Mahesh Dattani’s Tara: A Critical Study of Gender and Social Discrimination

Abstract

Mahesh Dattani is a well known Indian English dramatist. He was born in 1958 in Bangalore, India. He is resourceful theatre artist, a drama teacher, stage director and a good dancer. He was awarded with the prestigious Sahitya Academy Award for his plays; Final Solutions and Other Plays. It is the first Indian dramatist who received this eminent award. Apart from this, he wrote many plays like Dance like a Man, Bravely Fought the Queen, Tara, Where There’s a Will, Thirty Days in September, On a Muggy Night in Mumbai, The Tale of a Mother Feeling Her Child, Complete Plays, (it holds 8 plays), Morning Raja, Collected Plays 2 Vol., Collected Plays. The themes of gender discrimination and social upheavals keep a lot of implication in his plays. He is a very strong and genuine voice of the middle class society in India. Most of the characters of his plays belong to the middle and lower class family. He deals the issues of societal construct of gender, the position of patriarchy, the dilemma and problems of homosexuals, the institution of marriage, the hypocrisy of the middle class and some other which are directly related to the middle class sensibility. There is expression of everyday events. He does not endeavour to present an unfeasible realism.Discrimination, Feminism, Patriarchy, Inequality