August 14th, Friday – 6.30 pm to 8.30 pm

A performance by Shilpa Mudbi and Ramavva Jogathi

“Ramakka and I” is an unscripted, intimate performance between two women, one, a transwoman folk artist from rural Karnataka; the other, a city-bred theatre practitioner and researcher, educated abroad. Both bound by a long-standing friendship and nearly a decade of shared inquiry into the Joga tradition, a busking folk form rooted in North Karnataka.

Ramavva Jogathi, from the village of Gollarahalli in Bellary district, is a traditional Jogathi artist who plays the Chowdki and sings songs invoking Yellamma and Huligyamma. Shilpa Mudbi has worked with Jogathi communities for over nine years, navigating the intersections of performance, caste, gender, and rural knowledge systems through an artistic and research-based practice.

In this piece, Ramavva and Shilpa pose questions to each other about their histories, their choices, their work, and their entanglements. The conversation traverses shared laughter and divergent realities, revealing how caste, class, gender, and the rural–urban divide shape their lives, labour, and sense of self.

Their banter exposes the subtle and not-so-subtle differences in how each navigates the world as a transwoman from a Scheduled Tribe and a woman from a Scheduled Caste who has had access to global academic spaces. This contrast, however, is not the point of fracture but a site of deep listening and companionship.

Woven with Jogathi songs and fragments of lived memory, “Ramakka and I” is a moving archive of survival, artistic labour, and everyday resilience. It is not a polished duet, but a live negotiation of politics, pain, and the radical act of staying in conversation.

Duration: 90 minutes (with translation) / 60–75 minutes (without translation)

Languages: Kannada and English