Gender Discrimination in Mahesh Dattani’s Tara: A Critical Analysis

Abstract

Mahesh Dattani is a distinguished contemporary Indian playwright in English who works as a writer, stage and film director, actor, and theatrical personality. His plays are on the issues that arise in Indian contexts. He writes about those who are on the margins of society, such as minorities, women, gays, and transsexuals. The purpose of my paper is to investigate the female child's trauma in Mahesh Dattani's Tara. The predicament of Tara is akin to those of myriad unfortunate Indian females. In this conservative society, there are numerous obstacles to nurturing a girl child. On the one hand, they discover empowerment through good education, financial success, and individualism in society, yet our culture is unable to decimate long-held biases against them. "The girl child is still an undesirable arrival into an Indian home, even when the family is ostensibly educated and even has exposure to Western ideas," argues Dr. Jyoti Sharma (1). In this play, Tara is the daughter of an educated upper-middle-class family in Bangalore. The play's plot revolves around twins who are born with three legs, with blood circulation to the third leg coming from the newborn girl's torso. Only one of the twins could have two legs, while the other had to make do with one. The unwavering pronouncement to attach the third leg to the boy child's body to complete the child. This decision was not based on the medical ground but due to gender discrimination and injustice towards girl children in our Indian society. Dattani is concerned with gender discrimination and inequality toward girl children. This is done not because the girl is incapable of surviving in the merciless hands of society, but because societal conventions, economic standards, and cultural elements are to blame for this horrific activity. All of these circumstances constitute an ideology in our society in which the girl child must live and die. In this case, a girl's potential is sacrificed on the altar of gender, in which a female's role is also unforgettable and unforgivable, resulting in this unwelcome criterion.