I am often asked by friends from school and family how I found myself with the interdisciplinary background that intersperses art, politics and literature. It was assumed I would stick to literature and the Arts and my choice to study Hindi literature and then International Relations was met with skepticism, not by my family, thankfully, but by nearly everyone else who spoke to me about it. My passion for research came when I realised that every story I read was also a documentation of power: who held it, who did not and what happened to those who tried to bring change. I knew Mahadevi Verma before I learned there were different waves of feminism, Ismat Chughtai before I had a word for intersectionality. To understand how I got here, it helps to know that my choices have always made more sense to me than to anyone watching.I started performing on stage at nine, in a white gown my mother bought me, with white net gloves and a white cloth hairband as accessories. It was our school’s annual production day and I was a second grader with just enough confidence to stand on stage and remember my lines – I played Humanity, in a play about society. My mother has played a significant part in turning me into an artist and a writer. She did not want her children in the audience; she wanted us facing the crowd and performing. And so, I went on to perform, produce and write plays throughout my school years, until it became inseparable from how I thought and created. But it was much later that I realised there is only so much to draw from inside a boarding school’s walls. It was what waited outside them that changed me as a performer.It was not until I went through the audition process for my college’s dramatics society, two weeks of theatre exercises, vocal training and baring our souls to our seniors, that my perspective began to shift. The society had two wings: the stage wing and the street wing (nukkad natak). I was selected for both and had to choose which one called to me. I chose the street wing. We were told it required rigorous research and characterisation; we were not there to entertain alone, but to create what felt like a holy periphery – a tight circle of actors jumping from their haunches into a scene, shifting characters in an instant to carry the story forward.Nukkad natak has its roots in political protest. Halla Bol, the final play by Safdar Hashmi, is still revered for its essence, but more for what it stands for: he was shot mid-performance and succumbed to his injuries and 48 hours later, his team returned and finished the same play on the same spot. Not for him alone, but for what political theatre means. We performed a play about casteism more than 70 times across different parts of Delhi. Stepping onto those streets in our uniform kurtas and jeans, we were not just girls who liked to act; we were messengers of a cause we had spent six months researching. Every word carried meaning and could not be thrown around lightly. I felt most alive when we huddled to gather attention and then performed to hold it, improvising and looking through each face in the crowd, even the ones whose values and norms we were criticising. I left that street wing a changed writer and person. No pedestal, no distance and definitely no second chances. To perform dissent for an audience that never chose to be there is its own kind of political act, one no institution can sanction or contain. It changed my perception of who “the audience” is: not only people seated in an auditorium, but also people on the streets who left their homes who left their homes without knowing they would be watching characters and stories unfold in 20 minutes. A democratised, unpaid viewing of craft. What I learned on those streets, though I did not have the language for it then, was that art becomes most itself when it has no door to pass through. This understanding followed me long after I left Delhi. While pursuing my Master’s degree in Bristol, I found myself drawn to its graffiti-covered walls. I had no idea who Banksy was, but I stumbled upon one of his pieces two minutes from where I was staying. Well Hung Lover (2006), Banksy, Photo: Amritanshi Rathore.It was beautiful before it was anything else and political without asking permission to be. It was free, and to me, a stark commentary on who is allowed to restrict an artist from finding their audience in an otherwise heavily commodified world. What Banksy understood, and what the market never will, is that the moment art needs a guardian, it has already been conquered. Here was art that was not restricted; it simply belonged to whoever chose to make it and show it to the world, not as a product to be sold, but as a way of finding an audience among people who never thought of themselves as one.If art only belonged in stuffed rooms with manufactured lighting, open to whoever is deemed worthy of entry, we strip it of the very thing it set out to do: creativity and inspiration. As an Indian student of literature and politics, this matters deeply to me. India has longstanding traditions of visual and oral storytelling that preserved our history in its rawest, most unedited form. Pabuji ki Phad scrolls were never meant for a gallery; they travelled with their storyteller, unrolled in open courtyards for people who never needed a ticket. Nukkad natak carried social commentary to street corners before its audiences had an auditorium to retreat to. Langa and Manganiyar musicians carried generations of history through their music, made for open grounds and village gatherings, not concert halls. I refuse to believe these traditions need confining before they can be housed in grades, hierarchical systems of prestige. Democratised art is not just about what we create, but whom we resist in order to create and present it. Artists are dying in poverty or because their work is labelled as dissent. What is a world in which a jester may not jest and a critic may not criticise? I hope your work ends up in museums. But let it not start there.Amritanshi Rathore is a writer and researcher with an interdisciplinary approach to culture and society. Driven by a deep interest in the intersections of literature, politics and postcolonialism, her work explores how spaces and art can be democratised.