Drama
Unmasking our worlds
ADITI DE
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Mahesh Dattani's is a voice unafraid to joust with a bleak today.
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Collected Plays, Volume Two: Screen, Stage and Radio Plays, Mahesh Dattani, Penguin, 2005, p.572, Rs. 450.
WHAT sets Mahesh Dattani apart from other contemporary Indian playwrights in English today? Could it be his perfect cuing into burning issues of social relevance, ones we have collectively stashed away in dusty closet niches for generations? Issues pertaining to sexual identity, including the hijra community. Or child sexual abuse (CSA). Or hypocrisy about HIV-positive people. Or religious intolerance. Or gender inequalities. Or social stereotyping. Or even what constitutes the contemporary Indian family.
Ever since he first penned "Where There's A Will" in 1986, Dattani has treated each subject with a deep-seated identification rooted in everyday angst. Such charged emotions spare no one — neither the players and the director, nor the audience. Deep within platitude-ridden Indian society, his characters seethe and reveal, probe and discern, scathing their families and neighbours, leaving each reader or watcher with a storm within as the aftermath. An essential storm for our evolution as socially sensitive individuals.
No wonder this 1998 Sahitya Akademi Award-winning playwright has since explored horizons beyond theatre. As an acclaimed BBC radio playwright with his brilliant, Bangalore-based woman sleuth Uma Rao, who dazzles us through three radio scripts. Or as one of 21 global writers commissioned to write short plays by BBC to mark Chaucer's 600th death anniversary in October 2000. The result is the gooseflesh-provoking "The Tale of a Mother Feeding Her Child". Or more recently, as a writer and film director, engaging us through "Mango Soufflé" (2002) and "Morning Raga" (2004).
Through the emphasis on adaptations in these 10 plays, we realise why director Pamela Rooks' 2004 screen variant of Dattani's acclaimed stage play, "Dance Like a Man" requires a different ending to work cinematically. Or why modifications were necessary to make the first Uma Rao script pliant when New Delhi's Scene Stealers staged it in 2004, co-directed by the author.
Tackling reality head-on
Dattani's plays deal with real scenarios that are tough to turn away from. They are couched in Indian urbanspeak. They shy away from myth and make-believe to tackle reality head-on, no matter what the impact of the collision. They have worked onstage when directed sensitively, or read over BBC, or — somewhat less powerfully — when rendered as cinema. They prove indisputably that Dattani is in sync with millions of urbanites, to whom English is an Indian language. We are his audience, his characters, his source of sustained feedback.
The illuminating, almost intuitive, introduction by BBC Radio's Jeremy Mortimer enhances the volume. He observes, "Mahesh Dattani does not seek to cut a path through the difficulties his characters encounter in his plays; instead he leads his audience to see just how caught up we all are in the complications and contradictions of our values and assumptions. And by revealing the complexity, he makes the world a richer place for all of us". Similarly, the lead-in notes to the searing experience of "30 Days in September" by director-actor Lillette Dubey and to "Morning Raga" by actor Shabana Azmi add a stimulating dimension to each reading.
The Dattani dynamic
This celebration of the Dattani dynamic is worth engaging with as a companion volume to the first collection. But a few production details do detract from its overall quality. For instance, why is Vishwas in "Dance like a Man" referred to as "Vishal" twice on page 122?
These pages evoke the mind-blowing potency of "30 Days... ," which deserves sensitive cinematic treatment to open a million more eyes to CSA. Similarly, the clever Uma Rao plots, with their layered social commentary, need to reach a wider stage. Even the heart-rending tangled web of Anna Gosweb's life as she visits drought-hit Kutch in search of her past in "The Tale of a Mother Feeding Her Child", is a spartan story worthy of more detailed dramatic treatment.
Who knows what other issues Dattani will explore in the future? What versions of our world will he pinpoint with his unerring vision? His is a voice unafraid to joust with a bleak today. May its integrity remain unimpaired.
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