Mahesh Dattani, the creator of Tara, is a prolific theatre artist, dramatist, director, and a popular dancer. The plays of Mahesh Dattani emerged as a “fresh arrival” in the domain of Indian English drama in the last decade of the twentieth century. He is the only English language playwright who won the Sahitya Akademi award for his play Final Solution in 1998. Dattani used contemporary sensational issues as themes for his plays such as gender discrimination in Tara, the gay community in On a Muggy Night in Mumbai, the status of eunuchs in Seven Steps Around the Fire, and communalism in Final Solution.
The Plot of Tara
Tara circles around the grave and traditional issues of gender bias. The son and daughter delivered from the same womb are preferentially treated by no less than parents themselves in the intoxication of superstition and ancestral beliefs, and the daughter is sacrificed for the short-term benefit of the son. The play is contextual and relevant in the light of the increasing incidents of foeticide, infanticide and widening gap in the sex ratio of male and female child.
In the play, Tara is the daughter of an educated higher middle class family in Bangalore. The story is about the twins who are born with three legs and the blood supply to the third leg is from the baby girl’s body. Only one of the twins could have two legs, and the other had to survive with only one leg. It is decided to fix the third leg on to the male baby’s body so as to make the male baby complete. This decision was not on medical grounds but due to gender discrimination in society.
Ratan’s Role and the Play’s Structure
Dan (Chandan) is both the narrator and character of the drama. He lives in London to keep sufficient distance between his bruised past and present. A play within the play is witnessed as Dan is writing a script of a drama known as “Twinkle Tara.” The play takes the shape of flashback and action moves back towards Mumbai where Dan and Tara had passed their childhood lives.
The Patriarchal Society and its Impact
Dr. Thakkar is bribed by Bharati’s father to operate the Siamese Twin according to his wish. The father-in-law of Patel has played a villainous role and is responsible for the gender bias and class discrimination encountered by the family. His penchant for male-chauvinism remains unabated when he left money for only his grandson, Chandan, and nothing for Tara.
Death of Tara and Its Symbolism
The title “Tara” is symbolic of a shooting star that is a temporary guest of a small fraction of time. The inseparable twins very evocatively remind us of the celebrated pair Rahel and Estha in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things who are forcibly separated by choice.
Dattani sees Tara as a play about the gendered self, about coming to terms with the feminine side of oneself in a world that favours always what is “male.” The play depicts how Science cannot always conquer Nature as the leg attributed to the boy is rejected by the body. The word “freak” represents the state of Women, who are marginalized — not congenitally deformed but rendered so as society forces the handicap upon them. It echoes Simone de Beauvoir’s dictum: “One is not born a woman, one becomes one.”
As Virginia Woolf asserts in her A Room of One’s Own: “Imaginatively, she is of the highest importance; practically she is completely insignificant. She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from history.”
Works Cited
- Bhatia Krishna S. Indian English drama: a critical study. Sterling publisher, 1987.
- Das V.S. Avant garde Marathi playwright: Vijay Tendulkar (p. 9).
- Dhawan R.K. and Reddy V.K. Flowering of Indian English drama. New Delhi: Prestige, 2004.
- Dhawan R.K. The Plays of Mahesh Dattani. New Delhi: Prestige, 2005.
- Dattani, Mahesh. Collected Plays. New Delhi: Penguin, 2000.
- de Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex. New York: Vintage Books, 1973.
- Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1989.