One of India's most celebrated dramatists, Gieve Patel is a medical doctor by training and profession. Some have said his obsession (others might prefer the term "preoccupation") with the body and all its encumbrances (e.g., disease, pain, desires, and instincts) is the direct result of his medical training. A Parsi by birth, he is also a painter and an accomplished poet.

As dramatist, Patel is both a playwright and an actor, and he has managed to convey fundamental human themes--and to express the frailties and suffering of his characters--through a concise and economical use of language. Princes, staged for the first time in 1970, launched Patel's career as a playwright of note. The play is a powerful depiction of the disintegration and fragmentation of a middle-class Parsi family in India. This morose attitude concerning Patel's Parsi background is also evident in his subsequent plays Savaksa (1982) and Mister Behram (1988). The Parsis are a small but highly cultured, educated, and influential community, but the pressures they face in India are immense, and Patel's plays document with acute sensitivity the complexities facing them. One of the fascinating aspects of Patel's plays is the way he skillfully uses English to represent a distinct Parsi "flavor" and to put across the sense of isolation felt by many Parsis in India.

As a student of the human body and all its passions, and as a writer who seeks to understand rather than explain human behavior, Patel has few peers in Indian theater. He has stated that Jean Racine is the great influence in his life and that psychoanalysis, with its power to reveal patterns of human behavior, has also played a significant role. For Patel plays are a form of therapy, much needed though differently prescribed in different cultures.