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Unit 29: Mahesh Dattani: Final Solution—Detailed Study

They hire him! They hire such people and… those parties. They hire him! That is how he makes Notes
a living. They bring him and many more to the city to create riots. To… to throw the first stone".
They too, like others long for love and care. Javed loves his sister Tasneem very much. And he
does not want Smita to come in the way of her love for Bobby. "To me, my sister's happiness
means more than anything else". K. Satchinand comments on the problems of communalism.
"Communalism being the worst form of materialism divorced from being anything that is sacred
and oriented towards worldly wealth and power, can truly be combated by a higher form of the
sacred that combines the secular ideal of human equality, democratic awareness, identification
with the suffering alleviation of by poverty to resistance to a deep inner inquiry and belief in the
holiness of all forms of life, those who turn religion as mean to attain state, power and world
status are indeed the most irreligious of all, for they profane the most hollowed on usurp even the
last refuge of the spirit from a world where the best lack all the conviction and the worst are full
of passionate intensity by joining the ignorant armies that class might".
Dattani very successfully seeks to dismantle this assumption and to recover and reclaim the live
of the people on the margins. Laying his hopes on the youth like Smita and Babban, Dattani finds
the Final Solutions with them only. This play is a critique of violence. It is not overtly didactic but
does make a forceful appeal for love and broader understanding, transcending the divides has
rightly proved that the demons of communal hatred may not be out on the street, out they may
be lurking inside us. They need to be exorcised.
Self -Assessment
1. Fill in the blanks:
(i) Dattani started working in theatre from ............... .
(ii) Babban is a moderate while Javed is an ............... .
(iii) The Final Solutions is the story of a young baffled boy ............... .
(iv) Bobby has changed his name from ................ .

29.3 Summary

• Mahesh Dattani is considered as one of the best Indian playwrights and he writes his pieces
in English. He is an actor, playwright and director.
• After his first play, Mahesh Dattani began to concentrate on his writing and wrote more
dramas like Final Solutions, Night Queen, Dance Like a Man, Tara, and Thirty Days. From
1995, he started working exclusively in theatre.
• "Final Solutions" has a powerful contemporary resonance an it addresses as issue of utmost
concern to our society, i.e. the issue of communalism. The play presents different shades of
the communalist attitude prevalent among Hindus and Muslims in its attempt to underline
the stereotypes and clichés influencing the collective sensibility of one community against
another.
• The play moves from the partition to the present day communal riots. It probes into the
religious bigotry by examining the attitudes of three generations of a middle-class Gujrati
business family, Hardika, the grandmother, is obsessed with her father's murder during the
partition turmoil and the betrayal by a Muslim friend, Zarine. Her son, Ramnik Gandhi, is
haunted by the knowledge his fortunes were founded on a shop of Zarine's father, which
was burnt down by his kinsmen.
• 'Final Solutions' touches us, and the bitter realities of our lives so closely that it becomes a
difficult play to handle for the Indian Director. The past begins to determine the outlook of
the present and thus the earlier contradictions re-emerge.

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