Vijay Tendulkar's A Friend's Story and Mahesh Dattani's Seven Steps Around the Fire and On a Muggy Night in Mumbai: Reperforming Gender.

The precolonial and colonial discourses on/of gender have come to be reviewed in the aftermath of India's Independence in 1947. The spirit of rethinking the "given," originated mostly under the alien/ colonial influences, creates a postcolonial situation that espouses a nationalistic consolidation on the one hand and looks into the alternative discourses marginalized by such consolidation on the other. As a result, different lost or marginal voices have come to the fore. Indian theatre, after the independence, lends a voice to these unacknowledged zones of silence. Plays have begun to question sexuality and gender, redefining not only the issues themselves but also the thematic purview of Indian theatre and the audience reception. In this context, the present paper seeks to read three plays: Vijay Tendulkar's A Friend's Story and Mahesh Dattani's Seven Steps Around the Fire and On a Muggy Night in Mumbai. The paper examines how the plays challenge the conventional sex-roles through transgender identities and same-sex relations in a heterosexist society and how they trace the evolution of post-independence Indian theatre to be able to deal openly with taboo topics such as alternative sexuality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]