The portrayal of women characters in Mahesh Dattani
Sayanti Sen
English 201
14 October 2013
A Portrayal Of Women Characters By Mahesh Dattani While thinking about writing a research paper on female characters under the context of Indian play wrighters, the mind suddenly striked with that glorious name of a writer who was the first Indian English playwright to win a Sahitya Akademi Award. It is not that the former writers are less significant but Mahesh Dattani reveals his genius through the representation of the suppressed invisible issues that are forced back to the periphery and especially about the patriarchal domination of men over women, that are often hidden under the beauty masks of many Indian women. Dattani basically deals with the ladies of the urban, so called sophisticated families who under the hegemony of this autocratic social system cannot be able to find their proper identities. Actually this topic for this paper is appropriate because as a lady everyone find herself in that same social system where nothing changes and the position of women, though better than previous ages, actually remains same. Therefore the chief interest behind this paper lies in revealing that very truth fact, the fact of the exact position of women and their actual identities in this modern social construction. To achieve this goal, the decision is to construct this paper into three main sections centered basically on three great plays of Dattani namely Tara, Bravely Fought The Queen and Where There’s A Will . In these sections the main female characters of these plays have been drawn here one by one. Finally proceed to end the paper with the essential and also with the works cited list which can give this paper a constructed form. In an interview with Lakshmi Subramaniam, Dattani had himself made a statement : “I see Tara as a play about male
English 201
14 October 2013
A Portrayal Of Women Characters By Mahesh Dattani While thinking about writing a research paper on female characters under the context of Indian play wrighters, the mind suddenly striked with that glorious name of a writer who was the first Indian English playwright to win a Sahitya Akademi Award. It is not that the former writers are less significant but Mahesh Dattani reveals his genius through the representation of the suppressed invisible issues that are forced back to the periphery and especially about the patriarchal domination of men over women, that are often hidden under the beauty masks of many Indian women. Dattani basically deals with the ladies of the urban, so called sophisticated families who under the hegemony of this autocratic social system cannot be able to find their proper identities. Actually this topic for this paper is appropriate because as a lady everyone find herself in that same social system where nothing changes and the position of women, though better than previous ages, actually remains same. Therefore the chief interest behind this paper lies in revealing that very truth fact, the fact of the exact position of women and their actual identities in this modern social construction. To achieve this goal, the decision is to construct this paper into three main sections centered basically on three great plays of Dattani namely Tara, Bravely Fought The Queen and Where There’s A Will . In these sections the main female characters of these plays have been drawn here one by one. Finally proceed to end the paper with the essential and also with the works cited list which can give this paper a constructed form. In an interview with Lakshmi Subramaniam, Dattani had himself made a statement : “I see Tara as a play about male
Cited: List A Critical Study of Mahesh Dattani’s Stage Plays. Shodhganga.inflibnet.ac.in.Web.26 Oct.2013. Dattani, Mahesh. Collected Plays. New Delhi: Penguin Publishers, 2000.Print Dhawan, R.K. The Plays Of Mahesh Dattani. New Delhi: Chaman Offset Press, 2005.Print Women as Victims in Mahesh Dattani’s Plays. Literaryindia.com. Web.28 Oct.2013. Tara- A Feministic Study .Gobookee.org. Web.30 Oct.2013.