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.
Background and Context
Tara was written in 1990 and is a three-act stage play. It is set in an urban, educated, middle-class Indian home. The central event of the play is the surgical separation of conjoined twins, a boy named Chandan and a girl named Tara, and the unjust consequences of a decision made during that surgery.
The play belongs squarely within Indian English Drama's tradition of social criticism through domestic settings. Rather than locating injustice in a courtroom or a political space, Dattani places it in the kitchen, the living room, and a family argument. This is a deliberate artistic choice: it tells the audience that gender discrimination does not require a villain or a dramatic public event. It happens quietly, in families, between people who love each other.
The play also engages directly with one of India's oldest and most persistent social problems: the preference for sons over daughters. This preference is not confined to rural or poor communities. Dattani shows it at work in a wealthy, educated, apparently Westernised family. This is the hypocrisy the play wants to expose. Modernity and education, Dattani argues, do not automatically change attitudes. They sometimes just give patriarchy a better vocabulary.
The description from the video channel states it clearly: in this play, "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." The play raises questions that are still urgently relevant: Why should men be considered superior? Why can women not have the same access to education, opportunity, and physical resources as men? Why does wealth give some people the power to override basic fairness?
Characters in the Play
Understanding the characters before reading the plot is important because Dattani builds meaning through contrasts and relationships.
Plot Summary
Act One: The Frame Narration
The play opens with Chandan, now going by the name Dan, sitting alone and trying to write something on paper. He is the narrator of the entire play. He wants to write about Tara, about his memories, but he keeps failing. Every time he attempts to put those memories into words, he becomes overwhelmed. He is haunted by the past. From the very beginning, the audience understands that something terrible has happened to Tara.
Dan takes the audience back into his memories. We enter the family's home and see Tara with her mother, Bharati. Bharati is trying repeatedly to get Tara to drink milk. Tara refuses, insisting she wants to drink from a brass tumbler with some spices mixed in. It is a small exchange, but it tells us immediately about the dynamic between them. Bharati is overprotective, hovering, managing Tara's life in small and large ways. Bharati also mentions that Patel has still not allowed the family to unpack their boxes in the new house. This small detail opens a window onto the tension and distance in the marriage.
Act Two: Gender Bias in Action
Two incidents in the play show clearly how Patel treats Chandan and Tara differently, and how deeply rooted his gender bias is.
The cooking incident: Chandan wants to help his mother with cooking in the kitchen. When Patel sees this, he is immediately disapproving. He tells Chandan that this kind of work is not meant for men and that Chandan should not be doing it. He then orders Chandan to come with him to his office so that he can teach him the basics of running a business. Chandan pushes back. He tells his father to take Tara to the office instead, arguing that Tara would make a far better businessperson than him. Patel refuses to even consider this. He becomes angry, dismisses the suggestion, and gives Chandan a direct order to come to the office without further argument.
The education incident: Patel announces that he is setting aside money specifically for Chandan's higher education abroad. Again, Chandan objects. He tells his father that he does not want to go into business. He wants to be a writer. He asks his father to use that saved money for Tara's education instead and to give her the chance to study abroad. Patel completely ignores this request.
These two scenes establish the pattern at the heart of the play. The son is groomed for the public world of business, money, and achievement. The daughter is kept at home and treated as secondary in every decision. The fact that Chandan himself consistently advocates for Tara makes the injustice even sharper. Even the boy who benefits from the favouritism can see it clearly. Only the father cannot, or will not.
The friendship incident: Bharati bribes Roopa, the neighbour girl, with movie tickets so that she will agree to befriend Tara. Tara has no friends in the colony. This small and quietly sad detail shows how isolated Tara has become. Her family does not help her build independence or confidence. Instead, her mother tries to manage even her social life, which only increases her dependence.
Act Three: The Kidney Transplant and the Dark Secret
Later in the play, Tara needs a kidney transplant. When Bharati finds out, she immediately offers to donate her own kidney. However, Patel tells her that a commercial donor has already been arranged for Tara and that Bharati does not need to do anything. Bharati insists she wants to be the one to donate, but Patel overrules her once again. The surgery goes ahead, and it is successful.
After the kidney transplant, the doctors emphasise that post-surgical care will be critical for Tara's recovery. Tara has an appointment scheduled with a physiotherapist. However, instead of going to the physiotherapist, Tara ends up going to the hospital. She finds out that Bharati has been admitted there. She tries to visit her mother, but she is turned away and sent back home.
Tara returns and tells Chandan everything that has happened. They decide they both want to go to the hospital to see their mother. When they approach Patel to ask for his permission, he refuses. Tara argues back fiercely. She tells her father that even if he refuses, she will still go to see her mother. The confrontation escalates.
The Central Revelation
In the heat of the argument, everything that has been hidden finally comes out. Patel reveals the dark secret that the entire play has been building toward.
When Tara and Chandan were born as conjoined twins, they shared a third leg between them. The doctors ran extensive tests to determine which baby's body the third leg biologically belonged to. The tests showed clearly that the major blood supply to the third leg was coming from the girl's side, from Tara's body. This meant the third leg had a significantly higher chance of surviving and functioning if it were attached to Tara rather than to Chandan.
However, the grandfather on the mother's side, a wealthy industrialist and an MLA (Member of the Legislative Assembly), became involved. He was overjoyed at the prospect of having twin grandchildren. He held a position of considerable power and wealth. He negotiated privately with Dr. Thakkar, the surgeon, and bribed him. As a result of this bribery, the third leg was given to Chandan, the boy, even though the medical evidence clearly showed it had a better chance of survival with Tara.
The consequence was devastating. Because the third leg had been given to Chandan, Tara was fitted with two prosthetic legs. But these prosthetic legs could not be sustained. They were incompatible with her body. They had to be removed after surgery. Tara was left without the leg that medically should have been hers.
When Tara hears this truth, she is completely shattered. She cannot process what she has learned: that her own family's grandfather, using money and political influence, took from her something her body had a natural right to. She cuts off all contact with Chandan. She withdraws into herself. After some time, Tara dies.
The play ends where it began. Chandan is alone in London, living under a new name, still unable to fully write about what happened to his sister. He carries that grief, and perhaps a form of survivor's guilt, with him.