Homosexuality, Identity, and Social Marginalization in Mahesh Dattani’s On a Muggy Night in Mumbai

Abstract

Mahesh Dattani’s On a Muggy Night in Mumbai marks a watershed moment in the history of Indian English drama - it is the first play in the subcontinent to engage openly and unflinchingly with the realities of gay life. Moving beyond mere thematic novelty, the play constitutes a sustained dramatic examination of what it means to live a queer identity within the constraints of a deeply heteronormative Indian middle-class society. Drawing upon queer theory - particularly the work of Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick - alongside postcolonial critiques of sexuality by Gayatri Gopinath and Homi Bhabha, this paper analyses how Dattani’s play interrogates the social, psychological, and existential consequences of enforced sexual concealment. Through close readings of the play’s central characters - Kamlesh, Prakash/Ed, Sharad, Bunny, Ranjit, and Deepali - the paper maps the varied strategies of survival, accommodation, and resistance that gay and lesbian individuals deploy in the face of social stigma and legal prohibition. The study further examines the play’s symbolic architecture - the muggy, stifling atmosphere, the broken air conditioning, the fireworks, and the offstage wedding music -as a theatrical system through which Dattani encodes the suffocating pressure of heteronormativity upon queer lives. The paper concludes that On a Muggy Night in Mumbai is not merely a play about homosexuality but a searching critique of a society that, in condoning compulsory heterosexuality, condemns its gay and lesbian citizens to lives of hypocrisy, anguish, and enforced invisibility.