A tale of breaking gender stereotypes

Based on Padma Shri

Vijaydan Detha

’s story 'Dohri Zindagi' (Dual Life), the play opens with two girls enacting as sutradhaars, but soon we discover that they are also the protagonists. Every other character connected with the two women is also enacted by them. The story revolves around how in the olden days families used to pledge their children to marry each other. But here, both the couples give birth to a daughter each. To save the torture of dowry and shame, one couple raises their daughter as a boy and marries her to the other couple’s daughter. With it, the play embarks on a journey of how the two girls discover love and passion, after they realise on the first night of their marriage that they are both women. The storytelling is rapid, and soon the two leave the village to live a separate life away from the moral standards of the village and take refuge in a remote area, where a gang of ghosts protects them forever from the keepers of virtue. But as they discover that since they won’t be able to have a child, one of the girls expresses her wish for her companion to become a man. The ghosts grant them their wish. While the two girls are in love and happily married, the situation changes, when one becomes a man. What then happens is interesting and puts the relationship between men and women in perspective.
The two actresses, Neha Singh and Bhumika Dube, are talented and play their parts to perfection. The play could have been shorter. The fact that it dwells on — that two women can enjoy better companionship than a man-woman — is somewhat difficult to digest because not every man-woman relationship will be patriarchal or driven by only what a man wants in the relationship. Also, the premise of the story, where one of the couples marry their daughter to another daughter to save dowry is somewhat bizarre.