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Bonington Gallery is delighted to host the culmination of this year’s CADALFEST (Celebrating Adivasi and Dalit Arts and Literature Festival).

After two successful festivals between 2022-24, at locations within the UK and India, this third instalment will culminate with a two-day programme of screenings, discussions, workshops and masterclasses at Bonington Gallery, offering audiences a closer, more sustained engagement with contributors than on previous occasions.

This new, more interactive format will allow audiences to work closely, and embark on a two-day journey, with the filmmaker Jayan K. Cherian, the writers and poets Gogu Shyamala and Jitendra Vasava, the writers and researchers Gopika Jadeja and Priteegandha Naik, as well as the Jangama Collective.

This year’s festival also celebrates the 10-year anniversary of the network on Dalit and Adivasi literature that was launched by the first conference on Dalit literature at Nottingham Trent University in June 2014.

Promotional poster for Rhythm of Dammam (2024), directed by Jayan K. Cherian.

Day One: 25 June

10 am – 12 pm: Gopika Jadeja and Jitendra Vasava, ‘Adivasi lives in forest, village, city’.
Jitendra Vasava and Gopika Jadeja have been working over the past decade to translate and publish Adivasi poetry from western India, including Vasava’s own poetry. Beginning with a song in celebration of the Earth, Vasava and Jadeja will weave through Vasava’s poetry in Dehwali Bhili and English translation, video footage of readings by other Adivasi poets and reflections on poetry, orality and Adivasi struggles.

1 – 3 pm: Screening of Rhythm of Dammam, a film by Jayan K. Cherian, followed by a discussion with the filmmaker.
In Uttara Kannada, India, Jayaram Siddi, a twelve-year-old boy, is believed to be possessed by the spirit of his late grandfather, Rama Bantu Siddi. Despite seeking help from local black magicians, Jayaram’s condition remains unchanged. He escapes into a dream world, using ‘magical’ instruments from his grandfather to connect with his ancestors. However, he becomes overwhelmed by the agonizing history of his ancestors’ chattel slavery, losing touch with reality. Jayaram drops out of school, and his family strives to restore his balance by embracing tribal rituals and Dammam music, both vital to their cultural heritage. The film delves into Jayaram’s struggle with intergenerational trauma, emphasizing the challenges faced by him and his family in finding healing and stability.

Rhythm of Dammam is a groundbreaking production that brings to light the little-known Siddi community of India, also known as the Sheedi or Habshi, who primarily reside in regions like Karnataka, Gujarat, and Hyderabad in Telangana. The Siddi people trace their ancestry to the Bantu people from Southeast Africa, who were enslaved by Portuguese traders and brought to the Indian subcontinent between 1530 and 1740. While slavery was declared illegal in British India by 1835 (and continued until 1865 in Portuguese-controlled Goa), the Siddi people endured a different form of bondage within India’s complex caste system after abolition. 

Despite some progress in Indian society, the Siddi community continues to experience discrimination and marginalization, limiting their social and economic mobility due to their position within the caste hierarchy. Nevertheless, the Siddi people have shown remarkable resilience in preserving their unique cultural identity. They have achieved this by maintaining their ancestral customs while incorporating elements of Indian culture, particularly traditional Dammam music and tribal rituals. The journey of the Siddi people—from enslavement to current caste-based challenges—is a moving tale of determination and survival. It highlights the enduring impact of societal oppression while showcasing the strength of cultural heritage and community solidarity. The film Rhythm of Dammam offers a fresh perspective on the complex dynamics of caste, race, and identity in contemporary Indian society. It encourages viewers to question their preconceptions and biases while acknowledging the resilience of the human spirit in its pursuit of dignity and freedom.

3:30 – 5:30 pm: Masterclass with Jayan K. Cherian.
In this interactive masterclass, Jayan K. Cherian will focus on the logistics of independent filmmaking in a remote village setting—navigating limited infrastructure, working with non-professional actors, and building a creative process rooted in mutual trust. He will also share insights from his experience living and working with the Siddi community—how they prepared documentary subjects to step into fictional roles and developed the screenplay through oral histories, local legends, and the mythologies shared by elders. These became the foundation for a story that reflects the community’s collective memory, while also raising questions about who gets to represent whom, and how (the politics of representation in cinema).

Day Two: 26 June

10 am – 12:30 pm: Priteegandha Naik’s workshop ‘Reclaiming Tomorrows: Liberation through Dalit Futurism’.
This workshop aims to re-imagine and rewrite the intended telos of the caste system as envisioned by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar. It will employ speculative fiction to resist, challenge, and create anti-caste futures. The workshop uses Dalit futurism as a toolkit to build blueprints of tomorrows and bring them to life. It will use Dalit futurism to critique, dream, and create new narratives of hopeful and collaborative futures. 

1:30 – 3:30 pm: Gogu Shyamala’s presentation ‘Pain resonates in speculative fiction’ and conversation with Priteegandha Naik, chaired by Basma Mahfoud-Vandermeersh.
In this presentation with poems, songs and stories, Gogu Shyamala will engage in a dialogue with the writings by Dalit women who unveil mundane lived and shared experiences of those who are located at the lowest strata of society and whose lives are coloured by divisions of class, caste and gender. The context of this intersectional oppression of Dalit women is a civil society that is fragmented by religion, while caste compartmentalises India into 3000 fragments and about 25,000 subdivisions. Unlike religion, the division among castes is invisible but firmly in place. This systematic division, called the ‘Caste System’, is premised on codification of the five-fold varna system. This codification subscribes to an ideology of divisions in a hierarchy akin to a vertical ladder, naturalising and internalising the idea of purity and pollution of castes by religion, effecting untouchability and inhumanity. All top four varnas thereby humiliate the last varna in terms of the economy, ethnicity, culture and assertion.

Gogu Shyamala will discuss how the form of speculative fiction is well suited to explore all these caste contradictions and dichotomies in order to create anti-caste literature and the history of contemporary conditions. She will draw on poems and songs as well as her recently published short story, “The Phantom Ladder” (in translation from Telugu by Divya Kalavala), in The Blaft Book of Anti-Caste SF by BLAFT Publications.

4 – 6 pm: Jangama Collective, represented by Lakshmana K P and Mohit Kaycee, screening of the play DaklaKatha DeviKavya, followed by a discussion with Lakshmana K P and Mohit Kaycee. 
Daklakatha Devikavya is an experimental play drawing on the epic poetry and stories of the important Kannada writer and founder-member of the Dalit Sangharsha Samiti, K.B. Siddaiah. This experimental piece begins with a re- reading of a cosmogonic myth from a community that is oppressed even amongst the oppressed narrating the origins of the world and of life on it. The play progresses through weaving and unravelling untouchable rituals, beliefs, hunger and desires through song and storytelling. For untouchable communities nudi (speech, sound, voice, and word) is like breath that cannot be separated from the body. The play uses instruments such as the areye and tamte as vines of nudi that enmesh the narrative and sprout new directions from within. Thereby opening up the untouchable world as a world of deep sonic imprints. In a context such as this, the play confronts what happens when the ‘written word’ that has so far been unreachable collides with and becomes an organ of the untouchable body, giving rise to a new relationship of intimacy and struggle. The play provokes an exploration of how the received insights through the experience of untouchability and the ‘written word’ force us to confront what it means to be human in the depths of our being.

Participants and organisers
Jangama Collective

Jangama Collective is a Bangalore-based group of theatre artists with diverse cultural backgrounds who believe in creating cultural and political awareness choosing theatre as their way of expression. As an extension of this, the group has engaged itself in creative processes like education, literature, publishing, cinema and social struggles.

Image at top of page: Film still from Rhythm of Dammam (2024), directed by Jayan K. Cherian.

ABOUT THIS EVENT

This online roundtable is a pre-conference event on Dalit magazines with editors and subject experts from West Bengal and Maharashtra. It is being organised in association with the Network on Dalit and Adivasi Literature and Bonington Gallery as part of our Formations Series.

Conceptualised to draw the attention of researchers working in this field within and outside India, the roundtable will be moderated by Dr Nicole Thiara and Prof Judith Misrahi-Barak.

Funded by the Research Seed Grant Scheme, GITAM (Deemed to be University), the project on Dalit Literature in Marathi and Bangla Little Magazines intends to critically engage with the underrepresented area of Dalit Periodicals within the broad research field of Dalit Studies. It aims to trace and collect periodicals published in Bangla and Marathi (1950-2000) and look into their publication process, circulation and readership.

Besides, it aims to build a digital repository of Bangla and Marathi periodicals to facilitate easier access, a historiographic narrative on the evolution of Dalit literary periodicals in Marathi and Bangla and encourage translations of Dalit writings published in these periodicals.

As part of the outreach programme, a three-day conference is being organised in GITAM, Hyderabad, titled “Vernacular Periodicals and Dalit Writing: Production, Circulation and Reception” from 1st March to 3rd March 2023 in association with the Central Institute of Indian Languages, Mysore. This conference aims to bring together editors, subject experts, early career scholars and graduate students to initiate a conversation across Indian languages and to reflect upon the vernacular Dalit periodicals critically.

The discussion will primarily focus on:

1) the possibility and scope of research in the area of vernacular periodicals and Dalit writing,
2) the challenges in such research and
3) the significance of such research.

Biographies:


This free, online-in conversation event with writer Gogu Shyamala is part of our Formations series, hosted in partnership with Nottingham Trent University’s Postcolonial Studies Centre. This segment of Formations, CADALFEST, relates to the Celebrating Adivasi and Dalit Arts and Literature Festival (CADALFEST) taking place across India and in Nottingham. CADALFEST is the first international festival series dedicated to artists whose work creatively resists caste discrimination and social exclusion in India.

This event will take start at 4 pm (GMT) and 8.30 pm Indian Standard Time.

About this event

Gogu Shyamala will discuss her literary and academic work to mark the republication of her short story collection Father May be an Elephant, and Mother Only a Small Basket, But…, by Tilted Axis Press in March 2022. Her focus on the perspective of Dalit women and children as well as her stories’ celebration of Dalit strength and culture will be explored. Gogu Shyamala will tell us about her choice of, and experimentation with, the short story form, and how she sees her role as writer, academic and activist. We will also discuss land relations and the link to caste, sexual violence, inter-caste love and other key concerns of her fiction and academic writing.

Gogu Shyamala will be in conversation with Sowjanya Tamalapakula, Bethan Evans, Judith Misrahi-Barak and Nicole Thiara and the session will conclude with Q&A with the online audience via YouTube chat.

Tilted Axis is a non-profit press publishing mainly work by Asian writers, translated into a variety of Englishes. Founded in 2015, Tilted Axis are based in the UK, a state whose former and current imperialism severely impacts writers in the majority world. This position informs their practice, which is also an ongoing exploration into alternatives – to the hierarchisation of certain languages and forms, including forms of translation; to the monoculture of globalisation; to cultural, narrative, and visual stereotypes; to the commercialisation and celebrification of literature and literary translation. Tilted Axis values the work of translation and translators through fair, transparent pay, public acknowledgement, and respectful communication. They are dedicated to improving access to the industry, through translator mentorships, paid publishing internships, open calls and guest curation.

This free, online-in conversation event with multimedia artists Subash Thebe Limbu and Osheen Siva is part of our Formations series, hosted in partnership with Nottingham Trent University’s Postcolonial Studies Centre. This segment of Formations, CADALFEST, relates to the Celebrating Adivasi and Dalit Arts and Literature Festival (CADALFEST) taking place across India and in Nottingham. CADALFEST is the first international festival series dedicated to artists whose work creatively resists caste discrimination and social exclusion in India.

Book your free place now

This event will be streamed live on Bonington Gallery’s YouTube channel. Book your free place now.

About this event

In recent times, the rapidly changing socio-political, environmental, and technological changes have centralised focus on reimagining and reconfiguring futures. While the Futurism movement, which began in Italy and spread to other European countries, sought to cleave off from the past and prophesized exciting futures through new technologies, futurisms that emerged from the margins were motivated by different urges – to question Eurocentric ideas of progress, development, scientific rationality, and techno futures. Afrofuturism, Latinx Futurism, and different kinds of Subaltern Futurisms have imagined alternate futures through speculative art and fiction by firmly holding on to the past.

In the Indian subcontinent, artists Subash Thebe Limbu and Osheen Siva have conceptualised Adivasi Futurism and Tamil Dalit Futures respectively. This conversation will discuss how they utilise the anti-caste philosophy that guides their multimodal artwork. It will explore how the artists use speculative art to posit alternate futures that resist caste and privilege their identities. The conversation, moderated by Prof. K.A. Geetha and Priteegandha Naik will discuss Dalit and Adivasi futurism and the potential it offers to dream up new and equal futures.