A Feminist Reading Of Mahesh Dattani’s Selected Plays

Abstract

Mahesh Dattani is a very renowned playwright in the galaxy of Indian English playwrights who has achieved remarkable success in Indian drama. He has bedecked his plays with the burning issues of the society. Present paper is also a piquant attempt to analyze Dattani’s two plays Tara and Thirty Days in September from the feminist angle. Both the plays have touching and poignant themes related to women. In the first play, Tara is victim of gender discrimination since her birth. She wants to twinkle like a star in her life but she finds nothing except darkness and gloominess in her life and becomes a victim of gender discrimination. Another play Thirty Days in September also tells the anguish of a girl named Mala Khatri who is molested by her own maternal uncle, Vinay and to the great dismay, Mala’s mother, Shanta knows everything about the physical and mental torture of her daughter but she remains silent. Mala’s mother also has been the victim of rape by her same brother in her childhood but she remains silent but Mala emerges as a valiant girl and she breaks the age-old rotten systems of the society and teaches his maternal uncle a lesson to molest him. Thus, through this paper, gender discrimination and physical abuse of a girl have been the core themes of these plays and this paper has been structured to cover these twin themes.