Mahesh Dattani is a dramatist, actor, dancer, director, and mentor. In 1998, his play Final Solutions got the Sahitya Akademi Award for Indian English drama. Although he has written several plays in English, he hails from such a background with hardly any literary aromas. Some of these plays have been considered and are now part of the curricula of Indian and international universities. He was born on August 7, 1958, in Bangalore, and attended Baldwin's High School and Bangalore's St. Joseph's College of Arts and Science. His mother tongue is Gujrati, but he received English language schooling along with his siblings, which enabled him in learning English as a second language. He holds a bachelor's degree in Arts and a master's degree in Marketing and Advertising Management. He began his work as a copywriter for an advertising agency before joining his family's business.
Dattani writes plays about scintillating issues that are relevant to today's society. He focuses on the issues that some of his predecessors have addressed in their plays, such as gender discrimination, child sexual abuse, patriarchy, and taboos that are not allowed to be acknowledged vociferously, such as homosexuality and the plight of eunuchs, and, of course, he writes vis-à-vis communalism, which is an apple of discord among various castes, classes, and colours.
In Where There's a Will and Dance Like a Man, Dattani depicts patriarchy's constitution and authoritarian attitude, gender discrimination in Tara, and the heart-wrenching topic of child sexual abuse in Thirty Days in September, as well as the contemplated status of eunuchs and their marginality in society in Seven Steps Around the Fire, homosexuality and LGBT issues in On a Muggy Night in Mumbai and Bravely Fought the Queen, and Do the Needful, respectively. Communalism in Final Solution and Some other predicaments blur the tension and the prejudice of superiority in The Tale of a Mother Feeding Her Child, in which a foreigner feeds her breast milk to almost an orphan child having forgotten the condition of her child, believing in humanity and having firm faith in God, because HE is omniscient and helps kind-hearted human beings.
The objective of this paper is to discover the girl child's ordeal in a culture dominated by male chauvinism. Tara by Dattani is a drama that addresses the issue of gender discrimination in contemporary Indian society. Woman in a patriarchal society is "the image of the woman holding the mirror to her face is the typical feminine image. In a male-dominated society, a woman is valued for her beauty and sex appeal. She is always afraid of her beauty withering with time and therefore she holds up a mirror which tells her of her youth, beauty and sexual attractiveness remain intact" (Satwana Halder,
Since the dawn of civilization, women have grappled with a myriad of subjects. They have been stereotyped as sex objects and vulnerable members of society. From dawn to dust, they have been given to do numerous domestic chores to accomplish. And they are obligated to do the assignment within the time constraint, irrespective of whether they are suffering from a headache or backache. Paula Kaplan, in her book, The Myth of Woman's Masochism, asserts, that the myth that “women enjoy their suffering” becomes “responsible for profound and far- reaching emotional and physical harm to girls”
Dattani's play Tara is a two-act stage play that was first performed by Dattani's Playpen performing Arts Group on October 23, 1990, at the Chowdiah Memorial Hall in Bangalore as Twinkle Tara. It was subsequently performed as Tara by Theatre Group, Bombay on November 9, 1991, directed by Alyque Padamsee, and received the Sahitya Kerala Akademy award for the same year.
Tara is the story of Siamese twins who were conjoined from the hip down and had three legs. They were surgically separated, and one of them may have two legs. The two legs were suited for Tara's body because Tara's body supplied the majority of the blood, but they (legs) were given to Chandan, albeit the linked leg was eventually flaked off because it could not sustain as dead flesh. The premise of the play Tara is the emotional separation that develops between two conjoned twins after their mother and grandfather manipulate their physical separation to favour the male (Chandan) over the girl
Dattani has shown the middle-class society that is supposed to itself well educated and has a respectable status in society. He is an expert in mirroring the real conditions of girls who have been living in a crucial society where they have no respect and honor. When Tara wants to know how the girls were being treated in the Patels' family, Roopa, Tara's neighbour, says, “Since you insist, I will tell you. It will not be true. But this is what I have heard. The Patels in the old days were unhappy with getting girls babies. You know dowry and things like that so they used to draw them in milk… they could say that she choked while drinking her milk
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