Drama

Winner of the Sahitya Akademi award in 1998, Mahesh Dattani is one of the foremost Indian playwrights writing in English. Born to Gujarati parents in Bengaluru on 7^th August 1958, Dattani studied in the local Baldwin Boys’ High School, an English medium Christian missionary school where his only brush with theatre came in the form of a typical Christmas pageant in which he performed as an angel without dialogues. He then went on to study at St. Joseph’s College in Bengaluru and it was during his college years that he was introduced to Bangalore Little Theatre which significantly contributed to his subsequent immersion in theatre in its varied forms. Dattani wrote his first play in 1986 and has since continued his stellar journey in theatre and films, not just as a playwright, but also as an acclaimed actor, director, and screenplay writer. While his choice of language, his themes, and set-designs  set him apart in various ways from other contemporary or older Indian playwrights, what links him to his predecessors is a shared vision of the social responsibility of the artist and a commitment to serious theatre. His plays therefore offer piercing insights into various modes of exploitation and marginalisation, ingrained in different urban spaces, both within and outside the family and operating along both material and discursive axes. It is this consciousness that enables Dattani to explore subalternisation in urban spheres, especially along the lines of gender and sexuality.

Ranajit Guha defines subalterneity as “the general attribute of subordination in South Asian society, whether this is expressed in terms of class, caste, age, gender and office or any other way” (Guha, ‘Preface’ vii). The plurality of determinants which Guha’s definition foregrounds not only transcends mere economism but encapsulates the diverse processes through which subordination is ensured. While the question of class and the consequent problems still remain hauntingly palpable, classes themselves are fissured by conflicting forces of gender, community, and caste . and such forces are dexterously used by dominant discourses to perpetuate and consolidate processes of disempowerment that push the subalterns onto the margins. The post-independence nation-space is therefore marked by not only the exploitation of peasants and labourers or the massacre of Dalits, but also the ongoing marginalisation of religious minorities, subjugation of women across various classes, and the victimisation of sexual subalterns. However, Guha does not mention the issue of sexuality and the consequent production of ‘sexual subalterns’ (Bhaskaran 8) who are subjected to, on account of the pervasive dominance of the discourse of patriarchal heteronormativity, both social ostracisation and institutional discrimination, which are themselves conditioned by the differences of class, sex, race, nationality, region and such other determinants. What Dattani manages to do is to expand the horizons of postcolonial subalterneity itself by drawing our attention to the plural and diverse problems confronting these sexual minorities, along with subalternised women and religious minorities, who are subjected to an emotionally and at times physically traumatic crises of identity. Dattani’s plays highlight the fluid and dynamic modes through which heterogeneous individuals are subjected to varied forms of subalternisation which menacingly lurk beneath the veneer of sophisticated urban middle class families to which he himself belongs. As he notes:

I think the old cliché about writing what you know best holds good for any work or for any art (drama or literature). I think one has to be true to one’s own environment. Even if I attempted writing a play about the angst of rural Indian society, it wouldn’t ring true, it would be an outsider’s view – I could only hope to evoke sympathy, but never to really be a part of that unless I spend a lot of time there. I think there are enough issues and challenges in urban Indian society (the milieu I am a part of) and these automatically form the content of my work. (Multani 156-157)

This is evident from his very first play, Where There is a Will, (1986), which interrogates established patriarchal structures with a remarkable comic zest, and was written at a time when Dattani and his friends were staging European and American plays with their group, Playpen. It gives way to a more sombre and critical approach to power-structures and injustices undergirding families and societal networks in most of his other plays. Final Solutions (1993), for example, explores the subalternisation of Muslims in the context of Hindu fundamentalism, by focusing on the family of Ramnik Gandhi and their history. Similarly, in plays like Tara (1990), Bravely Fought the Queen (1991), and Thirty Days in September (2001), it is the relationship between siblings and other family members that forms the crux of the dramatic conflict and serves to highlight the varying modes of the subalternisation of women. While such plays use the generic features of family drama, they also end up problematising the very notion of the family in many ways. Though the dynamics of family structures have been explored by other playwrights, what distinguishes Dattani in his choice of themes is his ability to venture into uncharted territory by exploring such hitherto unexplored issues as homosexuality, transgender identities, sexual abuse of children and so on in plays like On a Muggy Night in Mumbai (1998), Seven Steps around the Fire (1999), and Do the Needful (1997). While the new millennium has seen other playwrights exploring such issues, Dattani was a pioneering figure during the 1990s in his exploration of alternate sexualities and the kind of subalternisation that sexual minorities were and still are subjected to. It is this exploration of what he once termed “invisible issues” (Multani 156), such as the subalternisation faced by homosexuals and transgender communities or the silence that shrouds the issue of sexual abuse of children even now, that endows Dattani’s plays with a unique radicalism.

Dattani is fully conscious of this radicalism and his responses to several questions regarding his choice of such subjects make us aware of his commitment to serious theatre and his sense of responsibility as an artist. As he explains to Erin B. Mee:

My own political stand came because I started doing theatre, not because I had something political to say and I used theatre as the platform – just the reverse. Since I’ve realized the potential of theatre as an agent, if not for social change, at least for reflection, I can’t be frivolous about it any more. Unless I have something strong to present, I wouldn’t write. (Multani 158)

If we apply these insights in the context of the urban middle class setting of Dattani’s plays, we realise that while most of his characters, in terms of class, do not necessarily belong to subaltern groups, the considerations of gender and sexuality often push them into subaltern positions in specific critical contexts. So while someone like Kamlesh in On a Muggy Night in Mumbai is very much a part of an upwardly mobile urban middle class, his identity as a closeted homosexual man locates him as a subaltern within the dominant heteronormative discourse exclusively on account of his sexual identity. At the same time, the same Kamlesh can act as a dominant character while using the caretaker for his sexual gratification. Similarly, while Alka and Dolly in Bravely Fought the Queen can be seen as subaltern characters who are humiliated and abused by their oppressive and indifferent husbands, they also play the role of the dominant characters in relation to the beggar woman who keeps visiting their houses and whom they are always eager to drive away. Even if the woman in question is financially independent she may still be subjected to domestic violence or sexual abuse within the space of ‘home’ and may thus be pushed into a subaltern position. It is this fluid multifaceted subalterneity within urban metropolitan spheres that Dattani so scrupulously and uncompromisingly continues to highlight. One can also cite in this context such figures as Hardika in Final Solutions or Baa in Bravely Fought the Queen. As someone who nurtures entrenched hatred of Muslims based on her experiences during the Partition, Hardika is part of the dominant discourse of majoritarian fundamentalism through which characters like Bobby and Javed are subalternised. At the same time, Hardika herself had been a victim of patriarchal subjugation after her marriage when she was incarcerated in a room for sharing a table during lunch with her Muslim friend Zarine. Likewise, while Baa herself had been physically abused by her husband, once she becomes the widowed matriarch of the family, she herself instigates violence against her daughter-in-law Dolly without any sense of the irony involved. Such duality is actually indicative of the “interpellated” nature of characters such as Baa who act as agents of the same discursive structure of patriarchy which had originally victimised them. The same pattern can also be seen in case of Bharati in Tara, who had given birth to Siamese twins – Chandan and Tara — who shared three legs between them. A surgery was scheduled to separate them and it was medically more viable to attach two legs to the daughter instead of the son. But along with her father it was Bharati who had pressured the surgeon to attach both legs to the son even though there was greater likelihood of rejection. In the process both her children ended up as cripples even though attaching the second leg to Tara could well have given her a more fulfilling life. Bharati here ends up acting as an agent of patriarchy against her own daughter and contributes to her subalternisation from her infancy. While she is able to initially use her father’s wealth and political power to generate greater agency for herself within the marriage, the failed surgery and her own subsequent guilt push her into a zone of acute vulnerability, eventually resulting in her own nervous breakdown. It is these fluid movements within the structures of power which Dattani so scrupulously maps.

Such subalternising processes generally come to the foreground in his plays through the orchestration of dramatic conflicts,, combining the typical suspense and climactic unraveling associated with detective stories. Interestingly, all such twists and turns and the corresponding crises generally take place within the domain of a typical urban middle-class family whose façade of normalcy or prosperity is progressively shattered. Such progression either occurs owing to a gradual intensification of fissures embedded in everyday reality or the convergence of unexpected circumstances. The domestic space thus goes on to become a microcosmic embodiment of the macrocosmic space of the nation-state where various forces such as patriarchy, communalism, and heteronormativity keep colliding with individual desires in manifold ways. Here again, Dattani explores what Aparna Dharwadker calls the “typology of home” as “the testing ground of…social and political relations” (269-70). In the process, Dattani helps refashion the space of the home, continuing a pattern initiated by his predecessors such as Vijay Tendulkar, Mahesh Elkunchwar, G.P. Deshpande, Satish Alekar, and Mohan Rakesh, and thereby releases the ‘unhomely’, the ‘other’ that inhabits the assiduously crafted but unacknowledged niches of our homes, society and nation. One might refer here to the misogynistic violence unleashed against Dolly by her husband Jiten after being instigated by his mother in Bravely Fought the Queen, the suicide of the minister’s son Subbu on his wedding night because of the murder of his beloved Kamla, a eunuch in Seven Steps around the Fire, or the generational trauma faced by both Mala and Shanta because of sexual abuse at the hands of a family member in Thirty Days in September. These are all examples of such irruptions of the uncanny which destabilise the facades of domestic familial bliss. It is in this sense that the formal aspects of his plays become entwined with their thematic thrust, which not only aids in his dramatic quest for a critical, hybrid Indianness, at once moored in its boundless pluralities and critical of its own limitations, but also renders possible the emergence of those subalternised characters and voices who endow his plays with their distinctive radical energy. Whether it is Dolly’s anguished imitation of her spastic daughter’s uncoordinated movements, the surreal scene where Subbu embraces the dead Kamla, dressed as a bride, on a separate level of the stage, or the scene between Kamlesh and Ed/Prakash where they express their mutual love which the world cannot see – these are illustrative of those uniquely evocative moments which Dattani distinctively creates in his plays.

This distinctiveness is also evident from the multi-level sets that Dattani often uses in his plays through which we are introduced not only to the hierarchised spaces within bourgeois homes and the subalterns located therein, but also to those peripheral spaces that lie beyond the purview of bourgeois homes, as something of a mote in the eye – a presence you seek to erase but are unable to overlook because of the discomfort it creates. Again and again, such spaces and the voices associated with them intrude into ordinary homes and upset the comforting delusions of peace and harmony we try to cling on to. One may refer here again to the beggar woman, wrapped in tarpaulin, outside the home of the Trivedis in Bravely Fought the Queen or the caretaker or the gardener who fleetingly enter the space of the bourgeois homes before retreating beyond the space of representation. In Final Solutions, Dattani also uses the space of the stage to switch between time periods and thereby implicate the traumatic past into the troubled present, as well as suggest the continuity and accretion of violence within the structures of family, home, and the nation. While Dattani remains aware of the forces of subalternisation that exist within bourgeois homes in terms of gender or sexuality or religion, he is also aware of those that lie beyond the pale of bourgeois homes or those whose voices remain outside the idiom of that discursive matrix within which he himself is located as an author. Therefore, he repeatedly reminds us of the silences and occlusions that are built into his own plays, despite their forays into hitherto unchartered territories. This self-conscious appraisal of his own limitations enables him to implant those precise elements which the careful reader or mindful spectator may use to raise other questions that may force us to re-orient our perceptions or re-configure our spaces. As Dattani states, “It’s only when you are left hanging in the air you start to question your own personality, perceptions…the theatre is a collective experience and the audience have to finish in their own heads what the playwright began” (Nair).

Recalling the earlier reference to the ‘unhomely’, it might be argued that the task of interrogating personalities and perceptions also entails an encounter with the ‘other’, the ‘double’, and considering the focus on bourgeois homes, this ‘other’ is precisely the ‘subaltern’, inside and outside the home, whom Dattani repeatedly foregrounds, either through direct portrayal or through a strategy of presence-in-absence that proves to be all the more disconcerting.

We may refer here to the character of the seventy-five-year-old former Devadasi, Chenni amma, in Dance like a Man (1989), from whom Ratna sought to learn forgotten compositions and arts of ‘abhinaya’. However, her father-in-law strenuously objects to such an association, on account of the moral stigma attached to devadasis, and neither permits Ratna to continue her training with her nor allows her to come to the familial home. Victims of earlier patriarchal structures, such as former devadasis, thus act as the silenced ‘other’ in opposition to which the good middle-class woman must shape her identity. This is not to suggest that Ratna becomes free from patriarchal constraints at the expense of Chenni amma – instead both women continue to struggle against patriarchal impositions, one to retain her individual identity both as a performer and a married woman, and the other to free herself from moral stigma and the attendant material deprivation. The homeless Chenni amma occupies that silence which constitutes the successful middle-class home of Jayaraj and Ratna and thus raises critical questions regarding the moral basis of such homes and by extension such nation-spaces. The nation-space also demands codified performances of masculinity in accordance with conventional gender roles and Jayaraj’s choice of dance as a profession not only goes against such orthodox gender roles but also heightens inter-generational conflicts within the family – a recurrent theme in Dattani’s oeuvre. As Sindhu Nagaraj remarks in a recent review in The Hindu, “The patriarchal figure, Amritlal…does not like his son, Jairaj, becoming a dancer — something he considered a female profession. Decades later, we still find ourselves asking the same questions on the stigmas that prevail in society” (Nagaraj, 17 December 2021). This parallels a similar focus on the collapse of the family and the familial home in other modern realistic plays of the post-Independence era of which Dharwadker remarks:

The disintegration of the home points to a fundamental conceptual flaw which destroys the nation…These are conscious allegories of the crisis of secular nationhood in India, which is an important referent in the postcolonial theorizing of the nation. (Dharwadker 307)

Foregrounding the cacophonous silences generated by orthodox discourses of class, creed or gender, Dattani allegorises the different ways in which the secular nationhood of India is threatened by the dominant discourses and the attendant parochialism. The death of Ratna and Jayaraj’s first-born thus becomes a telling commentary on the systematic erosion of the idealised hopes and expectations of a postcolonial nation-state.

In this context, it is also worth analysing Dattani’s choice of English as the language of dramatic communication and the politics in which such a choice is invariably implicated.  Dattani’s English plays do not suffer from those stifling artificialities that choked the early efforts of some of his predecessors such as Asif Currimbhoy or Nissim Ezekiel. Instead, he writes with a confidence and fluidity that confirms the position of English as another Indian language that is part of our lived experience in all its bristling multiplicity and unabashedly defends his right to perform Indian theatre in English in such ways that they may truly become, in his own words “metaphors for life” (Multani 171). A brief example from Tara may serve to illumine the nature and extent of this confident artistry:

Tara: This is Chandan.

Chandan: Hi.

Roopa: Hi. And you’re twins? Funny, you don’t resemble each other.

Chandan: Not all twins are peas in pods.

Roopa: (not understanding). Huh?

Chandan: Two peas in a pod. That’s something we aren’t.

Roopa: Uh, yes. Yes. Very funny.

Chandan: Is it? I didn’t think so.

Roopa: You know – two peas in a pot. Isn’t that funny?

Tara: (observes she hasn’t understood). Oh, yes of course. (Nudges Chandan) Very funny. Two peas in a (distinctly) pot. (Dattani: 1, 336-337)

Such a sequence highlights the ease with which Dattani weaves his English dialogues, without either deliberate affectation or ostentatious anxiety of Indianness. He even makes room for humour and banter based on such misuse of language that serves to highlight class-identities and the role of the English language as a marker of locational and occupational privilege (or the lack thereof) as an integral aspect of characterisation. Linguistic dexterity also becomes evident in those scenes where the otherwise bleak discussion at times becomes lightened through the use of humours, such as in the following excerpt from A Muggy Night in Mumbai:

Kamlesh: …For the first time in my life I wished I wasn’t gay.

Ranjit: Oh, come, dear fellow. At some point or another we all wish to be something we are not.

Kamlesh: Of course I don’t feel that way anymore. I realized where that feeling was coming from. The psychiatrist I was seeing.

Sharad: Oh no! Every Wednesday morning, right? And I thought you were seeing another man!

Kamlesh: I was. Only a straight homophobic psychiatrist. (Dattani 69)

This is precisely why Sudeep Sen, while reviewing a production of Dattani’s Bravely Fought the Queen in England, remarks that “Dattani writes with a pungency that is skilfully disguised, employing language that resorts to clarity and sharpness, one that pushes the limits of the spoken word and the pregnant silences in between” (Sen 1996).

It is not as if Dattani is unaware of the difficulties of such a choice. In the preface to the first volume of his collected plays, he categorically states, “I now realize that I am practising theatre in an extremely imperfect world where the politics of doing theatre in English looms large over anything else one does” (Dattani: 1, xiv). While on the one hand the remarkable commercial success of Dattani’s plays obviously testifies to their appeal across a wide cross-section of Indian audiences, on the other hand, it is also undeniable that a large section shies away from his plays because of the fact that his chosen language as English is still riddled with implications of class, privilege, and location (Rukmini S., 2019). At the same time, one also has to acknowledge that Dattani’s plays target a primarily metropolitan educated urban middle class audience whose hypocrisy and sophisticated veneer hide entrenched ideological and discursive frameworks that ensure the perpetuation of those processes of subalternisation that he so assiduously critiques. It is in acknowledgment of this particular reality that Dattani writes in his preface:

I love it when I am confronted with remarks such as ‘Your plays are preaching to the converted. You should do Final Solutions in the villages’. Such prejudice! How can anyone be so blind to their own remarks? Assumptions galore that cityfied English-speaking people are all liberal-minded and villagers are communal and bigoted. Worse is when that particular remark is followed by ‘It would make sense in Hindi or Kannada’. Meaning, ‘We are not bigots, it’s those bloody vernacs who need to think about all this.’ That too in the same breath as professing to be liberal-minded and secular! (Dattani: 1, xi)

It is by taking the exploration of subalterneity within the households of such avowedly ‘liberal-minded and secular’ people that Dattani breaks new ground and adds a distinctive dimension to his own brand of postcolonial theatre.

This exploration also leads to the generation of what Nancy Fraser calls “subaltern counterpublics” which operate as “parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses, which in turn permit them to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs” (Fraser 66-67). According to her analysis, such counterpublics not only contribute to the “widening of discursive contestation” but also as “spaces of withdrawal and regroupment” in the face of dominant, exclusionary and exploitative practices. Dattani’s plays are also remarkable for their representation of such counterpublics which we keep witnessing in several different plays. Whether it is the congregation of queer characters in Kamlesh’s flat in On a Muggy Night in Mumbai or the intervention by the eunuchs in Seven Steps around the Fire or the playful interaction between Bobby, Javed and Smita in Final Solutions – Dattani repeatedly manages to foreground counterpublics that challenge dominant prejudices based on gender, creed or sexual orientation. Particularly significant are the moments of affection and intimacy, shared by queer characters on stage: be it Ed and Kamlesh in On a Muggy Night in Mumbai or Subbu and Kamala the eunuch in Seven Steps around the Fire. Such moments defamiliarise heteronormative notions of love and intimacy and serve to emphasise those “oppositional interpretations” and “widening of discursive horizons” (Fraser 66-68). Furthermore, the staging of queer desire and intimacy as dramatic spectacle also serves to foreground some of those emancipatory potentialities and utopian energies which often constellate within counterpublics. These features not only underscore Dattani’s own identity as a stalwart postcolonial playwright but also represent post-independence urban Indian theatre.

These qualities serve to ensure the abiding popularity of Mahesh Dattani, once credited by the late Alyque Padamsee as someone who gave “sixty-million English speaking Indians an identity” (qtd. in De 2001), as a playwright, not just in India, but in countries such as the UK, the USA, Canada, Sri Lanka, and the UAE (Ali 2005; De 2001). He continues to surprise his audience and readers with his sheer versatility as he explores such utterly diverse issues as the Partition (Where did I Leave my Purdah – 2012), the anguish of terminal cancer patients (Brief Candle – 2009) or even the life of inspiring figures such as Kalpana Chawla (The Girl who Touched the Stars – 2007) and their impact on others. In all of these explorations, however, Dattani’s sensitivity towards issues related to gender, patriarchal violence, and the trauma of unspeakable secrets of the past remains constant and it is this insightful exploration of the manifold facets of the human predicament that ensures his continued relevance.

Works Cited

Ali, Firdaus. “Play it Wright, Mahesh”. July 20, 2005. Indiacurrents.com. Accessed on 17.05.2022. < https://indiacurrents.com/play-it-wright-mahesh/>

Dattani, Mahesh. Collected Plays. Vol. I & II. Penguin, 2000-2005.

______. Brief Candle: Three Plays. Penguin, 2010.

______. Me and My Plays. Penguin, 2014.

De, Aditi. “The Drama in Mahesh Dattani’s Life”. 2001. N.p Accessed on 17.05.2022. < https://www.mansworldindia.com/currentedition/from-the-magazine/drama-mahesh-dattanis-life/>

Dharwadker, Aparna. Theatres of Independence: Drama, Theory and Urban Performance in India since 1947. University of Iowa Press, 2005.

Fraser, Nancy. “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy”. Social Text. No. 25/26, (1990). 56-80.

Guha, Ranajit. “On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India”. Subaltern Studies, I. Ed. Ranajit Guha. Oxford UP, 1982, pp.1-8.

Macherey, Pierre. A Theory of Literary Production. Routledge, 2006.

Multani, Angelie, ed. Mahesh Dattani’s Plays: Critical Perspectives. Pencraft International, 2011.

Nagaraj, Sindhu. “Dance Like a Man keeps time to inherent family tunes”. The Hindu. 17 December, 2021. Accessed on 17 May 2022.  <https://www.thehindu.com/entertainment/theatre/dance-like-a-man-keeps-time-to-inherent-family-tunes/article37978517.ece>

Nair, Anita. “Mahesh Dattani – The Invisible Observer”. N.p. N.d. 10 August 2011. <http://www.anitanair.net/profiles/profile-mahesh-dattani.htm>.

S, Rukmini. “In India, who speaks in English, and where?” Mint. 14 May 2019. Accessed on 6 July 2022. < https://www.livemint.com/news/india/in-india-who-speaks-in-english-and-where-1557814101428.html>

Sen, Sudeep. “BRAVELY FOUGHT THE QUEEN – reviewed by Sudeep Sen”. June 1996. N.p. Accessed on 17 May  2022. < https://www.bordercrossings.org.uk/bravely-fought-queen-reviewed-sudeep-sen>