Vijay Tendulkar never expected to have the Saraswati Samman bestowed on him for Kanyadan (1983). In his acceptance speech, he called it “a play for which I once had a slipper hurled at me.” He continued, “Perhaps it is the fate of the play to have earned both this honour and that insult.… I respect both verdicts.”

Swapna-suchana’s Bengali production in Veena Alase Hazra’s scrupulously close translation recreates the conditions that made it a sensation — one reason for the house-full audiences it has drawn since premiering in December. Kanyadan is politically quite incorrect. A respected socialist legislator is overjoyed to learn that his daughter wishes to marry a promising Dalit poet, though her casteist mother and brother oppose her determination to do so. True to their fears, after marriage the son-in-law reveals himself as a habitual drunkard who beats up his bride virtually every day, and exploits his father-in-law’s connections.

Not just Dalits but Tendulkar’s own progressive supporters protested against this seemingly prejudiced stereotyping of the oppressed community, particularly coming from the most famous Marathi dramatist. What should an author do when treating such delicate issues? Depict the downtrodden sympathetically — a right denied to them for centuries — in order to influence his large, impressionable public to change its social attitudes? Or show his characters not as representatives of caste or class but as individuals — as Tendulkar puts it, “I have written about my own experiences and about what I have seen in others around me”? There is no correct answer.

Bratya Basu directs with the respect that Tendulkar deserves. Further, he acts the Dalit man (picture, right) with the perfect mix of seething rage and uncouth behaviour conditioned by social neglect down the ages, a kind of native Jimmy Porter. Equipoised in “civilized” contrast (see picture), Meghnad Bhattacharya as the shaken senior epitomizes what Tendulkar termed “the admission of defeat and intellectual confusion”, his principles collapsing at the end into a compromise motivated by his daughter’s safety that she in turn castigates as hypocrisy. Sohini Sengupta presents her early idealism and traumatic disillusionment with verisimilitude. Swatilekha Sengupta, in an inwardly lacerated portrayal of the mother, proves why she has won the Sangeet Natak Akademi award for acting. Avoiding the high emotions in which the others culminate, Bijoy Mukherjee makes the brother the most inconspicuously natural. And Debesh Chattopadhyay’s set, dominated by folk figurine motifs, constantly reminds us of those discriminated against.