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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.

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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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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.

Works Cited

Borges, Jorges, Luis. Book of Imaginary Beings. London: Vintage, 2002.

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Caputo, John. On not Circumventing the Quasi-transcendental: the Case of Rorty and Derrida.
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