ANALYZING MAHESH DATTANI’S WOMEN PROTAGONISTS: THIRTY DAYS IN SEMPTEMBER AND SEVEN STEPS AROUND THE FIRE

 INTRODUCTION

Mahesh Dattani is a colourful man and so his characters are colourful too. He is a playwright who places his characters in such a way that they inherently expose the social maladies and hypocrisies. His plays are both powerful and disturbing at the same time, they make the audience ask questions on their own, rather than throwing the questions directly at them. As commented by Alka Tyagi on Dattani’s play On a Muggy Night in Mumbai: "Dattani deals with a difficult subject with bold pen and lays open the hypocrisies of social life which imposes stereotypical roles to men and women and acknowledges and legitimizes only these roles. Male and female - there are only sexual categories which have secured social existence and society's approbation. People who do not fit into these two classes either keep trying to fit into the rut and suffer throughout their lives a burden of living the big lie, or if they choose to live with the truth they have to bear social ostracism and contempt." (Dhawan 120) The same can be said for all his plays. Dattani’s focus on the ostracized sections of our society brings special reference to his women characters.

“To separate the women characters in Dattani’s plays and analyze them as different from the other characters is a little difficult because Dattani writes about women in much the same style as he writes about anybody.” (Multani 27) However, his work is evidence towards the abuse of this section; and in this context characters like Dolly and Alka in Bravely Fought the Queen, Mala in Thirty Days in September, Uma Rao in Seven Steps Around the Fire hold special mention.

MALA: TURNING AROUND OF A CHILD ABUSE VICTIM

Thirty Days in September is probably the hardest hitting of all Dattani’s plays till date. Dattani himself has said, “…I sometimes see the funny side of even the tragic events that I am concerned with. But in this, [Thirty Days], I did not have the scope. There’s no way you can see the funny side…” (Vardhan) The play was commissioned by an NGO called RAHI (Recovery and Healing from Incest) that helps survivors of child sexual abuse.

Setting and Perspective

The play is entirely Mala’s story with little use of subplot. We mostly see the play through Mala’s perspective, dealing with the memories of her childhood molester, visualizing him as result of her trauma and confronting those terrifying moments that leave us shaken to the core. Dattani makes us feel the conflict inside Mala and the mental torture she had to suffer. Dattani like his many other plays, chooses the setting of his incestuous child abuse story to be an upper middle-class family as he did not want his audience to feel that it is something that does not happen to people like them.

Development of the character

Dattani takes his audience through an unnerving journey with his character Mala. As the character develops through the play, so does the sense of the audiences about the harsh realities of child abuse. We see two versions of interviews of Mala with her counselor, one that takes place in February 2004, just after the death of her uncle Vinay who was her molester. In this interview, she is confidant and depicted as a fully grown personality, she has rejected the need she felt for male validation as a result of her systematic abuse as a child. The other interview is recorded in the past on September 30, 2001 when she goes to her counselor for the first time. Here one can clearly see a person who is mentally tormented, is in a self-dilemma and considers themselves as responsible for their miserable situation, “I know it all my fault really… it is not anybody’s fault except my own.” (Dattani 9)

Throughout the play Dattani plays with this self-accusation pattern as it more so reveals Mala’s trauma and the reality of the situation. Even Mala’s mother falls in this pattern as she accuses her mother to be responsible for all this. Mala becomes a victim of serious psychological repression which acts a major setback to her development and obstructs her growth into maturity. She constantly identifies herself with her childhood image and this stationary effect makes her incapable of developing humane relationship with other men, for example Deepak. This is a reminder of the ‘bonsai’ from Dattani’s play Bravely Fought the Queen, which is a symbol of the stunted growth of women’s personality as a result of repression since childhood. Mala’s trauma seems to be more severe when one analyzes her infidelity as an attempt to replicate those thirty days of abuse every summer in her childhood by marking on the calendar the thirty days of pleasure with someone similar to her uncle.

In this entire scenario, Deepak is a Freudian figure, and acts as a catalyst in the play to mobilizes Mala to bring her out of this loop of her past. His instigation makes Mala determined to face the repressed truth. Hence, at the end, a more confident Mala confronts her uncle and mother:
Mala: Yes you did. He just didn’t buy a flat. He bought you!
Shanta: That’s not true! Oh God! 

Mala: He bought your silence so you can never tell anyone what he did to your daughter! (Dattani 52)

This where Mala turns around from her past and stands up to defend herself as the truth behind her mother, Shanta’s numbness is revealed. She suffered the same fate as her daughter in the hands of her brother for ten years. Mala’s development as both a human being and a character in the play comes to full circle when she empathizes with her mother and forgives her. This shows that she out of her pattern of self-accusation and lives in the present rather than the past.

UMA: A SOCIAL WORKER ON A QUEST OF TRUTH

Seven Steps Around the Fire is a radio play of Mahesh Dattani commissioned by the BBC. The play deals with the lone attempt of a social researcher, Uma Rao to bring justice to the eunuch Kamla and her entire community. Dattani has made a major attempt at breaking the stereotypical constructs of the Indian society in this play. Miruna George has said, "Althusser's ideological apparatuses such as Family, Church, Educational Institutions, Arts, and Culture in the name of social norms have ensured the rules of subservience and conscious conditioning. By enabling the Subject with an opportunity to doubt his self-righteous attitude, the individual in Dattani's plays can break free of this bondage. More than the material, it is the mental and the emotional states that need a transformation." (Multani 145) This draws a parallel with Mala’s character in Thirty Days in September who suffers an identity crisis due to her childhood trauma, but later breaks out from that emotional state.

Uma's position in society

“I think we are all into role-playing — as somebody's wife, somebody's father — but don't touch the core where we may be someone quite different,” (Banerjee 164) says Dattani in an interview.

The woman protagonist of the play, Uma Rao is a Ph. D research scholar who is introduced to us as the daughter-in-law of the Deputy Police Commissioner, the wife of the Chief Superintendent, Suresh Rao and the daughter of the Vice-Chancellor of Bangalore University. By introducing Uma in relation to these men, Dattani on one hand gives an idea to the audience that she probably can exercise some power in the society, but at the same time also establishes that women are powerless in our society without the support of patriarchy. However, he goes on to prove that neither of these facts is true. On one hand, Uma is very self-sufficient at investigating Kamla’s murder and help Anarkali. On the other hand, she is the victim of a system to which both her husband and father-in-law is a part of.

Discovery of reality, along with discovery of self

Uma Rao is seen as a considerate, kind and honest character who cannot act against the call of her conscience. She boldly makes search for truth, as she respects even the rejected transsexuals. She treats them exceptionally well and is more conscious in treating them as humans rather than transgender. While in the quest of finding the truth behind Kamla’s murder, she finds herself in a situation where no one is ready to help her, on the contrary people like her husband, Munaswamy, the police constable and Mr. Sharma, a minister stands as an obstruction in her path. Here, Uma as character breaks out from the bonds the patriarchal relations of being a wife or a daughter. We see her character grow from a submissive wife who obediently dressed for her husband to satisfy his sexual pleasures at the beginning of the play to a social worker with a purpose as she says, “If my family throws me out, I hope that doctorate will come handy.” (Dattani 262) At the end when Uma finally finds out with Subbu’s death that his father Mr. Sharma was responsible behind Kamla’s murder for marrying his son, Uma hopes that the culprit will be punished. But to her dismay, it is her own husband and father-in-law who are responsible for dismissing the case and culprit escapes with impunity. Uma understands that she is the only person who wants to see justice done, but her voice will be silenced like the hijra community if she attempts to do so. Dattani leaves the play here with the audience to reflect upon the marginalization of subaltern groups in our society.

CONCLUSION

Mala and Uma are strong women protagonists who hold up a mirror of the society to us. Both the characters stuck in the web of patriarchy fight to find their individual identity and do so at a great cost of revealing the hypocritical practices in society. These characters have a great impact on our society by making people think for own selves and giving the ostracized groups a voice. Lillitte Dubey, the director of Thirty Days in September notes down her experience: "After every performance, women have come backstage with their own traumatic stories writ large on their faces, grateful for the catharsis the play offers, but even more, I think, for the expiation of their guilt which they have carried as a long burden for so long... For through it they believe their silent screams have been heard." (Dattani 4) In the same way, through Uma, Dattani gives the transsexual community the humanity they deserve, also at the same time show their voiceless situation and the abuses against them. Dattani through his women protagonists deliberately foregrounds the underdogs. He does not pity them, but endows them with self-dignity and inner strength to endure their pain and struggle. He purposely leaves the plays open ended like Rabindranath Tagore’s short stories, for his audience to imagine and deliberate upon the harsh realities.

REFERENCES

Banerjee, Utpal K. and Mahesh Dattani. “Utpal K. Banerjee in Conversation with Mahesh Dattani.” Indian Literature, vol. 48, no. 5(223), 2004, pp. 161-167.

Dattani, Mahesh. Collected Plays Vol. 2. Penguin Books Ltd., 2005.

Dhawan, R.K. and Tanu Pant, Editors. The Plays of Mahesh Dattani: A Critical Response. Prestige Books, 2005.

Multani, Angelie, Editor. Mahesh Dattani’s Plays: Critical Perspective. Pencraft International, 2007.

Vardhan, Manisha and Mahesh Dattani. “Interview: I’m no crusader; I’m a theatre person.” Final Theatre. http://www.3to6.com/final_theatre/peroftheweek-maheshdattani.html. Accessed 9 March 2020.