Assessing 'Final Solutions'

Murari Prasad, S Subhashini – Dattani’s “Final Solutions”

http://www.museindia.com/showfocus15.asp?id=1330

A Scene from Mahesh Dattani's 'Final Solutions.' Courtesy - theatre.sulekha.com

Abstract: The trauma of the vivisection of India and its continuing reverberations inform a good range of Anglophone postcolonial literature in India. However, its sensitive representation in drama is relatively sparse. Mahesh Dattani’s Final Solutions inhabits the communally charged world of the Indian subcontinent and brings out the nuances of the communal intransigence and proclivities, missing in what Suzanne Langer calls the ‘virtual past’ of narrative literature. The play helps to make sense of a major tension in postcolonial Indian society as the two communities of different stripes reclaim their past and re-imagine their future. This paper will examine how the play captures the communal rupture and sectarian impulse. Ironically alluding to Hitler’s racial arrogance and bigotry for a final ethnic cleansing, Dattani zeroes in on the siege within the characters ranged against one another and gestures towards addressing the in-house conflict with tolerance and empathy. The process of misbegotten politicization of religion and the dynamics of contemporary incitements to violence are also investigated, for good measure.

Dattani’s plays, in addition to being engrossing entertainment with satisfying plot dynamics, have substantial thematic meat to keep academics, as John McRae notes, “ at the feast for a long time to come”(in Multani 54). They embody crucial concerns of Indian society. Ranging from many thorny issues to major persistent taboos, the themes of his stage plays, such as Where There’s a Will (1988), Dance Like a Man (1989), Tara (1990), Bravely Fought the Queen (1991), On a Muggy Night in Bombay (1998), Seven Steps around the Fire (1999), Thirty Days in September (2001), as well as his radio plays, have been movingly rendered in the twists and turns of the plot. In Final Solutions (1993), Dattani gets to grips with the sectarian tension and mistrust between two major communities of India. The tense interface between the two communities of India in the aftermath of Partition provides the context for the basic situation. As the situation triggers action, the play unfolds palpable tension which climaxes into a final confrontation between the frenzied bands of the two communities and then into a statement on tolerant togetherness. The initial situation depicts a communal riot which has periodically tended to throw Hindus and Muslims into spontaneous combustion. The play establishes the initial situation in such a way as to foreshadow the tensions which emerge in the action. The ideas which are discussed grow out of and illuminate the course of action embodied in characters.

The play opens with Daksha reading from her diary, reminiscing about the “terrible” loss of pluralism in India’s vivisection even as the country’s tryst with destiny has eventually materialized in the form of its long-cherished Independence. This proud heritage which the British meticulously destroyed has not reasserted itself strongly enough to contain the trauma of Partition. The time span of forty years is squeezed as Daksha’s observations melt into Hardika’s voice: “Yes, things have not changed that much” (167). Her speech fills out the significance of the opening scene: even after 40 years of independence the Hindu-Muslim question has not been sorted out. Flawed reliance on singularity along a rigid line of segregation has bolstered bigotry and made India’s social fabric fragile and politically combustible. The full flavour of the situation derives from the setting, dialogue and intensification of the action that unfolds. The play revolves around the colonial legacy of Partition—its traumatic aftermath with incendiary implications. It sets off a pugnacious perspective on the periodic eruption of communal confrontation fuelled by religious polarization and reductionist conviction. Dattani comes out with flying colours in his dramatic representation of the persistent Hindu-Muslim tension since Partition. The issue of communalist violence and sectarian tension shaped and greatly exacerbated by memories of the Partition conflicts is a crowded and highly contested terrain. In recent years it has generated intensive, bottom-up case studies such as Paul Brass’s The Production of Hindu-Muslim Violence in Contemporary India (2003) as well as macro and top-down approaches like Ashutosh Varshney’s Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life (2002), apart from Partha Chatterjee’s celebrated work in the area, Nations and its Fragments (1993). In addition to these social scientists, Sudhir Kakar has also explored the complex reasons for Hindu-Muslim animosity in his book, The Colours of Violence. In this paper I utilize Kakar’s psychological investigation into the intolerably violent productions to analyze Dattani’s representation of a communalist riot which is the pumping heart of the play. As the play suggests, the hostilities emanating from the communal divide are multi-layered and therefore less tractable than often explained by the pseudo-secularists. In other words, the malady is not amenable to formulaic and stereotyped political management.

In The Colours of Violence, Kakar examines the patterns of collective communal violence which periodically breaks out and snowballs into Hindu-Muslim riots and pogroms in the subcontinent. Rumour and cultural memory serve as active accessories in fomenting mutual distrust. Kakar argues that certain typical ploys commonly recur in rumours fanning riotous activities in the subcontinent. The incendiary motifs include spreading the gossip about water and food supplies being poisoned by the other religious group, weapons being stockpiled in sacred spaces, temples or mosques being desecrated with carcasses of cows or pigs, symbols of faith being mindlessly attacked and sexual organs of the opposed religious group being mutilated, and Indian or Pakistani state getting covertly involved in communal violence (37–59). The rumours producing confrontational frenzy in Dattani’s play contain some tropes very similar to those suggested by Kakar:

[The Mob/Chorus wearing the Hindu masks]

Chorus2, 3. They broke our rath.
They broke our chariot and felled our Gods!
[…]
Chorus 2. The stone that hit our God was no accident!
Chorus 3. The knife that slit the poojari’s stomach was no accident!

[The Mob/Chorus wearing the Muslim masks]

Chorus 1. Their chariot fell in our streets
Chorus 2. Their God now prostrates before us!
Chorus 3. So they blame it on us?
Chorus 1. Was the chariot built by us?
Chorus 2, 3. Blame the builder of those fancy thrones.
Chorus 4. A manufacturing defect!
Chorus 5. Doesn’t their God have a warranty?
Chorus All. We are neither idol makers nor breakers!

Kakar argues that the covert and conspiratorially organised riots are sustained by stylized and self-perpetuating rumours. The canard going on the grapevine gains in street credibility and substitutes the events it talks about (37). The motives of the vile rumourmongers is never scrutinized and impugned nor is any empirical evidence sought to diagnose the oddly parochial correlates of these rumours. The sanity of society is overwhelmed by the rhetorical potency of these rumours and myths based on an astonishingly limited view taken by religious collectivities of one another. Embedded in prejudices, hostilities and quarrels between the two religious groups, these rumours spread quickly and are seized upon by the collective psyche. Of course, in the ongoing discourse of Hindu-Muslim communalism the momentous Partition stands as the most significant event to generate stories of oppression on both sides of the religious divide and so it is regarded as the first catastrophe of the historical consciousness in modern South Asia. The memory of neatly partitioned categories as well as the presumption that the two communities are disparate and disjunctive units has been kept alive, even made sharper, by the accretion of distortions of the religious conflict in the course of hearsay stories about communal pogroms:

Cultural memory is the imaginative basis for a sense of cultural identity. For isn’t imagination not [sic] a memory of vital moments of life freed from their actual, historical context? Cultural memory, too, is a group’s history freed from rootedness in time — it is as much imagination as the actual events that go into its construction. (Kakar 22)

Hard facts are glossed over in the evocative accounts of past violence in that such stories are circulated to construct a quintessential dichotomy and fortify crude ethnic particularities. Increased communal polarisation is promoted by painting the other group as the real culprit. In an interview, Urvashi Butalia points out the grossly partisan role of rumours in stoking up bitter Partition memories: “[I]n individual and collective memory, inside families particularly which is where this history of partition is largely contained, it’s very one-sided. You hear from families about their victimhood, but you never hear about their involvement in the violence” (in Whitehead 234). In a context of intense political mobilisation religious support is sought to be consolidated by mounting a hate campaign against the rival communal group.Dattani has Daksha to corroborate this point:

He [Daksha’s father] said that before leaving, they[the Britishers] had let loose the dogs. I hated to think that he was talking about my friend’s fathers… But that night in Hussainabad in our ancestral house –when I heard them outside –I knew that they were thinking the same of us. And I knew that I was thinking the same, like my father. And as their voices grew louder, I blamed them more and more for my father’s absence. The windows broke , one by one. My mother and myself , we hid in the pooja room. The stones came smashing into our home. I clung to my mother. My mother clung to the family idol of Lord Krishna. ( 167)

Kakar further suggests (53) that the need for solidarity in the face of adversaries across the religious divide is emphasised to rally the members around an all-engulfing identity of cultural affiliation. Intra-communal fissures disappear during the moments charged with religious ethnicity as a person’s all-encompassing identity. This is how rumours cement the communal scene. Inter-faith understanding is in short supply. People tend to be obsessed with parochial predisposition and the trigger sends their sanity and tolerance into unhealthy overdrive and disarray. Religion becomes the sole distinguishing marker of identity, pushing the single agenda of communal rift as the rallying point. Inevitably, other categories of group alliance, such as class, occupation, gender etc. are deeply miniaturised and classsified into a single carton of one-dimensional civilization. When Javed says that he was “ swayed by what now appears to me as cheap sentiment…[the talk] about motherland and fighting to save our faith and how we should get four of theirs for everyone of ours” (205) , he is echoing the words of Hitler: “ ‘The individual […] in becoming an adherent of a new movement feels lonely…[but] receives…the pictures of a greater community, something that has a strengthening and encouraging effect on most people’” (qtd in Kertzer, 165). Javed realizes remorsefully that he has been recruited to spread the raw vehemence of the radical version of his faith.

Dattani’s portrayal of post-Partition riots tacitly reinforces Kakar’s claims. His depiction of the street riots opens when the Gandhi family is retiring for the night. The horrendous strife between the two communities caused by Partition has not healed: “You pray to a god you do not know! You pray to a nothing. You do not know his form. And you seek to destroy our gods! Drive them out! Kill the sons of swine! Kill the sons of swine!” ( 178). As is implicit in the young men’s sweeping accusation by using the term “you” to denote the Muslims who have supposedly broken the chariot and killed the priest, at moments of crisis religious hatred looms like an open sore segregating religious identities sharply: “you…destroy our gods.” The Chorus wearing the Hindu masks give chase and some of their blows strike the two Muslim young men who cry out in pain over the Chorus’s ‘Kill them!’ ‘Kill the sons of swine!’ This kind of intolerant reductionism props up gross generalisation and, as Amartya Sen, refuting Samuel Huntington’s theory of a “civilizational clash,” perceptively notes, deposits human beings into little boxes of “ civilizational confinement” ( Sen 40) .

The incendiary rhetoric and explosive situation are represented with spectacular effects on the stage. Dattani captures the contour of communal conflict on the proscenium by devising split sets. The characters are shown confronting their demons of prejudices, their fragmented identities of religion. The material is suited to the space.The pain, pathos and excitement are packed in the dramatic encounter of the muslim young men—Javed and Bobby—frantically looking for shelter at the door of the Gandhis. There is a quick blackout. The aggressive chorus turns into an unruly mob baying for the blood of their adversaries. The police are indifferent; the town of Amargaon is placed curfew; the Muslim girls’ hostel is reportedly bombed and the girls are trapped inside.The Gandhis epitomize India in that the members of the family represent different levels of social transactions. Daksha’s simmering rancour has hardened into Hardika’s hostility towards the other community. Ramnik Gandhi, her son, is sane and moderately secular. His wife, Aruna, is an orthodox, though compassionate, Hindu woman while their daughter, Smita has a tolerant and liberated mindset. When Ramnik opens the door, they react to the communal strife and the ensuing situation in different ways:

Hardika. Why did he do it?
Daksha. Oh God! Why do I have to suffer?
Hardika. Didn’t he have any feelings for me?
Daksha. I just wanted them to be my friends!
Hardika. How could he let these people into my house?...They killed his grandfather!
[…]
Bobby. Please don’t throw us out!
Javed. They will kill us!
Aruna. Call the police!... Don’t listen to them!
[…] Chorus All. Thwart them. So we may live in peace.
Ramnik. We?...We who are right.
Chorus All. They who are wrong. Since we are right. And they oppose us…Do you doubt us? Your own people?
Ramnik. I have the right to doubt which is my own! No! I will not open the door! Go away!

The Hindu chorus declares the Gandhis traitors for their support and rescue of the two Muslim men running for cover. Ramnik sticks his neck out and gestures towards Javed and Bobby with empathy and concern.

Dattani identifies the tight binds between Muslims and Hindus, and suggests that even the undeniable hatred between the two communities is a sign of their enduring emotional bond. Although sliced apart by Partition, their inter-communal ties forged by way of composite cultural inheritance are not totally severed. He sees the cleaved homeland—borders between India and Pakistan—and the enormous psychological anguish as an inexorable dynamic of Partition. Unlike run-of-the-mill partition narratives, wherein the effects of violence and displacement are usually stressed , Dattani engages with the psychological effects of the country’s division and its brutal potential. However, the extent to which religion has segregated the two communities from each other is not invariably the same. Hardika and Javed are caught in the middle of the sectarian impulse with little demurral, whereas Ramnik Gandhi and Smita prefer a humanist pursuit of broad reach. Hardika, carrying over Daksha’s communal animosity, finds the cultural ties between the religious groups snapped and their composite identity in shreds. On the other hand, Ramnik Ganghi sees that they have more in common in their long shared history than parochial cultural identity sharpened by the division and disaffection since Partition: “I have always maintained that if you want peace…that is , if you treat peace as a commodity and you go looking for it—you will find it hidden in the armpits of the majority”( 191). Like Amitav Ghosh, Dattani insists on the continuing closeness between the Hindu and Muslim communities. He also seems to endorse the view of Indian secularist historians who argue that religion became a potent factor to fracture India’s multi-religious society with the advent of the British “divide and rule policy”. In Final Solutions, Daksha says: “He[my father] was happy we were rid of the Britishers. He also said something I did not understand then. He said that before leaving, they had let loose the dogs. I hated to think that he was talking about my friends’ fathers… But that night in Hussainabad in our ancestral house—when I heard them outside—I knew that they were thinking the same of us” (167).

However, while secularists emphasize the syncretism of Indian culture, disregarding instances of violence in pre-colonial India, Kakar finds their plea less than compelling in that it does not explain the dark and menacing forces behind recruiting religion for the periodic outbreaks of sectarian violence. In other words, the secularist approach makes light of the inexplicably hostile paradigms of identity that demarcate the two inflexibly opposed communities as well as demote and downgrade India’s composite and nondenominational heritage. Kakar writes that “the secularist has tended to downplay the dark side of Hindu-Muslim relations in India” (21).While Dattani in no way downplays the horrors of interreligious hatred, he finds it difficult, as a secularist with an optimistic view of the interchange between the two communities, to regard the communal barriers as insuperable. As John McCarie notes, “The redemptive power of Bobby’s touching the idol at the end of Final Solutions cauterizes the wounds of a society divided by communal religious violence[…]” (in Multani, 57).

Dattani’s play gets past the cold pessimism or any pallid view or blinkered vision of civilizational partitioning; it rather climaxes into a moving resolution endorsed by the central strength and sanity of characters on both sides of the communal divide. Smita mildly snubs her inward-looking mother:

Because you know they don’t believe in all the things that you feel are true. Doesn’t that make your belief that much more weak? Do two young boys make you so insecure? Come on , mummy. This is a time for strength! I am so glad these two dropped in. We would never have spoken about what makes us so different from each other. We would have gone on living our lives with our petty similarities. ( 211)

Bobby picks up the tiny image of Krishna in his palm and declares:

See, Javed! He does not humiliate you. He does not cringe from my touch. He welcomes the warmth of my hand. He feels me. And He welcomes it!...(To Aruna.) You can bathe him day and night, you can splash holy waters on Him but you cannot remove my touch from His form. You cannot remove my smell with sandal paste and attars and fragrant flowers because it belongs to a human being who believes, and tolerates, and respects what other human beings believe. That is the strongest fragrance in the world! (224-225)

The speaker makes a robust pitch for secular interaction in order to provide a positive contrast to confrontational militancy between religious communities of the subcontinent. Dattani does not elide the specificities of religious and ethnic diversities in which the communal issue is embedded but envisions a reassuring scenario of amity and tolerance.

Dattani’s device of communicating the specific resonance of sadistic thrill has compelling spectacular effects. The representation of historical rift in the form of Daksha’s diary and her reminiscences about the partition riots in tandem with the present riot-rousers and their hired accomplices evokes the state of entrenched communalist prejudices prone to peak into insane frenzy. The Mob/Chorus wearing and changing their masks (five men and ten masks on sticks) conveniently exposes the radical elements clinging to the externals of faith. The Gandhi family on the set represents the mixed values of middle class Hindu India. Adhering to secularism only instrumentally has failed to contain the circulation of religious nationalism. If we make peace with our conscience by withdrawing from the public domain, the space will be hijacked by the merchants of faith. Dattani does not sidestep the impediments to interfaith harmony.What the play suggests, at any rate, is that exemplars of secular tolerance should carry the torch of inter-religious harmony, otherwise exclusionary focus on religious rituals and separatist propensities will promote coarse characterisation of religious identity and, consequently, a sectarian conception of India. With shallow ideologies of secularism the Hindus and the Muslims have remained mired in their inane vesions of communalism and parochialism.Like Amitav Ghosh again, Dattani, too, cautions against exclusive identity in an increasingly multi-cultural society and looks for a locus of symbiotic embrace.To say the least, Dattani’s postcolonial play is a moving and creative intervention in strongly perceived cultural and religious differences in India.

[We are indebted to Claire Chambers’ analysis of Sudhir Kakkar’s insight into the complex issue of Hindu-Muslim animosity in India. See her excellent essay “ Riots, Rumours, and Relics: Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines” in Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines: Critical Perspectives, ed. Murari Prasad, Pencraft International, Delhi, 2008, pp.37-55.]

Works Cited

Butalia, Urvashi. “Blood.” Granta 57 (Spring 1997): 13–22.
Dattani, Mahesh. Collected Plays. New Delhi: Penguin Books India,2000.
Kakar, Sudhir. The Colours of Violence. Delhi: Penguin, 1995.
Kertzer, David. Ritual, Politics and Power. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1988.
Multani, Angelie (ed). Mahesh Dattani’s Plays: Critical Perspectives. Delhi: Pencraft International, 2007.
Sen, Amartya. Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny. London: Allen Lane,2006.