Abstract : Situating Mahesh Dattani’s 30 Days in September within theatrical tradition of feminist plays in India, this article attempts to foreground the depiction of experiencing and witnessing trauma. Dattani’s work probes tangled attitudes in contemporary India towards communal differences, consumerism, gender discrimination, violence against women, gender roles, construction of identities, etc. Caught as they are, in a repressed world of trauma, the survivours of child sexual abuse and incest, occupy a liminal position in our society. Their voices are stifled and silenced by the patriarchal society. The issue of incest and child sexual abuse can be tackled from the perspective of psychological theories. It wounds the mind and destabilizes language, consciousness and perceptions. Dattani so develops the plot that all through the play, Mala lives with the haunting memories of her past. The witnessing of women’s bodily traumas and violence offered in the garish public space of the contemporary theatre as in Thirty Days in September herald the possibility of resistance and transformation.
Keyword : narratives of violence, narratives of resistance, trauma theory, love and betrayal, politicised victimisation
Situating Mahesh Dattani’s 30 Days in September within theatrical tradition of feminist plays in India, this article attempts to foreground the depiction of experiencing and witnessing trauma from the perspective of trauma theory. Trauma theory is a discourse of the unrepresentable, a discourse of the event or object that destabilises language, consciousness and perceptions. Initial theory on trauma, put forward by Freud states that an overpowering event, unacceptable to consciousness, can be forgotten and yet return in the form of somatic symptoms or compulsive, repetitive behaviours. The tumultuous events in the life of Mala left behind legacies of trauma which is a ‘time delayed and negotiated process’.
Girish Karnad, Manjula Padmanabhan, Shiv. K. Kumar, Dina Mehta, Badal Sarkar, Vijay Tendulkar, and Mahesh Elkunchwa, N. Panikkar, Tripurari Sharma, and Mahesh Dattani are among the most interesting and important playwrights writing in India today, and their work demonstrates the wide range of styles, philosophies, and issues being dealt with in the contemporary Indian theatre scene. Dattani can be considered the true successor of Girish Karnad and is remarkable for the revolutionary progression of Indian English drama.
Dattani’s work probes tangled attitudes in contemporary India towards communal differences, consumerism, gender discrimination, violence against women, gender roles, construction of identities, etc. He rearranges the social fabric and depict the post colonial and gender dichotomy that exist in post colonial India. His major plays are Dance Like a Man, 30 Days in September, Bravely Fought the Queen, Final Solutions, Tara, On a Muggy Night in Mumbai. All of which form a brilliant contribution to Indian drama in English. His awards include Sahitya Kala Parishad for best production for Dance Like a Man(1997), Sahitya Akademi Award, in 1988 for book of plays Final Solutions and Other Plays in 2000 and Sahitya Kala Parishad for the best production of Tara. Dattani is also a film-maker and his films have been screened in India and abroad to critical and public acclaim.
The aesthetics of Mahesh Dattani’s plays is embedded in his deft constructions of gender and class discriminations, familial affiliations and discords, communal politics and violence, as well as the dilemmas and tensions of the differently abled, the transgendered, the gay and the lesbian. Dattani deserves the praise and honour bestowed upon him as Merchant says:
Mahesh Dattani’s pathos-with-a-punch approach, picked with a dash of humour, makes him the perfect candidate for chronicling urban angst. His plays are peopled with city slickens wrestling with issues-in a manner-close to the modern psyche…change-the-world brand of range and impulsiveness, threatens to upset some apple carts… eager to understand mind contrasted by informed prejudices…character growing…build in conflict in marriage…collapse of certain stereotypes…prejudice holder forced to look outside the cosy community circle… (India Today, Feb 14)
Mahesh Dattani writes in English, and takes as his subject the complicated dynamics of the modern urban family. His plays are also well known for the language he uses-Indian English. The plays of Mahesh Dattani are perhaps the first to challenge effectively the assumption that Indian drama written in English represents a disjunction between language and sensibility, material and medium. Dattani does not see his choice of English as arbitrary, as a ‘postcolonial’ gesture, or as an example of ‘the empire writing back’. Dattani’s plays signal a new phase in the naturalisation of English as a theatre medium in India, and redress some of the inequalities outlined by post colonial writers in English.
His themes reflect upon the ordinary and everyday conflicts of urban people who may be living in transitional periods of history, caught between the firm undertow of tradition and modernity. His characters struggle for some kind of freedom and happiness under the oppressive weight of tradition, cultural constructions of gender, and repressed desire. His characters and plot reverberate with the reality of contemporary Indian society. He belongs to that tradition of avant-garde feminists who presents women as the centre of their fictive world. Not only Mahesh Dattani but also other playwrights like Cyrus Mistry, Poile Sengupta, Dina Mehta and Gieve Patel view family as a source of oppression and the breeding ground for social prejudice and sexual violence. 30 Days in September also depicts family as a site of abuse and oppression in every sense of the term.
Theatre has the ability to redefine the natural concepts of time, space and movement. It goes beyond the verbal and the physical. As Tutun Mukherjee argues:
Drama and theatre are two cultural products, in which the bias of gender generics and sexual difference are in evidence as social and psychic reality. Placing the forms within the discourse of ‘gender as genre’ reveals the way [the] sex- gender system operates in the art and practice of drama and theatre and controls their cultural reproduction. (4)
Dattani makes use of this in a nuanced way, especially in 30 Days in September. Translated to Hindi by Smita Nirula, and directed by Arvind Gaur, 30 Days in September was presented by Asmita, a leading theatre group that stands committed to socially relevant theatre. A play about love and betrayal, 30 Days in September interrogates the sensitive and generally taboo issue of child sexual abuse. 30 Days in September is a play commissioned by an NGO called RAHI (Recovery and Healing from Incest) that helps survivors of child sexual abuse. 30 Days in September endeavors to lift the veil of silence which surrounds child sexual abuse and addresses the issue unflinchingly. It builds on the trauma of Mala who lives with the haunting memories of her abused past.
How women’s bodies have been constructed and politicised becomes a central question for contemporary Feminist theatre. In Judith Butler’s words, “there is no reference to a pure body which is not at the same time a further formation of that body” (10). Indeed, the constructions of gender and embodiment found in women’s performance narratives of violence draw important links between “the everyday body as it is lived, and the regime of disciplinary and regulatory practices that shape its form and behaviour” (Shildrick and Price,8). Nevertheless the witnessing of women’s bodily traumas and violence offered in the garish public space of the contemporary theatre are advents that herald the possibility of resistance and transformation.
30 Days in September, a play about love and betrayal treats the sensitive and generally taboo issue of child sexual abuse. Mala is the victim of abuse in the play. Her abuser who is her uncle subconsciously lives with her all the time, as part of her dirty reflections. He damages her natural growth, deters her from pursuing her love interests beyond the ominous 30-day period and scars her soul every now and then. As she comes to the stage of adolescence, she finds that the world is hostile and human relationships are sources of betrayal. She becomes hostile to the world around her and finds herself alienated from the same. She bears the pain of humiliation of her body but is not permitted to reveal the truth before the society. Her anguish becomes more painful on the realisation that even her mother maintains severe silence. As Mala withers under the psychological pressure exerted on her by the abuser, her mother watches silently, living her own pain and suffering mutely. Adrienne Rich in Of Woman Born emphasised the absurdity of such a situation:
Though motherhood is the experience of women, the institution of motherhood is under male control and the physical situation of becoming a mother is disciplined by males. This glorious motherhood imposed on women conditions her entire life. (45)
As motherhood was controlled and disciplined by males, Shanta was unable to face Mala’s predicament. The pathetic situation is best expressed in Mala’s lamentation:
You know, I couldn’t say anything to you. You never gave me a chance to. If only you had looked into my eyes and seen the hurt or asked me ‘beta’ what’s wrong? Then may be I would have told you…but ma, I did look to you for help, while you were praying your eyes avoiding mine, and I knew deep down I must have known that you will never ask me that question you already knew the answer. (53)
Exploring the painful problem, Mahesh Dattani raises valid concerns and structures a world of optimism where the wrongs can stand corrected and resurrection of brutalised faith is possible. But none of this happens without another man’s willingness to help the two women bury their traumatic past and find ways of rejuvenating their present.
Deepak, Mala’s boyfriend, becomes the agent of change here. He dares to unmask the evil, even at the cost of his love. He hits the women hard until they hit the rock bottom. Finally, there is no way but to come up – face the wrongs and dare to correct them, notwithstanding the challenges the process of correction entails. By marking a daring departure from norm, the play ensures that we, as a society, no longer take comfort in the routine of uttering word “incest” in gutless undertones. The play also brings us closer to the reality of abused children. Pleasure does form a part of their pain, but finally the consequence of dangerous games can only be dangerous. Our only way to fight danger is to recognise it and crush with generous doses of brutality lest we are ready to condemn innocence to lifelong death.
Caught as they are, in a repressed world of trauma, the survivors of child sexual abuse and incest, occupy a liminal position in our society. Their voices are stifled and silenced by the patriarchal society. The issue of incest and child sexual abuse can be tackled from the perspective of psychological theories. It wounds the mind and destabilises language, consciousness and perceptions. Dattani so develops the plot that all through the play, Mala lives with the haunting memories of her past. Perhaps, without being conscious of it, the uncle has permanently damaged her development with the result that she cannot pursue her love interest beyond 30 days, psychologically hinted at by her underlining a particular date on the calendar. By his words and deeds, her uncle expressed a desire at once to annihilate and consume her, demanding that she metaphorically, if not literally, assume whatever posture he might devise to revitalise his waning sense of mastery. Her uncle’s acts of sexualised violence assaulted not only the body of Mala, but also her psyche. It was traumatic and left Mala emotionally crippled throughout her life. Sexual assault is associated with greater psychological harm than other crimes. Mala’s suppression of the pain and abuse causes physical and mental disorders. She finds herself helpless and this helplessness gradually led to rebellion, aggressiveness to all kinds of humiliation, neglect and injustice.
Accounts of incest are quite common in Royal dynasties, mythology (especially Greek and Norse) and in various folklores. However, incest and child sexual abuse is politicised victimisation and the trauma of sexual assault cause acute or relatively immediate reaction and long range effects on the victim. And their post traumatic life is characterised by an array of emotional and mental disorders which can be collectively termed as Post Traumatic Stress Disorders. They repeatedly re-experience the torment and anguish of the ordeal in the form of flashbacks, memories, nightmares, or frightening thoughts, especially when they are exposed to events or objects that associate with or remind them of the trauma. The acts of violence render the victims helpless and they lose their sense of control, connection and meaning which is essential for a healthy life. These acts of violence leave the victims in a state of helplessness and thereby undermine their sense of personal efficacy, their relational capacity, and their ability to psychologically integrate the upheavals of life in meaningful ways.
In the play Mala is the victim in a state of helplessness. For instance, when Mala and her mother are blaming each other and Mala says to her mother, “Once we were talking about a rape case that was in the papers. You said something about children also not being safe…Then I told you about what happened to me. But you changed the subject…That time I wondered if it was I or did I imagine it all? Surely not. No, it did happen”(Dattani 18). The victims in India face two distinct problems- first, they have to convince their audience and readers and listeners that child sexual abuse and incest are widespread and is problematic to the social fabric. And the second one is the absence of an environment which will catalyse their inner healing. They find it difficult to make the society believe that it is real.
Trauma theory holds that the knowledge of trauma, or the knowledge which comes from that source, is composed of two contradictory elements. One is the traumatic event, registered rather than experienced. It seems to have bypassed perception and consciousness, and falls directly into the psyche. The other is a kind of memory of the event, in the form of a perpetual tromping of it by the bypassed or severely split (dissociated) psyche. Dattani describes not only the traumatic events in the life of Mala, but also how these events are registered in her mind. Mala’s mother knew all along that her daughter was being sexually abused but still chose to be silent. It is this silence of the near ones that makes the abused feel betrayed. Shanta instead of encountering the reality escapes the reality. Mala ends up accusing her mother; “Only person who can, who would have prevented all this is my mother. Sometimes I wish she would just tell me to stop (18). Shanta as a method of defence seeks shelter in the picture of Krishna or compels her to eat parathas:
Oh! Yes, you would remember that I always like the parathas because that is what I get whenever I come to you hurt and crying. Instead of listening to what I had to say, you stuffed me with food. I couldn’t speak because I was being fed all the time, you know that? I began to like them. I thought that was the cure of my pain. (24)
According to Judith Herman, remembering and telling the truth about terrible events are essential tasks both for the healing of individual victims, perpetrators, and families, and for the restoration of social order. Both the cognitive and the communicative must be accomplished if subsequent generations are to understand and ameliorate the seemingly intractable racial and gender hostilities and violence that continue to afflict our society. But as Mala’s mother, the society is so stubborn and just refuses to open discourses on incest and child sexual abuse.
“Forget all these bad dreams,” says the mother. “Every time uncle visited us it would happen…whenever I told you, you always said eat well and go to sleep, the pain will go away… Yes it did go away but it always comes back” (18). But traumatic experiences like incest and child sexual abuse upset the victim’s perceptions about life and drastically shatters their world view. It creates a sense of alarm, fear, panic, apprehension and dread that will linger well beyond the actual experience of the traumatising event. The belated experience of trauma exists in her as fragments of memories as testimony to the traumatic event:
Seems to be composed of bits and pieces of a memory that has been overwhelmed by occurrences that have not settled into understanding or remembrance, acts that cannot be constructed as knowledge nor assimilated into full cognition, events in excess of our frames of reference. (Felman and Laub 5)
Trauma is the result of victim’s adaptability to their experience of those events. Some develop resilience which enables them to carry on with life, and some find that their social, psychological, and biological stability is damaged. The victims of sexual assault fail to develop that kind of resilience and are emotionally scarred. Dattani unfolds the layers of butchered and tortured psyche of Mala whose suffering has two dimensions-firstly, her struggle with her own inner self and secondly her discontent with her mother who maintains terrible silence to escape horrors of the reality of the situation. This status quo thrives as the common notion that aggression and violence are unquestionably male while submission and vulnerability are traditionally female is circulated by the media and other official discourses of power.
Trauma is highly contagious in the sense that hearing the truth evokes terror, rage and despair in listeners. And thus the children of the victims also suffer from the aftermath of abuse as the adult survivors implant their own emotional stability into their children’s mental make up. So it is necessary to protect the second generation too who are under the clutches of traumatic memories of the parental generation.
Child incest victims are often called ‘secret survivors’ as there is often no one to take their side or to listen to their shame, confusion, and self-loathing as incest is a taboo topic. Very often they end up blaming themselves. “I know it is all my fault really…It must be. I must have asked for it…Somehow, I just seem to be made for it. May be I was born that way; may be…” (26). In many cases of such incest the non- perpetrating parent supports the other parent or denies the other parent’s perpetration, fearing the loss of the spouse. And hence the child does not have the other parent to turn for support. Sometimes parental incest is known to do severe psychological harm to a child, due to the child’s physical, mental, and emotional dependence on a parent, due to total disparity in the power of authority, due to the disparity in emotional and physical maturity, and finally due to the fact that the incestuous relationship may damage or destroy healthy aspects of childhood development. Their traumatic existence is one of suffering that fragments the psyche and body’s self-defense mechanisms, which leaves them with a variety of post traumatic stress disorders.
The dramatic conflict in the play develops through the unorganised and fractured consciousness of Mala. Action in the play moves through exclusive use of monologues and incomplete sentences echoing the fragmented psyche and inner conflict of Mala. Dattani takes the family setting to reveal the ramifications of trauma caused by sexual violence. However, according to John MacRae ‘the starting point for many of the greatest plays is family-from Orestia to Hamlet, from Racine to Ibsen and Chekhov, from, royal concerns of Shakuntala to the tribal spectacles of Wole Soyinka, human relationships and the family unit have always been at the heart of dramatic representation’. Dattani deliberately chose an upper class family as the setting. He said in an interview: I would rather see the setting of 30 Days in September as upper middle class. I chose this setting because I did not want them to dismiss sexual abuse as something that does not happen to people like them.
In India, reported cases on incest are less but on the other hand the actual number is alarmingly high. The patriarchal set up and even women who internalised those values refuse to admit the fact that incest is very much happening in our society. Irrespective of class distinctions it is quite common. Though Hinduism speaks of incest in highly abhorrent terms, it is rampant in various tribes and familial circles in Indian society. The harsh fact is that sexual violence remains a tool all too readily available for exploitation of women in modern warfare, whether in family or in the public space, be it real or metaphorical, domestic, civil, or international.
Narratives on incest and child sexual abuse should come up which must question the motives of the perpetrators, which would open discourses on the trauma that incest and child sexual abuse left behind and which would share the victims’ anger and indignation towards the society that does not provide a support network for incest. The narratives on incest and child sexual abuse will be helpful to thousands of victims all over India as they would be able to relate to the tales of incest told by a few and can create a framework within which to examine her own experience.
“Years of silence. Silence wrapped around life like a cocoon…” (Daniaca 77). In India women are reluctant to speak out about their abuse as it would invite social humiliation, ridicule and disbelief. Indian women are silenced by fear and shame. There was yet another most powerful scene when the mother tells her daughter what she had seen. “You were pushing yourself in the bedroom, you were asking him to kiss you, to touch you, to pinch you… I also remember when your cousin came for his holidays…you wanted my brother and your cousin dancing around you. How can I forget?”(Dattani 51). Here the victim is blamed for what has happened. The mother finally says, “Don’t talk about it, forget the pain… try to forget the pleasure.” “But the pleasure is part of the pain,” says Mala.
The very silence of the victims gave more opportunities and license to every form of abuse. In the play the financial assistance offered by uncle Vinay made Shanta silent. “He bought your silence so that you can never tell anyone what he did to your daughter” (52). Women should identify the sources of continued social pressure that keep them confined in the role of a victim. They should also identify their own socialised assumption and misconception which make them vulnerable to abuse. They should realise that what matters is their confrontation and disclosure while how the family and society react is immaterial. When the family responds with unyielding denial or fury, there must be a peer group or friends or other survivors or therapists who are always ready to support and validate the victim’s testimony. Otherwise the child victims will not come out of the hard shell which bounds them. In 30 Days in September Mala is silent because of various reasons. “I remained silent not because I wished to but I didn’t know how to speak. I cannot speak. I cannot say anything my tongue was cut off…” (55).
Sexual violence is by definition beyond the blue, a topic that most of the people were content to leave unspoken. Given this cultural reticence, there existed no established language in which to narrate the experience of sexual trauma, and that absence itself circumscribed the possibilities for conceptualising and representing any but corporeal injuries. This interpretation resonates well with Judith Butler’s astute observation that the site of traumatisation may be the very loss of what is narratable, hence, intelligible. Nevertheless, Dattani succeeds in bringing forth the pain and frustration of Mala in a pertinent manner with great success.
Exploring the painful problem, Mahesh Dattani raises valid concerns and structures a world of optimism where the wrongs can stand corrected and resurrection of brutalised faith is possible. But none of this happens without another man’s willingness to help the two women bury their traumatic past and find ways of rejuvenating their present. Deepak, Mala’s boyfriend, becomes the agent of change here. He dares to unmask the evil, even at the cost of his love. By marking a daring departure from norm, the play ensures that we, as a society, no longer take comfort in the routine of uttering word “incest” in gutless undertones. The play also brings us closer to the reality of abused children-pleasure does form a part of their pain, but finally the consequence of dangerous games can only be dangerous. Our only way to fight danger is to recognise it and crush with generous doses of brutality lest we are ready to condemn innocence to lifelong death.
REFERENCES
Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. New York: Routledge, 1993.
Daniaca, Elly. Don’t: A Woman’s Word. San Francisco: Cleis Press, 1988. Dattani, Mahesh. Collected Plays. New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2000.
Felman, Shoshana and Dori Laub. Testimony: Cries of Witnessing in Literature Psychoanalysis and History. London: Routledge, 1992.
Merchant, R. On Mahesh Dattani, India Today, Feb, 14, 2000.
Shildrick, Margrit, et al. “Openings on the Body: A Critical Introduction.” Feminist Theory and the Body: A Reader. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999, 1-14
Contributor:
RAJ SREE M.S. Is Assistant Professor, All Saint’s College, Thiruvananthapuram.
