Q. Critically analyse ‘Bravely fought the Queen’ as a Feminist play.

(2017) (2014)

A. Portrayal of women by modern Indian playwrights like Rabindranath Tagore,

Vijay Tendulkar, Girish Karnad, Mahesh Elkunchwar, Mahasweta Devi, Mahesh
Dattani, Manjula Padmanabhan and Poile Sengupta provide interesting
dimensions of Indian women like the oppressed woman, woman fighting social
and racial discrimination, dalit woman, woman asserting her individuality, woman
as a victim of sexual abuse, and so on. Only in recent times, however, we find
male playwrights, inspired by western and Indian feminism, tending to write plays
with the consciousness of feminism. Mahesh Dattani, the Bangalore-based Indian
English playwright-director, belongs to the above category. Consequently
Dattani's portrayal of women in his plays is different from other Indian male
playwrights like Girish Karnad or Vijay Tendulkar, in the sense that Dattani not
only writes about women or their problems in a typically patriarchal society like
ours, but he also writes from the woman's point of view. That’s why his plays are
‘feminist’ plays in the truest sense of the term.

‘Bravely fought the Queen’ is one prime example of the same. In handling woman
as the marginalised subject, Dattani always explores a wider area of oppression -
sexual, social and cultural too. Mala in his ‘Thirty Days in September’ is sexually
oppressed by her own uncle; Sonal in ‘Where there’s a Will’ is oppressed by her
demanding husband who verbally abuses her; Tara in ‘Tara’ is discriminated by
her own family, due to which she is doomed to be lame. Similarly, in this play, Baa
is a widowed old woman who is still haunted by the violence inflicted on her by
her late husband; Alka is a woman trapped in a marriage where her husband is a
homosexual; Dolly is physically abused by her husband almost on a daily basis;
even her daughter Daksha was born invalid as her husband had hit her badly
when she was pregnant. Even Lalitha, the cosmopolitan Modern Indian woman,
introduced into the play as a foil for the manacled Trivedi women, eventually
reveals that beneath her apparent emancipation to chalk out a career of her own
she is actually subsumed into the patriarchal process of fashioning and shaping
women. In fact, she has learnt to shape her life, its preoccupations and interests
according to Sridhar’s tastes only, much like the bonsai trees that she produces as
a pastime.
Dattani's women, however, are neither openly rebellious nor completely
submissive too. They try to face their daily struggles in their own unique ways as
the playwright himself explains his women: "They are humans. They want
something. They face obstacles. They will do anything in their power to get it."
(Lakshmi Subramanyam; A Dialogue with Mahesh Dattani). Dattani projects their
fortunes and misfortunes; they have flaws yet he does not ignore their strengths.
Each woman is different from another woman, each endowed with her own
qualities. He has drawn his women with great sympathy, but they are by no
means saintly victims. They are also endowed with negative qualities. These
women can be egoistic (Ratna in ‘Dance like a Man’), greedy (Preeti in ‘Where
there’s a Will’), spunky (Tara in ‘Tara’), stupid (Roopa in ‘Tara’), cruel (Bharati in
‘Tara’), or even sly (Baa here) (C.K Meena; "Unmasking the Middle Class"). But all
in all, they are real women with their real flesh-and-blood desires, delusions and
depressions too. The oppressive patriarchal society fits them into a traditional
role model as represented in Tennyson’s verse:

"Man for the field and women for the hearth;

Man for the sword and for the needle she." ("The Princess" V, 427)

As the above verse relates, Sonal's (‘Where there’s a Will’) 'hearth' is her kitchen,
where she spends most of the time, making 'parathas' or 'orange-flavoured
halwa'. However, the two Trivedi women depicted in ‘Bravely fought the Queen’
are not so submissive. Ironically, the same ‘kitchen’ takes on a completely
different hue here and a completely different kind of dinner is cooked therein.
Lights are on and off there with the presence or absence of Kanhaiyalal, a fantasy
hero only nineteen years of age, who is ‘ripe’ in Alka’s words and whose “two
powerful black arms” clasp around the nightie-clad body of Dolly while the love-
song of Naina Devi is played in the background. Of course this is pure fantasy
stuff, but Alka’s alcoholism is not. Thus, these two oppressed sisters both rebel in
their own respective ways and also support each other in an example of the
female bonding, even temporarily taking Lalitha too in their fold, which is a
predominant feature of all feminist writings, particularly those which lean
towards lesbian feminism, a cultural movement and critical perspective, most
influential in the 1970s and early 1980s, that encourages women to direct their
energies toward other women rather than men, and often advocates lesbianism
as the logical result of feminism. True that none of the women here is a lesbian
really, but their bonding in Act I, captioned as ‘The Women’, is a remarkable
example of “how in this male-dominated society, where women's oppression
keeps unfolding, the only hope for a woman is sharing and shouldering life's
burdens with another woman” (Evangeline L. Marbaniang).

In Dattani's plays, the male too, seen as victim of patriarchy, is female-sensitised.

The playwright as a male writer with an awakened female sensibility, renders a
gynocentric vision to his plays which has helped him to view patriarchy as
affecting the weaker males too like Nitin and Shridhar here who are nothing but
mere puppets in the hands of strong machos like Praful and Jiten. As Dattani
says in an interview: “I am not sure I have portrayed the women as victims in
Bravely Fought The Queen. I see men as victims of their own rage and repression.
This has serious consequences on the lives of women.”

Not Dattani's ideas only, but his use of images too reveals a man's feminist
empathy for the woman's cause. Alexander Viets comments in an essay: "The
images used to express the condition of women by one of India's playwrights are
startling and vivid: The dwarfed and stunted boughs of a bonsai tree, …a spastic
child from an unhappy and destructive marriage”—all compound to create a
subaltern cultural consciousness which is unique in Indian English writings. Almost
all the male characters present or mentioned here, including Jiten and Nitin’s
deceased father, Dolly and Alka’s deceased father, and even Shridhar too, have
been or had been cheating on their female counterparts all the while and shaping
their lives like bonsai trees stunting their natural growth. Their shoots or their
desires are constantly trimmed and cut so that they spread only to a particular
level. They are not allowed to attain the required height. Their roots are not given
ample space to spread. As Dattani himself says to Lakshmi Subramanyam in an
interview: “All I focus is the powerlessness of these people... My only defence is
to say that I am not biased against women.” This is why Dattani is held as “a
Playwright of world stature” (Ms. Jagadiswari and Dr. G. Baskaran).