Writing back

A Bengaluru-based theatre practitioner’s new play looks, through the story of Rohith Vemula, into the experiences of marginalised students in Indian government universities, rejecting a Savarna gaze to write about caste from a place of empowerment

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.”

Vamsi says that he is keen to work with Dalit-Bahujan-Adivasi singers who have sung at protest sites, for his play Star in the Sky

Vamsi also shares that around the time he was reading the short story, whose title loosely translates to Star in the Sky, comedian Kunal Kamra publicly dedicated his much-discussed confrontation with news anchor Arnab Goswami, to the University of Hyderabad scholar who died by suicide in January 2016 having faced caste discrimination on campus. “If a dominant caste artiste could call Rohith his ‘hero’, I asked myself, ‘what was I doing?’” says Vamsi. “It is important for us to tell our stories. There is a certain Savarna gaze when people write about caste. When we tell our stories, the gaze comes from a place of empowerment rather than one of pity.”

There were few references or contemporary directors whose work he could fall back on, Vamsi recalls, as he started writing the play. He decided to put in an application for Indian Ensemble’s idea development lab First Draft, and wrote the play during the six months of the programme. With excessive exposure to screens during the pandemic, he says initial versions of his writing seemed as if it had been for the screen. He was told to focus on form as much as content, and the result was the introduction of three Dalit musicians who perform a choral function in the play, providing context and channelling rage in an artistic form. The play also incorporates protest songs, the playwright keen to work with Dalit-Bahujan-Adivasi singers who have sung at protest sites. At the start of 2020, Vamsi also read Sujatha Gidla’s Ants Among Elephants and Yashica Dutt’s Coming Out as Dalit, while revisiting Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste, all of which proved influential in setting the theme and tone of the work. “Although Gidla wrote in English, I felt like I was reading [the work] in Telugu,” he recalls of the Andhra author’s work. “I tried to do the same.” Inspired by these works, he also decided to include personal, intimate moments, “things that happen in a bedroom, things between two close friends” in the play. “Coming from the Dalit community and seeing how the mainstream often sidelines us, I tried to be as non-mainstream as possible. I didn’t want to follow any rules,” he asserts.

Vamsi’s play, of which he has been conducting readings both online and offline, transcreates Vemula’s story into a performance of myth, memory, resistance and identity, bringing it to bear on contemporary Dalit experiences. “I felt seen with the play,” urges Vamsi. “That is what is missing in most art. We are not seen anywhere, we are often invisibilised; our bodies are erased.”

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