Ram Ganesh Kamatham

Ram Ganesh Kamatham is a Bangalore-based theatre actor, director and playwright. He has created work for stage, film, and radio, as well as comics and video games. In 2007, he attended the International Residency for Emerging Playwrights of the Royal Court Theatre, on a Charles Wallace Award. The same year, he was also awarded a SARAI-CSDS Independent Research Fellowship for the development of his play Creeper. Enabled with this grant, Ram will research into the narratives of Indian seafarers who left home as labour aboard British ships in the early part of the 20th century. 

 

As a playwright, Ram has had a strong interest in micro-narratives - stories that throw into question our deep-seated assumptions and entrenched beliefs. His fascination with the on-ground minutiae has been evident in his work, allowing him to critically examine the ‘bigger’ narratives. In recent years, he has been interested in new forms of labour in the neo liberal economies. As a critic of globalisation in Bangalore, his first impressions of this phenomenon were through his investigations of labour and alienation among IT workers. Theatre allowed him to see how macro-processes play out in micro-settings, through the impact on the body and psychology of the individual as well as on society. 

 

Continuing his engagement with the ideas of labour, Ram now seeks to investigate into the experiences of Indian seafarers. India by virtue of its geographical location has been a maritime nation. Although slavery was progressively abolished from between 1833 and 1843, indentured labourers were used all the way till 1917 to meet global demands. The ‘lascars’ or coolie sailors are within this category of indentured labour, but are also distinct in many ways. They were paid abominably low wages and worked with extractive contracts that kept them in near-permanent indebtedness. The sailors never owned any land and their movement was restricted due to racial prejudice towards their migration and mobility. Macro-narratives about India have tended to remain preoccupied with continental movements such as invasions and creation of boundaries and have never really engaged in depth about this aspect of labour. Through this project, Ram hopes to foreground this history of labour with the stories of the sailors.  

 

Enabled with this grant, Ram will put together material about the subjectivities of Indian seafarers who ventured outwards from India, seeking new homes and leaving behind loved ones, often choosing to occupy liminal spaces with hope as the only positive feeling to cling to. The research will especially focus on the period preceding India’s independence (1900 to 1945), when Indian seafarers made up a significant proportion of labour aboard British vessels. The ocean as a form of connection and how these seafarers made sense of home, belonging and identity will be the main focus of the research. 

 

Due to the nature of colonial history, resistance movements or attempts at self-organisation have often been framed as ‘mutinies’ or ‘native rebellions’. The strike by sailors in 1946 has also been called a ‘mutiny. These resistance movements make for a compelling study of pre-independence labour relations. The collective struggle of sailors protesting against difficult working conditions, entrenched religious and racial power structures and the grind of early industrial shipping becomes a window into their collective working consciousness. Ram feels that an understanding of this will also be a comment on the present state of labour mobility and conditions. 

 

Ram observes that in writing the maritime history of India, South India has been relatively underrepresented. While there is a much work around ports like Calcutta, Bombay and Karachi, the ports in South India have been the ‘outposts’. In this research project, he will attempt to closely study the stories of sailors from southern ports like Vishakapatnam, Kochi and Madras. 

 

For this project, Ram will conduct interviews with academics and practitioners who have worked on the subject of maritime history as well as undertake field trips to Kochi, Vishakapatnam and Chennai. He will also consult archival material on India’s maritime history at the Archives and Research Center for Ethnomusicology in Gurgaon and the National Archives of India in Delhi. 

 

The material gathered from this research will lead to the creation of a script for a performance. The script will aim to evoke a sense of inter-connected journeys, filled with uncertainty and hope for new beginnings. Given the non linear, criss-crossing and wave-like nature of the subject material, Ram envisions working with the technique of multiple timelines in his script. 

 

The deliverables from this project to IFA will be an essay on his methodological approach and processes and a copy of the script towards the performance.