Sri Vamsi Matta’s Come Eat With Me is a performative piece about the multilayered relationship between caste and food, explored over a shared meal.

By Aishwarya Bodke

A routine occurrence after Sri Vamsi Matta concludes his show Come Eat With Me is that of a young Dalit person walking up to him, holding him and breaking down. “I can tell that they feel seen, that they have found a piece of themselves in the performance, but I can also see the weight of their pain,” he shares.

Toying with the possibilities of theatre, Come Eat With Me (CEWM) is a thunderous declaration of defiance. The very words, when emerging from a Dalit person, spell out a reversal of the past. The show invites audiences to introspect and reflect as Vamsi begins a conversation that, peel by peel, slices through the intricate relationship between caste, food and identity.

When you walk in, songs of prominent Dalit poet and activist Gaddar welcome you. Vamsi walks past a table adorned with childhood paraphernalia, a tower of Dalit literature and a photo of Ambedkar. He hands out a flower to each visitor. A homage to Ambedkar’s three-piece suit, he is dressed in blue; as am I and a few others in the room. “Blue symbolises the sky. And everyone is equal under the sky,” he proclaims.

I found myself wondering what Ambedkar would think of the show. The Samaj Samata Sangh, founded by him and his associates from oppressed and Savarna castes in 1927, would regularly organise community dining as an anti-caste tool.

At the 2024 edition of the Serendipity Arts Festival, CEWM bore a special place in the Culinary Arts section. Addressing centuries of erasure of Dalit cooking practices, it broke through the collective amnesia around it. For Vamsi cooking is an act of remembering and memory, a function of resilience. He explains, “It holds the weight of everything we have endured. Memory is what grounds us and reminds us of what was taken, what was lost and what can still be reclaimed. It is both personal and collective, visceral and reflexive.”

As tales from home are shared, the room is thick with the generosity and kindness of the listeners and speaker. You can smell his stories, devour them even. They leave in me a bittersweet aftertaste of my own childhood. For years, my memory had misinformed my experience of caste prejudice that I had erased and buried, only for it to slowly reveal itself over the course of my adult life. I remember the lunchboxes in my school. I remember lying. I remember unwittingly choosing vegetarianism as the superior, moral dietary preference as a kid. I remember a bowl of temple food offerings being disposed of when I brought it to the table at a friend’s house. I remember my father reminiscing over a preparation of dal he never had once he left his village. He remembers the recipe. I remember forgetting.

Forgetting comes easy when heaps of tender nostalgia linked to food is reserved for the upper castes. The food at our weddings and funerals and festivals did not make it to popular culture.

When I asked Vamsi if the show marked his coming out as Dalit—perhaps as this article would do for me— he said, “I had to come out as Dalit long before the show because that is what allowed me to create it. It exists so others from my community feel seen.”

The finale of the show is a potluck of sorts—a moment of complete catharsis—at the heart of which is a chicken curry Vamsi cooks for everyone. He borrows secrets from his mother’s recipe, which was an uncompromised Sunday ritual. The cashew and almond paste used to thicken the curry is replaced with a much cheaper alternative—poppy seeds. For many Dalit homes, ingredients like dried nuts and fruits were simply not a reality. It is in these instances of invention that our cuisine moved away from the rulebook of how a dish ought to be made.

Poet and artiste Daniel Sukumar’s words make it to the show. In ‘Sambar: A Balancing Act’, he writes, “If dhal went up in price / The sambar would have potatoes partially dissolved for consistency / Like my caste / When I write this poem in English.”

The complexities of this existence lie at the heart of the show; peppered with equal parts of rage and despair. The searing sentiment, however, is that of joy and triumph. Vamsi asserts, “It is intentional. We are often rendered invisible, seen only through the cracks of caste society or through the distorted, voyeuristic lens of the Savarna gaze. Our bodies are erased, or worse, fetishised as symbols of suffering. When I tell our stories, I aim to shift that gaze to show that we are not a collection of brutalised bodies. It is a rehumanising act.”

CEWM is radical in its spirit. It is nothing short of resistance when we co-exist in a country where leading educational institutions have segregated seating in canteens, the swankiest neighbourhoods in metropolises are gatekept through food, and restaurants and brands boast their badge of pure veg.

In the face of this irony, Vamsi alludes to rejoicing in this moment of camaraderie, telling us about his performance in Hyderabad. “Gaddar anna was in the audience. My show is also a homage to the cultural education provided by him. As he was leaving, he said: Next time I will come with my gajjalu and gongali and sing. Time stopped for me at that moment. It felt like a blessing from a giant.”

What are these stories if not a triumph? Vamsi avers, “This show is about celebrating our wholeness, centering our joy and our capacity to thrive. It is the refusal to be reduced to pain, a way to claim space and to be truly seen.”

This article was originally published in the March 2025 issue of ON Stage.