Master playwright
Nonika Singh

Celebrated playwright Mahesh Dattani’s affable gentle demeanour takes one by surprise, especially, if you have watched his plays. For doesn’t his pen singe and sear, laying bare the hidden underbelly of society. But then the most visible playwright of Indian English theatre loves to rake up complicated issues.

Forever scratching beneath the surface, he digs up concerns that the middle class lives with but hasn’t come to terms with. From incest to communal tension to homosexuality, he has handled it all. But why dig up contentious issues. "In acceptance, he believes, "lies the catharsis and the solution". Moreover, he quips, "Isn’t it important to pursue truth for ultimately all art is but a quest for truth".

Make no mistake, he nurses no fallacy about the art of play writing, which he insists shouldn’t aspire to be literature. "Drama is an integral part of performing art and must live on stage." So, never mind that his much-acclaimed play Final Solutions is being taught in universities and he has the singular honour of being the first playwright in English to be awarded the prestigious Sahitya Akademi Award. Or that compilation of his dramas Collected Plays has been published by Penguin.

Even today, each time he sits down to write a play is: Will someone stage it? Of course, dear friend and admirer, the famous and talented theatre person Lillete Dubey is only too willing to do so. He says, "Ours is a relationship of least resistance." Together they have not only clicked but created history of sorts and plays like Dance Like a Man that challenges stereotype notions about male dancers has clocked over 350 shows. However, it was advertising and theatre personality Alyque Padamsee who first noticed his writing and hailed him as the most serious contemporary playwright.

Interestingly, Dattani began writing more out of expediency than any conscious desire to establish himself as the first original playwright of Indian English. As a theatre person, he was conscious of the acute paucity of scripts in Indian English theatre. Today, the pioneer of Indian English playwriting confesses that there is a lot of talent but Indian English playwriting is still in its infancy, precisely because Indian English itself is relatively a new language.

Does writing in English make his job easier, for isn’t he catering to an educated — hence an already initiated audience? He retorts, "For that matter, all of theatre audience is "converted" and enlightened. Theatre isn’t a mass consumption product." Anyway, his plays are not about masses, albeit deal with urban contemporary reality with issues and people who are actually on the periphery. He is often accused of putting the marginal on centre stage. "And in this accusation", he smiles, "lies the compliment."

Playwriting, he agrees, is by all means a craft, contained in a certain frame. Busy creating a play out of Paulo Coleho’s Alchemist, adaptations, he feels, are an exciting challenge too. He is all for innovative adaptations of Shakespeare’s timeless classics.

However, Theatre of the Absurd, the kind Samuel Beckett is associated with, leaves him cold. Fascinated and intrigued by the drama of life, he is keen on chronicling what he observes. Only he is able to see what doesn’t meet everybody’s eye. Or perhaps others are too timid to notice it. But his pen has the gumption to tell it the way it is, and the way we Indians speak English with the right colloquial touches. Thus, he gives Indian English (theatre) its unique Indianness.

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