Mahesh Dattani is a distinguished contemporary Indian playwright in English who works as a writer, stage and film director, actor, and theatrical personality. His plays are on the issues that arise in Indian contexts. He writes about those who are on the margins of society, such as minorities, women, gays, and transsexuals. The purpose of my paper is to investigate the female child's trauma in Mahesh Dattani's Tara.
The predicament of Tara is akin to those of myriad unfortunate Indian females. In this conservative society, there are numerous obstacles to nurturing a girl child. On the one hand, they discover empowerment through good education, financial success, and individualism in society, yet our culture is unable to decimate long-held biases against them.
"The girl child is still an undesirable arrival into an Indian home, even when the family is ostensibly educated and even has exposure to Western ideas," argues Dr. Jyoti Sharma.
In this play, Tara is the daughter of an educated upper-middle-class family in Bangalore. The play's plot revolves around twins who are born with three legs, with blood circulation to the third leg coming from the newborn girl's torso. Only one of the twins could have two legs, while the other had to make do with one. The unwavering pronouncement to attach the third leg to the boy child's body to complete the child. This decision was not based on the medical ground but due to gender discrimination and injustice towards girl children in our Indian society.
Dattani is concerned with gender discrimination and inequality toward girl children. This is done not because the girl is incapable of surviving in the merciless hands of society, but because societal conventions, economic standards, and cultural elements are to blame for this horrific activity. All of these circumstances constitute an ideology in our society in which the girl child must live and die. In this case, a girl's potential is sacrificed on the altar of gender, in which a female's role is also unforgettable and unforgivable, resulting in this unwelcome criterion.
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.
It has been seen that boys have been given more chances to survive than girls have. Whenever the opportunity comes to choose between boys and girls, the preference will come for the boy to the girl. Society has been always giving supremacy and superiority to men over women. In Tara, Dattani beautifully depicts how patriarchal attitudes, authoritarian conduct, and social norms controlled girls. Tara has a better chance of surviving if she has two legs, but in the absence of a property heir, the patriarchal system favours a boy (Chandan) over a girl (Tara). According to Santwana Halder: "It is a society, in which an influential politician has a nefarious deal with a renounced physician who forgets all about professional ethics for more material comfort. It is society, again, in which girl children are provided with equal opportunity: the boy and the girl receive the same education, medical treatments, etc. - but the girl is never actually the heir of the family and so making any plan for her is superfluous…"
