Looking at Marritocracy from an Other Window: A Reading of Mahesh Dattani's Play Seven Steps around the Fire

Abstract

Marriage has remained a powerful tool by which society maintained and validated a lifestyle based on peaceful and conscientious cohabitation of partners and permanent sexual partnership from time immemorial, but the problem arises when the tough cultural policing of sexuality and sexual practice under the garb of so-called liberalism in modern India valorizes only the hetero-sexual intra-religious marriage (based on reproductibility, preferably son) relegating to the margin or expelling other kind of sexual union. The institution of marriage, thus, in a hetero-patriarchal society, had acted as the foundation stone of the family. The play “Seven Steps Around the Fire” authored by Mahesh Dattani is a fair case study of how the social intolerance works in oppression and extermination of any outsiders to the matrix of monolith of marriage. In course of “uncovering some of the hidden India” (Jeremy Mortimer, “A note”, 4) Mahesh Dattani explores an area outside the ambit of social relation, a periphery in which hijras are pushed into by the highly gendered and sexist society that fails to define them in terms of social relation. However, as Kira Hall observes, “Marginalized both socially and spatially, the hijras have created an elaborate network that spans all of India, establishing a divergent social space that both parallels and opposes organizations of gender in the dichotomous system that excludes them” (Hall, 429).