SAKHARAM BINDER

SAKHARAM BINDER is Tendulkar's most intensely naturalistic play. Banned in India after its 1974 premiere, The Bombay High Court, however, in a vindication of the right of free expression, struck down the ban.

Sakharam Binder, theprotagonist, thinks he has the system by the tail. That system is the de facto enslavement of women in postcolonial India, despite the promises of democracy and modernity.

Sakharam, a bookbinder, picks up other men's discarded women -- castoff wives who would otherwise be homeless, destitute or murdered with impunity -- and takes them in as domestic servants and sex partners.

He rules his home like a tin-pot tyrant, yet each woman is told that she is free to leave whenever she likes. He will even give her a sari, 50 rupees and a ticket to wherever she wants to go. ''Everything good and proper, where Sakharam Binder is concerned,'' he says. ''He's no husband to forget common decency.'' What he doesn't anticipate are the moral and emotional complications of this arrangement, which prove heartbreakingly ruinous to everyone involved.

Hindi translation is by Sarojini Verma.