Final Solutions By Mahesh Dattani Analysis

(The hiatus between the established situations in ideal sense and their working on the ground level is always instrumental in churning of human thoughts and finding new shades of reality. The social perception and individual beliefs are more based on conjectures and half known facts and it leads to the distortion of reality. The blurring of the truth becomes all the more acute in critical situations like communal tension. Mahesh Dattani, a well known Indian English playwright raises doubts about the accepted social situations and individual stance in his play Final Solutions which is based of communal tension between Hindus and Muslims. Instead of highlighting this issue, the emphasis of the present paper is to read the play with broader concerns
Born in 1958 in Bangalore, this versatile and prolific playwright has also worked as director and actor. He is related not only with playwriting but also with the enactment of plays on the stage. He formed his own theatre group namely Playpen in 1984. He is also associated with the teaching of theater courses in different institutes. Dattani writes about a wide range of social issues and his plays are the portrayal of various strata of Indian society. Radha Ramaswamy rightly opines, “His unusual themes, technical experimentation, and above all, brilliant use of a variety of spoken Indian English not heard on the English language stage before . . .” (vii) Dattani won Sahitya Academy Award for his dramatic writings Final Solutions and Other Plays in 1998 and he was the first Indian English dramatist to achieve this distinction. He is still very active and is propagating Indian English drama which is still in its nascent stage. His presence on social media sites make him easily available to the scholars and his
The play mainly portrays the atmosphere of communal distrust, its causes and repercussions and some indicative way out to save the situation. Suspicion, rumours, violence, petty politics, misadministration, memory pangs and personal vendetta all are depicted as a part of harsh and brutal communal facts of India. Dattani presents the present reality but subtly he relates it with the past memories of India which led her to the partition on the basis of religious divide. Though the plot of the play apparently seems to be very simple but it involves many strands of sub plots. It makes the play not only deeper in meaning but close to human reality as well. The play is about a situation of communal tension in a fictional Indian town Amargaon where a holy chariot of Hindus was attacked during a religious procession and a pujari was also killed. Different characters are portrayed in the background of ensuing commotion between Hindus and Muslims. The present has been related with the past through the character of Hardika, the grandmother and a victim of post 1947 communal riots. She is conveying her feelings and her past through her diary writings as Daksha. Other members of this Hindu family, namely, Ramnik Gandhi, his wife Aruna and his daughter Smita present two different aspects of individual belief systems, conservative