The basic premise with which one would go to see English language theatre in India would be that this theatre is necessarily exclusivist; with a tendency towards ‘elitism’. This was the case, until Dattani's foray into the scene changed the entire situation, homogenizing the audience with his theatre, and his theatre with the tastes of his audience. Like his repeated assertion that despite the fact that he is himself rooted in the Gujarati milieu, where his own familial context is concerned, because the family itself was displaced and resettled in Bangalore, he had to constantly search, as it were, for this sense of identity in a place where the linguistic community was alien to his own. English education, and the constant need to use this third language as the vehicle of communication, then somehow made itself an integral part of his own identity. Hence, the ‘natural’ ease born out of necessity and the sheer habit with which Dattani uses his chosen tongue, being comfortable in no other.

In creating and locating the self and constructing the identities of the characters who people his theatre, Dattani seems to contribute to the matrix of the processes that Erin Mee refers to as “a way of decolonizing the theatre” without, however, resorting to “a politically driven search for an indigenous aesthetic and dramaturgy” [Mee, 2002: 2], that motivated the writers of the Theatre of Roots movement.