Atho Hidimba Kotha
 2025-04-16 10:50:55.jpg)
Date: 2 May 2025
Time: 6:30 – 8:00 PM
Venue: KCC Amphitheatre
Language: Bengali
Atho Hidimba Kotha / অথ হিড়িম্বা কথা, a play by Birati Samuho Performers Collective – a queer and female-centric creative collective, with Titas Dutta as the director, is a retelling of the epic Mahabharata from the perspective of an indigenous, independent female character Hidimba. Samuho performs Hidimba’s version of the story to unveil the historical Brahmanical hetero-patriarchal oppression over people from marginalised identities and social positioning.
Hidimba is a demoness from Mahabharata who was only mentioned twice in the epic. Later, in some regional versions of Mahabharata, we saw Hidimba appearing at the Rajasyua Yagna at Indraprastha only to be insulted by Draupadi for her lower caste birth. It seems that the great poet Vyasa did not have enough space for Hidimba in his elaborated eighteen ‘parva’s praising Pandavas – the righteous ones against the evil Kauravas. In ‘Atho Hidimba Kotha’, Hidimba, as an ‘indigenous’ ‘woman’/ a marginal human being, comes up with her own version of the epic on behalf of the marginalised people whose presence is never acknowledged in the course of history. Telling her story herself, she encounters and raises questions that shake the very foundation of Brahminical patriarchal normative – which brings her to the realization that giving the power to write her story to the already powerful will never allow her to tell her version of it ever.
