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| Dan in his apartment in London Source: Tara- A scene from Stealers Production in 1997 |
Mahesh Dattani in his play Tara portrays the existing norms of patriarchy that prevail in the contemporary society. The play is about two conjoined (Siamese) twins, Tara and Chandan (Dan), who were separated when they were months old. Their separation involved a male-chauvinistic conspiracy which favoured the boy in risking a natural leg, even when it belonged to the girl. The girl was given a prosthetic leg, after which she became crippled, weak and died. The idea of favouring the boy over girl and considering them subordinate is not any unusual norm even today. In the play, one can observe Patel (Tara’s father) inkling about taking measures to make up a successful career for Chandan and not allowing him to help his mother in things like knitting which may turn him into a “sissy” and sensitive boy. Dattani tries to show how the male-gender is firmly welded as a lucrative identity and how people cling on to the myths of regarding femininity as a passive gender.
Throughout the play, there are several breaks in the
action and the narration moves to and fro from London to India. The London part
of the breakthrough is important in terms of Dan’s (Chandan) emotional breakdown
and his guilt over Tara’s inability to get a life of her own only because she
was a girl. Dan is in retrospective mode and is speculating the facts by
hosting an interview with Dr. Thakkar, the surgeon who supervised over the
surgery of the separation of the twins. The fact that Gujrat has a tradition of
drowning baby girls in milk (the practice is called, “Doodh Peeti’) has been shown
as a harsh reality which Tara’s mother didn’t want her daughter to know about. But
why?
In the entire course of the play, the bone of
contention is may surely seem to be about that “Why Chandan can’t knit and why Tara
can’t go to office?”
Family conflicts also play a major role, there’s a unstable relationship between Bharati and Patel. In Tara-A reading:
There is the pressure of past here as well as an unseen (dead), Bharati's father who seems to have played a role in their deteriorating relationship. The relationship between siblings is also important and you wonder what effect the turf battle between their parents (with them as -prizes to be won) will have on them.
Should our decisions be
affected by the norms of the society? Doesn’t the play signify that even
science is masculine and is bound to the decisions of ‘people’ who poison the
society for the hold of power? Isn’t it the responsibility of science that
regards women as the birth giver of all human species to treat her with upright
equity?
The play also shows us a mean, corrupt and exploitative teen figure, Roopa. she discreetly befriends the twins and later gossips about them. Her servility is only for the matter of fun and enjoyment. In the end of the play, Roopa flouts the twins as “We don’t need freaks!” Her character is symbolic of how the society receives ‘abnormal’ people and that they belong to an unwanted community.
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| Tara and Chandan Source: Tara- A scene from Stealers Production in 1997 |
Both Tara and Chandan are normal, optimistic, comic and closely indulged siblings who love each other. There is no point of considering a situation where Chandan in his whole senses or sounds as a teen would have been ready to accept a leg which is meant to be Tara’s. This reminds me of Anabaptist movement of the 16th century Europe who didn’t believe in infant baptism and thought a person should be baptized only after the whole acknowledgement of faith and christianity, which is certainly not possible for infants and hence infant baptism should be considered illegitimate. Should Chandan have been given Tara’s leg without his own consultation and asking whether he wants it or not? Was Chandan’s identity likewise suppressed as Tara’s? The bond between the twins was all made up of love and a healthy sibling life; throwing puns at each other, fighting and taking each other’s side in times of conflict.
Tara is not unaware of the contempt and the minor treatment that she faces from her father and says-
They (her father and Chandan) are going to go hunting while the women are looking after the cave.
Tara’s grandfather left all the property for Chandan without thinking about the financial support she might need in future. The play gives necessary flagships to the concerns of revelation of the suppressed past, societal deconstruction and patriarchy. The play mentions how the world can tolerate and accept a man but not a -woman amidst the societal norms. The whole plot resulted in Tara’s deformity not only in physical sense but also in her conceptual identity. The play represents patriarchy under the guise of science and openly disregards female identity.
