Negotiating Gender, Art, and Patriarchy in Mahesh Dattani’s _Dance Like a Man_: A Socio-Cultural and Theatrical Reading

Abstract

Mahesh Dattani’s Dance Like a Man constitutes a seminal intervention in contemporary Indian English drama, interrogating the confluence of gender, aesthetics, domesticity, and social respectability through the narrative of Bharatanatyam practitioners Jairaj and Ratna, and their daughter Lata. The play dramatizes the friction between individual artistic aspiration and the regulatory apparatus of patriarchal, middle-class domesticity, foregrounding the processes through which notions of masculinity and femininity are constructed, surveilled, and performed in urban India. It engages critically with the contested genealogy of Bharatanatyam—from its devadasi origins and colonial stigmatization to its postcolonial reinvention as a respectable, middle-class cultural practice—and demonstrates how these histories are inscribed upon the bodies and subjectivities of the protagonists. Through non-linear temporality, temporal doubling, and vernacular “urban speak,” Dattani produces a stratified dramatic text amenable to performance studies, gender theory, and socio-cultural critique. This article analyzes Dance Like a Man through three intersecting frameworks: gender performativity and the construction of masculinity, the politics of Bharatanatyam and respectability, and the family as an apparatus of discipline, failure, and intergenerational trauma. It contends that Dattani’s play not only questions the conditions under which artistic labor is legitimized, but also exposes the psychic and social cost of “dancing like a man” within a society that pathologies aesthetic androgyny and non-normative desire. The study seeks to contribute to scholarship on Indian English theatre by situating _Dance Like a Man_ within contemporary debates on patriarchy, cultural nationalism, and embodied identity.