Wellesley College Wellesley College Digital Scholarship and Archive Honors Thesis Collection 2012 Challenging Religious Communalism With Theatre: Mahesh Dattani’s Final Solutions Sohini Pillai Wellesley College,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.wellesley.edu/thesiscollection Recommended Citation Pillai, Sohini, "Challenging Religious Communalism With Theatre: Mahesh Dattani’s Final Solutions" (2012). Honors Thesis Collection. 52. https://repository.wellesley.edu/thesiscollection/52 This Dissertation/Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by Wellesley College Digital Scholarship and Archive. It has been accepted for inclusion in Honors Thesis Collection by an authorized administrator of Wellesley College Digital Scholarship and Archive. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Challenging Religious Communalism With Theatre: Mahesh Dattani’s Final Solutions Sohini Pillai Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Prerequisite for Honors in South Asia Studies April 2012 ©2012 Sohini Pillai. TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments ii Introduction 1 Chapter One- Drama, Politics & Religion: Theatre and Communalism in South Asia 11 Chapter Two- The Ayodhya Dispute: The Political Context of Final Solutions 22 Chapter Three- The Playwright & The Play: Mahesh Dattani and Final Solutions 30 Chapter Four- Final Solutions: A Textual Analysis 37 Chapter Five- From Bombay to Palo Alto: Final Solutions in Performance 67 Chapter Six- What’s In A Language?: Final Solutions in Hindi-Urdu 81 Chapter Seven- The Right Medium?: Theatre in a Film-Dominated Society 98 Conclusion 107 Appendix: Photographs from Productions of Final Solutions 112 Bibliography 118 i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This thesis would not be possible without the support of a number of people. Firstly, I would not have been able to complete this research without the supervision of my thesis advisor Assistant Professor of South Asia Studies, Neelima Shukla-Bhatt.