Interdisciplinary theatre artiste, Sri Vamsi Matta brings overlooked oral histories of Dalit cuisine to light through an interactive performance
Mahima Nagaraju
BENGALURU: Food is often a unifying force cutting through all barriers. After all, who doesn’t love good food? But in a society divided by caste, food and eating are plagued by political violence, discrimination and notions of purity and impurity.
Dalit cuisines, particularly, are forgotten in mainstream conversations around Indian food. In such a context, what happens when people of all social locations come together to share a meal and stories of their relationship with caste and food?
Theatre artiste Sri Vamsi Matta explores these questions through an ongoing three-day series this weekend. It kicked off yesterday with a talk on caste, medicine and nutrition.
Today, a workshop, ‘Popula Dabba’ allows anyone with an arts practice to explore memory and identity, using food, before culminating in a performance of ‘Come Eat With Me’, on Sunday.
The performance explores the relationship between caste and food through community histories, autobiographical narratives, and inter-caste dining.
“We only talk about caste in terms of atrocities, discrimination or when people talk about reservation. But caste exists in infinite different ways. It defines what you eat, who you love, who you marry and where you get a job. In the culinary history of India, there’s a huge void in the documentation of marginalised foods of marginalised folk. They are just passed down from person to person as oral history,” says Matta.
The performance became a way for Matta to document and share these lesser-known stories of Dalit cuisine along with the varied experiences that come with them “In Dalit autobiographies, food becomes a location of discrimination, assertion, joy, anger, all of it. The performance became an important place to find these stories and also dispel them in the fashion that I would like. In the history of community eating, there are many reformers who worked on abolition of caste and talked about inter-caste dining. My performance is a subversion of that,” he says.
Touring cities across India and the United States with this performance, Matta has attempted to move conversations around caste outside of academic spaces.
According to him, the performance has become a therapeutic space for himself and the audience. “A lot of people from Dalit, Bahujan, Adivasi, Muslim, and Christian communities would sit in the audience, listen to these stories, tell their own and feel seen because caste makes you feel very lonely. It’s also an interesting space for Savarna folk to grapple with really complicated feelings, because caste is not just the Dalit’s problem,” he elaborates.
Addressing the importance of such a performance, programme manager at Studio 345, Samyuktha Manogaran says,“Conversations around caste and food are often avoided because of the discomfort surrounding it but it’s important to sit with this discomfort and look at the privilege one may have and what it means. We want more people to talk about and experience this, and hope that the performance is a starting point for those who are new to such conversations.”
‘Popula Dabba’ and ‘Come Eat With Me’ will take place on October 19 and 20 respectively, at Studio 345, Cooke Town. For details, visit @sandboxcollective on Instagram.
Courtesy : TNIE
Note: This news is originally published in thenewindianexpress.com and was used solely for non-profit/non-commercial purposes exclusively for Human Rights
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