Shobhana Kumari

This Foundation Project implemented by IFA under Arts Projects (Research/Practice) will create a theatre performance that will attempt to capture vignettes of Bangalore through the lived experiences of a single woman in the city and their interactions with the working class and queer communities. Shobhana Kumari is the Coordinator for this project. 

Shobhana Kumari is a theatre artist and an activist from Bangalore. They have been part of Dalit rights movements in the city and have worked individually and institutionally with sexual and gender minority groups. They are the General Secretary at Ankura, an organisation working on rights for Dalit communities. They are part of various projects in Bangalore that involve creating skill-development modules for women, transgender and queer communities. They have been working on HIV/AIDS prevention projects with city-based groups for the last two decades. Given their experience, they are best placed to be the Coordinator of this Foundation Project of IFA. 

 Bangalore has developed extensively to be a city of many lives. People from various backgrounds and cultures have found their living and home here. More than 20 percent of the city constitutes slums and small layouts of waste pickers and migrant daily wage labourers. Community-based organisations and NGOs across the city have been helping these marginalised communities by creating awareness of their rights and guiding them in securing social entitlements like ration cards, land titles, pensions, and scholarships. These organisations have also educated excluded groups on the functioning of local governance structures and pertinent legislations. Shobhana has been working on these grounds for the past two decades, facilitating crisis intervention work among local queer and Dalit communities. Lately, they have been working in community theatre projects and have begun using performance art as an advocacy tool.

The current project is imagined as a theatrical performance that will look at Bangalore through Shobhana’s own lived experiences and their interactions, over the years, with the city’s working class and queer communities. The performance titled Nantu (meaning, bond in Kannada) will attempt to reflect Shobhana’s relationship with Bangalore by bringing in questions on belonging, memory, loss, experience, helplessness, and survival in a vast city like Bangalore. For this project, Shobhana has chosen 20 locations across Bangalore. Based on their interactions with local vendors, sex workers, auto drivers, and other marginalised communities, and using found materials from these locations, Shobhana will weave the performance script with elements of songs, short stories, anecdotes and abstract expressions. They will also invite sketch artists to create pencil sketches of the stories collected during this process. Theatre director Sharanya Ramprakash will facilitate Shobhana to create the performance, which is aimed to be a wholesome sensorial experience. 

The performance is slated to open in Bangalore in July 2023. Once the show opens, Shobhana plans to travel with it to some of the educational institutions in the city to encourage students and young adults and to promote women’s empowerment. 

The outcome of this project will be the performance. The Project Coordinator’s deliverables to IFA with the final report will be still and video recordings of the rehearsals and the performance.

This project suitably addresses the framework of IFA’s Arts Projects under Project 560 programme in the manner in which it attempts to overlay individual and collective experiences with the marginalised histories of the city. 

IFA will ensure that the implementation of this project happens in a timely manner and funds expended are accounted for. IFA will also review the progress of the project at midterm and document it through an Implementation Memorandum. After the project is finished and all deliverables are submitted, IFA will put together a Final Evaluation to share with the Trustees.