Of Race/Religion, Nation and Violence: Incident at Vichy and Final Solutions

Abstract

Arthur Miller's Incident at Vichy (1964) and Indian English playwright Mahesh Dattani's Final Solutions (1992) invite comparison in that they each deal with a historic moment that demonstrates contextually how violence can be common to racism, (organized) religion, and national imagining. While Miller's play externalizes human cruelty by locating it in the Nazi experience, Dattani's — centred around the recent Hindutva movement in India — clearly evokes the image of the Holocaust, without equating it with Nazism, though. Yet similarities between the plays abound — suspect secularity of the nation-state, insecurities around one's racial/ethnic/religious identity, denial of responsibility, and the eventual need for human communication. The endings of both plays posit a certain notion of justice, but without clarifying whether it can be realized through 'the true humanly valuable concepts' of decency and love or whether it functions more as 'a claim made by the oppressed'. This tone of self-criticality underscores the persistent need for restraint in the exercise of power.