Cultural Representations and Social Critique in Indian English Drama: Currimbhoy and Dattani in Perspective

This article mainly examines how the two major Indian playwrights in English—Asif Currimbhoy and Mahesh Dattani—deploy the theatrical form to mainly represent the culture and articulate thesocial critique. Although the two plays focus on the fault-lines of the Indian modernity, the playwrights portray Currimbhoy with the political and transnational crises of the 1960s and 1970s and Dattani with domestic social tragedies of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, although the period of the writing of each of the plays is close to thirty years apart and the historical development of the two nations impacts them differently. The context of their plays is reflected in the paper with the growth of the Indian English theatre, the language, the stage, the creation of characters and the dramatising technique that the issues of classes, caste, gender, sexuality, communalism and nation are mediated. This is achieved through more thorough readings of the sample articles, and that is done by Currimbhoy, Goa, Inqilab, The Do drummers, The Refugee, Dattani, Final Solutions, Dance Like a Man, Tara, Bravely Fought the Queen, On a Muggy Night in Mumbai and Thirty Days in September. It claims that the theatre of immediacy employed by Currimbhoy draws upon documentary energy and political allegory, discovering systematic violence and postcolonial disillusionment as opposed to the city and bourgeois household being the ethical factories that make identities coordinate and reveal prejudice within Currimbhoy. It is summed up that all of them fall within the Indian English drama as the gift of critical publicity; the type of drama that transfers the struggle between different social elements to the sphere of performative argumentation consistently.