Unit 6: Mahesh Dattani: Tara

ENG112 — Indian Writing In English 9 min read

I. Orientation

Mahesh Dattani (born 1958) is a major contemporary Indian dramatist who writes in English about silenced social realities, especially gender discrimination, family conflict, sexuality, class, and cultural hypocrisy. Tara was first performed in 1990 and published in 1991. The play uses the intimate setting of an urban Indian family to expose how patriarchal values influence medical decisions, parental love, identity, and memory.

Dramatic setting: The action moves between the family’s past and Chandan’s later life in London.
Central principle: Private family decisions can reproduce wider social inequalities.
Form: The play combines realistic domestic drama with memory, retrospective narration, and theatrical self-consciousness.
Social context: The Patel family belongs to an educated, economically comfortable urban middle class.
Gendered convention: Male privilege operates not only through men but also through women who accept or enforce patriarchal expectations.
Ethical convention: The play asks whether biological knowledge, parental authority, and social respectability can justify injustice.
Symbolic focus: Tara’s body becomes the site on which family ambition, gender prejudice, class power, and guilt are inscribed.

II. Tara: A Play in Two Acts

A. Synopsis

The play presents the tragic history of Tara and Chandan, conjoined twins whose shared third leg is surgically separated. The narrative gradually reveals that the operation was manipulated to benefit the boy, although the leg had a better chance of surviving if given to Tara.

Family conflict: Bharati and Mr Patel are the twins’ parents; Bharati’s attachment to Tara is intense, while the family’s earlier decision privileges Chandan.
Medical decision: Dr Thakkar performs the operation after the family’s influence and money affect the treatment.
Immediate result: Chandan receives the leg, but it fails to function successfully; Tara is left physically disabled.
Psychological consequence: Tara recognizes that she has been sacrificed because she is female, even though the adults attempt to conceal the truth.
Later frame: Adult Chandan, now living in London and using the name Dan, reconstructs the past through writing.
Tragic ending: Tara’s physical decline and Bharati’s mental collapse reveal the lasting consequences of the original injustice.

B. Thematic analysis

The play’s central theme is the relationship between gender discrimination and the destruction of family trust. Dattani connects personal tragedy with social systems rather than treating Tara’s suffering as an isolated accident.

Gender prejudice: The decision to give the leg to Chandan expresses the belief that a boy’s future is more valuable than a girl’s.
Body and identity: Tara’s body records the family’s moral choice; her disability is not merely medical but socially produced.
Guilt and memory: Chandan’s adult narration shows that surviving physically does not mean escaping responsibility or emotional damage.
Motherhood: Bharati’s love for Tara is genuine, but her earlier participation in the discriminatory decision makes her affection morally complicated.
Silence: The family’s attempt to suppress the truth intensifies its power; what is hidden returns through illness, confession, and memory.
Modernity versus tradition: The family is educated and medically sophisticated, yet it remains governed by the traditional preference for sons.

C. Plot construction

The plot is constructed through delayed revelation, shifting time, and a frame narrative rather than through a simple chronological sequence. This structure makes the audience discover the injustice gradually.

Two-act design: Act I establishes the twins, their family environment, and the operation; Act II develops the consequences and exposes the deeper truth.
Retrospective method: Adult Chandan looks back on childhood, so the past is presented as remembered and interpreted rather than neutrally reported.
Dramatic suspense: The audience learns the consequences of the surgery before receiving the complete explanation of why Tara was denied the leg.
Revelation: Mr Patel’s disclosure confirms that the operation was deliberately influenced by the family’s preference for the boy.
Parallel timelines: Childhood scenes are placed beside Chandan’s later life, linking the physical past with continuing psychological suffering.
Circular effect: The play begins with an attempt to narrate the past and ends with the recognition that the past remains unresolved.

D. Characterization

Dattani develops characters through dialogue, concealed motives, family relationships, and the contrast between public behaviour and private guilt.

Tara: Intelligent, lively, and emotionally perceptive, Tara refuses to be reduced to her disability. Her questions reveal that she understands the injustice surrounding her.
Chandan/Dan: Chandan benefits physically from the operation but remains psychologically burdened. His move to London and adoption of the name “Dan” suggest an attempt to reinvent himself.
Bharati: She is loving, possessive, guilty, and emotionally unstable. Her treatment of Tara combines affection with overprotection and compensation.
Mr Patel: Practical and controlled, he represents patriarchal authority and the family’s effort to manage scandal through silence.
Dr Thakkar: He represents professional power corrupted by social influence and financial pressure.
Roopa: As Tara’s friend, Roopa provides an outside perspective. Her ordinary curiosity exposes the unusual secrecy within the Patel household.
Character contrast: Tara confronts reality more directly than the adults, while the adults use explanations, silence, or emotional manipulation to avoid moral responsibility.

E. Gender equality

The play presents gender equality as a question of equal value, opportunity, bodily autonomy, and recognition. Tara’s tragedy demonstrates the consequences of denying these principles at the earliest stage of life.

Unequal valuation: Chandan is preferred because he is male, although both children possess equal human worth and emotional importance.
Medical discrimination: The surgical decision transforms patriarchal preference into a physical outcome: Tara loses the chance to receive the limb.
Female complicity: Bharati and her mother participate in a system that disadvantages Tara, showing that patriarchy can be maintained by women as well as men.
Social expectation: Chandan is imagined as the child who will carry the family’s future, while Tara is treated as less socially useful.
Tara’s resistance: Her sharp observations and emotional independence challenge the assumption that a disabled girl must be passive or grateful.
Broader implication: Equality requires institutional fairness in medicine, family decision-making, inheritance, education, and emotional recognition—not merely formal statements that boys and girls are equal.

F. Moral ethics

The play’s ethical conflict concerns responsibility: who is accountable when private desire, medical authority, and social custom combine to produce harm?

Parental responsibility: Parents have a duty to protect both children equally; Bharati and Mr Patel violate this duty by allowing gender preference to influence treatment.
Medical ethics: Dr Thakkar should have followed medical evidence and the patients’ welfare, not social pressure or money.
Consent and power: The infants cannot consent, so the adults act as custodians; this makes their betrayal especially serious.
Truth versus protection: The family claims that concealment protects the children, but secrecy prevents Tara and Chandan from understanding their own history.
Consequences: Tara suffers physical and emotional consequences, while Chandan inherits guilt and alienation.
Moral ambiguity: Bharati is neither simply villainous nor innocent. Her love, remorse, and breakdown do not erase the original injustice, but they show how wrongdoing can coexist with genuine attachment.
Ethical question: The play asks whether an outcome that appears medically or socially practical can ever be justified when it depends on treating one human life as less valuable.

G. Class structure

Tara examines class through an affluent urban family whose education, money, and access to specialists do not free it from inherited prejudice. Class privilege helps conceal injustice rather than eliminate it.

Urban middle-class setting: The Patel family has a comfortable home, professional connections, and access to advanced medical treatment.
Economic power: The family’s influence over Dr Thakkar suggests that wealth can shape medical decisions and produce unequal outcomes.
Respectability: The Patels are concerned with reputation, social appearance, and control over family information.
Professional hierarchy: Doctors possess specialized authority, while household members and less powerful figures have limited ability to challenge decisions.
Domestic hierarchy: The family home contains unequal positions based on age, gender, education, and authority.
Class contradiction: The family appears modern because it is educated and economically secure, yet its treatment of Tara reveals deeply traditional values.
Structural point: Dattani does not present class as separate from gender; class privilege gives the family resources, but patriarchal ideology determines how those resources are distributed.

III. Mahesh Dattani’s Contribution to English Literature

A. Mahesh Dattani's contribution to English literature

Dattani expands Indian English drama by making the stage a space for difficult social conversations. His plays bring marginalized experiences into mainstream literary and theatrical discourse without abandoning the rhythms of Indian urban life.

Indian English theatre: He demonstrates that English can represent Indian domestic speech, social tensions, humour, and cultural codes.
Marginalized subjects: Works such as Tara, Final Solutions, and On a Muggy Night in Mumbai address gender, communal conflict, sexuality, disability, and social exclusion.
Theatre as criticism: His drama does not merely entertain; it exposes the assumptions governing family, religion, medicine, and respectability.
Psychological realism: Characters are presented with contradictions rather than as simple moral types. Bharati, for example, is both affectionate and responsible for harm.
Innovative structure: Dattani uses memory, direct address, multiple locations, and non-linear narration to make audiences examine how stories are formed.
Language and performance: His dialogue is conversational and stage-oriented, allowing silence, gesture, movement, and spatial arrangement to carry meaning.
Cultural significance: In 1998, Dattani received the Sahitya Akademi Award for English for Final Solutions and Other Plays, confirming his importance in Indian English literature.
Contribution of Tara: The play makes female foeticide-like son preference, disability, medical ethics, and family guilt visible through one concentrated domestic tragedy.

IV. Critical Perspective

A. Analytical significance

The play is most effective when its personal tragedy is read as a social and ethical structure rather than only as the story of one unusual family.

Individual and society: Tara’s suffering begins in the family but reflects a wider culture that values sons as heirs, protectors, and bearers of lineage.
Visible and invisible disability: Tara’s physical condition is visible, but Chandan’s guilt, Bharati’s mental collapse, and the family’s moral damage are less visible forms of suffering.
Power of drama: A live audience witnesses the family’s silences and confrontations, making spectators ethically involved in the process of judgment.
Enduring relevance: The play remains significant because unequal treatment can still appear in healthcare, inheritance, education, technology, and family expectations.
Central interpretation: Tara shows that discrimination does not require open hatred; it can operate through a seemingly loving decision made within a respectable household.