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Abstract

Mahesh Dattani is the first Indian-English playwright to be awarded with the Sahitya Akademi Award. He is always known for byzantine dynamics of the modern urban family. In his plays, he handles innumerable topics like gender discrimination especially dealing with the problems faced by the second sex, LGBT studies precisely homo sexuality, socialism and child mishandling. Dattani challenged the uncanny social structure of Indian society. Tara deals with the aspects of twins which are considered as the two sides of the same coin. The play presents the struggle between deception and genuineness as reverberated by the multi-level set. In this play, Tara, Dattani attempts to bring the gender-based inequality and how the male child was given predilection over the female child in a middle-class Indian family, which gave upper hand to the male, as quoted by Simone de Beauvoir. Dattani’s Tara deals with the sensitive separation of two Siamese twins. It also deals with the concept of female infanticide that is still practiced by the Gujaratis. The family tried to manipulate the mother of the Siamese twins and their grandfather in favour of the boy child over the girl child. Tara also focuses on the issues of class and community and traditional values.

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