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THE SELF IN DRAMA: CREATING/CONSTRUCTING SPACES IN MAHESH DATTANIS BRAVELY FOUGHT THE QUEEN Namrata Pathak , DEptt. of English Literature, EFLU. Theatre, according to Mahesh Dattani, ceases to be an art form once it becomes didactic. It is a potent tool to observe and then translate what is around us. Refusing to state in a matter of fact manner by using a bland language, Dattani prefers expressions that are indirect, but potent. Lots of meaningful phrases that hit hard on us exhibit his trademark style of weaving realistic narratives around contemporary issues. Replete with the intricacies of homosexuality and gender divide, his plays expose the stark problems and predicaments of an India which is constantly evolving as a spatio-temporal entity, and is obviously quite different and unique from its traditional image. Going by the words of Michael Walling, we can say that in Dattani we discern a subtle mix of both the Eastern and the Western elements, a common ingredient in the multicultural and cosmopolitan cauldron of a postcolonial nation like India (Walling, 2000: 229). Says Mahesh Dattani in his preface to Collected Plays (2000): I am certain that my plays are a true reflection of my time; place and socio-economic background. I am hugely excited and curious to know what the future holds for me and my art in the new millennium in a country that has a myriad challenges to face politically, socially, artistically and culturally (2000: xv). When most playwrights play safe by sticking to an insular India with strict gender confines and cultural norms, Dattani is bold enough to break the straitjacket of representation. Succinctly enough, instead of portraying traditional avatars in his plays, he choose to give birth to characters that are dynamic, very much living, animating, breathing, making choices in every juncture of their life, and accepting myriad influences on their inner and outer worlds. Such characters are not ashamed of being a homosexual, transgender, eunuch, whodunit, or being a part of the third gender. They make their choices blatantly, as they are not afraid of the society dictating terms to them. Some, on the other hand, conceal their true identity under a veneer of a stereotype so as to act normal in front of all. Sooner or later, this faade falls off, showing the grim truth to us. Dattani himself has contended that out of both the masculine and feminine selves in him, the former is active, assertive, and at peace with himself, but the latter is complacent and needs to be expressed or pushed to the centre stage. The feminine self is in need of a voice to declare aloud her thoughts, to speak out, to protest or simply, and if not anything, then to express (Kuthari Chaudhuri, 2005:49). Each play of Dattani acts as a mode of disciplinary exchange. He believes in a form of knowledge production, an enquiry that seems to bear all the signs of multiculturalism. Such a play transforms itself into a site, a shared domain of conversation and debate, of polyphonic voices, and of plural subjectivities. This site is burgeoning all over with epistemological crisis engendered by globalization, changing world orders, sudden civilizational clashes, erasure of context-specific cultural motifs, destabilization of rigid historical modules and so on. Acting as polyvalent sites, these plays operate from the margins. The narrative discourse revolves round marginalized events and marginalized people whether in terms of the underrepresented or nonrepresented other. We cannot deny the fact that his materials shock and disturb us, and keep us teetering at the edges of what is acceptable and what is not, what is labelled as cultural taboo and what is not, what is ethically suitable in terms of the indigenous context and what is not. After

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all, the judges of normalcy make it a bit difficult to herald an unremarkable shift in disciplinary centres of gravity, same is the scenario in India when Dattani started writing---there were fingers pointing toward him, there were controversies generating around him. Writing/ Reading from the very margins of colonial archives, (as Foucault would say) and producing new centres for the analysis of marginal people, is not free from the constitutive power of colonial/ postcolonial anxieties. These anxieties signify not just the perceived threat of the opposition or incommensurable temporalities within the nation, but also the act of recognizing the tenuousness of the concept of national identity and its fluidity. Dattani gives importance to the place and context in his plays. According to him, they are significant in conjuring the fragmented subjectivity of the social actors on stage as well as for the emergence of a plural, diffuse, and variegated identity. In this regard, his plays threaten to reveal the fragile systems of representation and they, in a way, account for the deviant social and cultural formations in the past and present. Relying on the connections or disjunctures of futures and pasts in heterogeneous presents, his plays show up the ways that the supposed margins and metropoles, or peripheries and centres, fold into, constitute, or disrupt one another (Comaroff & Comaroff, 1999:17). Bravely Fought the Queen is one such play that makes us think and think critically. It is first performed in 1991, while it is published in 1992. The play has three acts categorized into three gender segments: Women (Act I), Men (Act II), and Free for All (Act III). As it uses a spatially segregated proscenium stage and a language which is regarded by most as the colonizers idiom, therefore Mahesh Dattanis Bravely Fought the Queen ( 1992) is regarded by many as hardly Indian. But what is Indian theatre anyway? As E. Mee has pointed out, our language is something which we internalize, work upon, fight with, accept and reject at the same time. It is a part of our identity. Dattanis comfort in using his third language, English, has much to do with his upbringing, education, locale, and exposure. And who said that his English interspersed with cultural markers, indigenous expressions, local flavour, and subjective constructions is not Indian? Instead of sticking to our ancient traditional theatrical forms, we need to look around and state how such things are not enough to gauge the present situation in India. Mee has much to say in this context. According to Mee: What we need to do now is to look at those forms and say were approaching the twenty first century, this is who we are and this is our legacy, so where do we take t happening and thats a matter of serious concern (Mee, 1997: 24-5). In a Derridean vein, Bravely Fought the Queen (1992) propels forward potential critical shifts and contextual transformations by seeking to unleash the politics of representation of the self. We tend to rethink the presumptions of social theory because most of Dattanis plays explore techniques of reconstructing some important shafts of drama and theatre by taking recourse to the boundaries and frontiers of the I. Similarly, the concerned play questions the functioning of disciplinary divisions and hierarchies like male and female, visibility and invisibility, concepts like overtly active and submissively passive and so on. Moreover, we need to force forward many questions herein. Does Bravely Fought the Queen (1992) reveal the disruption of institutionally defined strictures in India? Is this play a mere commodity because it creates the valuable venues for expressing vicissitude? Is it popular due to the productivity of ambivalence? Can we trace a vulgar sensationalism in it? Does it produce a vicarious pleasure, a voyeuristic obsession? Is it responsible for recreating an imagined community or an ideology that harbours on the perspective of the other? Perhaps, the questions are too polemical, too dense, and too diverse! Nevertheless, while dealing with this play (both visual and written), our preoccupation

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is still with the evaluation of the self through frames of representation, such as the nation, (post)colonialism, time, space, ethnography, the archive, gender, history and so forth. Dattanis Bravely Fought the Queen (1992) signifies how power works in a society and how resistances to it are articulated. In the discursive formulations of power, the subject is constantly subjectified or subjugated by the society at large. Although power is insidious, it is fraught with some external factors of resistance that unsettle it. Jiten, Nitin, Baa, Alka, Dolly, Lalitha, Sridhar, and to some extent, Praful are numbed by the workings of power. Moreover, the plurality of resistance produces social cleavage and fractures powers hegemonic coherence. The females have less scope to resist the structures of power, unlike the males, but nevertheless, someone like Dolly tries in her own way to unsettle it. The effect is the generation of new groups who might in turn produce new methods of resistance. For instance, domination could be one form of power that eventually manifests in every walk of life and seeks legitimacy. Modes of power define the legitimate answers to questions like what counts as a person, what counts to be gendered, or what rights a citizen has. Correlatively, the subject is formed by power, resistance, and freedom. Says Foucault: . in order for power relation to come into play, there must be at least a certain degree of freedom on both sides . This means that in power relations there is necessarily the possibility of resistance because if there were no possibility of resistance (of violent resistance, flight, deception, strategies capable of reversing situation), there would be no power relations at all (1997: 292). There is an apparent paradox that resistance does not only disrupt power; but sometimes it serves the ends of domination more than it inhibits it. In Prafuls case, resistance serves as a form of social ontology from the start. A poor sister like Alka succumbing to the machinations of Praful, is symbolic of the lack of resistance to power that operates extensively through the social network. In this context, the character of Dolly has dual significance. Firstly, she has an emancipatory aspiration of reducing the asymmetrical form of domination to a minimum. Eventually, it proves fatal to her when she could not combat Jitens exploitative tendencies. Nevertheless, she tried to resist him, in her own simple ways. This failure of Jitens moral message (unable to confront Dollys truth, he rushes out of the house, crushing a downtrodden one with his car) constrains and entraps Dolly in asymmetrical relations and binds her to a range of possibilities. Again, in complex terms, Nitins case proves that resistance does not always subvert domination, but on the contrary, is often taken over and exploited in such a way as to increase domination. Thus, Nitins every act turns into a form of compliance. Baa, however, epitomizes the fact that when power functions more effectively, the less visible it is. Disillusioned by powers deceptive appearance, she helps in serving rather than subverting power. For her resistance is just a mere disguise that hides the insidious spread of normalizing processes. She becomes the delirious abnormal person whose destabilizing physical and mental activities take the form of a threat to her daughter in laws. Moreover, Lalitha is the prisoner of the males world. This is an instance of ironic reversal because she confines himself to the raising of miniature trees, that is, bonsais to conceal behind a veneer. She chooses to be a part of the prison system of the males being propelled by a functionalist drive towards selfpreservation. Her obsession is the result of the social system, but it is also a part and a construct of it. In spite of her sense of self-preservation, she fails to escape the exploitative aspects of power. The prison as a symbol of discipline, if from her point of view a safe place, is not so because the prison is controlled by the dominant power that could unsettle her self-derived premise of safety. On this understanding domination proceeds according to discourses and

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practices that construct the other as less valuable as compared to the members of the dominant center (who control the discourse). The theatrical models employed herein offer not merely a critique of representation as such, or of its supposed inaccuracies, but an engagement with the changing force fields. In Bravely Fought the Queen (1992), we have the same set structure split into multiple levels to accommodate the three sets. The silhouetted figure of Baa is common to both Act I and Act II, whereas in Act III, much emphasis is given on the covert homosexual relationship between Praful and Nitin. From this standpoint, what is at issue is not only a desire to uncover or narrate the oppression of the underrepresented people, but also the analysis shifts to the production of disparate schemas through the representational strategies of political discipline. This engagement moves back and forth between the distillation of intricate local moments and the emergence of logics of circulation, politics of comparison, and the orders of power and knowledge. The performance space of Bravely Fought the Queen (1992) produces a mobile itinerary of contested knowledge. This space also reveals the constantly changing technologies of rule, sometimes the men rule, whereas at other times their power is crushed. But the primary challenge that we face is: how to contextualize the characters subjectivity? Regarding context, we can just say that in a performance space, we need to attend to the minute details of enunciation; the bodily movement and gestures; the temporal settings of social interaction; the emergent meanings; the framing of purported cultural forms; the procedures of subjectification and so on. According to Derrida, a context is never absolutely determinable, or...its determination is never certain or saturated (1982:310). In the similar vein, Derrida questioned, Does the notion of context, harbour, behind a certain confusion, very determined philosophical presuppositions? (1982: 310). Again, by rephrasing Foucaults words we can say that the interruptive elements of dissension, disparity, and displacement make any context marginal to itself and certainly never susceptible to closure. In a way, each character is placed in a matrix of subject positions depending on the selection and dissection of variegated strategies employed on the stage, schemas of variance, correlation, and, at times, regression. The metaphor of the bonsai is very important in the play. In the play, the womans space signifies the intricate underground labyrinth in which they are entangled. The men are the lord of it. Paradoxically, the women are baffled, lost and directionless in their desire to move out of it. For Lalitha, the bonsai is the pride and joy of her existence. The stunted growth, grotesque and macabre form of the small plant signifies the spatial parameters of Lalithas life. All the three female characters are mere pawns in the males hands, but Dattani himself says that they are trying to move out of this structure of oppression. They ultimately chained themselves in a constricted space to escape the tyranny of the males. Alka drowned herself in alcohol, Lalitha is always preoccupied in her peculiar obsession to tend the bonsais, and Dolly, to some extent vocal enough to combat the intrusion of the male space, has to bear the brunt of Jitens physical violence throughout her life. The invading male gaze, surrounding the females, in all likelihood symbolizes death. For the females, to combat this panopticon gaze becomes an avenue of freedom, a lifeline. But the question is, how could they do that? If death (and life) is freighted with double meaning, freedom becomes an ambiguous word as well. The labyrinth is endless. The figure of it intensifies our appreciation of the split, divided or paradoxical nature of the self. By invoking the words of Jorge Louis Borges in The Book of Imaginary Beings (2002), we can say that labyrinths are interminable, and can be closed off only by death. Ironically, the concept of the constricted space not only entraps the females, but to create a new space for themselves means redemption

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for them. Interestingly, the females spaces act as alien territories to get disoriented for. But are the men in their own spaces free? The last scene of Bravely Fought the Queen (1992) leads to a distinctive view of the nature of the self which seeks personal autonomy; emphasizes on an internal conflict between systems; and ultimately craves for a personal space for both the males and the females. The playwright forces dissolution of traditional spatial identities and attempts their reconstitution along new lines. The concept of space is very important in Dattanis plays. The playwrights engagement with the metaphor of space depends on the fragmentation of older solidarities and a reintegration that is heavily shaded by new modes of cultural appropriation. Space initiates and explores the ambiguity of the self. According to Dattani, space can be abstract as well as a mental landscape of an individual that translates the social meaning of the self. The abstract space situates our experience and shapes our perspectives. Space can be concrete, a landscape of visual consumption. In the play, an urban landscape provides certain spatial forms; and these forms not only map culture and power but also chart out the meanings of social institutions, economic forces, and processes of production and consumption as well. The play establishes the rapidly shifting values and structuring of the self in a locale where the traditional and the contemporary clash, but are not able to create a new social landscape. In the play, all the characters refusal to acknowledge their true identity comes under the scanner. The playwright succinctly handles some important issues like creativity and imagination being posed against the structures of a social, cultural milieu in the metaphor of the bonsai. In the metaphor of the bonsai we can trace lines of escape and freedom provided by a particular spatio-temporal arrangement in the play. The bonsai can be placed at the chasm between what is natural or given and what is artificial or constructed. In Lalitha, Dattani probes the nuances of an artists mind; exposes the untrammeled, unpredictable and non-rulebound nature alluding to the imaginative operations of an individuals psyche; and shows the artists engagement with the continuous possibilities of imagined meanings. In the formless form of the bonsai, it is shown that it is through their imagination that individuals create and recreate the essence of their being, making themselves what they were, are, and will become. The problem that confronts all the females, is the act of going beyond a set of circumstances, and an existent reality. Dollys sexual rendezvous with Kanhaiya, the cook also ropes in the active imagination of the domestic and domesticated female to transgress the limits codified to her. Indeed, it is the rule breaking of inspired individuals that leads to new social formations; but this act of rule breaking is vehemently opposed by the so-called dominant and powerful people of the society who are in a position to legitimatize their views. The creative act of human imagination is therefore conflictual because it transcends the apparent realities of conventions and surpasses the conservative rules of life. The non-conformity of Dolly (at least in her fantasizing about Kanhaiya) is categorized and labeled as reflecting a subjective disposition, an urge that let her flap her wings. In the play, we see how the subjectivity of Dolly is created, moulded and constructed by the opinions, perceptions, and judgments of others. Overnight, Jitens blows transformed her into a victim who has to accept the outcome of it. The spastic daughter will always be a testimony to Jitens violence. Thus, Dollys subjectivity is based on the instrument of moral variation, disruption, renewal and innovation. It is a slice of her social, cultural, historical and material condition. In the second Act, all the men are shown arguing over a brand of lingerie, ReVaaTee. Jitens linguistic skills portray him as an enunciator, a rhetorician, who tries to seize control through manipulation of language. This machine of expression is changed and activated by moments of crisis and performance. Sridhar mantles a politically correct exterior, whereas Nitin is calm and composed. The mens fetishism regarding

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language implies that a sense of certainty is either ludicrous or terrifying. Speech requires an audience, but who is there to judge whom. This absurdity prevents us from a smooth reading of the power of rhetoric, if not confronting us with a debunking of the individuals identity. Moreover, Sridhar offered Jiten his leftovers when the latter asked him to fetch a prostitute. So, driven by moral grudge and self-interest, each of the males, like the bonsai, projects a stunted slice of their subjectivity. Baas presence in the play is all about the theatricality and power play involved in the clashes of classes and generations. Through Baas constant bell-ringing and summons, a history of mindless repetition is enacted. Interestingly, baa always makes it a point to disrupt the comfort zone and intimacy of the daughter in laws. In the play, the saga of oppression is endlessly repeated like a snake that wants to bite off its tail. Baa was wronged by her husband, but she also perpetuated the same kind of violence when she goaded Jiten to hit a pregnant Dolly, but selectively. These are two different incidents which can be perceived from the same perspective. In the last scene, the histrionics and self-dramatization somehow prepare us for the eventual climax. The issue of alternate sexuality comes out of the closet when the two worlds of men and women collide and clash. The overt homosexual relationship between Nitin and Praful is revealed. Herein, the masked and paste-on realities of the mens and womens worlds are exposed. The spotlight falls on a drunken Alka, sleeping peacefully, oblivious to all the extreme realities that surround her from all the sides. The playwrights awareness of Alkas fragile identity; her very modern sense of exclusion and her equally modern craving for integration are evident here. In Alka and Nitins relationship, there is a deep sense of incongruity and disjunction. This disparity is concealed behind the sham of a marriage. For both of them, the subject-ed conditions of existence are controlled or constituted by ideologically motivated discourses of power which predominate in the society they inhabit. Power games in the play takes on the mantle of a hybrid sort of monster that evokes the anxieties of the collapse of foundations and is swept away by language games that constantly undo themselves by opening up an irreducible heterogeneity of the other in pursuit of the self. This is a method that leads to identification and subjectivization that, in turn, deconstructs theatre space. Here, space can be staged as a palimpsest, a failure at containing meaning, a means to empty out narrative in advance or make it generate itself over its impossibility. The sound that Baa exudes is a sign that connects the myriad strands of history and their eventual representation in the present. If direct access to the past is denied, all we have is a coherent arrangement of competing stories, arranged in a sequence by the historian narrator. An exact correspondence between narrative and the past and the final representation of history is not possible. There are different ways of describing the same event as our access to the evidence is always mediated. The final revelation of Prafuls using his sister as bait punctures a nave representation of the past. History-making is not at all simply transparent, but there are always absences, gaps and biases. However, thais historical trend also projects a different slice of Prafuls subjectivity. Thus, in the play, the inner world of each character is used as a tool to deal with the recurring rhetoric of hatred, aggression, monetary and political exploitation, chauvinism and parochial mindset of the moral police and guardian of the society. The politics of representation of the self as eulogized by the playwright keenly exposes the anarchic, ludicrous facts of social life. However, the searches for a space between the always male-centered secure representations of gender and what that representation leaves out or, more pointedly, makes unrepresentable give birth to a psycho-philosophical frame of cultural representation. This frame re-marks the woman as a signifier or metaphor; and the man becomes the un(re)marked norm, the point of

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view. The play, however, aims to reinvest value in a subjectivity or identity that is not, or cannot be, represented in these terms. This runs counter to the presumption held by left and right alike that to gain visibility is to attain power. Quite interestingly, this act is akin to the theatre theorist Peggy Phelans suggestion that the specific focus on performance is framed by the way in which the pleasure of resemblance and repetition both reassuringly centres the spectator and fetishizes what is being looked at. The concept of the self that we have traced in Dattanis plays is essentially unstable in nature, as it is changeable, transitive, plural and fragmented. The self works in alignment with the other in its specific, local, and institutional struggles. The altered and diversified role ascribed to the subject can be termed as that of an interpreter who takes part in a conversation across discourses; rather than a legislator who arbitrates on respective values. The subject is shown to occupy multiple positions and sites as it is a combination of class, racial, ethnic, regional, generational, sexual, and gender positions. The concept of the self disposes off precisely the Kantian unity of the person which makes for social order and moral orthodoxy. From a postmodern point of view, there is a move to deconstruct the moral unity of the subject and a classically liberal desire to evade the repressive ideological boundaries that the self encounters. This is indeed a process of liberating and expressing the self. The second perspective that we trace in his plays is an interrogative stance which underlines that the justification of evading or redrawing boundaries as an ideological position. Similarly, we cannot deny the fact that the subject occupies a central position in the struggle to bring about a social and political change. Although the self occupies an analytical position, it also affirms and works through differences; it is nevertheless related to the strengthening of our collective capacities to engage in meaningful resistances. By positing his characters in the contemporary Indian setting, Dattani seeks to challenge or deconstruct essentialist and universalizing identities. He shows that in a more open, pluralist, and tolerant world the experience of cultural politics also foregrounds the complexity of doubt and uncertainty. But all the same, the traditional or essentialist identities cannot be wished away or written off. In the polemics of self and subjectivity, the fear of subjection and the loss of identity predominates the cultural scenario. The present culture not only points to the irreconcilable differences of identity and a mosaic of language systems, but it also takes the colonized, the female (the third gender) and the black in a strong grip. However, all these currents are captured in the metaphor of the bonsai. The bonsai not only represents the erosion of local distinctiveness, but it also provides an ensemble of spatial forms and cultural practices. The space surrounding the bonsai transforms itself into a liminal space by slipping into and mediating between nature and artifice; the global and the local; and public use and private value. Specifically, Dattanis concept of space gives birth to a malleable responsibility to create, to invent, to produce some fluctuating tendencies. Representation of space, in the play, ropes in the issues of the contemporary characters area, location or setting. This concrete space unleashes multiple signifying-systems that conjure up issues like autobiographical frameworks, historical positioning, disciplinary homes, and pragmatic motivations. The stiff and bare structures of the play signify the reflexive rhetorics of authority and deploy numerous strategies of narrativizations of authorizing claims. In different spaces, through every encounter with the other, each character writes the self in a series of writing, asking Which of these constructions is my real self? Hence, what is real or what is truth? This self-referential allusion to space, thus, gives birth to a strong incentive for rigour and produces an ethico-political text for the body, especially the gay and female body. The body, as Haraway has showed, coagulates the

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Works Cited
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perceptions and demands of audience in the version of a place---which is not just a listing of adjectives or assigning of labels such as race, sex and class. Haraway maintains: Location is not the concrete to the abstract of decontextualisation. Location is always partial, always finite, always fraught play of foreground and background, text and context, that constitutes social enquiry. Above all, location is not self-evident or transparentLocation is always partial in the sense of being for some worlds and not others (1997:37). The personal spaces of the characters are not something that can be set straight but each of these spaces can be tracked through its moves and mappings, its permeability and vulnerabilities, its nervous shifts from one thing to another, its moments of self-possession and dispersal. The theater space, herein, is fraught with the mechanics of displacement and an interwoven logic of astonishment. Here, by trying to read/survey the topographical details of the place, but not knowing the intricacies of being in a multi-temporal world which is at a flux due to transference, negotiation and change, each character falls into his/her own trap. However, in the Indian context, Dattani shows how it is really important to distort the mores and rules by announcing the paradoxes, monstrosity of retaliation and selfcriticism. Each characters internal landscape is manifested against a backdrop of an exotic space---strong is the power that the unknown, uncharted, and unintelligible hold for them. Thus, we discern a strong urge in each of them to intrude such zones. In a way, the concept of the self in Dattanis Bravely Fought the Queen (1992) can be a way of both negotiating a relationship to loss and through its very dangers steering away from the melodrama or easy sentiment attendant upon it. Quite simply, the concept of the self, when put under erasure, shatters understanding that underlies the saliency of the incomprehensible, something we confess we do not understand (Caputo, 1997:74). Paradoxically, this is not a new way of seeing rather a kind of blindness--- a confession that we are up against something to which we can only bear witness. Under the light of deconstructive reading, Dattanis plays unravel the neo-Nietzschean critique of the Cartesian cogito and its emphasis on language and power instead of the earlier concerns for subjective or individual freedom. In the field of drama and theatre, the central effect is to break down the philosophical distinction between the theoretical and the practical. Moreover, the concerned plays show how the self is tied to the idiom of expression: language games express and enact the authority of those who are empowered to use it within a social group. The short answer this play provides is that the self can still resist oppression without invoking the ideal of a society in which there is no oppression at all. That is, the idea makes us believe that there are different kinds of oppression still around, some of which may even have been caused by our very success in alleviating previous oppression. A deconstructive reading of Dattanis plays exposes the sites of oppression and domination; blurs philosophical distinctions; and foils every methodological strategy and every stratagem of delimitation. Dattani makes possible for one to resist conformism and normalization imposed by others. In the terrain of deconstruction, the bourgeois concept of a singular, stable subjectivity clearly differentiated from the outer world is no longer tenable. The self has become a contested terrain positing as an occupant of shifting subject positions.

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Caputo, John. On not Circumventing the Quasi-transcendental: the Case of Rorty and Derrida. Working through Derrida. Ed. Gary Maddison. Evantson, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993, pp 147-69. , ed. Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida. New York: Fordham University Press, 1997. . The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1997. Carlson, Marvin. Performance: A Critical Introduction. New York: Routledge, 1996. Chaudhuri, Asha Kuthari. Contemporary Indian Writers in English. Mahesh Dattani: An Introduction. New Delhi: Foundation Books Pvt. Ltd., 2005. Comaroff, Jean, and Comaroff, John L. Ethnography and Historical Imagination. Boulder, Colo: Westview Press, 1992. Das, Bijay Kumar. Form and Meaning in Mahesh Dattanis Plays. New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers and Distributors (P) Ltd., 2008. Dattani, Mahesh. Contemporary Indian Theatre and its Relevance. Journal of Indian Writing in English, 30:1, Jan 2002. Dattani, Mahesh. Collected Plays. New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2000. Derrida, Jacques. Theatre of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation (1966). Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1978, pp 232-9. . Margins of Philosophy. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1982. . Aporias. Stanford : Stanford University Press, 1993. . The Specters of Marx. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge, 1994. . Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Trans. Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Erin, Mee. Contemporary Indian Theatre, Three Voices. Performing Arts Journal, 19: 1, 1997, pp 1-26. Fortier, Mark. Theory/ Theatre. London: Routledge, 1997. Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage Books, [1966]. 1970. . The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language. New York: Pantheon, [1969]. 1973. Haraway, Donna. Modest Witness@second Millenium: Feminism and Technoscience. New York: Routledge, 1997. Hoy, Couzens, David. Critical Resistance, From Poststructuralism to Post-Critique. Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 2005. Jackson, Shannon. Professing Performance: Theatre in the Academy from Philology to Performativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. London: Routledge, 1993. Subramanyam, Lakshmi, ed. Muffled Voices. Women in Modern Indian Theatre. New Delhi: Har-Anand Publications Pvt. Ltd., 2002.

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