Page 250 - DENG503_INDIAN_WRITINGS_IN_LITERATURE

Indian Writings in Literature

Notes situations of violence which have been enacted before and are all to frightening fanubor. History
is also evoked and used by almost every character on stage as a justification/rationale/excuse for
each fresh out break of violence. This justification may be overt by political overt by personal or
thinly disguised between the two.
Dattani's characters also each have their own justification their own rationale for their actions.
Daksha (now the grandmother) hates Muslims because her father was killed a communal riot and
because her overtones of friendship to Zarine a young Muslim girl were rejected after other
communal riots that razed Zarine's father's shop, and which incidentally was bought by Daksha's
father-in-law. Javed, the young Muslim fundamentalist and member of a gang has long nursed
resentment against the world because of the otherness and the deionization of his community and
religious identity by the dominant community. Ramnik Gandhi, Daksha/Hardika is son is trying
to atone for the sins committed by his father and grandfather and therefore is a conscious secularist.
His wife, Aruna is an ordinary devout Hindu Woman/Wife/Mother/Daughter-in-law, implacably
sure of her place in the home, in society. Secure in her unquestioning faith and sense of right and
wrong.
There are also two other characters- Bobby (Babban) and Smita (Ramnik and Aruna's daughter)
who are oppressed by their own sense of history, and seem desperate to escape from its clutches,
to leave behind the baggage of social, religious and communal identities that seem to dog them in
all their relationships and actions. As each character in vokes history as an objective witness to
justify their own sense of oppression and victimization, it is this very sense of an objective past
that Dattani undermines.
As has already been stated, in the act of re-writing her diary Daksha proves that history is
constructed, and that the present is implicated in the ways in which we imagine our past. Reading
from the diary written 40 years ago. Daksha/Hardika tells us abort the riots in which her father
was killed, how and her mother took refuge from the flying stones in the Pooja room, and how her
faith in God represented by the idol of Krishna was suddenly gone never to return. And as
punishment for this loss of faith a stone thrown by the mob smashed all her gramophone records.
Which she loved most. It was Daksha's youth her culture represented through the records of Noor
Jehan. Suraiya and Shamshad Begum that was smashed that night. And as Hardika remember we
realize that 40 years on indeed things have not changed that much as the play has opened in the
midst of another riot, and a curfew is on in the small town of Amargaon where the Gandhi's live.
The set design of the play emphasizes Dattani's contention that the family unit represents society.
The living space of the Gandhi family is shown through a barebones presentation with just wooden
blocks for furniture (Act one). The only detailed sets are the kitchen and Pooja room. This is
significant as really it is lonely through food habits and tattoos that we all draw the lines that
separate us from each other.
There is a close relationship between food habits and religious beliefs and the obvious other men
of different communities is manifested through differences in what/how we and they eat. We also
make sharp distinctions where food and food related utensils etc are concerned. Which perhaps
serve to emphasis reparation in a uniquely distinctive and deferred manner? Taboos are most
clearly expressed in our relatives through these two particularized spaces in Dattani's sets the
room for worship and the space where food is prepared.
The sets also position the family signified by the home in relation to society which is represented
through the Mob/Chows (five men and ten marks on sticks) who more or less encircle the Gandhi
home. The representation of the younger Hardika (Daksha) takes place on another level thus
ensuring in front of us and can not be forgotten. As the play opens and the riot is established the
two young men sought by the mob are sieved as member of the other community'.
'Naturally' this immediately makes them a threat as the aggression of the Mob heightens to a
dangerous pitch. In times of tension even ordinary object take on meaning become symbols of a

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