Your candour and self-awareness regarding Indian play writing in English is refreshing. What is your take on your plays and Indian theatre in English? Has it changed since you started writing in the late 1980s?
Indian-English writing is less self-conscious than it was a generation earlier. In drama, it is interesting to see young theatre groups look at language the way it is spoken and not so much as an artifice. Of course, there is a danger of putting labels on it such as Hinglish or Tanglish. I don’t think those labels serve any purpose. Language is a living thing and it is vibrant in the way it is spoken just as it can be vibrant the way it is imagined. To me language continues to be an art form more and more. I started off by limiting my focus on English- speaking Indian only but I can use the language with some skill to use it more as the language of creation. For instance, in Morning Raga and in my play Seven Steps Around the Fire, the language of the characters is not English, but the language of the film or play is.

Mahesh Dattani (right) with Sonal Joshi during ar rehearsal for his play, The Big Fat City