Unit 4: Mahesh Dattani: Final Solutions

I. Orientation: The Playwright and the Play's Coordinates

Mahesh Dattani (b. 7 August 1958, Bangalore, in a Gujarati family) is India's foremost English-language playwright-director and the first Indian dramatist writing in English to receive the Sahitya Akademi Award (1998, for Final Solutions and Other Plays). Final Solutions was premiered on 10 July 1993 at Guru Nanak Bhavan, Bangalore, directed by Alyque Padamsee — months after the demolition of the Babri Masjid (6 December 1992) and the riots that followed. Dattani's theatre is urban, middle-class and domestic: the drawing room is his laboratory for examining what respectable people conceal.

• Occasion and title: "Final Solution" deliberately echoes the Nazi Endlösung; the plural, Final Solutions, mocks the idea that communal hatred has any single or final cure.
• Milieu: an unnamed Gujarati town; a Hindu business family, the Gandhis, whose surname ironically invokes the apostle of non-violence.
• Time-scheme: two periods interleaved — 1947–48 (Daksha's diary, Partition, Gandhi's assassination) and "the present" (a riot following a chariot procession).
• Form: three acts, no interval-friendly closure; a masked Chorus that doubles as Hindu mob and Muslim mob; a split stage.
• Recurrent Dattani preoccupations: the invisible issue ("I write about invisible issues" is his working credo), the marginalised insider, the family as the transmitter of prejudice, and gender as the hidden partner of communalism.

II. Writing Style and Techniques

Dattani's method is to make the theatre space itself argue the play's thesis: that the private house and the public street are continuous.

A. Architectural Dramaturgy

• The detachable ramp: a raised, curving ramp encircles the Gandhi living room; the Chorus/mob occupies it. The audience literally sees the household surrounded by the crowd — the riot is never "outside".
• The split acting area: downstage is the present-day living room; a separate upstage space belongs to Daksha/Hardika, so past and present coexist without blackout or scene change.
• Simultaneity: Daksha reads her diary while the present-day action freezes or continues around her, so the 1948 memory and the 1993 crisis appear as one continuous event, not cause and consequence.

B. The Chorus of Masks

• Doubling: the same actors play the Hindu mob and the Muslim mob, distinguished only by turning their masks around — hatred is shown to be interchangeable, not tribe-specific.
• Function: the Chorus voices what characters cannot admit — suspicion, disgust, the fear that "they" breed faster, cook differently, are not loyal.
• Greek inheritance, Indian idiom: the Chorus chants, questions and taunts like a Greek chorus, but its rhythm draws on street slogans and processional chant.

C. Language and Dialogue

• Register-shifting English: Aruna's ritual vocabulary (prasad, puja, tulsi), Smita's collegiate Indian English, Javed's aggressive slang, Daksha's diary-English of a fifteen-year-old bride — one language, four social positions.
• Interruption and overlap: arguments are built from unfinished sentences and cut-off lines, so revelation happens by accident, never by speech-making.
• Documentary texture: dated diary entries, the Noor Jehan gramophone record, the reference to Gandhi's death, anchor the memory-plot in verifiable history.

D. Techniques of Withholding

• Deferred revelation: Bobby's real name (Babban), Smita's attachment to him, and Ramnik's family guilt are each held back until the final act, so the audience's own assumptions are exposed first.
• No villain, no verdict: Dattani refuses a moral spokesperson; even the most liberal character (Ramnik) is implicated, which is the play's structural argument.

III. Plot and Character Analysis

A. Synopsis

A chariot procession is attacked and the pujari killed; riots break out. Two Muslim youths, Javed and Bobby, fleeing the mob, are given shelter by Ramnik Gandhi. His wife Aruna resists their presence on grounds of ritual purity; his daughter Smita is agitated because she knows Bobby. Over one night, Javed's history as a paid rioter emerges, Aruna's rituals are challenged, and Ramnik finally confesses that his father and grandfather burnt down a Muslim family's shop during the 1948 riots and bought the site cheap — the shop he still runs. Hardika (the aged Daksha), listening from her room, learns that her own family, not the Muslims, were the arsonists.

B. The Gandhi Household

• Ramnik Gandhi: the tolerant liberal whose tolerance is restitution. He offers Javed a job in his shop — the very shop built on arson — so his hospitality is revealed as guilt-money, not conviction.
• Aruna: orthodoxy as anxiety. She insists the boys drink from separate glasses, guards the kitchen threshold, and measures virtue in ritual observance; yet she is also a woman with no power outside that kitchen.
• Smita: the young sceptic who exposes her mother's rituals as fear, and who carries her own secret — her feeling for Bobby, fiancé of her friend Tasneem, Javed's sister. Her honesty is not pure either; she is also protecting herself from exposure.

C. Javed and Bobby: Two Responses to Rejection

1. Javed — the radicalised: as a boy he was tricked into delivering an offensive package to a Hindu house and was reviled for it; expelled from the neighbourhood's affection and eventually from his own family's approval, he becomes a hired hand for riot-mongers, throwing stones for money. His aggression is a wound performed as strength.
2. Bobby (Babban): the assimilationist. He conceals his Muslim name behind a neutral nickname, works, loves, and moves easily among Hindus — an accommodation that costs him his name. In the climax he enters the puja room and lifts the idol of Krishna, demonstrating that the god does not recoil from a Muslim hand; the gesture shames Aruna's purity but also, he admits, uses her god for his own point.

D. Daksha / Hardika: One Woman, Two Ages

• Daksha (1948): fifteen, newly married, writing a diary; friend of Zarine, a Muslim girl; they listen to Noor Jehan records. She is beaten for entering Zarine's home and is told her father died in the riots.
• Hardika (present): the same woman, silenced within her son's house, nursing forty-odd years of inherited hatred — until Ramnik's confession dismantles the very grievance her identity rests on.

E. The Mob as Character

• Collective protagonist: the Chorus has more stage time than several named characters and drives the plot's pressure — it is what makes the door a moral question.
• Anonymity as licence: masked, unnamed, it can voice prejudices the individuals disown, dramatising how ordinary people become "the mob".

IV. Imagery and Symbolism

• The mask: reversible Hindu/Muslim faces — identity as a costume, communalism as a role available to anyone.
• The ramp: simultaneously a wall and a bridge; it encircles the home, and characters must cross it to move between private and public selves.
• Fire: the burnt shop of 1948, the burning of the present-day riot, and the sacred flame of Aruna's puja — the same element sanctifies and destroys.
• Water and the two glasses: Aruna's separate vessels for the Muslim guests make purity visible; the glass is the smallest unit of partition in the play.
• The kitchen and the puja room: thresholds of caste and community; Bobby's entry into the shrine is the play's decisive transgression.
• The idol of Krishna: held in a Muslim hand without pollution — the image argues that divinity is indifferent to the boundaries its worshippers police.
• The diary: memory objectified; a document that can be read aloud, and therefore reopened and revised.
• The chariot/rath: religion in motion through public space, the procession that turns devotion into provocation.

V. Exile and Memory

A. Exile

• Javed's expulsion: thrown out of his neighbourhood's trust and then of his family home, he is the internal exile — a citizen made foreign inside his own city.
• Bobby's onomastic exile: to belong, "Babban" must live as "Bobby"; assimilation is exile from one's own name.
• Hardika's domestic exile: widowed, aged, confined upstage, she is exiled in time as much as in space, still living in 1948.
• Aruna's exile in ritual: she withdraws into observance because it is the only sovereignty patriarchy allows her.
• Exile as minority condition: the play's Muslims are never migrants; their displacement is psychological — the "guest" status forced on a citizen.

B. Memory

• Inherited memory: Hardika's hatred is not experienced but transmitted — she was told who killed her father, and the telling was false.
• Memory as structure: the diary sequences puncture the present act by act, so the audience receives the past in the same instalments the family did.
• Falsified memory dismantled: Ramnik's confession converts a family legend of victimhood into a record of profiteering; grievance is shown to be an inheritance that can be audited.
• Memory and forgiveness: the play ends not with reconciliation but with Hardika's altered silence — the possibility that a remembered story, once corrected, might loosen its grip.

VI. Thematic Analysis

• Communalism as habit: the riot is triggered by a procession and a killing, but sustained by kitchen rules, marriage taboos and dinner-table jokes — Dattani locates the pogrom in the domestic.
• Hypocrisy of liberalism: Ramnik's generosity is compensation; tolerance untested by self-knowledge is a form of denial.
• Gender and patriarchy: Daksha is beaten for a friendship, Aruna's authority is confined to a shrine, Smita's independence is limited by a secret — women police communal boundaries because they are permitted no other jurisdiction.
• Identity and naming: Babban/Bobby, Daksha/Hardika — a changed name marks each character's negotiation with a hostile society.
• Scapegoating and the crowd: the Chorus shows prejudice as reciprocal and imitative, each side citing the other's atrocity as licence.
• The irony of the title: "final solutions" are what both mobs desire; the play's plural, provisional ending insists that the only real solution is the unfinished work of self-examination.