7 - Conclusion: Mahesh Dattani and Contemporary Indian Writing

Summary

From the time he began his career on the stage in Bangalore – the city where he had grown up, enjoying, as a child the spectacle of the Gujarati theatre that sometimes travelled there – to doing English theatre that was mostly derivative in nature, and finally to becoming one of the leading and most performed playwrights of the country, actor-director Mahesh Dattani has come a long way. While he admits to being a “reluctant” playwright, perhaps the seeds of his success lay in this very reluctance: he needed English plays to perform, and they were unavailable. So he wrote them – not as a writer writing a self-consciously ‘literary’ work like a novel or a poem – but as a performer amalgamating the ‘extra-literary’ polyphony of the stage in his writing and keeping audience reception in his mind. That has perhaps made all the difference to the manner in which Dattani has managed so fluently to communicate with such audiences, as well as the reason, ultimately, for the ‘literary’ quality of his output.

The need to make contact with, to speak to one's audiences in their own terms, and yes, in their own language is the paramount condition for the playwright's success. Speaking of the audience for English theatre in India, we have already at length tried in the earlier chapters to locate and rationalize the ambit of their identity in postcolonial India. Important questions of audience pragmatics come in here, and in some sense, dictate the content and form of a writer writing for the stage.