniques and Indian folk forms, his portraiture of overt and covert violence in human beings, and above all his deep and abiding consciousness of women’s vulnerability in Indian social hierarchy. Sharply focussed and illuminating, the essays in this volume assess all the major plays of this towering Indian dramatist.

V.M. Madge is Reader and Head of the Department of English, A.M. College, Hadaspar, Poona. His first publication was Academiad (1978), a mock-heroic satire on Indian academics. In 1991, as a British Council Scholar, he visited the University of Kent for a Dickens Summer School, and founded the Indian Chapter of Dickens Fellowship on his return. He has also co-edited with Dr A.P. Dani Literary Criticism and Theory: Ruminations – Essays in Honour of Dr V.N. Dhavale and Classical Literary Theory and Criticism, both Pencraft publications. Last year, his doctoral work on T.S. Eliot, The Knight and the Saint: A Study of T.S. Eliot’s Development was published. At present, he is writing out his first novel Once Upon a Time and a second volume of verse.