Happy Hypocrisy in Mahesh Dattani's Do the Needful: A Search for Potential Threat to Marriage

Abstract

The plays of Mahesh Dattani usually form a close bilateral or trigonal reality. Dattani's plays are about people who are somehow marginalised in our binaristic society. An‘other' confined reality constitutes his fictional world. It is the world of the homosexuals², bisexuals, transgendered, eunuch and the new women of India. Dattani sees these socially ostracised classes as a potential threat to our modern India as far as we are unwilling to accept them as a reality. I have used the word ‘society' not only as a hierarchical stagnant platform the nation/state but also as a living organism which, when needed, enlarges its periphery to accommodate the need of the each individual creature for the general wellbeing of the whole system. Then, Dattani happens to be a microscope to detect out the potential dangers of the society that may prove fatal to the postcolonial progressive India. Dattani believes that our seemingly untroubled society in its most spheres is in a forceful harmony. In most of the cases peoples are bound to succumb to existing social systems like patriarchy, economic inequality, religious fundamentalism and political fanaticism etc. From these floating issues, Dattani shifts his locale to a zone so far untrodden by any Indian creative artist especially the dramatist. It is the community of the LGBT (Lesbian Gay Bi-sexual Transgendered)- their pleasure and pain, satisfaction and agony, independence and subjugation.