Performances
Come Eat With Me
Sri Vamsi Matta
Come Eat With Me is a performance piece that explores the relationship between caste and food while sharing a meal together. Focusing on Dalit Cuisine, the piece begins with personal stories and oral histories around food in the performer’s household and community and is peppered with existing literature and academic writing around the multilayered, many-flavoured relationships between caste and food. The piece unpacks questions of oppression and solidarity, grief and joy, and the everyday victories of the human spirit in the face of structural injustices.
Audiences are invited to eat together and share their own stories around caste and food. In doing so the form subverts an activity laden with caste hierarchies and hopes to create a space for community building, and now it has sort of evolved into an event that will/has to find its place in the larger anti-caste movement, in the Ambedkarite movement.
The event is supported by Goethe Institut, Bangalore.
Image credits: Vamsi
Sri Vamsi Matta
Sri Vamsi Matta (b. 1992, Visakhapatnam) is a Bangalore-based interdisciplinary theatre artist whose work is rooted in his Dalit identity and anti-caste politics. His play Star in the Sky explores the struggles of Dalit students in Indian universities and was a runner-up for the Sultan Padamsee Playwriting Award, opened in Bangalore, April, 2025.
His performance Come Eat with Me uses food and storytelling to examine caste and resilience, Following a successful U.S. tour, the piece returned to India after Vamsi completed his 2023-24 residency as the Interdisciplinary Artist in Residence at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Vamsi co-founded OffStream and the Perishable Goods Collective, both dedicated to decolonial, anti-caste art-making and reclaiming marginalized histories through performance, food, and collective memory.
