It is a terrible thing, and a common one, to discover that a people have no memory of those who gave them their most indispensable images of themselves. We do not speak here of the State, whose memory is a ledger kept for its own convenience and whose silences are arranged according to the necessities of power. We speak of ourselves, the artists, the makers, those who pretend to care .Vijaya Mehta has left the stage, and the silence that rises to meet her departure is the silence we ourselves have prepared.
In the nineteen-sixties, in the city then called Bombay, there existed a company that called Rangayan. Its principal figures were Vijay Tendulkar, who wrote what the others could not yet say; Sriram Lagoo and Arvind Deshpande, who gave those words blood and breath; and Vijaya Mehta
What a time that must have been . What a brief, blazing assertion that the Indian theatre might yet become a place where a people could meet themselves without the comfort of lies.
Vijaya Mehta belonged to that time . A theatre Director, An Actor. A Film Director .
Farewell, Vijaya Bai. You have gone where all the masters go, beyond our capacity to thank or to betray. We bow to you and all the other masters of your time !