Description
Voice Over: Under the British Raj in India, the self-indulging Nizams of Hyderabad abdicated the
administration of their vast principality to doralu, the village heads, letting them turn the areas
under their domain into their personal fiefdoms. While the successive Nizams were obsessed
with building palaces and acquiring jewelry, the village heads succeeded in ushering in an
oppressive era of tyrannical order. Acting as loose cannon from their palatial houses called gadis,
the doralu succeeded in foisting an inimical feudal order upon the downtrodden dalits. Besides
making these dalits toil for them as cheap labor without impunity, the doralu had no qualms in
making vassals out of the hapless women folk. What with the police patels and the revenue
patwaris in nexus with the landed gentry and the moneyed shaukars making a common cause with
the doralu in their unabated exploitation, their sub-human condition ensured that the dalits were
distressed economically, degraded socially and debased morally. Ironically, lending the
privileged few the muscle power to perpetrate the inimical social order were their henchmen
from the other backward classes. Moreover, given the British political pragmatism of an
indifference to the Indian caste conundrum the downtrodden dalits had nowhere to run for
cover.
Though the merger of their province with the Union of India brought the curtains down on the
Nizams‟ two-hundred year misrule, the exploitation of the rural dalits by the dora-patel-patwari
nexus continued unabated. And that led to the formation of ‘communes’ as part of a peasant
movement in July 1948 under the Telangana Struggle that didn‟t take off any way. On the other
hand as the seeds of egalitarianism began to take roots in the urban Indian soil, in time, these
“slighted souls” too began to envision the dawn of an equitable era for them. However, the
nascent upward mobility of the downtrodden was at odds with the vested interests of the feudal
order, and to nip the dalit moral assertiveness in the bud, the „axis of evil‟ saw to it that such were
brutalized to make an example of them.
“Slighted Souls” scripts the life of the downtrodden of Rampur nearly a decade after the famous
but failed peasant struggle of Telangana. Making cohorts with Muthyal Rao the dora in
oppressing its dalits are Papa Rao the Police Patel, Rami Reddy the Patwari, Papi Reddy the
landlord and Shaukar Suryam the moneylender. Beginning with the life and times of Yellaiah and
his wife Mallamma this play unfolds the urge of the deprived to unyoke themselves, and the
desperation of the privileged to rein in them.
[Curtains up: Mallamma sits in front of her thatched hut in the dalit mohalla weaving a bamboo
basket. Enter: Yellaiah, and seeing him, she goes into the hut to fetch some water for him, and
he takes over the work.]
