Citation
Deshmukh, B. R. (2022). Performing the Unspeakable: Gender, Identity, and Transgression in the Plays of Mahesh Dattani. International Journal for Social Studies, 8(9), 17–21. https://doi.org/10.26643/rb.v118i2.7625
Dr. Bharat Ranjeet Deshmukh
Assistant Professor, Department of English
Narayanrao Waghmare Mahavidyalaya, Akhada Balapur, Hingoli, (MS)
Abstract:
Indian drama has long served as a mirror to society’s evolving anxieties, yet few playwrights have challenged the patriarchal foundations of Indian culture as incisively as Mahesh Dattani. As the first Indian English playwright to receive the Sahitya Akademi Award (1998), Dattani occupies a unique position in the landscape of modern Indian theatre. Unlike his predecessors who focused on anti-colonial nationalism or economic injustice, Dattani turns his gaze inward to the family, the closet, and the female body. Through a careful examination of three of his major this article argues that Dattani deconstructs gender not as a biological given but as a performative construct enforced through language, space, and ritual. His plays expose how Indian patriarchy disciplines both women and men, while simultaneously offering moments of transgressive possibility.
Keywords: Culture, Gender, Identity, Patriarchy, Space.
Theoretical Framework: Gender as Performance
Dattani’s dramatic technique aligns closely with Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativitythe idea that gender is not an innate identity but a “repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame” (Butler 179). However, Dattani indigenizes this framework by situating it within specifically Indian institutions: the joint family, caste-based honor, and the postcolonial middle-class home. Critic Nandi Bhatia observes that Dattani’s “domestic spaces are never neutral; they are ideological battlegrounds where gender norms are scripted, rehearsed, and violently enforced” (Bhatia 67). The stage itself becomes a laboratory where the taken-for-granted naturalness of gender is systematically dismantled.
The Female Body as Sacrificial Ground: Tara
Perhaps Dattani’s most devastating critique of gender emerges in Tara, a two-act play based on the true story of conjoined twins. The play revolves around a brother and sister, Chandan and Tara, who were born with a shared third leg. Their surgeon father and conniving mother, Bharati, decide to “separate” them by privileging the male child. The leg is given to Chandan, while Tara receives a prosthetic. Dattani uses this medical metaphor to expose how Indian families systematically allocate resourcesnutrition, education, medical care, and emotional attentionto sons over daughters.
The play’s brilliance lies in its temporal structure. The adult Chandan (now calling himself Dan) narrates the past from self-imposed exile in London, tormented by guilt. Dattani stages the inequality not through polemic but through devastatingly casual dialogue. When Tara confronts her mother, Bharati defends her choice: “What was I supposed to do? Your brother needed that leg to stand onliterally! You have your spirit. He needed the strength” (Dattani, Collected Plays 212). Bharati’s justification reveals how patriarchy operates not through overt cruelty but through a logic of “sacrifice” that naturalizes female deprivation as virtue. Tara’s eventual death—from complications related to the prostheticbecomes a scathing indictment of a culture that valorizes the girl child only in death.
Scholar Anu Aneja reads Tara as an allegory of the nation-state’s partitioning of female bodies. She writes, “The shared leg represents the prelapsarian wholeness of the female principle, which patriarchy must sever to establish binary gender. Dattani shows that the ‘natural’ male-female difference is actually a surgical wound” (Aneja 134). The play refuses catharsis; the surviving brother cannot redeem himself, and the mother remains unrepentant. Dattani leaves the audience with the uncomfortable realization that gender violence is often enacted by women themselves as agents of patriarchal reproduction.
Masculinity in Crisis: Dance Like a Man
While Tara focuses on the female victim, Dance Like a Man examines how patriarchy also mutilates men who fail to conform to hegemonic masculinity. Set in a traditional Tamil Brahmin family, the play follows Jairaj, a man who wanted to become a Bharatanatyam dancer in the 1950s, when the art form was considered effeminate and associated with devadasis (temple courtesans). His father, Amritlal, a freedom fighter and rationalist, forbids him from dancing publicly, declaring, “My son will not prance around like a woman. We have broken the shackles of caste superstition, but we will not break the shackles of decency” (Dattani, Collected Plays 89).
Dattani complicates the gender analysis by introducing Jairaj’s wife, Ratna, who comes from a more progressive family and becomes a successful dancer herself. The play unfolds in flashbacks and present-time confrontations, revealing that Jairaj has sacrificed his art for his father’s approval, only to end up a bitter, impotent man living in his daughter’s shadow. Here, Dattani critiques not just patriarchy but its intersection with class and postcolonial nationalism. Amritlal’s rationalism, meant to oppose British colonial stereotypes of Indian “effeminacy,” becomes a new form of masculine discipline.
Performance theorist Rustom Bharucha argues that Dance Like a Man exposes “the homosocial anxiety underlying Indian middle-class respectability” (Bharucha 156). Jairaj is never explicitly homosexual, but his desire to dance is coded as feminine and thus threatening. Ratna, by contrast, succeeds precisely because she performs her femininity “correctly”she is a wife and mother first, dancer second. Dattani thus demonstrates that gender norms trap both sexes, albeit asymmetrically. The play’s tragic irony is that Jairaj internalizes his father’s contempt so completely that he becomes the enforcer of his own emasculation.
Communalism and Gendered Space: Final Solutions
In Final Solutions, Dattani shifts focus to the intersection of gender and religious communalism. The play confronts the 1992-93 Bombay riots, but rather than depicting street violence, it stages the aftermath inside a middle-class Gujarati Hindu home. The patriarch, Ramnik Gandhi, shelters two young Muslim men, Babban and Javed, during riots. The conflict unfolds through the women of the house: Ramnik’s wife Aruna, his mother Smita, and his daughter Sonal.
Sonal, the young educated woman, becomes the play’s moral fulcrum. Initially, she parrots her grandmother’s communal prejudices: “They are not like us. They breed like rats” (Dattani, Collected Plays 312). But as she interacts with Javed, she begins to question her own socialization. Dattani deliberately reverses gendered expectations: the men (Ramnik and his father-in-law Hardika) are paralyzed by their past secrets, while the women drive both violence and reconciliation. Smita, the grandmother, harbors a memory of a Muslim lover from Partition who abandoned hera trauma she converts into hatred. Dattani thus shows that communal violence is not just political but intimately gendered; women’s bodies become the repositories of collective memory and revenge.
Feminist critic Jasbir Jain observes that Final Solutions “refuses the easy binary of women as peaceful and men as violent. Instead, Dattani shows women as both victims and agents of communal ideology” (Jain 201). Aruna, the liberal mother, tries to maintain “civilized” behavior while the Muslim men are locked in her garage, revealing how domesticity is itself a structure of exclusion. The play ends without resolutionthe Muslims leave, the family remains intact, but Sonal’s final silence suggests a fragile, uncomfortable awakening.
Staging Gender: Dattani’s Theatrical Innovations
Dattani’s thematic concerns are inseparable from his formal choices. He consistently employs non-linear narratives, flashbacks, and simultaneous staging (two or more scenes happening on stage at once) to show how the past haunts the present. In Tara, the adult Chandan watches his childhood self like a ghost; in Dance Like a Man, older and younger Jairaj appear together. This Brechtian estrangement prevents audiences from identifying comfortably with characters. Moreover, Dattani uses “plays within plays” to highlight gender as performance. In Final Solutions, the grandmother Smitareen acts her youthful romance with a Muslim man, blurring the line between memory and drama. Critic Erin Mee argues that Dattani’s “metatheatrical techniques compel audiences to recognize that gender and communal identities are not natural but stagedand therefore capable of being restaged” (Mee 44).
Conclusion:
Mahesh Dattani’s contribution to Indian drama extends beyond his awards and publications. He founded the alternative theatre group “Playpen” in Bangalore in 1984, creating a space for taboo subjects that commercial theatre avoided. More importantly, he gave Indian English drama a new vocabulary for discussing gender—not as a women’s issue but as a structure that deforms all human relationships. His plays have been criticized for their urban, upper-caste, English-speaking milieu, and indeed, he rarely represents Dalit or Adivasi experiences. Yet within his chosen terrain—the Indian middle-class homehe has exposed patriarchal violence with unmatched precision.
In the final scene of Tara, the dead Tara speaks directly to her brother: “You could have refused the leg. But you didn’t. So don’t pretend you’re innocent” (Dattani, Collected Plays 256). This accusation haunts not just Chandan but every audience member who has benefited from unearned privilege. Dattani’s theatre does not offer salvation; it offers recognition. And in a culture that prefers to keep gender violence unspeakable, that recognition is a revolutionary act.
Works Cited
Aneja, Anu. “The Body as Allegory: Mahesh Dattani’s Tara and the Politics of Difference.” Modern Indian Drama: A Reader, edited by Nandi Bhatia, Pencraft International, 2010, pp. 128-42.
Bharucha, Rustom. Theatre and the World: Performance and the Politics of Culture. Routledge, 1993.
Bhatia, Nandi. “Gender and the Politics of Space in Mahesh Dattani’s Plays.” Contemporary Indian Drama in English, edited by Chitra Panikar, Sahitya Akademi, 2005, pp. 65-82.
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge, 1990.
Dattani, Mahesh. Collected Plays. Penguin Books India, 2000.
Jain, Jasbir. “Women and Communal Violence in Dattani’s Final Solutions.” The Plays of Mahesh Dattani: A Critical Response, edited by R. K. Dhawan, Prestige Books, 2008, pp. 195-210.
Mee, Erin B. “Theatrical Transgression and the Performance of Gender in Mahesh Dattani.” Asian Theatre Journal, vol. 27, no. 1, 2010, pp. 37-58. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40985006.
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