IJELLH Volume 6, Issue 12, December 2018 1228

Souvik Bhattacharjee

Guest Lecturer

Rajganj College, University of North Bengal

Jalpaiguri, West Bengal, India.

[email protected]

Benare as a New Woman in Tendulkar’s Silence! The Court is in Session

Abstract

Translated from its Marathi original Shantata! Court Chalu Aahe, Vijay Tendulkar’s

Silence! The Court is in Session, although written in 1963, was first performed in 1967. It was

directed by Arvind Deshpande and the part of Benare was played by Sulbha Deshpande. And

ever since its performance and translation into English and other languages (the play has been

translated into 16 languages in India and abroad) the character of Leela Benare has been

rigorously studied by critics in multiple perspectives. In this paper I will try to reconstruct

Benare’s character as represented in Tendulkar’s Silence! The Court is in Session while re-

evaluating it from the perspective of the feminist ideal that emerged in the late nineteenth

century, i.e. the “New Woman”. The “new woman” is a “figural other” to both the phallocentric

demography of a traditional society and to a normative binary opposition of the

“goddess/whore” or “docile woman/rebellious woman”. She can inhibit any locus in the range

from monstrosity to nymphomania or from careerism to male-bashing. But in Silence! The

Court is in Session we do not find her as a stereotype but as a human irony between motherhood

and suicide attempt.

Keywords: Vijay Tendulkar, New Woman, Leela Benare, Feminism

IJELLH Volume 6, Issue 12, December 2018 1229

“A conspiracy of silence.”

Mary E. John and Janaki Nair,

A Question of Silence: The Sexual Economies of Modern India

“ . . . she comes in the ashes

Who loved could not be won

Or won not loved

Or some other trouble

Comes in the ashes

Like in that old light”

Croak, in Beckett’s Words and Music

“A specific and irreducible urgency which power tries at best it can to dominate.”

Michael Foucault, the History of Sexuality; An Introduction

“My private life is my own business . . . That can’t be anyone else’s business, understand?”

Benare, in Tendulkar’s Silence! The Court is in Session, Act III

The “new woman” is a “figural other” to both the phallocentric demography of a

traditional society and to a normative binary opposition of the “goddess/whore” or “docile

woman/rebellious woman”. She can inhibit any locus in the range from monstrosity to

nymphomania or from careerism to male-bashing. But in Silence! The Court is in Session we

do not find her as a stereotype but as a human irony between motherhood and suicide attempt.

In Tendulkar’s Plays, generally women are at the centre -- the action revolves around them,

and technically as well as politically they eclipse the roles played by men figuring in the plays.
IJELLH Volume 6, Issue 12, December 2018 1230

Leela Benare in Silence! The Court is in Session and Sarita in Kamala play the leading roles

against the backdrop of a male chauvinistic, hypocritical and reactionary society. Both Benare

and Sarita refuse to accept their marginalisation or victimisation. So these plays can justifiably

defined as gynocentric even though Tendulkar is not a self-acknowledged feminist – and these

women figuring in these plays can be labelled as the “new woman”, keeping in mind the

debatable power, discursive formations and cultural models of this term both within women’s

movements and misogynic practices in male-stream, conservative societies.

Leela Benare is a school teacher who is sprightly, rebellious and assertive, and an

enlightened activist, being a member of a progressive theatre group. However, the other

members of the group are people of dubious moral standards, and often regressive in their

ideology. The playwright uses a meta-theatrical inset to expose the deeply misogynic and

superstitious core of the male-dominated theatre group, who exploit the game of a rehearsal to

marginalize, criticize and victimize Benare. Benare’s negotiations with the males in this game

are sometimes that of irony and sarcasm, sometimes splendid wit, sometimes a playful first

move, sometimes a bitter silence. With these discursive strategies the “new woman” survives

the ‘androcratic’ onslaught, and sums up the “theatre-within-the-theatre” with a passionate yet

rational plea to the audience for her individual choices, especially regarding the reproductive

and professional rights of a woman.

Benare as a “new woman” is a co-ordinate of several feministic and modern lifestyles,

attitudes and assertions, not necessarily homogeneous or unitary all through the play and not

necessarily free of either moral dilemmas or incompletions – such as her flirtatious tendencies

and the ethical question of single motherhood/abortion – but also not succumbing to the

patriarchal hypocrisies or the unjust demands of a majoritarian society. We should not confuse

the sociological category “new woman” with value-judgements, and at the same time we

should not conflate the term with the stereotypes of a thematically liberated urbane feminist.
IJELLH Volume 6, Issue 12, December 2018 1231

She is a “new woman” because of her features, qualities, actions and enunciations, and like

every “new woman”, for Benare the “personal is political”. In some regards, she is a “new

woman” like Viola-Cesario is a “new woman” in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night negotiating

wittily the boundaries of gendered behaviour, female body, sexuality and agency. In some

regards she is a “new woman” like Jude or early Bathsheba. In some other regards, especially

in her interrogations of the disciplinary and punitive structures of a misogynic conglomerate of

males and patriarchally induced females like Mrs. Kashikar that passes in the name of society,

she is a “new woman” like Sara in Taming the Beast or Shaw’s Ann Whitefield, or the speaking

persona in the radical poems of Kamala Das.

If we tend to innumerate these qualities and attitudes that construct the category of a

“new woman, we would find an amazing fluid and antithetical personality, yet straddling the

opposites, should there be no external imperative or indictment coming from norms,

conventions and androcratic discourses. In other words, in spite of being radically disjointed

person, Benare is actually a person of such integrity and stability that befits the figural other to

the society of double standards. In the “fourth world”, i.e. women of the third world, where the

body, mind, material possession of a woman is made into what Maria Mies calls “the last

colony”, and at the face of a conservative tradition that underprivileges and disempowers the

individual corporeal, financial and cognitive rights of a living, flesh-and-blood woman in spite

of worshipping the goddess-like image of the docile, domestic woman, it is neither an easy

ethics of living nor a perfection of accomplishment to be a “new woman”. Benare’s apparent

fallibilities and dichotomies are actually manifestations of the hidden gaps and fissures in the

traditional male-stream society – they do not reflect her as a split personality but they reveal

the ontological, personal and sexual ambiguities between “new” and “good”, the former being

a temporal-cultural marker and the later being an unsure, confounded, relative ascription.
IJELLH Volume 6, Issue 12, December 2018 1232

In this essay, I would try to examine Benare’s status and function as a “new woman”

by looking into three contradictions in her character, and explain these as finally revelatory

to/of hr deep-seated integrity to her “new womanhood”, however problematic that might be for

the dual standards of the society:

i. The excess of corporeal sprightliness and yet an innate secularism about body marks

Benare’s sexuality, and also distinguishes her attitude to her body as truly liberated

or secular in contradistinction from what the males like Prof. Damle vulgarize in

the name of bodily intimacy or people like Kashikar stigmatize in the form of moral

panopticon. Before the arrival of the other members, Benare supposedly makes

bodily overtures to Samant, and with a light-hearted recurrence initiates physical

proximity and flirtatious verbal gestures. While on the other hand this violates the

norm of woman as “passive neuter in public life”, and also apparently demonstrates

her frivolous erotic gaiety, Samant realises the spontaneous, unorthodox core of her

being better than the rest:

“No, no, this lady behaved in a most exemplary manner. We just talked of magic

shows . . .” (Act II)

Her apparent role as a seductress or vamp is turned upside down when she confesses

that it is males like her maternal uncle and Prof. Damle who have actually played

with her. She has followed her natural female self in love, intimacy to the other’s

body – but they have exploited and victimized her hospitable jouissance by their

selfish interests. In fact Prof. Damle has proved irresponsible to his sexual union,

but against all odds, Benare has retained her responsibility as a mother:

“Now it carries within it the witness of that time – a tender little bud . . . I want my

body now for him.” (Act III)

IJELLH Volume 6, Issue 12, December 2018 1233

Benare’s long soliloquy at the end shows that she Benare’s body was a gift she

forwarded to Damle because she adored his mind – not the vulgar licentiousness.

ii. Benare does not behave like a stereotypical teacher yet she is a successful teacher.

She is quite playful, unconventional and uninhibited before the mock-trial and

sparkles her wit and vivacity with an almost innocent joviality. Her songs,

uncontrived imitation of children’s nursery rhymes, are both autobiographical and

infantile in tandem. She is, in fact, a role model as a teacher in one sense – she

identifies with children’s needs, her face is not a “mortal remain of cultured men”

but the face of a spontaneous teacher as opposed to a professional fob:

“I swallowed that poison, but didn’t even let a drop of it touch them! I taught them

beauty, I taught them purity. I cried inside, and I made them laugh. I was cracking

up with despair, and I taught them hope.” (Act III)

It is ironical that politicians like Sindhe and privileged citizens like the Kashikars

want to tame her spontaneity by robbing her job, based on private issues.

iii. Benare has “mastery” of language yet silence is a large part of her resistant

utterances or critical comments. This way seen, she function at the intersectional

zone of women’s assertion and women’s silence – an ambiguity that makes the

woman’s relationship with the language which is essentially a phallogocentric

tissue. We find Benare’s sharp-tongued interrogations of patriarchal, hypocritical

norms as well as the foolery of the doubtful moralists around her:

 “Hmm. Once there was a hmm! And he knew a girl called Erhmm!”

 “Is this a court of law, Karnik, or a spitting contest?”

 “I can visit whom I like. Damle wasn’t eating me up.”

 “If you like, I’ll give you the names and addresses of twenty five more people with

whom I am alone at times.”

IJELLH Volume 6, Issue 12, December 2018 1234

But the assertions are interspersed with silence – when the androcratic mock-trial

court wants to interrogate her as a prisoner, she retorts the questions with silence. This

is not a passive internalization of women’s normative dumbness but a dramatic ploy

used by Tendulkar to sow women’s alienation in patriarchal discourses. That is why

even after her long monologue, Kashikar cannot hear anything: “The accused has no

statements to make.” (Act III). During her monologue, Benare is quite assertive in

justifying her silence:

“Yes, I have a lot to say . . . But each time I shut my lips up.”

Arundhati Banerjee comments that this may be the dramatization of what she has to say

being swallowed by the silence imposed by the authorities. Yet to the sensitive audience

her notes ring the most sonorous, just like the Mouth’s Monologue in Beckett’s Not I

or the absent woman’s voice in Eh Joe.

In light of the above discussion, it is quite evident that beyond the dilatability of single

motherhood, premarital sexuality, ‘feminine’ flirtatiousness and female sexuality, Benare is a

strong woman, or what the “new woman” does inhabit – the liminal zone between passive

assertion and marginalized ‘outlaw-ness’ in a male dominated society. In her frivolous, playful

pursuit of men there is the agendum of maternal responsibility, that “old man” Damle shies

away from but the “new woman” does not. Besides, we can defend her feminine, libertarian,

almost seductive surface by quoting from Susan Brownmiller’s Femininity (1984):

“By incorporating the decorative and the frivolous into its definition of style, femininity [of the

new woman] functions as an effective antidote to the unrelieved seriousness, the pressure of

making one’s way in a harsh, difficult world.”

IJELLH Volume 6, Issue 12, December 2018 1235

Works Cited

Tendulkar, Vijay, Silence! The court is in session, (New Delhi: Oxford University Press,

1992).

Brownmiller, Susan, Femininity, (Linden Press/Simon & Schuster, 1984).