Resumen de Looking Back, Looking Forward: Examining Pre-Colonial Identities in Mahesh Dattani's Dance Like a Man
Since the publication of Salman Rushdie's *Midnight's Children* in 1980, more and more postcolonial novels from India have been receiving acclaim at home and abroad. With this in mind, this article examines the recent popularity of playwright Mahesh Dattani (1958-) who became the first English-language dramatist to be awarded the Sahitya Academi award by the Indian government in 1998 for his book of plays *Final Solutions and Other Plays* (1989). Getting this award is no mean achievement for an Anglophone writer in India where authors who write in English are still considered inauthentic by many. In this article I explore some of the reasons that may have motivated the official Indian acknowledgement of an Anglophone author as "one of our own." By focusing on Dattani's work, and in particular, on his play *Dance Like a Man* (1989), my article directs its readers towards a different set of postcolonial aesthetics than that established by the primacy of the postcolonial novel. If the latter genre often draws its inspiration from colonial aesthetics--Indians were first introduced to this form by the English--Dattani's work draws heavily on pre-colonial art forms and their relevance to postcolonial Inida. Consequently, his work might be said to offer a more nuanced look at the many facets of contemporary India rather than the singular and perhaps dated preoccupation with the British Raj and the partition of India that has come to define so many of the popular postcolonial novels of the time
