Perishable Goods Collective is a transdisciplinary collective of anti-caste practitioners working between creation, curation, and conservation at the interface of food and oppressed caste identities in South Asia. The collective consists of Sri Vamsi Matta, Tabitha Percy, Bao, and Rahee Punyashloka, each of whom artistically contend with their Dalit identities and the culinary lifeworlds it activates.

Members of collective:

Sri Vamsi Matta, or simply Vamsi, is a Bangalore-based interdisciplinary theatre artist whose work is deeply informed by his Dalit identity, experiences, and the socio-political context of his location. As a member of a community historically marginalized and labeled “untouchable” within the Hindu caste system, Vamsi critically engages with oppressive structures and narratives affecting his community.

His recent work includes Star in the Sky, a play that poignantly captures the struggles and resilience of Dalit students in Indian universities, exploring themes of pain, identity, and systemic discrimination. Developed under Indian Ensemble’s Idea Development Lab-First Draft program, the play was a runner-up for the Tata Lit Fest’s Sultan Padamsee Playwriting Award. Another notable project, Come Eat with Me, is a critically acclaimed performance piece that examines the intricate and often fraught relationship between caste and food. Through the shared act of cooking Dalit cuisine, Vamsi interweaves personal storytelling to challenge caste-based stigma and prejudice. Following a successful U.S. tour, the piece returned to India after Vamsi completed his 2023-24 residency as the Interdisciplinary Artist in Residence at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

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The Big Fat Bao, or Bao (They/she) is a Mumbai based visual designer and design researcher whose work primarily focuses on how caste impacts design, food, and gender. Their illustrations and research challenge the casteist and colonial cultural narratives that propagate through “good design” and “clean food.” Their design practice and research is based on the anticaste framework which is built on critical, emancipatory, and anti-hegemonic perspectives, demanding equity, social justice and the inclusion of knowledges and experiences of Dalit communities. Through their illustrations they attempt to challenge the hegemonic visual language, ideas of design justice, and promote greater critical awareness, especially among designers and design researchers, by challenging the colonial and casteist gaze and epistemes of creative production. Their recent illustrations have been exhibited at the Sister Library’s Celebration of Sisterhood Exhibition in Mumbai. Their research on Indian design has been published by Futuress, Switzerland and The Trouble Makers Magazine, Japan.

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Percy is a visual artist based out of Hyderabad, India. She is inspired by the idea of memory and how it works in the personal, social and political. She is currently in Yakshi Constitutional values in a praxis program working with marginalized women using art to understand the Constitution. Her works have been exhibited in numerous venues including the Kaghazi Pairahan: publishing & Resistance in South Asia at Arles photo festival; Vanam art festival 2023 in Chennai and Fault lines –visual symptoms of discordance in Indian history at Conflictorium , Ahmedabad

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Rahee Punyashloka is an artist, writer, researcher, and experimental filmmaker based out of Bhubaneswar and New Delhi. Working across disciplines, he seeks to illuminate the vastly unrepresented/underrepresented artistic history of the anti-caste struggle and the Dalit identity. He tries to create online interventions around the same under the moniker ‘artedkar.’ His works have been exhibited in numerous venues including International Film Festival Rotterdam; Athens Video Art Festival; Tribeca Film Festival (New York); ARKIPEL (Jakarta); Ishara Art Foundation (Dubai); KHOJ (New Delhi); Museum of Art and Photography (Bangalore); Arts House (Melbourne), among others. His second solo show, fieldnotes from begumpura, was recently held at Pulp Society, New Delhi.