Kaleidoscopic Portrayal of Gay issues in the Plays of Mahesh Dattani

Abstract

Theatre is very close to the life of the people. It has always been a
medium to express and present the problems of the contemporary life, in a
realistic way. That is the reason why both Aristotle in the West and Bharata
in the East have regarded Drama as the greatest form of art not only in its
aesthetic value but also in its proximity to life. The modern playwrights of
the West and the East have justified this view in no less manner than the
ancients. While G. B. Shaw, W. B. Yeats, Harold Pinter, J.M. Synge, John
Arden, Arnold Wester etc. were the advocates of British Drama in modern
times, Eugene O’Neill and Arthur Miller held the fort of modern Drama in
America. In India, theratre thrived mostly in regional languages. In Indian
English Drama only a few playwrights namely Girish Karnad, Vijay Tendulkar,
Mahesh Dattani, Asif Currimbhoy emerged taking the theatre to great heights