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Tara — Mahesh DattaniTara — Summary & Analysis

Tara — Summary & Analysis — Notes

Tara by Mahesh Dattani: Summary and Analysis

Playwright: Mahesh Dattani

Genre/Form: Three-act stage play

Curriculum: BA English Honours, Indian English Drama, Contemporary Indian Theatre

About Mahesh Dattani

Mahesh Dattani is one of the most significant contemporary playwrights in Indian English Drama. He was born in Bangalore in August 1958 and completed his schooling at Baldwin High School. He went on to graduate with a degree in History, Economics, and Political Science. He is a celebrated playwright, director, and screenwriter, and holds the distinction of being the first Indian playwright writing in English to receive the Sahitya Akademi Award, which he won in 1998.

Dattani is Bangalore-based and his plays are performed and read across India and internationally. His greatest contribution to Indian English Drama is his representation of real-life social problems. He does not write about abstract ideals or historical figures. He writes about the people in the next room: urban, educated, middle-class Indian families who appear modern on the outside but operate on deeply traditional and patriarchal values on the inside.

His major works include Final Solutions, Dance Like a Man, Bravely Fought the Queen, On a Muggy Night in Mumbai, and Tara. Each of these plays challenges social taboos. Dattani regularly takes on subjects that mainstream Indian society avoids: gender inequality, sexuality, disability, communal violence, and family dysfunction. His plays are known for making audiences uncomfortable in productive and necessary ways.

Dattani's theatre does not offer easy answers or moral lessons. It asks hard questions. Why are men and women treated differently? Why can wealth silence medical ethics? Why does a modern educated family still think like a feudal one? Tara is perhaps his most personal and painful exploration of these questions.

Characters in the Play

Understanding the characters before reading the plot is important because Dattani builds meaning through contrasts and relationships.

  • Tara: The female protagonist and one of the conjoined twins. She is intelligent, sensitive, and capable, and the play shows repeatedly that she has been denied opportunities that should have been hers by right.
  • Chandan (also called Dan): Tara's twin brother. He is the narrator of the play. He tells the story from the present, looking back at the past. He lives in London under a new name and carries the grief and guilt of what happened to his sister.
  • Patel: The father of Tara and Chandan. He is a businessman who represents the patriarchal authority of the household. His treatment of his son and daughter is fundamentally unequal.
  • Bharati: Tara's mother. She appears devoted and loving, but her love for Tara is shaped by guilt. She knows what happened during the surgery and compensates with excessive attention rather than genuine advocacy.
  • Roopa: A girl in the colony where the family lives. She becomes Tara's friend, though the circumstances of that friendship reveal something unsettling about Tara's social isolation.
  • Dr. Thakkar: The surgeon who performed the separation surgery on the twins. He is a key figure in the dark secret that drives the play toward its devastating conclusion.

    • Themes and Analysis

    Gender Discrimination and Son Preference

    The central theme is gender discrimination. Every decision in the play treats the son as more valuable than the daughter. Patel grooms Chandan for business and sets aside money for his education abroad. He excludes Tara from both, even when Chandan himself argues against this. The grandfather goes further still: he uses bribery to give Chandan a physical advantage over Tara at the cost of her health and ultimately her life. Dattani's point is that this kind of discrimination does not require conscious cruelty. It is so deeply embedded in how people think about boys and girls that it happens as a matter of course.

    The Guilty Love of the Mother

    Bharati's relationship with Tara is complex and painful. She showers Tara with attention and protectiveness, but this does not come from a straightforward place of love. The play strongly implies that Bharati knows what happened during the surgery. Her excessive care for Tara is guilt trying to find an outlet. She cannot undo what was done, so she compensates by trying to manage every aspect of Tara's life. But this guilt-driven love does not liberate Tara. It makes Tara emotionally dependent, socially isolated, and unable to build her own life. Dattani shows that well-intentioned but passive women can also cause harm by substituting emotional management for genuine advocacy.

    Wealth and Power as Instruments of Injustice

    The grandfather's role shows how economic and political power work together with patriarchy to produce injustice. He did not use violence or open cruelty. He simply used money and connections to pressure a doctor into giving a medical benefit to a boy rather than a girl. This is the particular kind of injustice Dattani wants us to see: quiet, private, and almost invisible. It operates through systems of privilege that most people never get to challenge. As the channel description puts it, "the power of wealth often joins hands with the power of patriarchy for the subjugation and oppression of women in our society."

    The Hypocrisy of the Educated Middle Class

    The family in this play is not poor, uneducated, or rural. They are urban, educated, and economically comfortable. This is deliberate. Dattani is critiquing a very specific kind of hypocrisy: the belief that modernisation solves gender inequality. The family appears progressive, but every decision they make reinforces traditional patriarchal values. Patel is not a cartoon villain. He is a businessman and a father who provides for his family. But his attitudes toward his children are fundamentally unequal. The appearance of modernity is a mask, not a transformation.

    Memory, Guilt, and the Writer's Task

    The narrative frame of the play is significant. Chandan is trying to write about Tara, but he keeps failing. Writing about her means confronting what happened to her, and what he was complicit in simply by being born male in a family that valued males more. His move to London under a new name is an attempt to escape the past, but it does not work. The story demands to be told. Dattani suggests that memory is a responsibility, not just a burden.

    Literary Devices and Key Terminology

  • Retrospective narration: Chandan tells the story from the present, looking back at the past. This creates dramatic irony because the audience knows from the beginning that Tara dies. Every happy or hopeful scene is shadowed by that knowledge.
  • The conjoined twins as symbol: The physical connection between Tara and Chandan represents the social reality that men and women begin equal and attached. It is human decisions, shaped by patriarchy, that separate them and give one an unfair advantage over the other.
  • The dark secret as structural device: The entire play is structured around the revelation of what happened in the surgery. This technique creates dramatic suspense and also enacts the theme: injustice operates through concealment. When the secret is finally revealed, its impact is devastating precisely because it has been hidden for so long.
  • Domestic space as political site: By setting the play inside a home, Dattani argues that political and social power do not stay in parliament or the marketplace. They enter the bedroom, the kitchen, and the family dinner table.
  • Son preference: The cultural practice of valuing male children more than female children, shown here through education, career, and physical resources.
  • Complicity: Bharati knows about the surgery but does not openly resist. This makes her complicit in the injustice done to Tara. The play examines how passive participation in a patriarchal system can be as harmful as active participation.
  • Bribery as systemic oppression: The grandfather's bribery of Dr. Thakkar is not just a personal act of corruption. It represents how institutions (medicine, politics, family) can all be bent by wealth in ways that harm women.

    • Important Quotes

    From the video description: "A female is subjugated and underestimated by patriarchal society and she remains only a caretaker for household utensils, children, husband, other domestic requirements and tasks of fatigue."

    This is the play's core argument stated plainly. Tara is not given equal opportunity. She is kept in a reduced domestic role despite being capable of far more.

    Chandan to Patel (paraphrased from the transcript): "Take Tara to your office. She would make a much better businessperson than me."

    This moment is central to the play. Even the favoured child can see the injustice. Only the father, holding the power, chooses not to.

    The medical revelation: The major blood supply to the third leg came from the girl's side. The third leg had a higher chance of surviving if given to Tara. It was given to Chandan because of bribery.

    This is the most powerful moment in the play. Gender discrimination does not just limit Tara's career or education. It takes away a part of her body and eventually her life.

    Key Takeaways for Students

  • The plot in one sentence: Conjoined twins Tara and Chandan are surgically separated, but the grandfather bribes the doctor to give Chandan the third leg that medically belonged to Tara, which leads to Tara's death.
  • Central theme: Gender discrimination within a modern, educated, middle-class Indian family. Dattani shows that patriarchy does not disappear with wealth or education.
  • Chandan as narrator: He tells the story from London under a new name. This retrospective structure means we know Tara dies even as we watch her alive in the scenes.
  • Bharati's guilt: Her excessive, overprotective love for Tara is rooted in guilt about the surgery. It does not help Tara. It makes her dependent.
  • The grandfather: He is the most powerful agent of injustice in the play. He uses money and political connections to override medical ethics and give the boy what should have gone to the girl.
  • Three-act structure: Act 1 introduces the narrator and the family; Act 2 shows gender favouritism in education and career; Act 3 reveals the dark secret about the surgery.
  • Dattani's key argument: Modernity is not the same as equality. A wealthy, educated family can still operate on deeply patriarchal values.
  • For exams: Be ready to discuss: (1) the theme of gender discrimination, (2) the role and guilt of the mother Bharati, (3) how the play critiques the Indian educated middle class, (4) the use of a dark secret as a dramatic device, (5) the significance of the narrative frame with Chandan as narrator.
  • Chandan consistently advocates for Tara: He tells his father to take Tara to the office, to fund her education abroad, and to treat her equally. His advocacy makes the father's refusal even more damning.

    • Watch the full video here: YouTube