Gender and Violence in Mahesh Dattani’s Select Plays

Gender is an aspect of our everyday lives as well as a social, economic and cultural category that subsumes and re-writes the meaning of human sexuality, the fact of being masculine and feminine. The image of woman, her position, power and status in the society as well as in the family is central to the study of literature all over the world. In Indian drama, too, women characters have been portrayed from different perspectives. Violence is a universal phenomenon representing man's aggressiveness, hostilities, conflicts, and brutalities towards the individuals (including the self) and the groups. Suicides, murders, rapes, loot, arson, riots, and genocide are all violent manifestations on individual and group levels. Modern man in the present age of science is equipped with devilish tools of death and destruction. The aspirations and need for a wholesome existence are fraught with man's primitive impulses.  An overview of Dattani's works reveals that gender ambiguity is a recurring theme in his plays.