Gender Bias Traxis in Transgender: A Critical Study of Mahesh Dattani’s Seven Steps Around the Fire

Actor, director, playwright, dancer and screenplay writer Mahesh Datani is the first English language playwright to win the prestigious Sahitya Akademi Award. To him, a playwright is not only a writer of a special kind of literary device but a craftsman whose design is to reform the society bringing the controversial issues before the audience. Through his play Dattani tries to hit the dogma and superstitions of Indian Society Issues like gender-discrimination, communal problems, the plight of women in the male-dominated society, corruption of power hungry people, marginality etc. found a voice in his writing. The present paper collates and interprets literary perceptions of Mahesh Dattani's contribution to transgender studies. The umbrella term 'transgender' includes those people whose gender identity is the opposite of their assigned sex i.e. transmen and trans women. They are the social group who are socially and politically outside of our structured frame of society. The Indian word for transgender is hijra which is a hindu-urdu word, derived from the semantic Arabic root 'hjr' in its sense of 'leaving one's tribe', identifying social groups who are excluded from an established social structure. Dattani highlights the generic identity crisis of the hijra community in the Indian context. The book selected for the present study is “Seven Steps around the Fire” by Dattani.