A Comparative Study of Vijay Tendulkar’s Kamala and Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House

Abstract

                                                             Vijay Tendulkar is hailed as one of the most influential dramatists in India since the last forty years. He is a prolific playwright with twenty-eight full length plays, twenty-four one–act plays, seventeen film scripts, eleven children plays and a novel in Marathi language to his credit. Many of his plays have been translated into English and other Indian languages. One of his plays Kamala published in 1981 was originally written in Marathi. It was later translated by Priya Adarkar. The play exposes the hypocritical attitude of the society towards women. It draws attention towards issues like the flesh market, the condition of typical Indian women (as portrayal through the characters of Sarita and Kamala), the unsolved discord in the marital lives of Indian couples etc. It also brings to our mind Henrik Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House which was published in 1879. The similarities in both these modern plays are beleaguered by their male characters and lucid imagery but the virtuous female characters here undergo unrelenting anguish. Both present a story of abent husbands who want a wife to behave just like puppet irrespective of whether she is literate or illiterate.