Page 239 - DENG503_INDIAN_WRITINGS_IN_LITERATURE

Unit 29: Mahesh Dattani: Final Solution—Detailed Study

me is a method of reflection, understanding and debating the contemporary socio-political issues Notes
through the process of the play. We hope the play will also have a lasting impact on the audience.

29.2 Critical Appreciation

India gained Independence, people were jubilant; however, the moment of jubilation was associated
with a horrible and ghastly experience of bloodshed that history has rarely witnessed. People,
who had been living together for centuries, became blood thirsty and bitter enemies of one another,
in the name of religion. The barbaric cruelty against the fellow human beings arouse communal
sentiments, the venom of which is still not completely washed. Many people were rendered
homeless, children became orphans, people lost their loved ones and there appeared a horrible
number of raped and widowed women:
"Millions of people had to flee leaving everything behind, Muslim from India and Hindus and
Sikhs from Pakistan. Two great rivers of humanity flowing in opposite direction along the pitifully
inadequate roads and railways. Jamming and clashing, colliding head on leaving their dead and
dying littering the landscape."
The shocking events and the miseries of the migrants did not end here. The sad and dismal memories
of their past haunted them. Instead of fraternity, communal hatred and bias lurked in their minds.
India's secularism, could not wash this hatred, anguish and insecurity. Many strange issues confronted
the country - looking after the newly acquired land, rehabilitation of the refugees, decline in political
and human values, assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, rise of religionalism and the linguistic problems
threatened and challenged the national unity and integrity. Asha Kuthari Chaudhuri writes:
"For the Indian, the most important battle for the establishment of a distinctive identity within a
territorial location lay in the partitioning of India. National identities were conceived and took
shape in accordance with the ideologues that formulated these on the basis of religions (and later,
linguistic, ethnic, caste), identities. The gruesome rioting and communal/religious disharmony
that took seed in 1947 has continued to throw up countless such incidents in independent to
secular India. Such incidents and communal violence in India between Hindus and Muslims was
underscored emphatically by the brutal bloodshed in Gujarat in 2002. These were some of the
issues that Dattani had actually dramatized in the form of Final Solutions earlier, dealing with the
recurring rhetoric of hatred, aggression, the monetary and political exploitation of communal
riots, in chauvinism and parochial mindset of the fundamentalists, in the context of the India of
the 1940s interspersed with the contemporary India. In confronting and negotiating responses to
the post-Babri Masjid demolition and the post Godhra Hindu Muslim communal violence in
Gujarat, through varied discursive frames of history and theatre, Dattani subsequently explored
issues of identity, memory, suffering and loss… within the larger political context through the
various productions of this play (Final Solutions)."

Mahesh Dattani won the Sahitya Akademi award for Final Solutions in 1998. The theme
of the play is to highlight human weaknesses, selfishness, avarice and opportunism.
Woven into the play are the issues of class and communities and the clashes between
traditional and modern life style and value systems. The problem of minorities is not
confined to only Hindus and Muslims, it eats the peace of any minority community
among the majority.

Final Solutions has taken the issues of the majority communities in different contexts and situations.
It talks of the problems of cultural hegemony, how Hindus had to suffer at the hands of Muslim

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