A Socio-Psychological Analysis of Gender Identity in
Tara
Mahesh Dattani’s is the first Indian Playwrights in English to be awarded the
Sahitya Academy Award for his remarkable contribution to world drama.
Among his critically acclaimed plays include Where There is a Will (1988),
Dance like a man (1989), Tara (1990) , Bravely Fought The Queen (1991),
Final Solutions (1993), Night Queen (1996), and Thirty Days In September
(2001). He has indeed added a new dimension to Indian drama in English
since his play do not aim at mere entertainment, but deal with the issue of
modern life like religious tension, discrimination, gender, and sexuality.
Winner of many awards and Scholarships, Dattani’s, besides being a
writer, is an actor director screenplay writer and a teacher conducing work
shop for young lovers of drama. He is also the founder of Playpen, a
performing arts group which promotes English plays and translated plays
from regional language.
Tara First performed on 23rd October, 1990 as Twinkle Tara, and later
popular as Tara, is Mahesh Dattani’s third play. A modern play in technique
which has left audiences stunned ever since its first performance, it is
structured in two acts with multi level set and with characters often taking
in groups. Thematically it is both novel and powerful dealing with the
conflicts of twins who were conjoined at birth, but later separated both
surgically and emotionally. However it does not center on twins and their
life alone and reveals the elements of domestic tragedy involving
grandfather, parents and children. The play revolves round four major
characters – the Siamese’s twins named Chandan and Tara and their
parents Patel and Bharati. The central protagonist of the plan is Tara, a girl
of fifteen, Chandan’s twin sister and a daughter of Patel and Bharati. The
play reveals the birth and brought up of twins and marginalization of girl
child of the conjoined twins. Mahesh Dattani’s has systematically and
laudably exposed determinism, sexism and parental hypocrisy in Tara.
The elements of social determinism gradually emerged from the play
and make it even more realistic and compelling. Society assumes the role of
the determinerforcingthat a girl child’s life must be patterned in such and
such way on account of her being a girl child and thus the dynamics of
society for the boy and girl seem to be contrastive. Whereas the masculine
has traditionally come to be identified as acquiescent, irrational and
passive. In the process of their being specialized women are taught to
internalize patriarchal ideology, to accept male superiority over female. As
Simone de Beauvoir put it:
One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman….
It is civilization as a whole that produces this creature… which described as
feminine.
Tara and chandan were conjoined twins like “a fertilized egg, destined
to separate and develop into different emboyos, fails to do so fully.”
Ironically it was not a simple surgery of two bodies which nature had made
one, not only a battle between nature and medical science, but it was an
emotional saperationof two lives. The process of discrimination against the
girl child begins right from her birth. the political influence of Tara’s
grandfather and his act of bribing the doctor for unethical surgery reveals
not only the hurried face of the cultured lot, but also expose unequal social
structure which ignores a girl child. The very nature of surgery was not only
unethical but also in human since a limb and a vital organ from the
daughter was taken to favor the son. Consequently Tara loses her strength
hear brother thrives. Dattani’s has artfully raveled the marginalization of
the girl child in
Patel family. Patel seemed to be the product of mail-dominant society who
has succeeded in life without taking help from others. He imposes
patriarchal ideology on his children often deciding what Chandan must not
to do and Tara must to do. In scold in chandan for helping his mother in
knitting and in refusing Tara as heir to grandfather’s property Patel seems
to strengthen assumptions of the male dominant society. Tara must fit in
the social structure for her survival and must passively receive what others
give her. The irony of her tragic existence lies in: ‘she is an object like other
objects in a cosmos, whose orbits are determined by those around”. And
she lives in an empty world where there are: “No shooting stars to make
wishes on.”
Tara lives in a sexiest society which separates here even more from her
brother Chandan. Despite the fact that Tara and chandan were conjoined
twins, more similar than dissimilar, contrastive social reception which they
get on the biases of their sex increases tension in the play. It is than the
politics of difference which torches Tara and reduces her to be an
unwanted thing in Patel family. Her health intellectual power, career, status
as heir, even her welfare is ignored. Patel does not bother whether Tara
takes milk regularly or not, whether she has put on weight or not. Roopa
once informs Tara about the old practice among Patel’s to drawn the
unwanted babies in milk. Now the replacement for the old practice of
drawing the unwanted girl babies is turning a blind eye to them and thus
rendering them loveless and lifeless. Tara always wins at playing cards and
she has potentials to be a great business woman, but her father fails to
recognize potentials within Tara. However, Patel’s failure is not that of an
individual alone, but metaphorically it is of society as well. The
grandfather’s property would go to Chandan and Tara would not get
anything because society cares for sons and grandsons too often at the cost
of daughters and granddaughters. Patel’s quarrel with Bharati over the
issue of donating kidney to Tara reveals her overbearing attitude.
Rosemarie Tong observes:
Sometimes women play their roles not so much because they want to, as
because they have to in order to survive economically and/or
psychologically. Virtually all women engage in the feminine role playing,
Bharati who engages herself in feminine role playing and follows the sexiest
society she lives in is also a tragic protagonist in the play. Earlier she had
done what her father had told her to do and now she struggles to follow
her husband. But gradually she feels the burden of what she had done
earlier and what she is doing now. She tries to defy the phallocentric
pattern and is left at the mercy of a psychiatrist. Caxias notes: “Either the
woman is passive; or she does not exist. What is left is unthinkable
unthought-of of.”
Once she had prepared herself for unethical surgery of conjoined twins in
which injustice was done to Train order to ensure the physical strength of
Chandan. Bharari’s struggles to lesson Tara’s emotional burden seem to be
compensatory. In fact Bharati’s efforts to flatter Roopa with Charlie bottles,
lipsticks and magazines so that the latter may come to play with Tara seem
to work as compensations for injustice done to Tara. Bharati mollycoddles
Tara which becomes intolerable for Patel:
Yes! Look at the way you treat Tara. As if she is made of glass. You coddle
her, you pet her, and you spoiled her.
The mention of Lady of Shallot is very suggestive in the ply. It certain
respect Bharati is no less tragic figure than Tara; she has suffered in life, has
come across harsh realities of life and knees well that Tara’s future will be
even worse. “It’s all write while she s young. It’s all very quiet and
comfortable when she makes witty remarks. But let her grow up. Yes
Chandan. The worlds will tolerate you. The world will accept you but not
her! Parental hypocrisy has been exposed in the play especially through
the character of Patel who cares more for Chandan than Tara and therefore
he does not like his son Chandan getting involved in mother’s knitting.
It is an irony that confidence of the daughters like Tara passes unnoticed in
the sexiest society. Thus Mahesh Dattani’s Tara is indeed a thought
provoking play and its chief protagonist Tara interests us both for her
survival instinct. Indeed she has developed many physical complications,
has undergone surgical operations, yet she maintains courage to fight her
own diseases and those of society as well.
What provides the elements of tragedy in the play
TARA by mahesh dattani?
Tara ia through out a tragic play and its difficult to point out only few points
for its tragedy, but even then i would say that besides Tara and Chandan's
physical and mental condition, though they r mentally sound, Bharti is more
tragic in comparison to tara and chandan, her demented behaviour, her
demonstration of so much affection to tara is just a convincing attempt.
Bharti has been feeling guilty for her partiality towards Chandan from the
time of their operation in Victoria hospital in Bombay where she and her
father favoured the saperation of these Siamese twins and giving the kidney
to chandan while it had its major blood supply from tara/s body. And that's
why her statement like " love can make up for a lot' and her turning the
children against Mr. Patel strike much as they have the inner sense of guilty
and overloaded feelings. Besides Mr. Patel, though never appeared in
despair, always thought of his children but deep inside he was stung, Dan is
also trying to recover from the tragedy of being Siamese twins and loss of
tara just by writing he revives tara, his own part..............
