“We Don't Want Freaks”: Performing Disability in Mahesh Dattani's Tara

Abstract

Mahesh Dattani's dramatic works are celebrated for highlighting “invisible issues,” such as gender-based oppression. In Tara, Dattani accomplishes this goal through the attention-getting device of conjoined twin protagonists. The play's treatment of this unusual form of physical difference, while positing some qualified arguments against sexism, ignores and/or modifies the realities of concorporate bodies, providing an example of postcolonial “narrative prosthesis.” Disability studies and postcolonial studies can offer each other richly co-generative theoretical and rhetorical potential, and Dattani's particular focus could illuminate concerns with community, biopolitics and Foucaultian “abnormality.” Instead, Tara echoes problematics inherent in foregrounding one notion of “difference” at the expense of others.