Vijay Tendulkar, the prolific Marathi playwright, has become a name to be reckoned with not only as far as Marathi stage is concerned but also in Indian theatre. A journalist by profession. Tendulkar has tried his hand at various genres as a creative writer. These include articles, short stories, one act plays dramas, screenplays, and dialogues, literacy criticism and translations. Though he has been successful in whatever he has tried but his forte remains drama. An excellent wielder of pen, he has won the Sangeet Natak Academy Award, the Kamla Devi Chattopadhyay Award and the Padma Bhushan.
For Tendulkar the inspiration comes from the society around him. He is keen observer of the human relationships especially in lower and middle class society. He has written twenty- eight full- length plays and in almost all of them, women play crucial roles in the plot.
Whether it is Sakharam Binder, Shantata Court Chalu Aahe, Kamla, Gidhade, Baby, Ghasiram Kotwal, Mitrachi Goshta, Kanyadon or Ek hatti Maulagi, one gets a feeling that there is an underlying current of sympathy towards the women characters created by him. in Shantata Court Chalu Aahe, although Tendulkar is looking closely at the tangled web of human relationships, yet in the end it is the heroine who comes out to be stronger than the male characters.
In Shantata Court Chalu Aahe and Sakhram Binder, Tendulkar raises several questions about love, sex, marriage and moral values prevalent in the society. It is the society which asks everyone to confirm to its own yardsticks of decorum and propriety. The writer makes ample use of irony, satire, pathos and even mock- element to highlight the hollowness of middle-class moralities. These moralities might be having slight variations but at all tmes and all ages they remain the same.The last one in this long procession of silent men and women was a thin old man. Even she carried a load of two baskets, a thin old man. Even shoulder. In one basket there were some pots. The other basket it seemed there was a quilt, extremely Although and patched, but clean still. new the load was light, it was too much for the old man.