Abstract
In this paper I will try to play the role of satyanweshi (truth seeker) Byomkesh Bakshi in order to explore/investigate the way in which Dattani’s plays try to de-stereotype the prevailing notion of gender stereotype and in which way he has portrayed the subjugated, oppressed, marginalized position of women, hijras, minority voices or in which approach Dattani has been able to become an adventurer in soul making much like Bob Dylan in "Chimes of Freedom" or Abbasuddin Ahmed in "Amay Bhasaili Re" as like these two legendary heart-touching songs Baudelairean painter of modern life Dattani is also at his best in portraying the various agathokakological entities of human life or in his earnest attempt to find out a metaphysical/philosophical understanding of our lives or in the upliftment of vasudhaiva kutumbakam(the world is one family) principle or in his projection of humanitarian equilibrium or in his thoughtful critical insights for the equal distribution of resources to the marginalized and proletarian working class people who belong to the boundary level of a power structure with reference to his Dance Like a Man (1989), Tara (1990), Bravely Fought the Queen (1991), Thirty Days in September (2001), and Seven Steps Around the Fire (1999). Mahesh Dattani’s plays give a special place to the underprivileged, marginalized, oppressed voices of our cast ridden, phallocentric society vis-à-vis Dattani’s earnest attempt to break gender stereotypes where phallus is in the centre and women are pushed at the periphery deserves our kudos because with a true impartial journalist’s eye Dattani has vividly portrayed the various agathokakological entities of human life through the artistic representation of his characters. Dattani is a true mascot of democracy, India’s pluralistic identity and his aversion to authoritarianism, orthodoxy gives him a special place in literary world. In a society where unequal power structure hails women, minority voices, marginalized people do not even get access to the resources and the pathetic condition of the marginalized underdogs is inversely proportional to the extremely rich lifestyle of a selected number of people who belong to the centre of a power structure.
Keywords: Agathokakological, Democracy, Gender Stereotype, Marginalization, Mascot, Proletarian
Ei jaahaj mastul chharkhar (The ship and its mast have been ravaged)
Tobu golpo likhchi banchbar (But I am penning the tales of life)
Ami rakhte chai na aar taar (I don’t want to keep within me)
Kono raat dupur-er abdar (The pleadings or requests of day or night of any sort)
Tai chesta korchi bar bar (So I am trying again and again)
Santre paar khonjar….. (To swim across the shores in order to search the bank…..)
––“Amake Amar Moto Thakte Dao” (Anupam Roy)
Far between sundown's finish an' midnight's broken toll
We ducked inside the doorway, thunder crashing
As majestic bells of bolts struck shadows in the sounds
Seeming to be the chimes of freedom flashing
Flashing for the warriors whose strength is not to fight
Flashing for the refugees on the unarmed road of flight
An' for each an' ev'ry underdog soldier in the night
An' we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing
––“Chimes of Freedom” (Bob Dylan)
As there are hyena-man and panther-men, I shall be a Jew-man
A kaffir-man
A Hindu-from-Calcutta-man
a man from-Harlem-who-does-not-vote
—Notebook of a Return to My Native Land (Césaire in McLeod81)
They knew. Anarkali, Champa and all the hijra people knew who was behind the killing of Kamla. They have no voice. The case was hushed up and not even reported in the newspapers.
—Seven Steps Around the Fire (Dattani 282)
Every time I menstruate, I thank God I am a woman
—On a Muggy Night in Mumbai (Dattani 66)
Dattani’s tapasya (meditation of restraint) in his noble venture for constituting a fusion of res cogitans (thinking things, the mind) and res extensa (extended things, bodies) molecules him to be a pervasive Promethean instrumentalist as his indefatigable zeal comprising of lila (joyous energy flow), Tagorean friluftsliv ( open-air life), santarasa (rasa of peace, tranquility), his système allocutoire to the nation which celebrates Bakhtinian heteroglossia (mixture of different voices and various cultural traditions) and most importantly his mise en abyme (in a kind of mirroring of representation) of Indian pluralistic society triumph his ousia as a mouthpiece of marginalized/peripheralized/defenestrated voices who belong to the boundary level of a power structure. India’s foremost dramatist and director Mahesh Dattani (1958) deserves our kudos because his works claim a place for marginalized, degraded, peripheralized people and simultaneously his works also highlight gender injustice, subjugation of women in our phallocentric society and of course, Dattani’s earnest attempt to give voice to the voiceless and to bring the invisible into our mainstream narrative shows his passionate commitment to democracy and social justice, his intense repugnance to authoritarianism and fundamentalism, and his exuberant celebration of India’s pluralistic culture. As Kaustav Chakraborty in his Preface to De-Stereotyping Indian Body and Desire (2013) observes:
De-Stereotyping the conventional perspectives is crucial for the identity which suffer the common internal colonialism of the state, where, either they are pushed at the periphery as the ‘non-normative’ Other of the ‘mainstream’ or, are compelled to give up their intrinsic nonconformity and become nationalized as being programmed into useful citizens of the state. In the mode of de-stereotyping, the individual/human body, social body and the entire body of knowledge become interchangeable, while permitting us to fluctuate from the center to the margins, to crumble down the relation between signifier and signified ... (ix)
Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949) stressed upon how a woman is tagged as “Other” (xxii) in our patriarchal society while Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1970) showcases how women are inessentialized in patriarchy and how power structure operates which seeks its pleasure only in shifting women to the margin. In this article I would like to show how Dattani has tried to take a dig at the strong patriarchal bastion through the portrayal of marginalized people, homosexuals, hijras, unequal power structure, stereotyped notion of gender identity, problematization of relationship etc. with reference to his Dance Like a Man (1989), Tara (1990), Bravely Fought the Queen (1991), Thirty Days in September (2001), and Seven Steps Around the Fire (1999).
In Nitesh Tiwari’s Dangal (2016) patriarchal society mocked and taunted at Geeta and Babita’s short hair cut because in a traditional age-old patriarchal Indian society boys generally grow short hair while girls grow their hair long and when Mahavir Singh tried to break this conventionality by cutting his daughters’ hair short though his daughters vehemently rejected his proposal at the beginning because they themselves have internalised patriarchal power structure. In Dance Like a Man (1989) authoritarian and age-old watchdog of patriarchy Amritlal mocked at Guruji’s sporting of long hair and his way of walking as these appeared to him as abnormal, effeminized in a patriarchal heterosexual power structure:
AMRITLAL. I have never seen a man with long hair.
JAIRAJ. All sadhus have long hair.
AMRITLAL. I don’t mean them. I meant normal men. (Dattani 39)
Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990) argued that “Identity is performatively constituted by the very “expression” that are said to be its results.” (24-25) Thus, sex is biological and gender is social.
Amritlal appears to me as a poster boy of masculine hegemony, conservatism, prudish mentality, “compulsory heterosexuality,” (a term Butler borrowed from Adrienna Rich) and a worshipper of “phallogocentrism” (Derrida’s term for the masculine power at the origin of the Law). His palilalia which concentrates upon his son Jairaj’s growing up as a man also hints at his Bloomian Anxiety of Influence which is constantly grooming a fear psychosis that if Jairaj fails to grow up like a man and if he fails to shape himself according to the patriarchal norms and conditions as prescribed/stipulated he will be castrated, effeminized, and will be tagged as Other by the society which is phallocentric and believes in the politics of masculine hegemony:
AMRITLAL. ... Grow up, Jairaj. (Dattani 45)
In Amritlal’s Utopia dance is forbidden and he believes that boys should be holding phallic cricket bats and should not be wasting their time in dancing which is womanly. Jairaj himself is adult but he struggles to find his own identity as a dancer which is obviously not stereotypical in his conscience, under the surveilling patriarchal monopoly of Amritlal. Jairaj’s liberal identity which promotes and encourages dance, rights and justice for the marginalized temple dancers is in a constant battle with Amritlal’s fundamentalism which stereotypes dance as effeminized and temple dancers as prostitutes. In an unequal power structure phallus is in the centre and women are pushed at the periphery. Amritlal’s quintessential patriarchal ethos proudly claims:
AMRITLAL. A woman in a man’s world may be considered as being progressive. But a man in a woman’s world is pathetic. (Dattani 50)
It reminds me of Clara Reeve’s thought provoking two lines from An Argument in Favour of the Natural Equality of Both the Sexes (1756):
For what in man is most respected,
In woman’s form shall be rejected. (Reeve in Carter and McRae 226)
In Dance Like a Man (1989) Chenni amma belongs to “[n]on hegemonic groups or classes.” (Gramsci xiv) In “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1985) Spivak (1942) highlighted the subaltern existence of women and to Spivak subaltern women are doubly oppressed in colonial/postcolonial situation: “...the subaltern has no history and cannot speak, the female as female is more deeply in shadow.” ( 271) Together with the postcolonial feminist thinkers Chandra Talpade Mohanty,(1955) Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, (1950) Nawal El Saadawi (1931) and Kumari Jayawardena (1931), Spivak’s critical thought has challenged the assumption that all women are homogenized, and to Spivak differences in race, class, religion, citizenship and culture should also be taken into consideration. (Morton 71-72) Amritlal is conscious of his elitist and hegemonic social status which marginalises and pushes subaltern woman like Chenni amma at the periphery. Dattani with his sensitive heart of an artist shows a class struggle where autocratic and patriarchal Amritlal belongs to the category of “haves” while Chenni amma belongs to “have nots” (Marx in Wen 74) category. As Gyanendra Pandey (1949) in his Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History in India (2001) and Kancha Ilaiah (1952) in his Why I am not a Hindu (1996) have argued that India is invariably an upper caste Hindu India where the voices of Dalits, Adivasis, and minorities are excluded from our mainstream grand narratives. Chenni amma’s dying, subjugated, and lower caste maternal body highlights the loopholes of the Mother India mythology as a bourgeois ideological construct. (Morton 40) For Amritlal, Ratna’s dance practise at Chenni amma’s courtyard is spoiling his status and he does not know actually how to convey one’s gratitude towards artists who are beyond caste, creed, and religion. Amritlal fought against the British colonial rule and after independence he played the role of a reformer by trying to eradicate dowry, untouchability or by building ashrams for temple dancers or by giving them education but when he stops his daughter-in-law Ratna from visiting Chenni amma out of his pathological hatred for this downtrodden, marginalised woman exposes him as a neo-colonial and a hypocrite who fought not for our country’s freedom but for preserving power in his hands after independence:
JAIRAJ. Where is the spirit of revolution? You didn’t fight to gain independence. You fought for power in your hands. (Dattani 37)
Instead of being a man Jairaj never tries to command his authority over Ratna and he not even blames Ratna for her carelessness and insincerity which inevitably led to Shankar’s untimely death. Jairaj is victim of both his wife and father’s psychological manipulation. In the beginning of the play we see that Lata is telling Viswas that her parents would not care for his hereditary lineage but what matters most is whether Viswas would allow Lata to dance or not after their marriage. Why as an independent human being Lata is depending upon his would-be husband’s diktat of whether or not he would allow her to dance? Has Lata herself been structured/internalised in the patriarchal power politics where generally husbands are in the commanding positions and wives are pushed at the receiving ends? As a student of literature I cannot lightly take Viswas’s seemingly funny overture at Lata: “Hmm. And what if I whisk you away to Dubai and sell you to a Sheikh?” (Dattani 4). It actually has a deep political angle and it symbolically metaphorises women’s body as an object of commodity fetishism or hints at the illegal trafficking of women as sex objects. In orthodox patriarchal household women are generally believed as experts in kitchens or in domestic works and this very stereotypical notion about women casts the limitations of women’s capabilities in patriarchy:
VISWAS. When my mother comes here, she’ll want to watch you make coffee. Be prepared. (Dattani 12)
Viswas’s mother will judge Lata only on the basis of whether she can make a cup of coffee or not. Viswas’s sanskari mother who herself has been internalised in patriarchy will also look at Lata’s legs to know whether these are tanned or not because sarees not miniskirts are found admirable in patriarchy and any woman found violating this dress code will be called not a sanskari. It is noteworthy that Lata shined as an excellent Bharatnatyam dancer and became a celebrity overnight in an unequal phallocentric society and her marvellous and artistic representation of adavus throws a challenge to the age-old patriarchy which believes that shining and progress are unequivocally engaged with men only because they are at the centre of power. Lata’s success inspires thousands of other Latas who are the victims of rigid patriarchy and gives them the encouragement that if a woman tries her level best after negating stereotype she will obviously hail success and a woman is no less than a man. In Dance Like a Man (1989) it is shocking that Ratna is rejecting Jairaj’s maleness openly:
RATNA. You! You are nothing but a spineless boy who couldn’t leave his father’s house for more than forty-eight hours. (Dattani 21)
Ratna’s definition of Maleness suggests a man’s own decision making power and obviously his capability to stand on his two feet but according to Ratna, Jairaj fails to tick these boxes of Maleness as defined by her. Throughout the play it seems that Jairaj is always in the back foot whenever a time of a big face off comes between him and Ratna. Biswas was quite right in his assumption:
VISWAS. Your mother must be dominating the poor man! (Dattani 8)
Dattani has tried to subvert or deconstruct the prevailing notion of gender stereotypes. His Tara (1990) portrays how Tara was deprived of the third leg because it was favoured to Chandan. Tara and Chandan were born as Siamese twins but under the influence of Bharati’s autocratic father figure and the shocking silence of her husband even the medical officer Dr. Thakkar had hatched the conspiracy and by the virtue of his surgery Chandan was awarded the third leg though it got its blood circulated from Tara’s body only because Chandan is a male child. Tara’s crippled body reminds me of the physically deformed and emotionally challenged Laura of The Glass Menagerie. (1944) Both Tara and Laura’s physical deformity symbolically unveils the subjugated and marginalized status of women in patriarchy. Bharati’s muteness to the barbaric injustice practised upon Tara is reminiscent of Anurag Kashyap’s Mukkabaaz (2017) where the character of a mute girl played by Zoya Hussain symbolically posits the view that women are mute creatures in patriarchy. After the separation of the third leg tension was aggravated in the Patel household and I think that it was peripeteia for the Patels because peace was disrupted after Tara’s untimely death and even Chandan was not properly fit after surgery leading him to leave India for England to expiate and Bharati became insane. Patel family’s witch-hunt for peace which they had expected would be showering upon them after favouring Chandan actually faced a big jolt only leaving the household in jittery. The patriarchal hubris although it got its gratification after instrumentalizing Bharati in its sinister campaign against Tara only for favouring Chandan led to the moment of our anagnorisis that how women are stereotyped, oppressed, subjugated, and crushed under the fatal mill of patriarchy.
The decision to deprive Tara of the third leg obviously was a hamartia because it violated Tara’s natural and legal share of the leg only culminating an atmosphere of guilt and resentment in the mind of Chandan and Bharati. Chandan’s so called expiation for his crippled sister appears as a big jolt to the sensitive readers when Tara was showcased as a commodity and not as an individual in his play: “Forgive me, Tara. Forgive me for making it my tragedy.”(Dattani 380) Dattani’s holistic search for identity is indomitable and his plays do not chew the cud but they are evergreen and they gain their consciousness through de-stereotyping our gender identity or through the portrayals of the marginalised voices. Bias against a girl child is a common matter in India obviously with certain exceptions and ingrained patriarchy often forces mothers to abort their girl child hinting at the age-old, truncated, moth-eaten patriarchal notion of gender stereotype where boys are in the centre. Unfortunately instead of mutually helping and supporting, women often seek pleasure in strategizing cynical plot against each other. Here Roopa teases Tara on her physical deformity or in Dance Like a Man (1989) Ratna sounds like a typical Machiavellian when she declares that she wants to see Lata reaching the zenith of her success by hook or by crook and for that she is even ready to be sweet to her opponent camp:
RATNA. Even if it means being sweet to that bitch Chandra Kala. (Dattani 33)
Bravely Fought the Queen (1991) at its outset portrays that Indian women’s identity depends upon their husbands’ identity in a traditional patriarchal society and it is like a Catch-22 situation for a woman to liberate herself from these shackles of patriarchy. Here Jiten and Nitin dominate their wives Dolly and Alka. Dattani’s strategic use of bonsai actually points out the dwarfed status of women in patriarchy where women are shaped, regulated, and controlled by our phallocentric society and any deviation or violation of this role is seen as abnormal and asymmetrical. Alka was dominated by her brother Praful before marriage and after marriage she is dominated by her husband Nitin. Nitin is a homosexual who has married the sister of his partner in homosexuality, Praful.
Foucault in his History of Sexuality (1976) theorized sexuality as situated within structures and discourse of power. He provided a further approach to the so-called natural marginalization of queer sexuality by arguing that certain forms of sexuality were constructed as unnatural and evil and its practitioners placed under state surveillance. (Foucault in Nayar 185) As Pramod K. Nayar in his Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory observes:
Butler proposes, via a reading of Freud, that the taboo against heterosexual incest is preceded by another taboo—against homosexuality. Gender identity, she states, is built on this prohibition against homosexuality. It is the loss of the samesex object of desire that creates a melancholic heterosexual identity. Butler thus argues that feminine and masculine dispositions are the result of an internalization of assimilation of loss. This loss and prohibited desire is inscribed (Butler’s term is ‘incorporated’) on the body, ... (190)
Nitin’s homosexuality challenges the unified, monolithic heterosexual normativity of our society and Dattani here tries to celebrate this deviant form of sexuality which is seen as perverted desire in our heterosexual society though Dattani is equally conscious of Alka’s troubled and tortured psyche and mental state due to Nitin’s homosexual identity which did not give sufficient time to Alka leaving her sexual desires unfulfilled because Nitin liked to give much more time to his homosexual partners. Lalitha and Dolly despite their deep nuances of class consciousness as Lalitha belongs to working class while Dolly represents capitalist class, both are marginalised and subjugated as women in our patriarchal hierarchy. The title of the play is inspired by the lines of a poem by Subhadra Kumari Chauhan which begins, “khoob ladi mardani woh to Jhansi ki raani” (The Queen of Jhansi fought like a brave man). Jiten gets his sadistic pleasure only in beating and kicking his wife Dolly while Dolly’s boredom resulted in building up a sexual fantasy with Kanhaiya, a 19 year old fictitious character. Capitalist Trivedi brothers’ current advertisement programme called Re va Tee which focused on women’s undergarments portrayed women as mere sex objects while the possessive nature of the nagging mother Baa for her son Nitin most probably attracted him to orchestrate Oedipus pull towards her. Nitin is like another Paul of Lawrence’s (1885-1930) Sons and Lovers (1913) in the sense that Baa and Mrs. Morel both had experienced unhappy marriage which only resulted in Mrs. Morel’s desire for Paul and Paul failed in his love for Miriam and here Nitin is also a failed husband because of Baa’s possessiveness for him which prevented to cement any chemistry of emotional bonding with Alka leading only to Alka’s tragic death. Alka’s dance in the rain symbolises her earnest desire of liberation from the shackles of patriarchy and like the brave Queen of Jhansi she symbolically protested against patriarchal oppression in her dance even after knowing that she would fail. Baa inflicts her trauma and suffering upon her daughter-in-laws because she herself is a victim of torture and subjugation by patriarchy.
Thirty Days in September (2001) shows how Shanta, guided by patriarchal principles remains mum at the sexual abuse of her little daughter Mala. During this period of global pandemic Corona, social isolation and quarantine my intellectual/ontological aristocracy is emblematically scrolling the smells of gender injustice, re-representation of stereotypical muliebrity, phallocentric monopoly, Centre/Periphery, Master/Slave dichotomy or the 21st century version of a She-tragedy in this text where Man’s machismo gets sadistic pleasures in lifting/installing profoundly lalochezia to the topoi of Mala. Mala was sexually harassed for the first time by her own maternal uncle Man when she was a child of seven years old. Man did not regret for committing such a heinous crime upon Mala. Here, Man appears to be protector turned predator. He previously had also seduced his own sister Shanta during her childhood days and later he is continuing this incestuous relationship with his own niece. Shanta and Mala were economically dependent upon Man and capitalizing this weakness he continued to rape Mala for several times. After entering the Lacanian Symbolic stage when Mala could understand because of the virtue of the process of socialisation what blow actually went upon her during her childhood days, also wonders why her mother Shanta remained always silent whenever Man used to seduce her. Mala’s past traumatic experiences led her to psychoneurotic position though later under the supervision of medical counselling sessions and obviously by Deepak’s encouragement and company Mala turned into a bold and confident woman. Women who are the victims of sexual harassment are often trolled on social media and sometimes the victims failing to cope up with the violent taunts and abuses from the patriarchal society which never questions the rapist and always finds its sadistic pleasure in mocking the victims, commit suicide. Here Mala is not ashamed of her and according to her seducers like Man should be ashamed of themselves: “I do not hesitate to use my real name now. Let people know. There’s nothing to hide. Not for me. After all, it is he who must hide.” (Dattani 8) Sophia Phoca in a chapter entitled as “Feminism and Gender” observes: “The male gaze is constructed according to structures of control inscribed by sadistic voyeurism and/or fetishistic scopophilia (looking as a source of pleasure).” (47) Here, Man’s male gaze and his paedophilic disorder looked at Mala only as a source of carnal pleasure. Amidst Shashi Tharoor's "Exasperating Farrago of Distortions" tweet (@ShashiTharoor) or when Brexit is short for "British exit" which would predictably flush catastrophic dysfunction to the financial fluidity of the global economy creating a very adverse situation for jobless youths or when the primetime political debates on national media have become a high decibel tu tu main main (I am no less than you) or when consumerism operating in postmodern capitalism is mercilessly killing innocence and is creating dry burnt out cinders or when the pandemic Covid-19 is ruthlessly ravaging the world bracketing us in quarantine and social isolation then my Apollonian veracity in order to be intellectually impregnated by the Dionysian elements in this text reminded me of Head of the Department of English of Raiganj University Military Historian Professor Dr. Pinaki Roy's 2016 thoughtful insights on Tennyson's "The Lotus-Eaters" at CBPBU where the erudite scholar harvested my young brain by his critical explorations where he opined that in patriarchy whether a girl is beautiful or not always matters which is also emblematic of "compulsory heterosexuality" (a term Butler borrowed from Adrienne Rich); this text is sandwiched between toxic masculinity and re-representation of women's body as objects of men's libidinal energy. Not only in this text but also in Bollywood hits and item numbers we can see in which way women are showcased as objects of men’s libidinal energy and carnal desires. I would like to put an emphasis on the politics beyond male gaze, fetish objects and the representation of female body in Indian rapper Badshah’s controversial “Genda Phool” which virulently celebrates toxic masculinity. The sexy butterfly tattoo on Jacqueline Fernandez's waist carries figuratively a political significance with it as it virulently/strategically unfolds the producer's hidden/camouflaged agenda, i.e. the commercialization of woman's body which is repeatedly/incessantly concocted in this song in the way of zooming the naked belly or the thumka of the projected women characters. Much like Honey Singh's controversial misogynistic "Blue Eyes", "Love Dose", "Choot" or Mamta Sharma and Wajid Ali's duet "Fevicol Se" Badshah, Jacqueline Fernandez and Payal Dev starrer "Genda Phool'' which has already been viewed over 180 million times on YouTube in the last 3 weeks juxtaposes two antithetical principles,i.e. boastful machismo and submissive effeminized existence of women in a patriarchal power structure where phallus is in the centre and women, marginalized/peripheralized voices are pushed at the periphery level. The defenestrated existence of women in rigid, authoritarian and dictatorial ambience of India's age-old surveiling patriarchal ethos has again been postulated in this song: "khelta nahi cricket cricket/ par teri le loon vicket vicket". These dangerously phallocentric lines triumphantly encashing male ego as used as lyrics in this song celebrate women as sex objects or rather baby producing machines I would like to say where "vicket" is a metaphor for male genital organ, i.e. phallus and these lines tell about the satisfaction of the carnal desires of the hero boy which will come only in physical mating with the "Genda Phool'' girl. Jacqueline Fernandez is not obviously ticking the boxes correctly of a RSS backed Good Mother concept as she is not portrayed as sanskari in this song; she will be tagged as a Bad Mother/ "Other" by a number of hypocrites who will be obviously having nocturnal emission when the skyrocketed confidence of their erect phallus will get its sadistic pleasures at the thumka, frenzied butt or the sizzling body of the lady character as presented in this song but these people with double tongues on the other hand will also start destructive gossiping about to and fro or ifs and buts of such an iconic actress like Jacqueline Fernandez only because she is woman as in the same way the staunch supporters of patriarchy backed by Fundamentalists and age-old watchdogs of phallocentric monopoly tag Sunny Leone as a Bad Mother.
Man is trying to inflict upon Mala and Shanta a kind of Hegelian Master/Slave dialectic by terrorising, threatening, seducing and emotionally blackmailing them. Only a Me Too Movement with a hashtag preceded by it cannot reduce the alarming rates of crimes committed upon women until or unless our society does not start seeing women as capable as men or it does not start questioning rapists like Man instead of questioning the victims.
Dattani’s characterization of hijras in Seven Steps Around the Fire (1999) or the terribly defenestrated condition of transgender Sujan in Partha Chakraborty’s movie Samantaral (2017) actually portrays the abominable, marginalized, and unwanted status of hijras who are the most populous third sex in India. The story spins around the death mystery of a beautiful hijra called Kamla. Dattani by portraying these hijras who live in the slums and skirts and earn their livelihood by begging, dancing, singing or by clapping loudly has tried to place an alternative historical narrative in our mainstream narrative. Dattani has outlined the struggles, hardships, and marginalized situation of these queer minority voices. They often entertain people in buses or in trains but their own life is full of pathos and dismay. We curse them for using slangs and filthy languages but we remain totally unconscious of our darker sides which are filthier than those slangs. In this play the minister’s son Subbu secretly married Kamla and he used to bring hijras for sexual pleasure to his bed. Hijras are often blamed, excommunicated, used as scapegoats and seen as unlucky by our so-called civilized society. They are referred to as ‘it’, not as ‘she’. The SP, Suresh thinks that hijras are liars, dogs, scoundrels, evils and what not. Here Uma Rao embracing a very strong family background plunges into the dirty slums of hijras in order to research on their lifestyles, poverty, and struggles. Mrs. Rao deserves our kudos because she carries love and affection for hijras and she refers to them as ‘she’, not as ‘it’. She is trying to bring these invisible minority voices into the spotlight of our mainstream narrative. When she proposes the idea of a ‘sisterhood’ of eunuchs, Suresh howls with laughter: “They are castrated degenerate man...” (Dattani 238) Heterosexual power structure pushes marginalized voices at the periphery and Dattani has challenged this Self/Other, Centre/Margin, Master/Slave dichotomy in this play: “We cannot speak...when we want to speak nobody listens...” (Dattani 259)
Raveena Joseph in her 8 June, 2016, The Hindu, article, “On a muggy night in Chennai...” observed: “Dattani’s plays, that dealt with burning urban issues, including child abuse, social stereotyping, religious intolerance and gender inequality, soon created a stir in the world of theatre.” (Joseph) Dattani has tried to execute a surgical strike upon various maladies of our society either by de-stereotyping our gender stereotype or by portraying the dehumanised, stigmatised, marginalized status of invisible minority voices or the subjugated and oppressed condition of women in our patriarchal society where Taras (stars) are not allowed to twinkle. Jairaj’s dance in a woman’s attire or Kuchipudi is a celebration of transvestism or the divine dance of Shiva and Parvati or the birth of the Siamese twins embolden the idea of the composite androgynous form called Ardhanarishvara or the vivid representation of marginalized voices — all celebrate the idea that like a deconstructing archangel Dattani is trying to break today’s construction, e.g. phallocentric monopoly, gender stereotype and the peripheralization of marginalized voices:
Through the city's melted furnace, unexpectedly we watched
With faces hidden as the walls were tightening
As the echo of the wedding bells before the blowin' rain
Dissolved into the bells of the lightning
Tolling for the rebel, tolling for the rake
Tolling for the luckless, the abandoned an' forsakened
Tolling for the outcast, burnin'…(Dylan)
India’s iconic and versatile genius Dattan’s episteme which I have tried to genuinely explore in my scholastic mission and in the psycho-geographic reading of his texts reckon the presence of two scrambled fragmentations, i.e. ton logon (false reckoning) and ta onta ( true existence) in the sense that the habitus of his plays on the one hand truly portrays the subjugated, downtrodden and miserable condition of women, hijras and minority voices in our unequal power structure while on the other hand even in this 21st century it is obviously a wirklichkeit that the staunch supporters of authoritarianism and fundamentalism always try to air a kind of false and stereotypical eikona that women can’t grow their hair long or phallus is in the centre or the hijras or minority voices are untouchables and muted existence strategically narrated by state programmed Althusserian RSA principles. Dattani’s mondialisation brilliantly celebrates India’s heterogeneous identity and in his earnest attempt to bring the Subaltern voices into our mainstream narrative once again proves that he is singing again Bob Dylan’s “Chimes of Freedom” in order to create an egalitarian society where decentralization of resources will get first priority.
References