Toto Funds the Arts
& Abhinaya Tiranga
are pleased to invite you to
Swati Simha’s play
The Echoing Chamber
performed by actor-singers
Shilpa Mudbi Kothakota and Pallavi M D
Directed by Pallavi M D
Date and Time: Sunday, 1 December 2019, 11 a.m.
Venue: Abhinaya Taranga intimate theatre, 5th cross , A.N. Subbarao Road, Hanumantha Nagar, Bengaluru 560019
About the play
In October 1948, a year after the partition of India and Pakistan, another massacre occurred in central India. Tens and thousands were brutally slaughtered in the princely state of Hyderabad. Aurangabad, Bir, Nalagunda, Medak, Gulburga, Bidar, Nader, Osmanabad were the areas that experienced extreme bloodshed, rape and torture by the armed forces of the newly formed Indian state. The Sunderlal Committee report compiled after the massacre estimated the death toll to be anywhere between 27 and 40 thousand. This important incident has been absent in the collective memory of the nation – absent in our history books, absent in the stories we share, absent in our imagination of independence and democracy. The play is a dedication to our forgetfulness.
The Echoing Chamber brings together subaltern voices and allows the audience to engage in an anachronistic reflection on the consequences of failing to recollect the making of the ‘nation’ and ‘national identity’.
Swati Simha is one of the most exciting young playwrights to emerge from India in recent years. She is the author of several plays, many of which have been performed. She received her Masters from Shanghai Theatre Academy, China and is pursuing a PhD at the Centre for Comparative Politics and Political Theory at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi. The Echoing Chamber won her the Toto Award for Creative Writing in 2019. She was one of the playwrights commissioned for the B!rth Festival at Royal Exchange, Manchester. Her play Flypaper Trap was written under the mentorship of Royal Court Theatre at the Writer’s Bloc residency.
Pallavi M D is a singer, actor, composer, editor, sound designer and filmmaker based in Bangalore. She has a degree in Psychology, English and Journalism from Bangalore University and a degree in Hindustani classical music from the Banaras Hindu University. She won the META Award for Best Actress for her one-woman performance in C Sharp C Blunt, and the Karnataka State Best Playback Singer Award for her song in the film Duniya. She was recently awarded the Bismillah Khan Yuva Puraskar for her work in the field of Bhav Sangeet. She is keen on multidisciplinary collaborations.
Shilpa Mudbi Kothakota is a filmmaker, theatre practitioner and vocalist born and brought up in Bangalore. She completed her Masters in Filmmaking from the University of Technology Sydney in 2008 and returned to Bangalore to make films on agriculture, rural development and women’s empowerment. She worked as a manager/actor/singer/songwriter for Indianostrum Theatre: a contemporary French-Tamil troupe. She is the founder and artistic director of the Urban Folk Project.
