Vijay Dhondopant Tendulkar (6 January 1928 – 19 May 2008) was an Indian playwright, movie and television writer, literary essayist, political journalist, and social commentator primarily in Marathi.

Many of Tendulkar's plays derived inspiration from real-life incidents or social upheavals, which provide clear light on harsh realities.

Vijay Dhondopant Tendulkar was born in a Gaud Saraswat Brahmin family[2] on 6 January 1928 in Girgaon, Mumbai, Maharashtra,[3] where his father held a clerical job and ran a small publishing business.

Shrimant jolted the conservative audience of the times with its radical storyline, wherein an unmarried young woman decides to keep her unborn child while her rich father tries to "buy" her a husband in an attempt to save his social prestige.

Tendulkar's early struggle for survival and living for some time in tenements (Chawl) in Mumbai provided him first-hand experience about the life of urban lower middle class.

In his following creations, Tendulkar explored violence in its various forms: domestic, sexual, communal, and political.

Satyadev Dubey presented it in movie form in 1971 with Tendulkar's collaboration as the screenplay writer.

[11] In his 1972 play, Sakharam Binder, Tendulkar dealt with the topic of domination of the male gender over the female.

The main character, Sakharam, is a man devoid of ethics and morality, and professes not to believe in "outdated" social codes and conventional marriage.

He regularly gives "shelter" to abandoned wives and uses them for his sexual gratification while remaining oblivious to the emotional and moral implications of his exploits.

He justifies all his acts through claims of modern, unconventional thinking, and comes up with hollow arguments meant in fact to enslave women.

The play demonstrates Tendulkar's deep study of group psychology,[13] and it brought him a Jawaharlal Nehru Fellowship (1974–75) for a project titled, "An Enquiry into the Pattern of Growing Violence in Society and Its Relevance to Contemporary Theatre".

With over 6,000 performances thus far in its original and translated versions, Ghashiram Kotwal remains one of the longest-running plays in the history of Indian theatre.

His last screenplay was for Eashwar Mime Co. (2005), an adaptation of Dibyendu Palit's story, Mukhabhinoy, and directed by theatre director, Shyamanand Jalan and with Ashish Vidyarthi and Pawan Malhotra as leads.

Tendulkar died in Pune on 19 May 2008,[19] battling the effects of the rare autoimmune disease myasthenia gravis.

His powerful expression of human angst has resulted in his simultaneously receiving wide public acclaim and high censure from the orthodox and the political bigwigs.

The real-life story of an actress whose acting career got ruined after her same-sex affair became public knowledge inspired Tendulkar to write Mitrachi Goshta.

All in all, Tendulkar's writings have contributed to a significant transformation of the modern literary landscape in Marathi and other Indian languages.

He has written screenplays for many significant art movies, such as Nishant, Akrosh, Ardh Satya and Aghaat.