Fluidity of Gendered Identity in Mahesh Dattani’s Play Tara

Abstract

Mahesh Dattani’s play Tara (1990) is a two-act play. The play is about Tara and Chandan, two Siamese twins who were physically separated as infants. Even after their unjustified and manipulative division, which violates the law of nature, they remain emotionally united. Both of them share similar mental agony, which is delineated by Chandan when he grows to be called Dan. The psyches of both the twins are intertwined throughout the play. On the surface, Tara (1990) is a story about two conjoined twins who are surgically separated yet remain entwined. The personality of each twin is revealed within the context of the twins' unified selves. That is the frame of reference, the axis around which the entire script revolves. It can be interpreted as the twins sharing a single ‘self’ that is split between the masculine and the feminine. Symbolically, this ‘self’ can be taken as a metaphor of gender fluidity. The present paper attempts to study the mingled self of both the twins in terms of fluid identity, which gives another dimension to the problematic of gender discussed in the play. The present paper consults the gender issues from a theoretical perspective. The paper is analytical, descriptive, and theoretical in nature.