Mahesh Dattani: Invisible Issues

Mahesh Dattani has his own theatre company in Bangalore, called Playpen. His plays Where There’s A Will, Dance Like A Man, Bravely Fought The Queen, Final Solutions, and Tara have been produced in Bangalore, Bombay, and Delhi. Dattani recently co-directed Bravely Fought the Queen with Michael Walling for Border Crossings in London, as well as playing the title role in Terence McNally’s A Perfect Ganesh for the Artists Repertory Theater in Portland, Oregon. Dattani is currently at work on a radio play for BBC Radio 4, and is collaborating with dancer Jonathan Hollander and a composer from Finland on a piece for The Battery Dance Company which will premiere in New York City in 1988. This interview was conducted by Erin B. Mee at The Bookery in Bangalore on August 27, 1996.

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It seems to me that you’re one of very few—possibly the only—playwright in India writing serious plays in English.

I wouldn’t say the only one, but I would say that I have been the most successful for various reasons: I have my own theatre company [Playpen], and I have a theatre background. I’m not writing because I’m a writer [of literature], I’m writing because I have a theatre background.

Most of your plays are family dramas dealing with very serious urban issues. Can you tell me a bit about your choice of subject matter?

I think the old cliché about writing what you know best holds good for any work or for any art (drama or literature). I think one has to be true to one’s own environment. Even if I attempted writing a play about the angst of rural Indian society, it wouldn’t ring true, it would be an outsider’s view—I could only hope to evoke sympathy, but never to really be a part of that unless I spend a lot of time there. I think there are enough issues and challenges in urban Indian society (the milieu I am a part of) and these automatically form the content of my work.

Nitin in Bravely Fought The Queen is the first homosexual character I’ve encountered in any modern Indian play.

I would say the only time a homosexual character has been treated with sympathy. There have been caricatures. If we look at the statistics of a gay population in any given society, even if you look at it as a conservative five per cent (people put it at ten, but even if you take five per cent), with a population of 850 million we’re talking about almost 50 million people, and I think it’s a real invisible issue. Almost all gay people are married in the conventional sense, so I think there are invisible issues which need to be brought out and addressed. In this case, it wasn’t such a conscious attempt to say “look, here is an invisible issue, let’s talk about it,” I think it’s there, and since it is very much a part of our society, very much a part of my society, it happens to be there.

What was the response?

Varied. Very varied. Some people said brilliant, I’m glad we’re talking about this at last—the liberal section of our society—and then I got several letters saying look, we come to the theatre as part of a family, we come with our children and our spouses, and we don’t want issues which are very embarrassing to talk about.

Meaning that their children had asked them questions?

Probably, yes, I’m not too sure. But from the way the letter was worded it was embarrassing even for that person to say don’t talk about homosexuality—the word “homosexuality” was never mentioned. So I’m glad I did it, and in fact the new play I’m writing now, which is a radio play for BBC, is on arranged marriages, and I have interior monologues where the guy is already arranging his life with his male lover—how he can do so with...