Page 235 - DENG503_INDIAN_WRITINGS_IN_LITERATURE

Unit 28: Mahesh Dattani: Final Solution—Introduction to the Text

with powerful feelings of resentment, humiliation and hatred. Bobby's entire effort to bring him Notes
out of his past will fail if he slips back into those feelings. Whatever progress has been made so far
in the action of the play has been through reason and argument. Bobby's act is ostensibly
sacrilegious, yet it is profoundly and luminously spiritual too. He reaches out with his whole
being to a Hindu embodiment of Godhead and leaves his everlasting touch on God's body. The
Hindu God does not mind a Muslim's touch, he proclaims. The Chorus supports his act with its
"[we] are not idol breakers". Indeed, there is a profound and innocent reverence in his gesture. He
has communicated what no argument in language could. It is a strange replay of what Krishna
does to Arjuna in the Mahabharata (and the battle lines are not drawn, but to be erased). When
language falters and reason fails, communication finds deeper resources in order to happen. Sheer
gesture might be such a resource: the body, the common ground of humanity, can discover itself
as a treasure, as it does in Bobby's case. To make the night memorable for everyone.
Self -Assessment
1. Fill in the blanks:
(i) Mahesh Dattani is the First Playwright in English to be awarded the ............... .
(ii) Dattani’s debut film was ............... .
(iii) Final solutions was first performed in ............... .
(iv) Ramnik Gandhi opens the door to let in Javed and ............... .
28.2 Summary

• Mahesh Dattani was born in Bangalore. He went to Baldwin Boys High School and then
went on to join St. Joseph's College, Bangalore. Mahesh is a graduate in History, Economics
and Political Science. He is a post graduate in Marketing and Advertising Management.
Mahesh Dattani, prior to his stint with the world of theater, used to work as a copywriter in
an advertising firm. In 1986, he wrote his first full-length play, Where There's a Will, and
from 1995, he has been working full-time in theatre. He has also worked with his father in
the family business.
• Prior to his stint with the world of theater Mahesh used to work as a copywriter in an
advertising firm. He has also worked with his father in the family business. In 1984 he
founded his playgroup 'Playpen' and in 1986 he wrote his first play.
• Besides being a playwright and a director, Mahesh Dattani adorns the mantle of a teacher
with equal ease. He teaches theater courses at the summer session programmes of the Portland
University, Oregon, USA. He also imparts training in the field of acting, directing and play
writing at his own theater studio in Bangalore.
• Mahesh Dattani's Final Solutions was first performed on 10 July 1993 against the backdrop
of demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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

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