As long as I can remember my childhood, I remember myself taking dance lessons. My mother got me admitted for Kathak training at the age of 2.5 years. The earliest vivid visual memory I have is appearing for my Junior Diploma examination at the age of 4. Located in the suburbs of Dum Dum in the early 90s, I did not meet too many men or boys in real life, who danced, barring one or two exceptions. Of course, there were male classical dancers on Doordarshan, all those Maharajas mentioned in the theory books that we had to mug up right before the annual dance examination, the male instructors who took workshops, and of course the dashing heroes of Bollywood dancing to the popular numbers; yet real-life examples of men or boys training together with us, being co-dancers was remarkably low. In the subconscious dancing remained as a women’s job. This was also true for the majority of the people in the society, who did not dance. They did not think of Amitabh Bacchan or Govinda or Pravu Deva when they concluded that the men, who dance, are effeminate. Being strongly guided by the norms of societal binaries, an effeminate man was not desirable, hence the unconscious bias against men who dance was predominant.

By the time of adolescence when we had performed and toured out of our comfort zones, literally & figuratively, and had met the sizable minority of men who danced, the stories of them being termed as a freak, or perceived as incompetent or weak by the people around them were common. Another discrimination that was extremely common was being hurled with gendered and queerphobic slurs. The most common of them was “Hijra.” Clubbing all gay, androgynous, trans, effeminate people as Hijra, which again is a professional identity, itself defines the level of gender sensitisation of the society.

Our dance content itself was no exception either. The gender representation was unilateral, with too many mythological references. The women characters were fragile, codependent, mothers, unconditional lovers, trauma-bonded with their partners, and often manic-pixies whose entire life depended on validation from their love interests/ offsprings/ God. The pieces based on Radhika, Sita, Yashoda, Meera, or some princess, or some priestess, all radiated the same energy (probably Durga is the only exception). The male characters, on the other hand, were the brave & strong ones, those who fight, protect, express anger, curse others at the drop of a hat; they were great yet indifferent lovers, who leave their women or keep them waiting for the priority of the “greater good”. With a binary so well settled into the very marrow of the performance, a scope for representation for any kind of gender or sexual fluidity was beyond question. Our classical dance forms narrate stories of the great men who protect and the great women who serve, representing only the cisgender, heterosexual, upper-caste Hindu, and often upper-class individuals ― the cultural richness that we take pride in, and keep pushing forward like Sisyphus.

This obsolete distribution of gender roles did not remain cocooned within the classical performers but has silently percolated to modern performance. People in modern performing arts may not be exclusionary and abusive towards the gender and sexual minorities, however, the stories that we hear are still of legendary heterosexual couples, great mothers who sacrifice, great men who change the society, even cunning men who destroy society ― seldom a stay at home dad; seldom an androgenous woman; seldom a fantastic female villain, who is bad just for the fun of it, and not to get the attention of a man; seldom a Romeo and a Julius who fight their powerful, orthodox families to live for each other. The queer content is either the ones made by the queer people, often with limited resources; or the ones that shout queer and splash rainbows, like a crude poster, at every split second. Surprisingly, the submission towards Hindu mythology is so strong that even the alternative stories of stronger women are derived from the same pit, instead of being stories of us, stories of today, stories of gender & sexuality in a postmodern world or even a dystopian time to come.

What happens then? Needless to mention that a society with such a tremendous unconscious bias towards gender roles and sexual representations stems into an unsafe, discriminatory, exclusionary workplace, with uneven power distribution, where gender justice is not a real issue. Creating, performing, yielding, exhibiting, competing, getting recognition, staying in the news become the real agenda, the battles to be won. Supporting, complying, adjusting, compromising, cooperating, sacrificing, staying put, become the subsidiary agenda, things that good team players do. Whistleblowing, saying no, wanting a change, wanting justice, wanting to exercise personal agency become a disruption, an obstruction in the path of “the great creation.” Spaces with such hierarchical locations are often susceptible to becoming sources of gender discrimination, sexual assault, psychological manipulation, gaslighting, and coercion.

Modern performance may not be telling stories of Gods in the sky or kings on the battlefields, or princesses waiting for their prince charming; maybe they talk about pleasure, politics, inclusion, dialectics, however, those are often elements of the final product that the audience would cherish. The process of making, creating, being is often so product-oriented that it remains happily trapped in the midst of power hierarchy, coercion, manipulation, favouritism, with zero political praxis whatsoever. Sadly, the people participating in this unjust process are often making a conscious choice, unlike those people in the earlier times who did not have the sensitisation or the rhetoric to identify the injustice.

No amount of training in diversity & inclusion, no amount of internal committees would resolve the problem, unless there are performance spaces exclusively of, by, for the people who do not create content at the cost of political ideology in practice, in order to remain relevant. Till then there will be no political performance, only a mockery of it.

About The Author: Panchali Kar

Panchali Kar is a theatre practitioner and a gender rights activist.