Kalidas agreed that Sharmishtha was very dear to Yayati. In life all of us get married, but it does not follow that we love each other ardently. I felt that the words, ‘May you be as dear to your husband’ conveyed much more. The explanation that was offered did not carry conviction. So have mercy and give me back my youth.’ When Shukra curses him with old age, in asking for his youth back, the mythological Yayati said, ‘I am not yet fulfilled in my marital life with Devayani. There, when Shakuntala leaves for her husband’s house Rishi Kanva blesses her thus: ‘May you be as dear to your husband as Sharmishtha was to Yayati.’ These words stuck in my mind but I did not agree that Sharmishtha was dearer to Yayati than Devayani. The story of Yayati did not really interest me as a tale until I read Shakuntala. If at that tender age a publisher had asked me for a novel, it would certainly have been Babar and not Yayati! I had by then read the story of Babar praying to Allah by his son’s deathbed, to bestow the remainder of his life to his son Humayun. On the contrary I was angry with Yayati for robbing his son of youth. When I read it as a child, I must have been fascinated by the mysteries in it, specially, the interesting incident of the instantaneous exchange of youth and old age! But why Yayati, married to Devayani, falls in love with Sharmishtha or even after the birth of five sons from these two, says, ‘My lust for pleasure is still unsatisfied,’ I just did not understand. T he story of Yayati had been on my mind for 45 years before I got around to writing it. ‘Artistic maturity and a high seriousness of purpose make this work a significant contribution to Marathi literature.’
He was conferred the Padma Bhushan in 1968 for his landmark contribution to Indian literature. It won him the prestigious Sahitya Akademi Award (1960) and the Jnanpith Award, India’s highest literary award, in 1974. Yayati remains his best known and perhaps his most critically acclaimed work. His works have been translated into several languages, including English, Hindi, Malayalam, Bengali and Gujarati, amongst others. In 1941 he became the President of the Marathi Sahitya Sammelan and was later nominated a Fellow of India’s National Academy of Letters, the Sahitya Akademi in 1975.
In his literary career spanning nearly half a century he published eleven novels, thirty one collections of short stories, six collections of allegorical stories and fifteen volumes of critical literary essays. Vishnu Sakharam Khandekar (1898-1976) is acknowledged as one of the all time greats of Marathi literature.
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