The title of Sri Vamsi Matta’s one-man performance, “Come Eat With Me,” is an invitation. Vamsi, a writer and performer from India, tells stories to the audience revolving around food, ranging from fables from Indian mythology to anecdotes about his own family.
At the end of the performance, he serves chicken curry, based on his late mother’s recipe, to the entire audience.
But “Come Eat With Me” is also a provocation. India’s caste system — an ancient social hierarchy based on birth — permeates every aspect of society, including who cooks your food and who you eat with. One of the true stories Vamsi tells is about a lower-caste cook at a government school who was fired because the upper-caste students refused to eat the lunches she prepared. To eat with someone of a lower caste, to accept Vamsi’s invitation, is a political and even transgressive act.
“In India, there is an emphasis on ‘Who is your cook?’ ‘Who occupies your kitchen?’” said Vamsi, who is living in Madison for the 2023-’24 school year as the artist-in-residence for the UW-Madison Division of the Arts’ Interdisciplinary Arts Residency Program. “People put out (help wanted) ads saying they want somebody from a certain caste. That I would go out and occupy these spaces was an important part of designing the performance.”
On a Saturday night in October, that space was the Sultan Restaurant, a new Pakistani restaurant on Williamson Street. The tables and chairs were stacked along the sides of the restaurants, and the 40 or so invited guests sat on cushions on the floor or on a bench against the wall. Vamsi had handed each of them a small, pink flower as they came in the door, and some stuck the blossom behind their ears, while others held them in their hands.
Vamsi’s style of performance is very different from most. Instead of standing on a stage, he sits, holding the script for “Come Eat With Me” rolled up in one hand. He asks questions of the audience and encourages people to respond. It’s an approach that strips the performance of the artifice of theater — it’s as if Vamsi is sitting with us at the dinner table, keeping a conversation going as he tells stories and reads poems.
The final story involves Vamsi’s attempts to recreate the recipe of his late mother’s chicken curry from memory. At the end of the show, Sultan owner Sultan Ahmed brought out a giant steel pot of the curry that Vamsi has been making all day, and everyone ate together.
“One of the ways that reformers looked at ‘How do we eradicate caste?’ was intermingling,” Vamsi said. “So inter-caste dining was a thing back in the day. My concept came from there. I want to replicate the idea of inter-caste dining. But also, mythology is a very important part of telling my stories. ‘The Last Supper’ is a very interesting image, the idea of people sitting and talking and eating together. This is also my image, of people eating together.”
Vamsi said that the rituals surrounding food are powerful in a society, that they can be connected to larger conversations about those societies and the inequalities within them. And because food is universal, those conversations can more easily be translated to other societies.
“When you talk about inviting someone for a meal, you say, ‘Oh, we break bread.’ What does that statement mean? It’s very theatrical. There’s drama in the word, in the act. The idea of pouring a bottle of wine in the glass, all of this very primal human behavior. So it has become easy to talk about, to relate it to someone who’s far away what my culture is, to talk about caste.”
Playwright and performer Sri Vamsi Matta is the artist-in-residence this year for the UW Division of the Arts.
‘Human to human’
Vamsi came to the UW-Madison through Zara Chowdhary, a writer and instructor with the UW-Madison Department of Asian Languages and Culture. Chowdhary, who was born in India and worked as a screenwriter there before coming to Madison, said she was struck how often conversations about South Asian culture in America are had by people who have visited there, not lived there.
“It’s one thing to see a person from Western academia going there and treating other parts of the world as a subject, and then coming back with that knowledge and transferring that knowledge to our students,” she said. “And it’s a whole other thing when a living, breathing person who’s embodying those stories is able to come here and share what they know and speak to you, human to human.”
Chowdhary began asking people she knew in the Indian theater community about recommendations for artists who deal with caste in their work. Several pointed to Vamsi, who was getting national media attention for traveling across India performing (and cooking) for audiences.
“We just hit it off,” Chowdhary said. “I was like, this is a brother. I found somebody who speaks the same language. There’s just these beautiful intersections that we find in our own questions and our own struggles.”
As part of the residency, Vamsi is teaching a three-credit class for 21 students from all different majors, both art and non-art. Called “Whose Art Is It Anyway?” the class helps the students to develop their own artistic ways of telling their stories.
The students will present and perform their projects on Dec. 5 at Arts + Literature Laboratory, 111 S. Livingston St.
Sri Vamsi Matta performs “Come Eat With Me” for an audience at Sultan restaurant in October.
Class dynamics
Vamsi said he’s been wanting to teach a class like this for a long time. It was important for him not to impose his own brand of storytelling on his students, and to let the class have a free hand in developing its arc.
“I had a structure in mind, but I’ve created in such a way that it’s dynamic, it can move around, it can bloom,” he said. “There are 21 students in my class, so there are 21 definitions of art. Most of their final presentations will be what art means to them. They’re bringing themselves into the stories. So it is very personal, but also very political.”
In past years, the UW Division of the Arts artist-in-residence has been on campus for a semester, and teaches for that full semester. But Vamsi’s residence will last for a full year, and in the spring semester he will focus on making art on campus.
He is planning a staged reading of his play, “Star in the Sky,” based on the true story of an institutional murder of a Ph.D. scholar from the same caste as Vamsi.
And he and Chowdhary are co-writing a new play, tentatively titled “Blue,” that they plan to stage on campus in April.
“It’s essentially looking at caste when it travels to the U.S. in diaspora,” Chowdhary said. “How it functions, especially in an academic environment. We’re looking at the story of a young person who comes from this marginalized background, but who doesn’t fully understand what that background means, because she is born and raised here.
“It’s an exploration of right now through the eyes of young people who really love to think that we’re like a post-race, post-caste society, to see how those ideas are very much part of how they navigate society. Especially because even academia has hierarchies.”
