In a Savarna world, how do Dalit women live is a question that is perhaps too ambitious to be addressed in a play. 'Live' is also a word that is packed with such ambition. For centuries now though, Dalit women have practised art in various forms, and passed it down as heirloom from generation to generation. For a long time, this art was a way of identity, sometimes an escape from it. In an urban academic workspace, how does a Dalit woman's art manifest? How is it received? What can she learn from how her community survived and how they managed to keep their art alive? In the words of writer Claudia Rankine, how does a self thrive in a world where people only recognise and value a historical self?
The World of Writing tries to ‘find’ voices from the margins - Dalit, Bahujan and Adivasi communities as if they never existed or the world of the dominant communities self-appoints to be the voice/words of the oppressed. All throughout history, women from the Dalit, Bahujan and Adivasi communities have preserved the stories from/of their ancestors like heirlooms to be passed on to the next generation. The subject and object of these stories are their own bodies, experiences, resistance and existence. Here we have Roopa, her story, her ancestor’s story and the stories of many women from her community. Teaching and Writing are the 2 compositions in Roopa’s Oxygen. Can she imagine a world without words to live in the academia? What does writing mean to her? What does it mean to create, to narrate and to live those stories? Like the violin that Ambedkar played, the extra saree that Savitri Ma kept in her bag to resist, the stars Rohit Vemula dreamt of, Roopa holds the pen to find and nurture her self-self to move away from the historical self.