Life & Background
Mahesh Dattani was born in Bangalore in 1958 into a Gujarati family. He founded the Playpen theatre company in Bangalore and wrote and directed his own plays, performing them before they moved to Mumbai and then internationally. He was the first Indian playwright writing in English to win the Sahitya Akademi Award, in 1998. His plays address subjects Indian theatre had rarely engaged with directly: homosexuality, gender discrimination, Hindu-Muslim violence, and child sexual abuse.
Tara
Twin siblings Tara and Chandan are born conjoined. During surgical separation, the doctors face a decision: which child receives two functional legs? The recommended choice is Tara, but their mother ensures the legs go to Chandan. Tara spends her short life disabled by her mother's choice. Years after Tara's death, Chandan — now a writer in London — attempts to reconstruct what happened and to give his sister a posthumous voice. The play moves between past and present, between Chandan's memory and family reality.
Tara works simultaneously as a family drama, a feminist argument, and a meditation on memory and guilt. The choice to give the legs to the son rather than the daughter — made by a mother, not a patriarch — is Dattani's most provocative structural decision: it implicates the family's own internalised sexism. The play-within-a-play structure, in which Chandan's writing is framed as an act of mourning and justice, asks questions about whose stories get told and who has the power to tell them.
Why Mahesh Dattani Matters
Dattani is the most significant playwright in Indian English drama since Karnad and Tendulkar. His willingness to address homosexuality, communal violence, child sexual abuse, and gender discrimination gave Indian English theatre a range and social urgency it had lacked. His Sahitya Akademi Award — the first given to an Indian English playwright — established Indian English drama as a legitimate literary form deserving of the academy's recognition.