The Starved

A layered portraiture of Dalit oppression and ruthless hierarchies in 1980s Odisha. Set against the bucolic landscape of undivided Sambalpur, the play follows five Bajnias – professional rural folk performers – whose lives are pushed into a corner by poverty, social discrimination, addiction and illiteracy. Believed to be conduits connecting ordinary people to the divine, the musicians echo the voices of the gods through the rhythmic play of their instruments. But the decline in folk music and drying farmlands soon become a persistent reality, and the circumstances of those on the fringes devolve from diffi cult to dire.