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Unit 6: Mahesh Dattani: Tara - Practice Quiz

ENG112 — Indian Writing In English 60 Questions
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1 Who wrote the play Tara?

Tara: A Play in Two Acts Easy
A. Vijay Tendulkar
B. R. K. Narayan
C. Girish Karnad
D. Mahesh Dattani

2 How many acts does Tara have?

Tara: A Play in Two Acts Easy
A. Three acts
B. Four acts
C. Two acts
D. One act

3 Who are Tara and Chandan?

Tara: A Play in Two Acts Easy
A. Teacher and student
B. Brother and sister
C. Husband and wife
D. Cousins

4 What physical condition do Tara and Chandan have at birth?

Tara: A Play in Two Acts Easy
A. They are deaf twins
B. They are blind twins
C. They are conjoined twins
D. They are adopted twins

5 What is Chandan's name after he moves to London?

Tara: A Play in Two Acts Easy
A. Dev
B. Derek
C. Dilip
D. Dan

6 Mahesh Dattani is best known as an Indian ____.

Mahesh Dattani's contribution to English literature Easy
A. Painter
B. Historian
C. Economist
D. Playwright

7 In which language did Mahesh Dattani mainly write his plays?

Mahesh Dattani's contribution to English literature Easy
A. Bengali
B. English
C. Marathi
D. Tamil

8 What kind of subjects does Dattani often explore in his plays?

Mahesh Dattani's contribution to English literature Easy
A. Only ancient mythology
B. Only travel adventures
C. Only scientific theories
D. Social and personal issues

9 What major social issue is highlighted in Tara?

Thematic analysis Easy
A. Gender discrimination
B. Space exploration
C. Industrial development
D. Environmental pollution

10 What does Tara's unequal treatment mainly reveal?

Thematic analysis Easy
A. Scientific progress
B. Religious harmony
C. Political freedom
D. Patriarchal prejudice

11 Which theme is connected with Chandan's change of name to Dan?

Thematic analysis Easy
A. Agriculture
B. War
C. Tourism
D. Identity

12 What event forms the central conflict of the play?

Plot construction Easy
A. A journey across India
B. The separation of the twins
C. A village election
D. A business competition

13 How does the play present many events from the past?

Plot construction Easy
A. Through flashbacks
B. Through songs only
C. Through courtroom speeches only
D. Through newspaper reports only

14 What is the main purpose of the flashbacks in Tara?

Plot construction Easy
A. To introduce comic characters
B. To explain scientific formulas
C. To describe foreign countries
D. To reveal hidden family events

15 Who is Tara's mother?

Characterization Easy
A. Bharati
B. Nalini
C. Maya
D. Roopa

16 Which character is Tara's twin brother?

Characterization Easy
A. Patel
B. Mr Thakkar
C. Chandan
D. Danesh

17 Why is Tara denied the better chance of surviving the operation?

Gender equality Easy
A. She refuses medical care
B. She leaves the hospital
C. She is older than Chandan
D. Her family favors the boy

18 What ethical question does the operation raise?

Moral ethics Easy
A. Is it right to value one child over another?
B. Should families travel abroad?
C. Should schools teach music?
D. Can cities build hospitals?

19 What kind of family is mainly represented in Tara?

Class structure Easy
A. A rural farming family
B. An urban middle-class family
C. A royal family
D. A nomadic tribe

20 How does class structure influence the world of Tara?

Class structure Easy
A. It makes every character equally powerful
B. It prevents the characters from living in a city
C. It removes all family conflict
D. It shapes access to doctors and social status

21 What central event in the twins' medical history shapes the later conflict in Tara?

Tara: A Play in Two Acts Medium
A. Both twins receive artificial legs
B. Tara receives the stronger leg
C. Chandan is given the stronger leg
D. The operation is cancelled by the doctor

22 Why does Chandan use the name Dan in the later part of the play?

Tara: A Play in Two Acts Medium
A. To hide his medical profession
B. To honor his father's profession
C. To reject his family history
D. To create distance from his past

23 What is the dramatic effect of presenting Chandan as both a character and a narrator?

Tara: A Play in Two Acts Medium
A. It makes the events entirely comic
B. It limits the story to Bharati's view
C. It combines personal memory with reflection
D. It removes all emotional distance

24 What is a significant feature of Dattani's contribution to Indian writing in English?

Mahesh Dattani's contribution to English literature Medium
A. He writes mainly historical romances
B. He presents urban social realities directly
C. He imitates only British dramatic conventions
D. He avoids controversial social subjects

25 Why is Dattani's use of English significant in the context of Indian drama?

Mahesh Dattani's contribution to English literature Medium
A. It restricts his plays to foreign audiences
B. It adapts English to Indian social experience
C. It separates drama from Indian society
D. It proves regional languages are inadequate

26 The unequal treatment of Tara and Chandan most clearly develops which theme?

Thematic analysis Medium
A. The effects of patriarchal preference
B. The triumph of scientific progress
C. The conflict between rural communities
D. The value of economic competition

27 How does Tara's physical disability function thematically in the play?

Thematic analysis Medium
A. It proves disability causes moral weakness
B. It removes gender from the family conflict
C. It exposes society's treatment of difference
D. It makes Tara dependent on every character

28 What does the play suggest through Bharati's guilt and attempts to care for Tara?

Thematic analysis Medium
A. Guilt can repair every injustice
B. Medical decisions are free from ethical concerns
C. Parental affection may coexist with harmful choices
D. Private love always defeats social pressure

29 How does the movement between past and present affect the structure of Tara?

Plot construction Medium
A. It eliminates suspense from the family story
B. It reveals consequences before their causes
C. It presents events in strict chronology
D. It changes the play into a historical chronicle

30 What is the dramatic purpose of delaying the full explanation of Tara's operation?

Plot construction Medium
A. To shift attention away from Tara
B. To prove Patel acted without knowledge
C. To make the medical details humorous
D. To create curiosity about the tragedy

31 Which structural feature most strongly links the personal and social dimensions of the play?

Plot construction Medium
A. The use of comic songs between scenes
B. The play's focus on one medical decision
C. The setting in several unrelated countries
D. The absence of a clearly defined conflict

32 Which description best captures Chandan's development in the play?

Characterization Medium
A. He moves from confidence to political leadership
B. He moves from poverty to material success
C. He moves from illness to complete recovery
D. He moves from privilege to guilt and alienation

33 What does Tara's response to her condition reveal about her character?

Characterization Medium
A. She accepts her parents' decisions without protest
B. She is primarily interested in social status
C. She is perceptive, questioning, and resilient
D. She is passive and unaware of injustice

34 What does Patel's role reveal about professional responsibility?

Characterization Medium
A. Professional authority can serve social prejudice
B. Expertise automatically guarantees ethical action
C. Scientific knowledge removes personal accountability
D. Doctors are powerless in family decisions

35 If the operation had been decided solely according to medical viability rather than sex, what would the play's central criticism emphasize?

Gender equality Medium
A. The superiority of private education
B. The unavoidable power of fate
C. The damage caused by gender-based judgment
D. The neutrality of family traditions

36 Which situation best reflects the gender ideology criticized in Tara?

Gender equality Medium
A. A son is favored despite weaker qualifications
B. A family shares domestic responsibilities
C. A patient makes an informed choice
D. A daughter receives equal educational support

37 Which ethical principle is most clearly violated by assigning the leg according to the child's sex?

Moral ethics Medium
A. Equal respect for persons
B. Confidentiality of medical records
C. Obedience to family customs
D. Freedom of artistic expression

38 Why is Bharati morally responsible even though Patel performs the operation?

Moral ethics Medium
A. She replaces Patel during the operation
B. She controls the hospital finances
C. She personally designs the surgical procedure
D. She participates in accepting the biased choice

39 How does the Patel family's social position influence the play's conflicts?

Class structure Medium
A. It prevents them from accessing medical care
B. It gives them comfort without removing prejudice
C. It makes them members of a rural labor group
D. It eliminates differences within the household

40 What does the family's access to advanced medical treatment suggest about class in Tara?

Class structure Medium
A. Wealth makes family relationships transparent
B. Economic privilege solves ethical problems
C. Medical technology is equally available to all
D. Class privilege can coexist with social injustice

41 What is the most significant dramatic effect of presenting Chandan as an adult writer who retrospectively reconstructs his childhood?

Tara: A Play in Two Acts Hard
A. It makes memory an unstable medium of guilt and interpretation
B. It removes the need for conflict between past and present
C. It turns the play into a linear domestic chronicle
D. It establishes Chandan as an entirely reliable narrator

42 The surgical separation of the twins most powerfully functions as a metaphor for which larger conflict?

Thematic analysis Hard
A. The conflict between science and religious faith
B. The conflict between bodily difference and social discrimination
C. The conflict between rural tradition and urban migration
D. The conflict between private affection and public reputation

43 Why is Tara's case more accurately read as a critique of patriarchal value systems than as a simple mother-versus-daughter conflict?

Gender equality Hard
A. Bharati alone invents the preference for Chandan
B. Tara rejects education because she accepts traditional gender roles
C. Patel's medical decision is unrelated to family expectations
D. The family and medical systems convert gender preference into bodily consequences

44 Which interpretation best explains Bharati's characterization after Tara's operation?

Characterization Hard
A. She becomes a comic representative of modern medical progress
B. She becomes an emotionally detached observer of Tara's decline
C. She becomes a purely heroic opponent of patriarchy
D. She becomes a figure whose guilt mixes maternal love, complicity, and psychological collapse

45 What ethical problem is created by the decision concerning the twins' third leg?

Moral ethics Hard
A. A child's future is sacrificed through discriminatory allocation of bodily opportunity
B. The parents conceal a harmless procedure from the children
C. Aesthetic preference is allowed to override informed medical judgment
D. The doctor refuses every possible surgical intervention

46 How does the play's movement between the adult present and the remembered past affect the audience's understanding of causality?

Plot construction Hard
A. It makes the final tragedy appear completely accidental
B. It confirms that Chandan has no connection with the events
C. It replaces family conflict with a purely historical narrative
D. It delays information so that earlier scenes acquire new moral significance

47 Which feature most distinctly represents Dattani's contribution to Indian writing in English through Tara?

Mahesh Dattani's contribution to English literature Hard
A. He reproduces European domestic drama without local adaptation
B. He uses English theatre to expose intimate Indian social contradictions
C. He avoids controversial questions in favor of mythological spectacle
D. He treats family life as separate from class, gender, and social power

48 What does the Patels' ability to approach a specialist and influence medical decisions reveal about class structure in the play?

Class structure Hard
A. The family belongs to a completely powerless social group
B. Medical institutions operate independently of wealth
C. Economic privilege can convert access into power over vulnerable lives
D. Class is presented only through servants' comic behavior

49 Why does the play's treatment of disability resist a purely medical interpretation?

Thematic analysis Hard
A. The disability becomes meaningful mainly through social attitudes and unequal treatment
B. Tara's body is never discussed by the other characters
C. The operation succeeds without producing any ethical consequence
D. The play presents disability as an issue affecting only doctors

50 Which contrast best captures the development of Chandan's relationship to Tara?

Characterization Hard
A. From childish dependence to adult guilt and self-imposed exile
B. From indifference to uncomplicated celebration
C. From social confidence to political leadership
D. From medical expertise to religious devotion

51 Which evidence most directly demonstrates that gender discrimination in Tara is structurally embedded rather than merely expressed in personal prejudice?

Gender equality Hard
A. Tara and Chandan share a childhood home
B. Chandan later changes his name in England
C. The medical decision privileges Chandan's future over Tara's survival
D. Bharati experiences emotional distress after the operation

52 What is the principal function of the revelation concerning the operation's altered medical arrangement?

Plot construction Hard
A. It eliminates Bharati's responsibility for the twins
B. It converts a family secret into evidence of deliberate ethical compromise
C. It supplies comic relief during the final act
D. It proves that Tara's death was caused only by natural weakness

53 Which ethical principle is most clearly violated when the children are treated differently because one is male?

Moral ethics Hard
A. The principle of national sovereignty
B. The principle of equal moral consideration
C. The principle of artistic freedom
D. The principle of linguistic uniformity

54 How does the two-act structure contribute to the play's thematic force?

Tara: A Play in Two Acts Hard
A. It allows the medical plot to conclude before the family plot begins
B. It gives equal narrative importance to every minor character
C. It separates comedy from an unrelated historical episode
D. It places remembered domestic scenes against the later consequences of concealed decisions

55 Why is Dattani's use of English significant in the dramatic representation of the Patel family?

Mahesh Dattani's contribution to English literature Hard
A. It proves that Indian drama must imitate British theatrical conventions
B. It removes all regional cultural references from the dialogue
C. It enables an urban Indian family to speak within a global literary medium while retaining local tensions
D. It restricts the play's audience to professional linguists

56 Which reading best explains the significance of the family's social position in the play?

Class structure Hard
A. Class identity disappears once the operation is completed
B. Middle-class respectability coexists with hidden violence and moral compromise
C. Privilege protects the family from every form of suffering
D. Poverty alone produces the twins' conflict

57 What is the most productive interpretation of Dr. Thakkar's role in the play?

Characterization Hard
A. He functions only as a source of medical vocabulary
B. He becomes the family's emotional caretaker after Tara's death
C. He represents a morally neutral science untouched by society
D. He embodies the danger of professional expertise being subordinated to privilege and bias

58 How does the play complicate the idea of victimhood?

Thematic analysis Hard
A. It presents every character as equally innocent of wrongdoing
B. It argues that emotional suffering has no relation to social power
C. It shows that guilt, privilege, injury, and responsibility can coexist within one family
D. It identifies only Tara as affected and excludes the rest of the family

59 Which judgment most accurately evaluates Bharati's later attempts to compensate for her earlier actions?

Moral ethics Hard
A. They completely erase the consequences of the operation
B. They prove that her earlier decision was medically justified
C. They reveal remorse but cannot restore Tara's lost life or equal moral status
D. They demonstrate that guilt is entirely socially imposed

60 Why does the play's gender critique remain relevant even though its central medical situation is unusual?

Gender equality Hard
A. The twins' condition makes cultural prejudice irrelevant
B. The extreme situation magnifies everyday assumptions about the greater value of sons
C. The unusual case prevents comparison with ordinary social practices
D. The play argues that gender bias exists only in hospitals
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