Around eighty-three million people speak Marathi, the official language of the South-Western region of India. Silence! The Court is in Session (Shanatata! Court Chalu Aahe!) is a play written in the Marathi language by playwright Vijay Tendulkar; the idea for its plot came to him after he overheard a group of actors on a train as they were traveling to Mumbai to perform in a mock trial. The actual narrative of the play was inspired by a novel by Swiss playwright Friedrich Durrenmatt.
The play tells the story of a group of people who are planning on staging a play in a small village. When one of the actors in the cast does not turn up for rehearsal, a local man steps into the role; in order for him to understand how the court procedures that they will be using in the play actually work so he can bring authenticity to the role, they decide to stage a mock trial. Unfortunately, this unearths some secrets that some of the other cast members would rather have never revealed.
First performed in 1967, Silence was largely well-received and Tendulkar was awarded the Karmaladevi Chattopadhyah Prize for Drama in 1970. He was also given the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award for his services to playwriting that same year. The play is one of India’s most performed, with over 6000 stagings to date.
In 1971, the play was adapted for the big screen in India and is still considered one of the greatest Indian films ever made. Tendulkar was invited to write the screenplay based on his original script; it was his first time adapting his work for the movies, but it was a monumental success, and he went on to write five more films that are considered to be amongst the top one hundred Indian movies ever made.
