Documentary Violence and Transgender Subjectivity in Mahesh Dattani’s Seven Steps Around the Fire
Author : Huma Parveen and Dr. Upasana Bharati
Abstract :
This paper explores Mahesh Dattani’s 1998 radio play Seven Steps Around the Fire as a media of transgender subjectivity formation via institutional documentation. It argues that Dattani’s drama reveals how bureaucratic procedures – police records, medical certifications and familial registers – produce what Judith Butler has termed ‘ungrievable lives’ (25) and at the same time force the transgender subject into defensive formations. By analysing the play’s forensic procedures and discourse, this study contributes to transgender studies by highlighting ways in which Dattani exposes the violence of documentary practices. The play’s engagement with the theme of documentation attests to the ways in which trans people are made to live according to institutional logic. A close reading of the drama demonstrates how far the author goes towards exposing the mechanisms of ‘paperwork of personhood’ (Dutta 432). Three documentary crises that trans people face in institutional settings are examined as a means to understand how trans subjectivity emerges as a response to these challenges. By exposing the ways in which trans people live by what could be termed as ‘body knowledge’, the play provides grounds for thinking about their subjectivity as contingent. The paper finally examines the resonance of Dattani’s play with the recent 2019 Transgender Persons Act that continues to require legal recognition via medical certification by district magistrate and medical institutions.
Keywords :
Documentary violence, transgender subjectivity, bureaucratic erasure, institutional recognition, evidentiary crisis, Mahesh Dattani, hijra identity.
