Women, Gender and India: Reading Dattani’s Bravely Fought the Queen

--Samipendra Banerjee
University of Gour Banga

For a playwright like Dattani, an authentic representation of the contemporary times

through concerted theatrical ploys has been the chief concern. His acute and sensitive
portrayal of contemporary India’s dilemmas, hypocrisies, tensions and conflicts,
especially of the marginalized people, have earned him a place among the foremost
playwrights of the country, because and despite of, the language of his communication. In
plays like Bravely Fought the Queen, Dattani ‘takes up cudgels for women’ and though
amply critiqued and theorized, such texts always seem to open up positions for fresher
inquiries and interpretations. This paper is an attempt to take a fresh look at such multiple
and intersecting domains as women, contemporary India and gender constructions vis-à-
vis Bravely Fought the Queen.

Dattani strokes Bravely Fought the Queen with a silent undercurrent of a culture of
production. While promoting the ReVaTee product and its dubious account highlight a
consumerist attitude of an urban Indian family at one level; at a deeper level it also
suggests how attitudes lead on to basic contrasts in terms of identity, sexuality and
gender.

Bravely Fought the Queen proceeds in contrasts. The gender divide is evident in the way
Dattani subtitles his acts-- ‘the women’ in Act I are contrasted with ‘the Men’ in Act II
while it is a literal ‘Free for All’ in Act III where the binaries clash openly. Primarily the
focus is on Jiten and Nitin’s advertising agency, their concerns over the ReVaTee account
and a forthcoming ball considered for promoting the ReVaTee product. Soon however the
atmosphere turns sinister as the play begins to weave a complex web of relationships.
Identities are challenged and sexual guilt, anger, power and violence bursts forth. Dattani
presents a stark portrait of a modern urban India which becomes a study in contrasts.
While explaining the set of the Border Crossings production of Bravely Fought the
Queen, Michael Walling, in his note on the play Bravely Fought the Queen, points out
that their set:

Centered on a slightly abstract inner space, furnished with three white blocks,
which represented the Trivedi household and the office. The only naturalistic
element in this area was the bar: a glowing blasphemous shrine to alcohol, with
the all-seeing eye of the television above it. Around this central area was another
world: red and dusty full of torn newspapers, discarded whisky bottles and
cigarette packets, the beggar woman’s tarapaulin, a wheelchair. This was an India
at once alluring and terrifying, both for the bourgeois characters of the play and
for its western audience. (Dattani 229-30)

The beggar-woman, who cannot be prevented from entering into the courtyard of the
Trivedis’ till she is run-over by Jiten’s car is a visible reminder of poverty in sharp
contrast to the general atmosphere of affluence while the invalid Baa remains a living
embodiment of past which breathes on the present.

Yet another strongly Indian element in Dattani’s plays is music. Indian classical music is
woven into the texture of his plays. With Bravely Fought the Queen, the playing of Naina
Devi’s thumris, the ‘soulful rendition of love songs’, takes on an added significance.
Whether Kanhailal exists or not, Naina Devi’s thumri builds up an atmosphere of love
and of sexual guilt which provides Dolly and Alka a world of escapades – an escape from
their blatant realities of oppression. Music thus becomes a symbol of liberation for Dolly
and Alka. The playing of Megh Malhar, the ‘raga of the rains’ leads to, in the words of
Michael Walling, ‘Alka’s’ liberating dance in the rain’. With the music slowly building
up, Alka dances with a frenzy. Dattani’s genius lies in the way he is able to blend music
with the thematic dialectic of the play. Having Dolly mention the life of Naina Devi,
Dattani adds a layer of significance to the music-liberation equation. He actually turns
Naina Devi a central symbol of resistance to oppression and therefore, apart from Rani of
Jhansi, the queen who fought bravely. Nainadevi’s passion for music had enabled her to
push herself from the status of a royal housewife to sing thumris – songs of love sung in
her days by tawaifs (whores). She dared to challenge socially conditioned codes of
demarcation and rise above them.

This brings us once again to Dattani’s chief concern—gender. A study of his plays show
that Dattani is powerfully aware of the tensions and politics of the gendered self, on the
one hand through the operations of patriarchy and on the other, moving a step ahead,
through the ‘invisible issues’ of alternate sexualities. ‘In plays like Bravely Fought the
Queen’ to quote Dattani himself, ‘I take up cudgels for women.’ 1 What’s more, he
questions certain essentialist patriarchal assumptions. The mention of Jhansi Ki Rani
brings along a host of such associations:

ALKA : ‘Khoob ladi mardani wah to…’

Lightning
DOLLY : Bravely fought the manly queen?
…… Why manly?—
ALKA : Because she was brave…
Brave enough to qualify as a man. (Dattani 296)

Interestingly the Rani of Jhansi is an icon of Indian nationalism. She was one of the first
freedom fighters who had resisted the British colonial forces. In an essentially patriarchal
society, even a national icon like Rani of Jhansi must be judged along ‘male’ parameters--
‘bravery’ and ‘manly valour’ for example. In the Indian patriarchal social setup bravery is
a quality which has been traditionally associated with the male. Hence because she
displays bravery, Rani of Jhansi is dubbed as ‘manly’. By a similar reverse logic, by
choosing dance, Jairaj in Dance Like A Man is never able to ‘grow up’ into a man in the
eyes of Amritlal. Nitin, similarly in Bravely Fought the Queen is sympathetic and
effeminate and therefore unlike Jiten. It is however revealed only in the end that Nitin’s
psyche actually takes on the gender divide further since he is a homosexual. However
Rani of Jhansi and Naina Devi are the queens who fought bravely — something which
Dolly, Alka and even Baa are unable to do, in their respective limited spheres. Both Baa
and Dolly have been subject to physical torture from their husbands, a common event in
most Indian households. However, Alka’s liberating dance in the rain can be seen as a
symbol of protest against the autocracy of Jiten while Dolly hits back at Jiten by
reminding him of his guilt embodied in Daksha. According to Subir Dhar, the ‘Queen’ in
Dattani’s title refers to Dolly. He notes:

Only Dolly Trivedi is a woman who has to fight a battle against a violent and
unfaithful husband and against a tyranical mother in law who rules over her sons
and daughters in law with the weapon of her wealth even from her paralytic bed
(Dhar 84.)
But it is difficult to agree with him that Dattani’s title was written with a specific
character in mind. Rather, the title probably refers to a construct of power, an imagined
form that remains beyond the reach of the real women of the play. And that is how
Dattani imagines contemporary India; he projects sharp contrasts between imagined
liberties and ground realities.

Even in Final Solutions there is an undercurrent of patriarchal oppression. Alyque

Padamsee draws attention to a dominant concern in Final Solutions:

…this [Final Solutions] is a play about transferred resentments. About looking for
a scapegoat to hit out at when we feel let down, humiliated. Taking out your anger
on your wife, children or servants an old Indian custom (Dattani 161.)

Daksha / Hardika remarks with a detached sarcasm the attitude of the average Indian
male:

Like Wagh, he will come home, demand his food, criticize it before eating it,
answer me in grunts and groans and chew tambacoo paan, sit on the big chair in
the courtyard with his feet up and stare into space… Then he will feel he is
somebody. A complete human being. His whole day of money making will have
meaning for him (Dattani 197.)

What is special about Dattani’s treatment of women in his plays is that they are not
merely a pathetic and pitied lot but also complete human beings. In an interview to the
Seagull Theatre Quarterly, Dattani himself explains this stance:

The feminine self is not a victim in my plays. Its subsumed, yes, its marginalized
but it fights back (STQ 32.)
Hence while taking a strong stand against the gender bias at various levels that continue
to operate in India, Dattani effectively represents the constructs that constitute the
postmodern nation. By delicately treating what he calls the ‘invisible issues’ of Indian
society, as Erin. B. Mee rightly points out in his note to the play Tara, Dattani thus at the
same time ‘challenges the constructions of ‘India’ and ‘Indian’ as they have traditionally
been defined in modern theatre.’ (Dattani 319) This is his contribution to the
contemporary nation.
In a recent article ‘The Ironic Gaze: A Reading of Dattani’s Bravely Fought the Queen’,
Anindya Sen interestingly places the power of Dattani’s text on the subversive ironic
gaze that operates in the play rather than on his stark representation of gender differences.
Anindya argues that much of Dattani criticism has suffered in its tendency to eulogize
rather than properly criticize. For Anindya, “while such laudatory responses are
encouraging for young playwrights and the future of Indo-Anglian theatre in the country,
it is not very effective as criticism. Especially in the case of Bravely Fought the Queen,
this bias has led critics to romanticize Alka and Dolly’s struggle against the patriarchal
social system” (Kaustav 320). Anindya also raises the point that Dolly’s protest is
ineffective and hence she shouldn’t be treated as a rebel. What is more important in the
play is its ironic structure and, for Anindya, “this is a play where the playwright’s voice
becomes quite evident from time to time and it is then that the latent irony of his vision
becomes most evident” (Kaustav 327). The point is important since this seems precisely
Dattani’s dramatic technique. In his plays, Dattani does take up a cause but that never
becomes overly didactic or is never at the cost of the theatricality of the medium
involved. The oft quoted remark by Dattani (also quoted by Anindya) is effective at this
juncture: “Theatre to me is a reflection of what you observe. To do anything more would
be to become didactic and then it ceases to be theatre” (Nair). This has been read as
Dattani’s self-conscious attitude towards didacticism and a proper starting point for
understanding the ironic framework in his plays. However, even while recognizing the
rich ironic structure critics often tend to overlook the most important word in the quoted
section—‘theatre’.

While it is imperative to note the ironic potential of a play like Bravely Fought the Queen
for a better understanding of its thematic content, I suggest that we could also read the
irony in his plays in conjunction with the sense of theatre that Dattani’s plays repeatedly
evoke. In the same interview to Anita Nair, Dattani pointed out that “I see myself as a
craftsman and not as a writer. To me, being a playwright is about seeing myself as part of
the process of a production. I write plays for the sheer pleasure of communicating
through this dynamic medium.” This ‘dynamic medium’ is of no less a concern for
Dattani along with his representation of the marginalized figures of a contemporary,
urban India and it is this urge to communicate through the theatre that identifies Dattani’s
curious blending of the stage spaces with an awareness of the plurality of contemporary
India. Most of Dattani’s plays use multiple stage levels. Often these are not only starkly
contrasted physical zones but also operate as separate time zones that allows the
playwright to shuffle between time past and time present and the dialogues, aided with
the visual patterns of contrast, effectively enhance the verbal ironies of the text. Hence in
Bravely Fought the Queen, Dolly’s inability to laugh in spite of her desire to do so
because she was afraid of cracking her mask or Lalitha’s obsession with the bonsai are
symbols that are a little more than as Anindya says, ‘neither novel, nor very subtle, and
often it stands out a little too rigidly from the otherwise naturalistic text’ (Kaustav 328).
In the theatre, since the actor’s body is in itself an important symbol, Dolly’s facial mask
that would crack at the slightest force of facial muscles, is actually a subtle theatrical ploy
that magnifies the irony intended. One has to imagine the fact that the actor playing Dolly
on the stage will visually strike a distinct pose with the mask on her face, a face that will
be a sharp visual contrast to other faces because of the mask itself, and when it remains
inert and unresponsive to moments of humour, the irony is further emphasized through its
sheer visual rendering, and the irony is no longer merely a verbal one. This is where
theatre carves a distinct scope of its own.

With a focus on the text of Bravely Fought the Queen and its potential as a theatrical text,
I have tried to show how Dattani evokes a faithful and authentic representation of
contemporary India and its tensions. A corollary of this evocation has been his
negotiation of the larger question of gender within the construct of the nation. But this
idea needs to be given a deeper thought. The interconnection between the figure of the
woman and the idea of the nation dates back to a historical past and in most cases the
nation was seen as a metaphor of the mother. Indeed it was during the era of the nation’s
contest for independence that the nation-mother equation gained momentum. It was
strongly believed that mother nation was bound to chains by the British; she was
suffering and it was up to her sons to liberate her. The process probably begins with
Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s eulogizing of the mother in his Vande Mataram. The
song was printed in 1875 in Bangadarshan, later inserted into Bankim’s novel
Anandamath in 1882 and sung publicly for the first time by Rabindranath Tagore at the
Calcutta session of the Indian National Congress in 1896. Many such renderings followed
as the Bengali songs by D.L Roy, Atulprasad Sen and Rabindranath Tagore show. A
visual incarnation of the deshmata was also necessary and by far the best example
remains Abanindranath Tagore’s painting ‘Bharatmata’. Describing the painting, Sugata
Bose points out:

Visualized as a serene, saffron clad ascetic woman, the Mother carried the boons
of food, clothing, learning and spiritual salvation in her four hands. A conscious
creation of an ‘artistic’ icon of the nation, Abanindranath tells us in a memoir that
he had conceived his image as Bangamata and later, almost as an act of generosity
towards the larger cause of Indian nationalism decided to title it ‘Bharatmata’
(Bose 53-4.)
Bose moves on to note how recent theories have problematized such nation-mother
equations. There has also been an active concept of the female as shakti or source of
strength in India which is evident through goddess figures of Durga, Kali and even the
mother nation. But on the other hand it is equally evident that mother nation will be
protected/liberated by her sons. Thus the construct of the ‘free nation’ will be implicated
by the mother’s sons. The ‘male’ basis behind the idea of the nation then cannot be
overlooked either. Indeed at the domestic and the individual level the rule of the patriarch
has been a dominant characteristic of the Indian social set up. The Indian woman in such
a setup has largely been at the receiving end of domestic violence and other forms of
dominance by the male. Commenting in the context of women and religious faith in her
article ‘Politics of Diversity: Religious Communities and Multiple Patriarchies’,
Kumkum Sangari questions:

When they (women) consent to the punitive aspects of religious identity or

community are they in fact consenting to the patriarchies with which these are
meshed, or vice versa, or both? Alternatively, is their consent effectively consent
to the host of other social factors in which both religions and patriarchies are
 enmeshed? Thus women’s consent to religious definition may go beyond
questions of individual faith and reflect the ways to which religions and
patriarchies are articulating with other social structures. (Chakraborty 182-83)
Hence, as Sangari notes, ‘religions’ and ‘patriarchies’ are deeply connected to ‘other
social structures’ which are also patriarchal in the construct of contemporary India.
Writing within this male-centered paradigm of the nation, Dattani however differs by
carving out a separate space to the women. In the process the construct of the nation that
emerges in Dattani’s plays is more evenly balanced between the male and the female.
Moving from Tara the issue of gender within the idea of the nation seems to reach its
crescendo in the final act of Bravely Fought the Queen. The subtitle ‘Free for All!’ is thus
ironically adequate because it prepares the ground for an even battle. Near the end of the
play, as Sridhar and Lalitha decide to hurry off, Dolly, Alka, Jiten and Nitin are left back
with the symbolic bonsai of Lalitha in their own stunted world, exposed with their
respective guilts but even there lies a unique sense of evenness, which was hitherto
absent. This balance results from Dattani’s own sense of the self as a combination of the
feminine and the masculine. Dattani clarifies that gender in his plays –

has to do with my own comfort with both the feminine and the masculine self in
me…the masculine self is very content; it doesn’t need to express itself. But the
feminine self seems to seek expression…And since I have the male self, which is
equipped to fight as well, it is a proportionate battle (Chaudhuri 47-8.)
His plays then represent a clash of the male and the female orders but they emanate from
a single personality of the playwright. But for Dattani, since ‘expression’ is an important
issue, he is able to translate the feelings into effective theatrical expression and
communication. It is in this expression and in its decision to stay away from offering
judgments that Dattani offers an authentic representation of the contemporary nation.

------------------------------

Notes:
1. ‘Of Page and Stage: An Interview with Mahesh Dattani’ by Anjum Katyal for Seagull
Theatre Quarterly 24, August 1999. p 32.

Works Cited

Bose, Sugata. ‘Nation as Mother: Representations and Contestations of ‘India’ in Bengali

Literature and Culture’. Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal eds., Nationalism, Democracy and
Development: State and Politics in India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Print.
Chakraborty, Bidyut ed. Communal Identity in India: Its Construction and Articulation in
the Twentieth Century. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003. Print.
Chakraborty, Kaustav ed. Indian Drama in English. New Delhi: PHI Learning, 2011.
Print.
Chaudhuri, Asha Kuthari. Mahesh Dattani. New Delhi: Foundation Books, 2005. Print.
Dhar, Subir. ‘Where There’s A Will and Bravely Fought the Queen: The Drama of Mahesh
Dattani’. The Commonwealth Review. 13.2. Special number on Mahesh Dattani, New
Delhi: Indian Society for Commonwealth Studies. Print.
Dattani, Mahesh. Collected Plays. New Delhi: Penguin, 2000. Print.
---. “Of Page and Stage: An Interview with Mahesh Dattani”. Seagull Theatre Quarterly
24, August 1999. Print.
Nair, Anita. “Mahesh Dattani—The Invisible Observer”. Web.
http://www.anitanair.net/profiles/profile-mahesh-dattani.htm. 18 Oct 2012.