MEG-7 Block-8 Mahesh Dattani: Tara
MEG-7 Block-8 Mahesh Dattani: Tara
Unit-1 An Overview of Indian English Drama
http://egyankosh.ac.in/bitstream/123456789/22864/1/Unit-1.pdf
CHALLENGES FACED BY THE INDIAN ENGLISH DRAMATIST
So little incentive monetarily, there is a dearth of good dramatists in India, and English is no exception.
Indian English playwright has to write dialogues in a language that his characters may not speak all the time or even in the specific circumstances that the playwright has created.
English is seen as the language of the elite, Indian English sponsors might only put up money for what they see as entertainment for the elite.
lack of trained actors in English
yet no accepted Indian English for the writers to use confidently and consistently.
Indian English novelist lives and writes in the same circumstances and yet manages to write quite well and successfully.The novel is published and read individually by readers. How credible would it be for a normal Indian character to speak in English to the maid etc.
Theatre costs money and private patrons like industrial houses have to be wooed to sponsor shows by theatre groups who do not have official patronage.
SOLUTIONS -
To build an Indian theatre is to translate plays from various Indian languages into each other, English is no exception to this rule for survival and construction.
A playwright must take risks but cannot take as many as the novelist. A novelist can frame a character, can write around the character, make comments on and explain the character to the reader. A playwright cannot do this but has to convey everything through the spoken dialogue and then depend on the understanding and competence of the director, actor and audience. The playwright has to make the language seem natural to the character portrayed. The character cannot be seen to be trying to speak in a language not his or her own.
Use of regional dialect english
HISTORY OF INDIAN ENGLISH DRAMA
Pre-Independence
Perhaps the earliest Indian English play was written in 1831, when Krishna Mohan Banerji wrote The Persecuted or Dramatic Scenes illustrative of the present state of - Hindoo Society in Calcutta.
RFB - Too many plays and playwrights
Post-Independence Indian English Drama
It is not as if things changed a great deal after independence. While the first five-year plan did give conscious thought to the performing arts. The few Indian English dramatists who achieved some success were actually staged abroad. The first major Indian English dramatist after independence was Asif Cummbhoy who wrote more than thirty plays.
RFB - Too many plays and playwrights
Unit-2 A Preview of Dattani’s Dramatic World
http://egyankosh.ac.in/bitstream/123456789/22865/1/Unit-2.pdf
Dattani’s works -Final Solutions and Other Plays contains four plays - Where There's a Will, Dance Like a Man, Bravely Fought The Queen, and Final Solutions. Recently his plays have been collected in a single volume called Collected Plays published by Penguin.
Plots of all the Plays are explained - RFB
Themes in his Plays -
Homosexuality
Patriarchy
Gender identity
Revelation of Past
hollowness of middle-class lives
His characters are displaced, disenchanted. They are dangerously normal, average, peo~le who are in search of happiness, and fulfilment. They need love and affection; they need to feel sexually fulfilled.
Family
TECHNIQUES AND LANGUAGE
While he writes about everyday life, he does not attempt an impossible realism. He in fact revels in the possibilities that the stage offers him.
Rapid and Swift transition
Thoughtful process of picking right actors for the parts
experiments with symbolism
Humor
Use of Language - Dattani's characters speak the kind of English that most middle class Indians do
Unit-3 Reading Tara
http://egyankosh.ac.in/bitstream/123456789/22866/1/Unit-3.pdf
Stage directions are indications of the intentions of the playwright. A novelist can go on and on about character and mood and location and motivation. A playwright has to show all this through dialogues and character interaction.
Act I and II story explained - RFB
Themes-
gender identity,
gender hierarchy,
patriarchy
injustices done to men.
the complications of family life,
the facade of middle class morality and
commitment to family values.
Love itself is an instrument, not an end or a state of being.
disability and its consequences
Bharati's excessive love for Tara, her concern for her future, her empathy and sympathy for her, her desire to donate her own kidney to Tara when there is another donor, her desire for Tara's exclusive love - everything is motivated by the act of having decided to deny her one leg. the knowledge of having committed a wrong that leads to her mental breakdown and the deterioration of her relationship with her husband.
Mr. Patel too makes plans only for Chandan's education and future career.
This is also a play about the injustices done to men. The construction of gender,.the hierarchisation, does as much harm to (sensitive) men as to women. The rnen in the play, here L mean Dan and Patel (Dan more than Patel): carry as much of an unfair burden as ihe women. Patei is complicit in the working of patriarchy but then so is Bharati. But, while Bharatl's pain & guilt have changed her views, Patei continues to subscribe to patriarchal views.
Patel had kept quiet because of Bharati's father's social status, as also because he had no clear-cut view to the contrary. His family has cut them off because of their inter-caste, inter-regional marriage. Hence, they are dependent on Bharati's father for both monetary and moral support. This in turn has led to a power structure in the family where Bharati and her father take the important decisions. Thus we see the couple bickering after the death of Bharati's father and after Bhawti has felt the full force of her guilt in taking the decision about Tara. Having sacrificed a leg, Bharati has had to struggle to construct her maternal love and concern for her daughter, to assert her moral superiority over her husband, to carve out her space in the family. Her final act of donating her kidney to Twcr is an act of expiation
Dattani makes it impossible for you to ascribe normality as a positive attribute to Roopa. Her minor foray into sexual exploration with Chandan is played for laughs and otherwise she is portrayed as a mean and slightly corrupt figure, the kind who will grow up to constitute the ever ' interfering, ever watching ('ogling') society. She exploits Bharati's need while 3 2 laughing at her.
At the surface level, the play seems to be about this in the beginn!ng. The impact of the children's disability on the family and their own lives seems to be at the heart of the play. The problems others have accepting them for what they are - fun-loving, wisecracking growing children - and hence their struggle for acceptance and the levels of frustration that this brings on seems to be part of the central action of the play. The strain on the parents and die {effect this has on their marriage seems to complete the picture.
Unit-4 Appreciating Tara
http://egyankosh.ac.in/bitstream/123456789/22867/1/Unit-4.pdf
TECHNIQUES -
- the division of the stage into various levels
Dan's level is described as the only realistic and is furnished to represent a London bedsitter. What we get 10 see at the other two levels is imagined (Dr. Thakkar's level or remembered, (the Patel household). is Dan's play and we see it from his point of view.
Narrator as Character
Dan is not only the narrator. He is also a character in the play. He is not looking back but participating in the action
Breaking Unities
Dattani breaks the unity of place. He disregards the other two unities as well - the unity of time and the unity of action. He cuts between different times and different actions. And yet there is a strong sense of unity in his play, the action moves inexorably towards the crisis, the ultimate revelation. All the levels come together in a crescendo towards the end, when you see and hear all the characters that have been on stage. While Patel makes his revelation, Dr. Thakkar moves to his triumphant conclusion, Roopa plays out her spite, Bharati shows us her over-compensatory love for Tara, and Dan expresses his revulsion. Everything comes together as the play comes to an end.
Lighting and Music
Dattani moves from one level to another with lightning speed using (yes!) lighting, and music.
Tara is made to expose her artificial leg to the three girls in her locality. She enters the house and after a little while comments on the music, listening to it with pleasure. She then says, "Beethoven must have been a passionate man." When she is told that it is Brahms' first concerto that they are listening to, she says, "Stop it. Turn it off. I thought it was Beethoven." After a while, after she has revealed to Chandan what had transpired outside and told him that one day she would tell those girls "exactly how frightful they look", she says, "Oh, play the music real loud. Beethoven was never as good as this." Beethoven started going deaf in his twenties, and wrote some of his greatest music when he was completely deaf. Tura, in her moment of deep hurt and resentment caused by the 'normal' world, wants to hear only Beethoven. She identifies herself with the musician with a disability, the musician who established his greatness in spite of being unable to hear his own creations.
the social environment and geographical locale.
This is a play set in Mumbai and London with a past (that is referred to) in Bangalore. The multicultural nature of Indian cities and especially Mumbai is easily worked into the play with the names of people
Names -
Chandan also stands for the coveted sandalwood. This resonates with his wooden leg, which is
hardly an object of desire in the play. Tara means star and Twinkling Tara has hardly
been treated as the star of anyone's eyes.
Introduction to movies -
Fatal Attraction, "Sophie's Choice", "Twins", and "Children of Lesser God," etc
LANGUAGE -
If Dattani had to use such a tag question ('don't we?'), he would have had his character say "isn't it?" for that is what is heard more often in Indian English. Dattani doesn't just make points with his use of English, he has moved far enough even to make points with his use of Kannada in Tara.
Making fun of Roopa’s English
This is a family formed by an interstate marriage, the mother is Kannadiga and the father Gujarati. The children have obviously been to public schools where the medium of education and, more and more, the medium of all interactions is English. The medium of communication in such a family would be English.
Roopa's language already; Dr. Thakkar's is the formal public speech English, the English of a scientist speaking to ordinary viewers. Chandan plays with the language more than the others (after all he is an aspiring writer); Tara's English is that of the educated young people's (with its quota of slang); the parents speak a more studied English but even here Bharati is more apt to use Indian words.
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