While studying at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru, Vamsi, was part of Rangmanch, the institute’s theatre club, and remembers that while the science curriculum progressively pushed him away, theatre drew him in. Soon after, he decided to take it up professionally, honing his craft by working on productions alongside teaching theatre, and in 2019 started his own theatre company Chandrāto Collective. Just before the pandemic put a stop to public performances, Vamsi directed a Bhojpuri production of Aristophanes’ comedy Lysistrata adapted by friend Sanjna Banerjee which used the Greek play to highlight contemporary issues like women’s sexual liberation, and the effects of labour laws on migrant workers.  

But the pandemic forced him to shift gears. “All the plays I had done until then were fairly political but they were not my stories. They had been from the gaze of an upper caste person,” says the theatre practitioner. Vamsi, who grew up in a literary household in Visakhapatnam and remembers reading a lot of Telugu literature as a child, chanced upon his writer father Dr M Suguna Rao’s short story Aakasam lo Oka Nakshatram about the life of a Dalit student in a university campus. “It is not just Rohith Vemula’s story but that of every marginalised student in Indian government universities. They are discriminated against, called names, their merit is questioned,” says Vamsi, admitting to personally facing such treatment too. “None of it is spoken about in the mainstream. People question reservation, and what it does to a marginalised person is that they in turn question themselves.”