www.galaxyimrj.

com Galaxy: International Multidisciplinary Research Journal ISSN 2278 – 9529

Presentation of the “Bonsai and dwarfed maturity” in Mahesh Dattani’s

Bravely Fought the Queen

Anindita Chatterjee
Assistant Professor, Department of English,
Sanskrit College (West Bengal Education Service)
Kolkata.

In an interview with Anita Nair, Dattani observed, “Theatre to me is a reflection

of what you observe. To do anything more would be to become didactic and then it ceases to
be theatre. Theatre is a collective experience and the audience have to finish in their own
heads what the playwright began.”(Das, 245) Dattani’s Bravely Fought the Queen is a dark
domestic tragedy set in the urban background of Bangalore which goes on to raise a series of

y
questions on contemporary society. Dattani claimed that his plays focus on the issues,
‘concerns and challenges of the urban Indian society’; since he himself is a part of that mileau
and also stated that his plays were geared to cater to the upper and middle class audience of
urban Indian society. (Mee, 19) Despite the fact that he foregrounds social issues in his plays,
yet he never posits pat solutions. His plays make the audience think.
ax The play Bravely Fought the Queen opens into the world of the aristocratic and
prosperous women living in joint families in which Lalitha arrives as an intruder. She peeps
into their caged world and through her eyes we find a glimpse of their everyday life where a
woman’s daily activities consist of catering to family needs, with occasional indulgences in
beauty regimes, social gatherings, planning ball dances, wearing facial masks or listening to
thumris. The first act entitled ‘the women’ reveals the fissures of tension beneath the façade
of the perfectly regulated lives of two upper-middle-class women of Trivedi family, namely
Dolly and Alka. The women expressed their repressed frustration and loneliness to Lalitha
and also confessed how they had found respite from their tedious life through surreptitious
activities like alcoholism or forging extra marital relationships. At the outset of the play
Lalitha is projected as a modern Indian woman quite unlike Dolly or Alka. She claimed that
al
she was a cosmopolitan woman who engaged herself in freelance writing for an occasional
woman’s column for the Times. She reviewed cultural events, practised meditation, indulged
in poetic compositions and shared a passion for growing bonsais. By the end of the play it
becomes evident that most of these women were either tormented figures caught in loveless
or troubled marriage relationships, abused and ill treated beyond measure by the patriarchal
world or they were rendered as passive entities safely ensconced and marginalised within the
protective confines of their husband’s world. Most of them were victims of domestic
violence, deception, loneliness, and boredom and sought escapes from their mundane life in
G

various ways-- Dolly shared the surreal fancy of a secret and passionate relationship with her
cook Kanhaiya to escape from her purposeless and meaningless marital life with her
adulterous husband Jiten, Alka found respite from her frustrating marriage to homosexual
Nitin by drowning herself in alcohol. Baa shouted at her daughter-in-laws to give vent to her
displaced anger which had accumulated due to years of exploitation, violence and torture to
which she was subjected in the hands of her abusive husband, whereas Lalitha cultivated
bonsais to fulfil the emptiness of her childless life. She claimed that she and her husband
Sridhar were childless by choice since they were saving money to buy a flat, however the
truth of her remark remains questionable.
Lalitha’s passion for growing bonsais has a symbolic significance in the play. The small
plants reared with utmost care were integral to Lalitha’s identity. Traditionally bonsai implies
a Japanese art of gardening where plants are grown in miniature forms on trays or small pots.

Vol. I. Issue. I 1 January 2012

www.galaxyimrj.com Galaxy: International Multidisciplinary Research Journal ISSN 2278 – 9529

Implementing the techniques of pruning, root reduction, grafting and defoliation, small trees
are grown that mimic the shape and style of full grown trees. In the course of the play the
symbol of the miniscule plant or bonsai goes on to assume a profound significance with
respect to the lives of the characters depicted in the play. The art of wiring and trimming of
the plants symbolically allude to the process of control and domination of women by the laws
and tenets of the patriarchy. The stunted growth thus becomes suggestive of the restrictive
life of the women in the play as well as the women of the Indian society in general who are
forced to fit into the pre-ordained identities of the mother, the daughter, and the wife
throughout their life.
Lalitha being a childless woman attended the bonsais with a maternal love. She trimmed and
pruned the saplings with utmost care. She brought one of her self-created bonsais as a gift for
the Trivedis when she came to visit them to discuss the masked ball event with Dolly Trivedi
on her husband’s boss’s request. Dolly was amused with Lalitha’s unconventional gift, Alka

y
was merely curious. Lalitha confessed to Alka that it was an art which she had been
practising for years.
Lalitha: I suppose it comes with a bit practise. In the beginning, you will have a lot of dead
shoots on your hands. But then you learn and it…comes. Anyone can do it. You first find a
sapling of your choice. It could be of any tree. I myself prefer fruit trees because when they

ax
are fully grown (giggles)-I guess you can’t call them fully grown-but when they’ve reached
their (demonstrates with her hands) dwarfed maturity, they really look bizarre with pea-sized
mangoes or oranges! (Dattani 18)
She was devoted in her craft which was her hobby as well her means of transcending the
confines of her barren lonely life. When she tried to share her fascination with about how one
has to diligently ‘keep trimming the trees as they grow’ (Dattani 19), the restless and
impulsive Alks replied, ‘Sounds very tedious.’ (Dattani 19) Alka did not possess Lalitha’s
patience or perseverance to deal with life, hence it was obvious that she was not interested in
the creation of bonsai which required painstaking labour and concentration, as well as her
defiant nature was a stark contrast to the image of ordered growth which the bonsai
represented. Thus the symbol of bonsai assumes a strategic significance in the play as Dattani
al
also uses it s a dominant metaphor in his exploration of the complex psyche of his characters.
The grotesque looking tree was deliberately acclimatised to its environment and forced to
adapt its growth accordingly. The trees despite their short stature could bear fruit, in spite of
their stunted growth and they possessed the perseverance to survive and in a way
symbolically hint at the characteristic trait inherent to Lalitha’s identity, who desperately
sought to survive in a world where everything else was crumbling and falling into pieces. The
‘bonsai’ symbol representing ‘dwarfish identity’ thereby expands to become something far
more significant in Dattani’s play. It becomes a visual representation of Dattani’s
G

representation of the marginalised consciousness of the women. Dattani observed, ‘The

feminine self in my plays is not a victim. Its subsumed, yes, it’s marginalised but it fights
back.’ (Datta 233).
Asha Kuthari Chaudhuri in her analysis of Mahesh Dattani’s play Bravely Fought The Queen
Chaudhuri pointed out:
The stunted growth, the bizarre shape, the grotesque reality of the bonsai
becomes resonant in the existence of all the characters in the play.
(Chaudhuri 54)

Almost all the characters in the play are made to comment on the bonsai in a deliberate
attempt at drawing parallels. Daksha, the spastic child of Dolly and Jiten, is an obvious
parallel to the stunted and dwarfish bonsai, a deformed child born in pain due to violence

Vol. I. Issue. I 2 January 2012

www.galaxyimrj.com Galaxy: International Multidisciplinary Research Journal ISSN 2278 – 9529

inflicted upon her mother, whereas Alka too appears constrained by the patriarchal discourses
of society resembling the bonsai born as a result of forced stunting.
In Act II of the play entitled “the Men” too we come across the bonsai image, albeit
differently. Lalitha’s husband Sridhar had placed a deformed bonsai on his working table.
Sridhar was an employee at the Trivedi’s office working for the Re-Va-Tee ad campaign.
Jiten and Nitin did not share Sridhar’s enthusiasm or fondness for the art of bonsai which he
had acquired from his wife Lalitha, in fact they hardly noticed the object he had placed to
render some beauty to his workspace. He was somehow fond of the grotesque, ugly plant on
his table, for reasons unknown. It could be because he was fond of his wife Lalitha and thus
felt a nondescript attachament towards the plant which had been grown by her. He exclaimed
as a word of caution to agitated Jiten angrily throwing away the papers on Sridhar’s table,
‘Careful, don’t knock the bonsai. He even suggested his other boss Nitin to whom he felt
closer than Jiten to offer it as gift to his wife Alka.

y
Nitin. You said you wanted me to take this for my wife
Sridhar. Yes
Nitin. Why?
Sridhar. I don’t know. I just thought it would make a nice present. I brought it here because I
thought it had an interesting shape.

ax
Nitin: You called it grotesque.
He picked it up from the floor with care and wrapped it in a piece of paper after he saw that
that Nitin had broken it by dropping it on the floor, an action generated by his mental trauma
born out of his brother Jiten’s accusations against him. Nitin knew his brother was correct,
and that his marriage was indeed a failure and his wife Alka was a drunkard, but he did not
have the courage to leave her. He was caught in a whirlpool of misplaced emotions and his
own homosexual inclinations to left him with a sense of guilt with respect to his wife Alka,
and somehow held on to the marital bond with a hopelessness. His act of shattering the
bonsai pot is an instance of display of his repressed anger and we realise that almost all the
characters in the play are driven by undercurrents of stress, agitation, anger and repression in
some way or the other. Despite the fact that the ‘bonsai’ imagery is not woven with the main
al
plot of the play yet it becomes a pertinent symbol in the course of the play, pointing at issues
which the dramatist seeks to suggest without clearly making any statement or assertion
whatsoever.
Sridhar and Lalitha’s desperate attempts to protect the bonsai from all turbulence almost
seeks to suggest that despite their personal failures and setbacks they attempted to make their
relationship survive. Although there are suggestions that Sridhar too indulged in casual
sexual relationships out of sheer frustration, yet somehow it appears that the Laliltha Sridhar
conjugal relationship was better than the other couples, despite its drawbacks and pitfalls.
G

When Lalitha explained to Alka how to create a bonsai in Act I of the play it becomes evident
that it was a process that demanded care and constant attention. ‘You plant the sapling in a
tray—you’ve got to make sure the roots’ don’t have enough space to spread. You have to
keep trimming them as they grow.’ In the words of critic Subir Dhar, ‘Lalitha’s passion for
growing bonsai is symbolically reflective of her own mindset. The wiring and trimming she
subjects her growing plants to may well be what she has done to her own life: control and
restriction. The result may be quaint and attractive, but it can also become ugly and grotesque
like the bonsai Sridhar keeps on his office table, and which, additionally, is a clear symbol of
the deformed relationship the brother share with their wives.’ (Dhar 93)
The image of the confined and deliberately structured plant also bears within it images of
subjugation and domination to which women were subjected to since time immemorial and
continue to suffer even till this day. ‘The vivid descriptions not only doubles up as symbolic

Vol. I. Issue. I 3 January 2012

www.galaxyimrj.com Galaxy: International Multidisciplinary Research Journal ISSN 2278 – 9529

accounts of socialisation through which the female is made to acquire the necessary attributes
for proper and expected behaviour in the context of her culturally ascribed roles, but also
affect an associative recall of the grotesque practise of footbinding.’ (Mandal 104) Until the
twentieth century Chinese women were subjected to intense pain and torture when they were
subjected to footbinding process which curbed their ability to move around freely and
normally. The symbolic connotations of the metaphor hint at a larger reality in which the
female is pinned down and deliberately confined under a monolithic edifice of patriarchal
injunctions. In the words of Dattani himself, in the play Bravely Fought the Queen, ‘I take up
the cudgels for women and depict a picture of the Indian society at once alluring and
terrifying, both for the bourgeois characters in the play and for its western audience’.
(Walling, 229-230)
Weller Embler in an article on the Symbols in Literature and Art claimed that a ‘symbol has
within its form and being the meaning it is intended to convey. The meaning attached to the

y
object symbol is not arbitrary, nor has it come about merely through long association with
what it stands for, so as to be, as it were, a cultural habit. On the contrary in true symbolic
expression there is a transcendental parity, a spontaneous and irresistible correspondence
between the concrete image and the thing it stands for…And it is genius of great artists and
writers that they have seen these transcendental parities intuitively and expressed them

ax
powerfully.’ (Embler 50) Dattani’s use of the image of the ‘bonsai’ is an instance of such a
powerful symbol which extends beyond the action and setting of the play to hint at greater
social and existential realities.
In Act III of the play entitled ‘Free For All’ the dramatist prepares an even battle for combat
between the world of men and women. He tries to strike a balance between the two different
worlds represented in Act I and II of the play respectively. The characters are made to
confront to each other and through the agonised encounter between individuals the facades
are shattered exposing the ugly realities of their lives. Alka confesses how she was forced to
marry her homosexual husband by her own brother Praful and Dolly claimed that the only
time she had secured a moral victory over her violent, abusive and sexually promiscuous
husband was when she gave birth to her daughter Daksha. As Alka breaks into a dance in the
al
rain before she falls into a state of drink induced sleep, Lalitha and Sridhar decide to escape
from the troubles space of the Trivedi home. Alka’s dance in the rain in a way signifies her
instinctive urge for freedom and individuality. She refused to accept the rigid shackles of the
patriarchal society and become the fettered ‘bonsai’ unable to grow or breathe as per her own
wish. On their way back home Lalitha and Sridhar picked up the bonsai that Lalitha had
brought as a gift for the Trivedis. “I can’t let it die! What a waste of effort!’(Dattani 91), she
had exclaimed earlier and had sprinkled rain water on it so that it would not die. In the final
evaluation as Lalitha and Sridhar embrace each other after the holocaust of the tragedy is
G

over, we cannot but concede that it is they who emerge as the real survivors at the end of the
play. In their dreams of a shared household, domesticity and acts of nurturing a form of life in
shape of the bonsai they represent the typical Indian middle class family, where ‘adjustments
and acceptances are celebrated as’ worthy feminine virtues.( Walsh, 25) Lalitha and
Sridhar’s travails and conservatism, their attempts to give some form of meaning and
coherence to the hollow and empty life are generally associated with that mode of existence.
The ‘bonsai’ thus becomes more than a simple dramatic metaphor as it expands in its scope to
allude to one of the primary concerns of Dattani’s plays, that of the gender. A study of his
play Bravely Fought the Queen shows his awareness and concerns about the multi layered
politics of the gendered self, on the one hand through the operations of patriarchy, and on the
other, through the invisible but equally important issues of alternate sexualities. The
deliberately structured undersized plant, stunted in growth, confined in wires resembling a

Vol. I. Issue. I 4 January 2012

www.galaxyimrj.com Galaxy: International Multidisciplinary Research Journal ISSN 2278 – 9529

‘dwarfish maturity’, go on to represent an image of the contemporary society-- deformed,

dehumanised to a large extent, yet bearing within it the seeds of life and the potential to
survive, fighting against all odds.

Works Cited:
Mahesh Dattani, Bravely Fought the Queen, (Penguin: New Delhi, 2006). All textual
citations have been taken from here. The page numbers are indicated in brackets.
Michael Walling, “A Note on the Play Bravely Fought the Queen” in Mahesh Dattani:
Collected Plays (Penguin: New Delhi, 2000)
Sanjukta Das, ed. From Derozio to Dattani, (Worldview Publications: New Delhi, 2009).
Das refers to Mahesh Dattani’s Interview by Anita Nair published in
http://www.anitanair.net-Mahesh Dattani-The Invisible Observer-a profile by Anita Nair
(The page was accessed on 29/4.2008).

y
Ketaki Datta, ed. Indo Anglian Literature Past to Present, (Booksway: Kolkata, 2008).
Datta refers to ‘An Interview of Mahesh Dattani “Of Page and Stage” published in Seagull
Theatre Quarterly, August 1999, p 32
Asha Kuthari Chaudhuri, Mahesh Dattani, (Foundation Books: New Delhi, 2005).
Sagar Taranga Mandal ed., Studies in Mahesh Dattani’s Bravely Fought the Queen,

ax
(Booksway: Kolkata, 2009).
Subir Dhar, “Where There’s A Will and Bravely Fought the Queen: The Drama of
Mahesh Dattani”, The Commonwealth Review, Volume 13 Number 2, Special Issue on
Mahesh Dattani, Indian Society for Commonwealth Studies, New Delhi.
Erin B Mee, “Mahesh Dattani: Invisible Issues”, Performing Arts Journal, 55, Volume 19,
No 1, January 1997.
Judith, E. Walsh, Domesticity in Colonial India: What women learned when Men gave
them Advice (Oxford University Press: New York, 2004)
Weller Embler, “Symbols in Literature and Art,” College Art Journal, Vol 16, No 1,
(Autumn 1956) pp 47-58. The page was accessed on April 7th 2008 from
<http://www.jstor.org/stable/772847>
al
G

Vol. I. Issue. I 5 January 2012