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