What is the theme of Dattani's play Bravely Fought the Queen?

One of the most important themes in the play is the subordination of women in traditional Indian society. Both Dolly and Alka are subject to physical violence at the hands of their husbands, Jiten and Nitin respectively. Such violence is presented by Dattani as the norm in this rigidly patriarchal society, where women are expected to do as they're told by their menfolk without complaint.
What's particularly interesting about this subordination is that it doesn't induce any kind of meaningful solidarity among the female characters in the play. The elderly Baa, Dolly and Alka's mother-in-law, though herself regularly subjected to beatings by her husband, has no sympathy for the predicament of her daughters-in-law. On the contrary, she takes out all her anger and frustration on them, constantly criticizing them and expecting them to wait on her, hand and foot, as if they were slaves.
In the fraught interactions between successive generations of women, we can observe how patriarchy prevents the development of a specific female consciousness, one that can begin to challenge some of the assumptions that have kept Indian women down for centuries. Instead, women have internalized the values of the patriarchal system to such an extent that, far from challenging them, they actually reinforce them.