Bravely Fought the Queen --- Title Or Treatment of Isolation, Sexuality and Some Repressed

Ideas. Or Picture of the Society.

Mahesh Dattani’s lively and provocative play, Bravely Fought the Queen, written in 1991, was
first performed at the Sophia Bhava Hall, Mumbai on 2nd August 1991. It presents the emotional,
financial and sexual intricacies of a modern Indian family. The play is about violence against
women, about exploitation of the weaker, and about mean, squalid corporate world. The play
seems to be approving Sigmund Freud’s theory about repression. It deals with women from
affluent homes fighting against patriarchal dominance as it prevails in India. Writers like
Kamala Das and Shashi Deshpande have also portrayed the plight of women in their novels My
story and That Long Silence. But in this play we have three generations portraying the
exploitation by men and it also reveals the fact that the suppression cannot last long as women
will fight back. This retaliation by women is hinted at in the title which in itself is an intertextual
derivation sourced from a translation of a Hindi poem about the indomitable Rani of Jhansi.
The narrative of the play is centred on an Indian family, in which two brothers, Jiten and Nitin,
the co-owners of an advertising agency, have married two sisters, Dolly and Alka. Baa is the
mother of Jiten and Nitin. She is an invalid who has been ditched by her husband. Embittered
the she is, she sets up her sons against their wives. The first Act, entitled The Women, plays off
three Trivedi women--- Baa, Dolly, and Alka--- with and against each other in the presence of
the fourth women Lalitha, the outsider who is the wife of Sridhar and represents a kind of
normality which the other three do not possess. And the basic picture that emerges is that of an
isolated woman Dolly locked in a loveless marriage with an uncaring husband and a slightly
demented mother-in-law who constantly intrudes into her personal space with her insistent
demands for attention. The final rhapsodic movement of the narrative paves the way for the
second Act, entitled The Men, in which Jiten, Dolly’s husband is revealed as comprehensively
unsympathetic, a violent lecher whose approach to business is a combination of brainless
obstinacy and clumsy scams. Jiten epitomizes male chauvinism and represents the conventional
male who treats women as sex objects and also gets whore to the office.
Baa sees the picture of her husband in the elder son, Jiten when she says, “Jitu is just like his
father. Just like him.” Jiten and Nitin’s father was a cruel who harassed their mother. The kind of
cruelty perpetrated on Baa by her husband is brought to light every now and then in the play.
Baa and Dolly’s exploitation is somewhat similar, but it is Alka whose anguish and frustration
are due to her husband Nitin’s homosexual libido and her brother Praful’s deceit of not revealing
the reality of Nitin to her. Alka who longs for her brother Praful’s acceptance of herself, silently
suffers a fruitless marriage with Nitin. This unhappy marriage life has gradually mad Alka an
alcoholic, a boozer. So, here we have two generations including Baa, Dolly and Alka sharing the
same experiences at the hand of their chauvinistic husbands. Also the third generation, Daksha,
experiences the maltreatment of her father Jiten before her birth. Dolly, beaten by Jiten while
she is pregnant, delivers prematurely and consequently the child Daksha is mentally retarded.
Act three of the play, headed, Free for All, is set in Dolly’s living room once again. It is raining
as the action starts. In the room, the sisters talk about Kanhaiya and Lalitha wonders if Daksha
too “hits it off” with her mother’s lover. Naina Devi’s thumri is replayed on the stereo all over
again and Dolly tells Lalitha all about this “queen of thumri” who had dared to “sing love songs
sung by whores”. The story of the singer reminds Lalitha a poem she had learnt at school- a
poem about the Rani of Jhansi:
We’d heard her praises sung so often. / So bravely fought the Rani of Jhansi. / So bravely fought the
manly queen.
And immediately we are reminded of Baa who had been stopped from singing by her tyrannical
husband, and of Dolly and Alka’s mother too had “tried to be a singer when she was young.”
Alka gets more and more intoxicated even Dolly stands by her as a support both literally and
figuratively, and as Jiten insinuates that Alka must be having a secret love affair with someone.
And then as Alka exist to bed fantasizing about going to the ball dressed up like the Rani of
Jhansi, Baa’s area on stage is lit up again and we have learnt Baa has nominated Praful to serve
as a trustee to the property she has willed to Daksha. This revelation makes Nitin burst out in
anger and indignation. More complications follow in the action as Jiten insults Lalitha and
Sridhar fights Jiten over this. Lalitha notices an auto rickshaw parked outside house; and when
Sridhar goes out too and hire it to take them back to their home, she sees the auto driver
climbing over the compound’s wall. This surreptitious visitant she takes to be Kanhaiya’s friend-
-- and perhaps another of Dolly’s secret lovers. Jiten, having entered at this point from the
kitchen where he had gone to fetch some ice, has a confrontation with his wife. Dolly cries out
that in all her sixteen years of marriage, she had won out against her husband only once, and
that was when she became a mother. Only Dolly is a Rani of Jhansi in her own right--- a fighter
capable of confronting and humbling the patriarchal man who would run her life and deny her
slightest liberties and love that is her due as a woman, wife and mother.
In a way, through Dolly whose very name betrays the role and identity in a male- dominated
society would fain impose on her, and through Nitin who embodies the so called “feminine”
instincts of love and sympathy and understanding and tenderness. Dattani’s play challenges the
society’s stereotypical constitutions of male and female identity. The focus of this awareness is
sited in the phrase about the Rani of Jhansi: Bravely Fought the Queen. The implication contained
herein is that a woman has to be “manly” – that is conform to the construction of manliness as
propagated by the patriarchy - in order to be recognized as brave. But in the inset story of Naina
Devi we are presented with another divergent paradigm of heroism. This is that of a woman
motivated enough to do what she wanted to do even in the face of patriarchal opposition that
would brand her a “tawaif” or whore, a woman who ultimately was acknowledged to be a queen
by dint of her resistant will. Here lies the appropriateness of the title of the play Bravely Fought
the Queen.
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