Page 232 - DENG503_INDIAN_WRITINGS_IN_LITERATURE

Indian Writings in Literature

Notes Oregon, USA. He also imparts training in the field of acting, directing and play writing at his own
theater studio in Bangalore.
28.1 Final Solution: Mahesh Dattani

Mahesh Dattani's Final Solutions was first performed on 10 July 1993 against the backdrop of
demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992. It was the time when the spectre of Partition appeared to
have returned, hungering for even more corpses. It seemed to be India's fate to live, if at all, with
a gash in its soul.
Dattani's powerful and subtle play shows the problem of Hindu-Muslim relations as not inherently
insoluble. It suggests that the real problem could well be with the limitations of prevailing discourses
about those relations. Each discourse affords a generalized and one-dimensional view of the
problem and is unable to address its specific complexity. If discursive boundaries could be ignored
in an effort to comprehend the complexity of the problem, solutions might not be really far away.
Reaching beyond politics and the social sciences, the play thus performs the quintessential act of
literature in identifying the problem as simultaneously historical and psychological, cultural and
economic, collective and personal, cognitive and affective. It retrieves repressed histories and
scrutinizes unexamined psychological motivations, makes taste and greed cross paths, notices the
contamination of the religious with the economic (and vice versa), unseparates the collective and
the personal, and affirms -through Bobby's transgressive final act- the power of visceral judgement
and "pure" action.
Significantly, the play's theatrical negotiation of the complexity of its subject is equally complex.
The conventionally linear narrative is overwritten with multiple temporalities and spaces,
represented mainly by a split-level stage and an action that takes place in the 1940s as well as the
1990s. Reading the entry made in her diary nearly four decades ago on 31 March 1948, the old
Hardika mumbles, "Yes, things have not changed that much". Both giving and denying the illusion
of continuity, the multiple temporalities and spaces converge in the character of Daksha/Hardika
and underline the deeply problematic genealogy of subjectivity. In thus locating the problem of
inter-community relations in the genealogies of subjectivity, the play charts the arduous trajectory
of the project of self-understanding before finally affirming the role of subjective agency in history.
The stage is so designed as to give the impression of being "dominated by a horseshoe- or crescent-
shaped ramp". The implied evocation of powerful elemental forces through this particular spatial
arrangement is reinforced by the suggestion of primitive tribal passions as the Mob/Chorus comes
to occupy the ramp. The "crouched" position of the Mob/Chorus has a hint of leonine ferocity
even as its black costumes (specifically explained as not alluding to any religious identity) suggest
obscure ancient passions. The doubling up of the self-same five persons as both the Mob and the
Chorus undoes the convenient distinction between the unthinking mob and the thoughtful
commentator. What further complicates the seemingly marginal role of these faceless people in
history (who yet command political action) is the changeability of their identities. The same five
persons become the Muslim and the Hindu Mob by turns, by holding in front of them the respective
masks of identity. The masks of identity turn out, paradoxically, to be masking deeper identities,
those which a violent politics of identities would gladly inter. When Bobby advances to pick up
the idol of Krishna, the Mob raises the Hindu and the Muslim masks together, affirming a
transcendence of separatist self-identification as well as a deeper convergence of identities.
The shifting of roles between the Mob and the Chorus as also between the Hindu and the Muslim
Mob manages to effectively foreground identity as a fluid strategy -or play- of subject positions. In
fact, Hardika's crisis of identity (symbolized by the split between her past and present selves,
Daksha and Hardika) arises from her failure to negotiate between two opposite subject positions,
each of which is unable to recognize the other. The split comes out simultaneously as both sharp

226 LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY