Bengaluru’s OffStream Futures Grantee Showcase, now in its second year, platformed six artists exploring caste, displacement, gender, and technology through poetry, oral history, visual art, and digital media. The event, held on March 1 and 2, aimed to challenge the exclusion of marginalised voices from mainstream art spaces.
Sri Vamsi Matta, one of the founders of OffStream, noted that most marginalised artists spend “80% of their time struggling for resources and only 20% creating”—a dynamic OffStream aims to change.
OffStream, a Bengaluru-based collective founded in 2020 by Nisha Abdulla, Padmalatha Ravi, and Sri Vamsi Matta, was created to address systemic barriers in the arts. The organisation provides funding, mentorship, and resources to artists whose work engages with caste and intersectional themes. “Our role is not to dictate what the artists should do, but to make sure they have the space and support to do it,” said Nisha.
At the event, artists, Aindriya Barua, Cindy Felneihthiem, Daniel Sukumar, Iqra Khan, Shripad Sinnakaar, and Srinivas Kondra–the selected grantees of OffStream for this year–presented works that drew from personal experiences and historical injustices, often countering dominant narratives that have erased Dalit, Adivasi, and other marginalised histories.
Cindy Felneihthiem, who is originally from Manipur, is a self-published author of From C To You: Revelations Of Buried Voices. Her work documents state violence and its impact on women. Her poetry is based on real events, including cases of sexual violence against women during the ethnic conflict in Manipur. “These are not abstract stories. I know their names, their faces. One of the victims I wrote about was my junior in school. I couldn’t bring myself to write about it at first, but silence wasn’t an option,” she said.
Her work also examines how violence against women in conflict zones is often normalised, both by the state and society.
Daniel Sukumar, a spoken word poet from Tamil Nadu, used his work to confront caste within Christianity. His poems, written as letters to his son Ezra, challenge the perception that religious conversion erases caste discrimination. “Caste doesn’t disappear when you convert—it just becomes invisible to those who don’t experience it. On paper, I’m no longer Dalit. In reality, I still face the same barriers,” said Daniel, whose poetry explores the dual burden of being both Dalit and Christian, a reality often ignored in the broader caste discourse.
Srinivas Kondra, a researcher and podcaster, presented an oral history project featuring podcasts of interviews with Dalit writers Joopaka Subhadra and Manasa Yendluri. His work focused on the erasure of Dalit women in anti-caste movements. “We hear about Dalit resistance, but whose names get remembered? Mostly men,” he said. “The women who were part of these movements are just as important, but their contributions are not documented in the same way,” Srinivas added. His project aims to correct that erasure, ensuring that Dalit women’s voices are recognised as part of the historical record.
Aindriya Barua, an AI engineer and artist from Tripura, examined caste and bias in technology through Shhor Mag, a publication critiquing the politics of artificial intelligence. Their work questioned how AI systems perpetuate social hierarchies. “Tech doesn’t exist in a vacuum—it reflects the biases of those who build it. Who decides what data AI learns from? Whose experiences are ignored?” they asked. Their project imagined alternative digital spaces, built by and for marginalised communities, as a counter to existing power structures in technology.
OffStream’s model extends beyond funding, focusing on long-term structural change. The collective is working on oral archiving and publication projects, aiming to create a sustained network of support for artists excluded from institutional frameworks. “We are not just funding projects—we are questioning why these artists had to struggle so much for space in the first place,” said Padmalatha.
With a new cohort of grantees each year, OffStream Futures continues to challenge artistic gatekeeping, ensuring that narratives from marginalised communities are not just included, but given the sustained space they have long been denied.