The Personal is the Political in Tara a play by Mahesh
Dattani
The plays of Mahesh Dattani are like ‘fresh arrivals’ in the Indian
sphere of writing where the playwright has used realistic images of his
society to shape his writing. He focuses on the deep rooted prejudice
and social issues which are not only constraining but also may lead
towards defensiveness and escapism. The main themes that the author
focuses on are gender issues and discrimination, transgender matters,
women subjugation, homosexuality, communal violence, among others.
Dattani evokes these issues which are embedded deep inside the society
___issues which are tend to be neglected and are often not looked or
worked upon. Dattani becomes the voice of many people, he is a keen and
socially committed writer and at the same time one that subverts
traditional ways of analysing things. According to Alyque Padamsee, ‘At
last we have a playwright who gives sixty million English-speaking
Indians an Identity. Thank you, Mahesh Dattani!’(CP Back Cover) Padamsee
explains what drew him to Dattani’s work, ‘I had been looking for a
Playwright I could work with for a long time, but all of them wrote
literary plays. Mahesh was the first modern playwright writing about
issues in contemporary India in which the dialogue Sparkled’. (Pillani,
34)
The famous and applauding plays by the writer are Tara which
portrays gender discrimination in an Indian society, Seven Steps
Around the Fire , shows the unfair treatment muted out to trans genders
in India, Bravely Fought the Queens , depicts woman issues and
unfavourable treatment they face in society specially by the husbands
and in-laws; On a Muddy Night in Mumbai presents, the lives of
homosexuals and their marginalisation in our society; Do the
Needful represents sympathy for gays who are considered mentally ill or
morally wrong and also it shows the value of marriage on the Indian mind
set, where one needs to get married to satisfy the society’s needs.
Mahesh Dattani, the contemporary writer, represents the current day
issues of the society where one finds, self-trapped in the clutches of
society and is degraded to be the marginalised. The society treats
marginalised with content as if they have committed serious damages on
the human species at large. It should be noted that being a woman is
natural, being a transgender is by birth and not a choice, being a girl
child is God’s gift not a curse on the family.
Prejudices are often the cause of resentment in his plays, for example
in Final Solutions which won Dattani the Sahitya Akademi award;
there is hatred among religions because of past certain pat involving
Hindus and Muslims. A society should realize that the solution, as
Dattani rightly portrays in the play, is to accept the differences and
acknowledge the similarities. Dattani mirrors life in his plays, where
there are serious issues to be acknowledged and discussed by humanity at
large. People living in society should rise above prejudices and live
with mutual harmony.
Dattani transforms the lives of the people, and portrays it on the
stage, which depicts the cries of the marginalized. He is able to depict
the realities of the society in his plays, which have been so enclosed
in the four walls of a house sometimes hidden by self and sometimes by
society. The social visionary points out in one of his prefaces, ‘I
write for my plays to be performed and appreciated by as wide a section
of the society that my plays speak to and are about’ ( CP xii). Dattani
uses the stage as a powerful medium to express his views and educate
people by information and knowledge they lack which give way to their
growing prejudices and resentment.
The term political, ‘was used in the broad sense of the word as having
to do with ‘power relationships’ not the narrow sense of electoral
politics’ as Carol Hanisch writes in her essay, The Personal is
the Political . The expression power relationship is applied to the
relations where one is dominant and powerful than the other. The
dominant one is usually a male who as an individual or the society as a
group dominate the female, the object. A woman is bound in this circle
of power where she is an object patriarchy.
Millett’s title, Sexual Politics, announces her view of
‘patriarchy’, which she sees as pervasive and which demands ‘a
systematic overview – as a political institution’ (Waugh pg. 123).
Patriarchy subordinates the female to the male or treats the female as
inferior to male, and this power is exerted, directly or indirectly, in
civil and domestic life to constrain women.
In the play Tara this notion is important because it coincides with the
fact that patriarchy is mediated through a woman, a mother who under the
influence of the society and her father chooses the privileged leg for a
son, a male who according to a society is a privileged individual
according to his sex. According to the studies the leg suited and
belonged to the girl child as it had blood supply from the body of the
girl.
Chandan, the twin brother of Tara is provided with the leg, which after
two days of the surgery is amputated. It is later revealed that because
of the influence of Bharathi’s father’s political influence the doctors
agreed to the surgery and give the leg to the male child. Michel
Foucault, states that, ‘The human subject is placed in relations of
production and of signification, he is equally placed in power relations
who are very complex’. (778)
Mrs. Patel becomes the object through which the society works; it makes
the mother bias towards the male gender as our Indian society believes
that the son is an individual who later would be the pillar of the
family, bringing wealth and power.
In feminist terms, the ‘personal is political’ refers to the theory that
personal problems are political problems, which basically means that
many of the personal problems women experience in their lives are not
their fault, but are the result of systematic oppression.