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The Plays of Mahesh Dattani: A Critical Study is an attempt to provide a detailed analysis of Mahesh Dattani's plays. Dattani is a versatile theatre person-- a writer, director, actor, dancer and teacher, all welded into one. He has been awarded the prestigious Sahitya Academy Award for Final Solutions and Other Plays. In his plays, Dattani provokes our thinking, compels us to think afresh about the problems he presents and appeals to us indirectly like an artist to change our conventional attitudes and assumptions about what is right and what is wrong, what is good and what is evil.

From his plays, Dattani emerges as humanist who cares for the marginalized section of the Indian society. Thus we have hijras, homosexuals, dancers, physically challenged people etc. dealt with artistically.

What emerges after reading his plays is that Dattani is primarily an artist. He loves to experiment with the stage space available to him. Almost all his plays have multiple level setting. Moreover, action in Dattani's plays move back and forth in time.