based on real life incidents
based on the lives of oppressed-caste folk performers, and their struggles against caste and patrirarchy

about artists’ love and dedication to their art practice
on search for expression and self-realisation

exploring idioms from the folk and colloquial of Bhojpur, Bihar
exploring the practices of Nirgun and Launda


Lattar is an experiment in naach performance 



*Launda Naach is a folk dance of the Bhojpuri speaking Community of India, Nepal, Mauritius and the Caribbean Islands. It is performed by males who dress as women to become ‘Launda’— a term which can mean: female impersonator, feminine man, queer man, and/or-alternatively a ‘folk’ artist-performer who practices this art-form. The term ‘Naach’ literally means dance, but in folk traditions can mean a mix of dance, drama, theatre, performance, and storytelling.

**Lattar means Creeper or Vine

Authors:


Sunil Ram, better known as Sunaina, is a renowned senior naach artist from Chanakewatiya. They stopped singing and dancing due to old age, but continue as a percussionist. Raju urged Sunaina to return from his retirement as a singer and dancer-performer because only with their presence, we could explore the practice of Nirgun. 
Raju Ranjan is a theatre artist and a jangayak. He comes from Farhada, and has performed all over India. He is aligned with several anti-caste and socio-cultural movements across India. Raju’s research practice considers diverse folk practices of Bihar, through lives and struggles of folk artists and public performers. 
Sipahi is a naach performer from Kanaela. He performs at weddings and baraaths, festivals, political rallies, and in traditional folk programmes. Off season, he migrates to Talegaon to work as a rose picker. 
Piyush, better known as zeropowercut is an artist and researcher whose work tries to locate how caste plays out in everyday life and deeper histories. Part of his work is creating collective productions of anti-caste discourse, which is how Piyush and Raju met.
Collaboration:

Lattar arrrives from ongoing collaborations of Raju and Piyush, which in this project expanded with coming of Sunaina and Sipahi.

Raju and Piyush started working together in 2022, to create anti-caste expression and knowledge in their local languages and colloquial forms. 


2022: Piyush’s installation BucketSpeak contained voices and writings of Raju



2023: Piyush, Raju, and Deepmala collaborated to make Anumanlok: an IVR based dissemination of unfinished poems in Bhojpuri



2023: Raju performed jangayek.txt: anti-caste song-segments co-written by Raju and Piyush; held as an online performance followed by discussion



2024: Raju and Piyush interview with Sipahi for a project on migration. Sipahi talks about how his wife likes his work and performance as a Naach and Launda artist



S: My wife likes it. Why wouldn’t she like that I am earning well?
R: Has your wife seen you dance/perform? [as a launda]
S: Yes, she has seen me, very recently too. I danced in one uncle’s daughter’s wedding. I was there as part of Suresh’s team.
R: What did she say?
S: She said, “You were looking beautiful!” [...] When I wasn’t dancing, I would wear whatever and go work as a buffalo herder...

This inspired a scene in our next work, Lattar

2024: Raju, Sipahi, Sunaina, and Piyush make Lattar


Lattar is made up of five scenes. Two scenes come from Raju’s research on lives and struggles of folk artists and public performers. One scene is inspired by our interview with Sipahi. Written as a reflection on “masculinity”, the beginning scene, is about a person who finds no place for himself inside the very house he has built. A middle scene is a traditional love (and jealousy) song.  



This version of the play is comissioned by Maraa Media & Arts Collective
SCENES
Bhojpuri and English, 40mins
From Chanakewatia, Farhada, Kanaela & Sadikpur
Bhojpur & Patna-Sahib, Bihar

Scene 1
In the house he made, he searches for a corner, where he can be


Written as a reflection on masculinity, the song explores Nirgun as a way to recognize the ungraspable (world) through imaginaries in the real—to locate where we ourselves are tied by gender and caste taboos, to realise our own self-abjectification, what feels real but missing on tongue is imagined through labour.

With their knowledge of Nirgun, the scene is brought to life by Sunaina’s “pukar” [call].



This song is almost the entire Scene 1; For further scenes, smaller excerpts are presented

Scene 2
Because the show must go on, a Launda artist is forced to continue performing while he receives the news of his spouse’s death.


Raju told me this story. He wanted this story to be part of the play and its expression of ‘masculinity’. This is the story of a naach artist with whom Sunaina has shared stage, and whom Raju has seen perform many times. We started working with this memory and history, and soon hit the form of reprise: With all that goes in a naach performance (teasing, show of ‘upper’ caste masculinity, firing guns), the crisis resounds again and again; in this we are unsure— 




—Is Chilgozra shackled to the stage or committed to naach?

Scene 3
A person dreams of their lover sending them a love-letter


Sipahi has returned on stage, and demands a song for his dance. We kept the lyrics of this song “as it is”— this is the only song in the play we have not written.

This song begins with love and longing, but soon the lover is abandoned for another ‘more beautiful’ by traditional-popular standards. This struggle with traditional standards and populism, is the struggle of the artists also.



In a culture of predetermined dictations, against the stake of not being understood on a public stage, the artists experiment and develop intelligibility.


Scene 4
A Launda artist recalls having barely escaped dominant caste men trying to sexually harass him


The artist whose story this is, narrated and sang their traumatic memories to us, as we met them for ‘research’. More artists among the listeners began recounting their own accounts of harrasment from the dominant caste men. We wrote this scene with elements from two incidents. For this scene, the dancing stops, and the dancer, Sipahi tells a story. 




Scene 5
My wife loves me like a Launda— 


While praise and humiliation stand shoulder to shoulder in crowd, there is certain hope when one is accepted and loved as they become many/other on stage, in life— we leave the play with this hopeful turn of embraced-becoming. Inspired by Sipahi’s story, we return to love; to freedom of expression in the many languages of love.



all scenes:
performed by Raju, Sunaina & Sipahi
music by Raju and Sunaina
co-written by Raju and Piyush
structured and conceptualised by Piyush 

food and shelter by Puneet