Thirst for Women’s Identity in Mahesh Dattani’s Tara

Abstract

Mahesh Dattani is one of the most leading contemporary playwrights in Indian writing in English. Dattani creates a real world Indian society, infamous for bringing atrocities against its female members and also introduce a dream world at the end of the play when Tara and Dan are seen hugging each other in some other place. A perfect combination of the real world and the dream world in Tara helps the dramatist pave a new way for projecting his views on gender discrimination. A patriarchal society is perfectly presented in Tara where the important family decisions are taken by its male members. In a patriarchal society, a woman’s identity is defined by others in term of her relationship with man. Patel, the representative of patriarchal authority in the play, clearly differentiates the role of his son from that of his daughter. Certain gendered roles are accepted in the society as natural and hardly does anyone bother to go beyond those accepted norms. This proposed paper aims at how women are dominated and looked down upon by the patriarchal society.