Tara by Mahesh Dattani: Summary, Characters, Themes and DU Notes

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Tara is the first text in Unit III (Reading Drama) of DSC-1, Introduction to Literary Studies, in the BA (Hons.) English programme of the University of Delhi. The syllabus pairs it with G.J. Watson’s essay on the nature of drama, Habib Tanvir’s It Must Flow: A Life in Theatre, and the introduction to Gary Day’s Class. You can check the exact wording in the official DU English syllabus, and see how this paper sits in the full programme in our DU BA (Hons.) English syllabus, Semester 1 to 6 guide.

This page gives you the playwright’s background, a character guide, a short summary for quick revision, a detailed act-wise summary, the truth about the surgery (where most students go wrong), themes, symbols, technique, the scholarly debates, and practice questions in DU style. Read the summary with the play open beside you; examiners expect textual detail, and no set of notes replaces the text.

Tara at a Glance

Background: Mahesh Dattani and Indian English Theatre

Mahesh Dattani: The Playwright Who Shows Us Our True Selves

Mahesh Dattani is one of the most important voices in modern Indian drama in English. Think of him as a sharp-eyed observer of everyday urban life. He was born in Bangalore, studied at Baldwin’s Boys High School and St. Joseph’s College, worked briefly as an advertising copywriter, and founded his own theatre group, Playpen, in 1984. His first play, Where There’s a Will, appeared in 1986, and since 1995 he has worked exclusively in theatre. The director Alyque Padamsee is widely credited with spotting his talent early and encouraging him.

In 1998 he received the Sahitya Akademi Award for his collection Final Solutions and Other Plays, and he is widely described as the first playwright writing in English to win it. That mattered because it signalled that serious plays about contemporary India, written in English, belonged in the literary mainstream. He has also written for BBC Radio and directed films, including Mango Soufflé (2002) and Morning Raga (2004).

What makes him special is that his plays feel real. He does not write about a romantic or old-fashioned India. He writes about the hidden pressures, secrets and silences of urban middle-class families, and he brings out into the open things people prefer to keep behind closed doors.

Dates follow the INFLIBNET e-PG Pathshala module on Tara.

What Are His Plays About?

His stories focus on the struggles of ordinary people. The main themes in his work are:

1. The pressure to be “normal”. Dattani explores gender and sexuality again and again. Tara looks at how a family’s decision about a surgery values a son’s body over a daughter’s. On a Muggy Night in Mumbai was groundbreaking for its honest portrayal of gay relationships at a time when the subject was rarely staged.
2. Family secrets. He shows that the “perfect” family is often an illusion. In his plays the home becomes a place where secrets, unfulfilled dreams and quiet frustrations simmer. Dance Like a Man is a good example: a father uses a daughter-in-law’s ambition to block his own son’s dancing career, because he considers dance unmanly.
3. Prejudice and hatred. Dattani is not afraid of social issues like religious intolerance. Final Solutions, one of his best-known plays, deals with communal prejudice and riots. It goes inside the minds of both the victims and the prejudiced to ask difficult questions.
4. Giving a voice to the unheard. His plays centre on people pushed to the margins, among them women, gay people, people with disabilities, and those who are simply different. He makes us listen to their stories.

Why Is His Style So Effective?

• Real conversations. His characters talk like real people. The English they speak is the English of Indian cities, with the bickering, teasing and sarcasm of actual families. That is why the twins’ banter in Tara feels so natural, and why it hurts more when we later learn what lies under it.
• Made for the stage. His plays are meant to be seen, not just read. In Tara, Dattani describes a stage built on several levels so that the Patel house, Dan’s London room and Dr. Thakkar’s raised seat can all be visible at once. Time is also fluid: scenes move between the present and flashbacks without stopping the action.

In short, Dattani holds up a mirror to society. He makes us look at the uncomfortable truths we often ignore, and in doing so he has made Indian English theatre bolder and more relevant.

The Main Characters of Tara

Other names you will meet: Dr. Kapoor, who is Tara’s doctor and appears through phone conversations, and Roopa’s friends Prema and Nalini, who join in the mockery.

Summary of Tara

Tara in Short (for Quick Revision)

1. Chandan, now “Dan”, sits in a London bedsitter trying to write a play about his dead twin sister, Tara.
2. His memories take us to the Patel household in Bombay, where the teenage twins live with their parents after moving from Bangalore for Tara’s treatment.
3. Tara is bright, funny and fiercely loved by her mother; Chandan is quiet and bookish; their father openly favours Chandan.
4. The twins were born joined at the hip, sharing three legs, and were separated when they were three months old.
5. Tara is ill and needs a kidney transplant; Bharati wants to be the donor, but Patel stops her.
6. Roopa, a neighbour bribed to be Tara’s friend, insults her behind her back and later accuses Chandan falsely.
7. Under pressure, Patel confesses the secret: Bharati and her father had bribed the surgeon so that Chandan, not Tara, would get the third leg.
8. Tara, who had the better medical claim to that leg, fades away. Bharati breaks down, Chandan runs to London, and Dan ends by asking his sister’s forgiveness.

What Happens in the Story?

The play moves back and forth between the present and the past. The present is Dan’s London room; the past is Chandan’s selective memory of his family. Dattani makes us aware at every step that we are watching a story being assembled by someone with something to atone for.

The frame: Dan in London. The play opens with Dan hammering at a typewriter, unable to start. He wants to honour Tara, but he does not know how to do justice to her, to their silent father or to their anxious mother. He decides to begin with the doctor who separated the twins, and Dr. Thakkar appears on the raised level of the stage as if being interviewed. He calls the twins’ joined condition a “defect”, says they were only three months old when the surgery was done, and notes how rare it is for such twins to be of different sexes.

Act I: The Patel house in Bombay. We then see the teenage Tara and Chandan arrive in their new home. The twins bicker and joke, play cards, and listen to music. Tara describes how local girls stared at her walk and how she brushed them off with humour. Their mother, Bharati, fusses over Tara and nags her about her health. Patel complains that Bharati is spoiling both children and trying to turn them against him, and he tries to take Chandan to the office; Chandan refuses to go unless Tara does.

Roopa, a neighbour, comes to visit. What the twins do not know is that Bharati has been bribing her to be Tara’s friend. Roopa treats Tara as a curiosity and reports on her to Prema and Nalini, using the word “freak”. Later she tells Tara a rumour that Patel’s community used to drown unwanted baby girls in milk.

Meanwhile Tara’s kidneys are failing. Over the phone, Patel learns from Dr. Kapoor that a commercial donor has been found. Bharati insists she wants to donate her own kidney. Patel physically stops her and hints that her fussing over Tara hides something else. At one point Bharati almost confesses the whole story to the twins, and Patel silences her, saying the secret should stay buried.

The act builds towards a confrontation. Patel returns to find Chandan knitting with his mother and Tara watching films with Roopa, and he lashes out at what he sees as time wasted and unmanly. He accuses Bharati of an unhealthy obsession with Tara. As Tara approaches, the quarrel nearly exposes the secret; Patel pulls back. Tara collapses in a seizure, Bharati breaks down helplessly, and Patel revives her with sugar. Act I ends there.

Act II: Truth and its cost. Bharati now openly shows her devotion to Tara, but the family is coming apart. After Tara’s transplant, Patel and Chandan bring her home and tell her that her mother has had a breakdown and has been institutionalised. Tara is stunned. Chandan says he will not apply to college if Tara cannot go. Patel tells him bluntly to get on with his life, because a son has to earn his living, and Tara does not.

We learn that the twins’ rich maternal grandfather left his large house to both of them but the money to Chandan. Patel’s hatred of his father-in-law is plain, and he tells his children they should burn the house down rather than live in it.

In the next scene Roopa’s cruelty comes to a head. Chandan, awkward and inexperienced, makes a clumsy advance, and Roopa accuses him of assault and then tries to convince Tara that he tried to rape her. Tara silences her by threatening to reveal a private embarrassment, and Roopa, furious, reveals that Bharati had been paying her all along. Tara reflects on how useless all the money and effort spent on her treatment have been, and says she wants to spend her life helping poor patients. Soon afterwards, Dan makes a phone call from London and is told that his mother has died. He shows no emotion and refuses to come back.

Tara has begun to suspect that Patel is keeping the twins away from their mother so that she cannot tell something. She confronts him, and he finally tells the truth (see the next section). Tara is shattered and begins to fade, while Roopa and her friends jeer at her in the alley outside.

The ending. In London, Dan sends Dr. Thakkar out of his memory. He admits to the audience that he has to atone for what was done to Tara, and he asks for her forgiveness, since his life was saved at her expense. Tara then appears and the twins embrace, the way they were joined at birth.

The Shocking Truth About the Surgery

This is the core of the play, and the part most often misremembered. Here is what the text establishes:

• The twins were born joined at the hip and shared three legs between them, so only one of them could have two.
• The medical reports showed that Tara had the stronger claim to the third leg. One scholarly account notes that the blood flow in that limb came from her body.
• Bharati’s father was a wealthy and influential man in Bangalore. He and Bharati wanted the boy to have the better body.
• Dr. Thakkar agreed, in exchange for three acres of prime land on which to build his hospital.
• The leg given to Chandan was rejected by his body and had to be amputated. Tara was left disabled for nothing.
• Bharati has lived in fear of discovery ever since, and her obsessive devotion to Tara is her way of paying a debt she can never settle.

The decision was not made on medical grounds; it was a choice driven by gender bias and paid for with a bribe. Notice also how Dattani spreads the guilt: it falls on a mother, a grandfather and a doctor, as well as on the father who says nothing for years.

Common Mistakes to Avoid in Your Answers

The Aftermath: How the Secret Destroys the Family

The truth poisons everything.

1. Bharati is consumed by guilt for agreeing to the decision. Her smothering love for Tara is her attempt to make up for it. She eventually breaks down, is institutionalised, and dies.
2. Patel resents his wife and her father. He feels trapped in a miserable situation he did not create, and he never forgives them. Yet his silence also makes him part of the deception.
3. Tara is bewildered and broken when she learns that her own family gave up her well-being simply because she was a girl. She loses her fight and dies young.
4. Chandan is overwhelmed with guilt when he realises he benefited from his sister’s suffering. Unable to cope, he leaves his family, changes his name to Dan, and settles in London, where he still cannot escape his past.

Major Themes

Gender Discrimination, and Who Carries It On

The central theme is the devaluing of a daughter. The INFLIBNET module makes an important point: the play does not simply blame men. The injustice is carried out by a mother who chooses the boy and a grandfather who insists on it, which shows how women, shaped by patriarchy, can also pass the injustice down. Dr. Om Prakash Ratnaker’s 2022 paper in The Creative Launcher states the point plainly: the decision was not made on medical grounds but through discrimination against a girl child.

Gender Identity and the “Other” Self

The INFLIBNET module reports that Dattani sees Tara as a play about the male self and the female self, and about accepting the “other” gender within oneself in a world that always favours the male. This shows in how the twins behave: Chandan prefers quiet domestic pursuits that Patel calls effeminate, while Tara is dominant and quick, and others find her un-feminine. Both are called “freaks”, not only because they were once conjoined, but because they do not fit the roles society has assigned them. Tara’s remark that the men in the house plan the hunt while the women mind the cave is a sharp summary of the division of roles she is expected to accept.

Guilt and Atonement

Almost everyone is trapped by guilt. Bharati’s love is a form of penance, Patel’s anger is partly displaced guilt, and Chandan’s play is an attempt at atonement. The interesting question for an exam answer is whether atonement is possible at all. The play ends with a reunion on stage, but it is a reunion in memory and fiction only.

Disability and Ableism

Tara is a disabled woman in a world that treats her body as a problem to be managed rather than a person to be heard. Roopa’s cruelty, the family’s decisions made about Tara but without her, and Patel’s refusal to plan any future for her all show this. Sayantina Dutta’s 2023 article, published in the Journal of Women’s Studies (University of North Bengal), reads the play through the lens of ableism and social disability, linking gender and disability as overlapping forms of exclusion.

Family, Secrecy and Money

The family’s secret is rooted in class and money. Bharati’s father uses his wealth and influence, a doctor sells his professional ethics for land, and a child’s body becomes a bargaining chip. The play shows how respectable, comfortable families can hide serious wrongs.

Symbols and Motifs

Structure and Dramatic Technique

• Frame narrative. The play is set within Dan’s act of writing. This turns the play into a confession, and it means Tara is always shown through Chandan’s selective memory. The INFLIBNET module points out that Tara appears through “carefully chosen” memories.
• Multi-level stage. Dattani’s directions place the Patel house on the main level, the London room above it, and Dr. Thakkar highest of all. The audience sees past and present at the same time, and sees the doctor watching everything.
• Flashbacks and fluid time. Scenes move freely between the two timelines, so the audience learns the secret gradually and the guilt builds with it.
• Interview-style interludes. Dr. Thakkar’s clinical, jargon-heavy monologues contrast sharply with the emotional reality of the scenes that follow them, and make his later bribe more shocking.
• Humour and banter. The twins’ jokes give the play warmth and make Tara’s fate more painful, because we have come to love her.
• Detailed stage directions. The text includes careful directions for pauses, lighting and expression, so it should be read as a script for performance as well as a text.

To think about how drama works as a form, read this alongside our notes on G.J. Watson’s “The Nature of Drama”. For a view of Indian theatre as a living practice, see Habib Tanvir’s It Must Flow: A Life in Theatre. Because Tara is about a middle-class urban family, the unit’s reading on social class is also useful: see our notes on Gary Day’s Class.

Important Comparisons

Tara and Chandan

Bharati and Patel

Tara and Roopa

Roopa is the play’s mirror image of Tara: shallow where Tara is sharp, spiteful where Tara is generous, and comfortable in the social world that has no place for Tara. Dattani uses her to show how ordinary society treats difference, while Tara’s wit shows how much she has had to fight for her dignity.

Tara in Dattani’s Other Plays

Where Scholars Disagree

DU answers score well when you show that the play can be read in more than one way. Here are three debates you can use, each attributed.

1. Is the play mainly about gender discrimination, or about emotional separation? Many readings, such as Ratnaker (2022), centre on gender injustice. Another view, quoted in Umar Altaf Sof’s article in Notions (2018) from an interview with Sachidananda Mohanty, is that Dattani himself took “medical liberty” with conjoined twins, because his real interest was the emotional separation of the twins rather than the medical separation.
2. Who is to blame? The INFLIBNET module stresses that the play does not simply blame men and that women under patriarchy also pass the injustice on. Other readings see the family as the instrument of a larger social system and prefer to speak of patriarchy as a structure rather than of individual guilt.
3. Is gender the whole story? Sayantina Dutta (2023) argues that the play also needs to be read as a story about disability and exclusion, while G. Jeyalakshmi (2023) reads it through female subalternity in a postcolonial context.

A fourth question is interpretive rather than scholarly, and you can argue it either way: is Dan’s play an act of atonement for Tara, or an attempt to find relief for himself? The ending supports both readings.

Limitations and Lines of Critique

These are points you can raise in an evaluative answer; they are our reading, and you should support them with the text.

• Medical plausibility. Dattani has acknowledged taking liberties with the medicine, and Dr. Thakkar himself says twins of different sexes are very rare. The play’s power is emotional and social, not clinical.
• Whose story is it? Because Tara is seen only through Dan’s memory, her own voice is always mediated. You can argue that the play is about Tara but narrated by the person who benefited from her loss.
• Secondary characters. Roopa and Dr. Thakkar are drawn sharply but with little shading, which keeps the focus on the twins and the family, but may leave them as figures rather than full characters.

Why Tara Still Matters

DU’s DSC-1 aims to give students a foundation in how literature works and how it can influence and reflect social and cultural change. Tara fits that aim closely: it takes a prejudice that families tend to avoid discussing and makes an audience feel what that prejudice costs. We have not included statistics here because we could not verify current figures for this note; use the play’s own evidence in your answers.

Quick Revision: Key Terms

Conclusion

In the end, Dan finishes his play. He speaks to Tara in memory and asks for her forgiveness, and the twins hold each other as they did at birth. The ending is moving but not comforting, because it leaves a question open: is his confession truly for Tara, or is it also for his own peace of mind? The guilt, it seems, will always be a part of him.

What Dattani gives us is more than a family tragedy. By showing how a mother, a grandfather, a doctor and a silent father can together decide a child’s future, he exposes a whole chain of people who each had the chance to say no. For a DU exam, the safest approach is to keep the facts exact (the bribe, the rejected leg, the Bombay setting, Patel’s confession), then move to interpretation: gender, guilt, disability and the question of who tells Tara’s story.

Continue Reading

• G.J. Watson: “The Nature of Drama” — Summary & Notes (DSC-1, Unit 3): the unit’s essay on drama as a form, useful for discussing Tara’s stagecraft.
• It Must Flow: A Life in Theatre — Habib Tanvir Summary & Analysis: the next Unit III text, on Indian theatre practice.
• Class by Gary Day Summary: the Unit III reading on social class.
• All Introduction to Literary Studies notes (DSC-1): Units 1 and 2 and the full paper.

University of Delhi Previous Year Questions

Frequently Asked Questions

Other Links

• Syllabus of English Honours
• Indian Classical Literature notes
• European Classical Literature notes
• DU BA English Previous Year Questions

Sources and Further Reading

• Mahesh Dattani: Tara, in Comparative Indian Drama (UGC–INFLIBNET e-PG Pathshala)
• University of Delhi, BA (Hons.) English syllabus (NEP UGCF), DSC-1
• University of Delhi School of Open Learning, Introduction to Literary Studies study material (Tara lesson by Deb Dulal Halder)
• Ratnaker, “Gender Discrimination in Mahesh Dattani’s Tara: A Critical Analysis”, The Creative Launcher, 2022
• Dutta, “Exploring Gender Discrimination and Oppression in Mahesh Dattani’s Tara: A Tale of Ableism and Social Disability”, Journal of Women’s Studies, 2023