Many lives of queer performance in India: a deliberation with Mahesh Dattani

Abstract

Mahesh Dattani took his first steps around the fire of Indian theatre in 1988 with the play Where There’s a Will. It became quite clear from the start that a new phase of Indian theatre had begun, with Indian-English as its lingua franca. This change was not only linguistic: Dattani’s thea- tre engaged with themes that were considered taboo, or too mature, for Indian audiences, and were thus often brushed under the carpet. Dattani’s celestial dance to amplify unheard voices from the margins of society – conjoined Siamese twins in Tara (1995), the third sex in Seven Steps Around the Fire (1998) – continued ever since, leaving the heteronormative Indian theatre reeling for breath. In 1998, Sahitya Akademi, India’s National Academy of Letters, recognized his con- tribution with the Sahitya Akademi award, making him the first playwright in English to receive the prestigious literary honor.19 In this article, which is presented in the form of a deliberation, I nudge Dattani to reflect on his theatre and to contem- plate what is queer about queer performance. I call it a deliberation rather than an interview because of the insightful and surreal quality of these reminis- cences. His reflections on queerness within the context of South Asia challenge the possibility of one absolute queer discourse. Overall, they show that the socio-linguistic conditions and theatrical traditions of India appropriate the universal con- struct of queer performance, adapting it for South Asia in general and to India in particular