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Notes :
1 See the report of the incident in The Times of India, Bombay, 7 February 1988, A 7. The fact that Tendulkar was invited to address the con- vention speaks to his own earlier credentials in critiquing casteism.
2 Vidyadhar Date, "'Kanyaadaan': Divorced from Reason", The Times of India, 16 February 1983. On the whole, the mainstream press found Arun an unconvincing character, and the play pessimistic.
3 Reproduced as an Afterword in KANYADAAN, translated by Gowri Ramnarayan (Delhi: Oxford
University Press), 1996. All quotations from the play are from this edition. In this speech, as elsewhere, Tendulkar claimed his unorthodox approach as an artistic right and duty: "I did not attempt to simplify matters and issues for the audience when presenting my plays, though that would have been the easier option. Some- times my plays jolted society out of its stupor and I was punished." Throughout his career, Tendulkar was self-conscious about not pan- dering to established political or artistic tastes:
I am not ready to surrender the freedom of choosing my subjects to my audience,nor am I ready to accept to the restriction of writing plays according to the audience's whims. It's not just that I want a viewer - it's only for him that I write my plays. But this viewer has to be someone who respects my freedom to choose the subject of my drama, possess a lively imagination, and savours artistic allusion, subtlety and natu- ralness instead of well-spoken inanities and showy plot-twists while watching a play.
Quoted by Aparna Dharwadker, Theatres of Independence, Drama, Theory, and Urban Performance in India since 1947 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press), 2005: 113.
4 André Béteille, "India's Destiny Is Not Caste in Stone", The Hindu, 21 February 2012.
5 Bhagwati is quoted by Gabrielle Dietrich in Anupama Rao (ed.), Gender and Caste (New Delhi: Kali for Women), 2003, p 64. See that volume and Anupama Rao, The Caste Question: Dalits and the Politics of Modern India (Berkeley: University of California Press), 2009, for de- tailed discussions of such violence, which of course is daily news.
6 Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun Times, 25 Janu- ary 1968.
7 William Shakespeare, Othello (1.3.289-90).
8 The Rashtriya Seva Dal was founded by Pandurang Sadashiv Sane, colloquially known as Sane Guruji, whose picture hangs in the Naths' drawing room, along with pictures of Yusuf Mehrally, who founded the Congress Socialist Party, and of Narendra Dev, and Ma- hatma Gandhi.
9 See Char Gupta, "Feminine, Criminal or Manly?
Imagining Dalit Masculinities in Colonial North India", The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 47:3, July-September 2010, pp 309-42; Anuradha Rao, The Caste Question: Dalits and the Politics of Modern India (Berkeley: University of California Press), 2009.
10 Consider the contrast with Shakespeare's Othello: Desdemona answers her father's pro- vocative question about whether she owes allegiance to him to who has raised her, or "the Moor" she has married. She argues that her marriage marks, "just as" her own mother's did earlier, a woman's passage from father to husband. Of course, it is no such thing, because she has been "stolen" rather than passed on.
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