Dance when nobody's watching

Women inmates of Byculla and Thane jails have been keeping a date with abhinaya and tala with a Kolkata-based Bharatanatyam dancer.

Three years ago, when Bharatanatyam exponent Sohini Roychowdhury first walked through the high-security gates of Byculla Women’s Jail—of which she remembers there could have been no less than 14—a sense of fear enveloped her. “I was warned that many of the inmates were convicted for murder,” Roychowdhury  recalls. “When I was told to keep my earrings and wristwatch aside, because I could risk an attack, it shook me up a bit. As their dance teacher, I didn’t really know what to expect.” Roychowdhury was travelling all the way from Kolkata to teach the inmates Indian classical dance. 

However, it took just an hour-long class to quell her fears. “They were so excited about doing something different.”

Bharatanatyam exponent Sohini Roychowdhury, who has centres in Madrid, Berlin and Kolkata, began teaching children from vulnerable and marginalised communities in 2009. Seen here are children from the NGO Little Big Help

This kick-started a long association, which continued through the pandemic, as Roychowdhury started conducting virtual classes. “This has been a liberating experience, not just for them, but me too.” The daughter of leading sitar maestro Pandit Subroto Roychowdhury, who was the first Indian musician to be appointed guest professor at the Department of World Music, Berlin University, Roychowdhury has been using the vocabulary of dance to inspire those on the margins of the society. 

She took to dance, when she was just three-and-a-half years old, after watching a performance by Yamini Krishnamurthy. “I was so mesmerised that I wanted to learn only that particular form. At home, art was always taken very seriously, and so my father said that if I was planning to take it up, I would have to be committed to it. A year later, after attending another show, I got a dancer to write the name of their guru [Bharatanatyam and Mohiniattam maestro] Thankamani Kutty on a piece of paper and took it to my father, insisting that she teach me. That’s when my father realised that I was determined.” As a kid,  Roychowdhury remembers spending her summer holidays teaching the children of their house helps. “I used to also plan these elaborate dance productions.” After she moved to Madrid following her marriage, she started Sohinimoksha World Dance and Communications, which currently also has centres in Berlin and Kolkata, and fuses Bharatanatyam with Flamenco.  

For nearly a decade starting 2009, she has spent two months in India, teaching dance to kids at the NGO, Apne Aap. “The children, who were rehabilitated here, had been trafficked, or whose mothers had been sex workers. That was my first serious project with the marginalised. We also prepare them for professional dance shows,” she adds. She later went on to work with Little Big Help that works to create better opportunities for vulnerable children and women in West Bengal. “I truly want the next generation of artistes to come from this section of our society, because they are immensely talented, and we cannot keep following the elite economic model in art. I feel very strongly against it.”

Her tryst with the Maharashtra Police began sometime after her father’s passing in 2017, when she decided to divide time in India and the dance centres abroad, to be closer to her mother. “I performed for the Maharashtra Police at their annual concert in Aurangabad, after which, I had expressed my interest to teach the inmates. They were only too happy to facilitate the sessions.”

Roychowdhury is seen conducting virtual classes for women at Byculla Women's Jail

For the first few years, Roychowdhury would fly down to Mumbai twice a month, and conduct an average of three classes each time at both Byculla and Thane Central Jails. “I remember this three-year-old child and her mother, who was just 27. They were both wonderful dancers. The jailor later told me that the woman had killed three people in one night. During my conversations with her, I learnt that her husband forced her into prostitution. While she had borne it all quietly, she decided to take matters into her own hands, when her father-in-law threatened to do the same with her child. She told me, ‘In logon ko jeene ka koi haq nahin tha’. I realised that it was not my place to judge. Many of them were victims of circumstances, and so, if anything, I became more empathetic.” While most of the inmates were keen on learning dance, there were those who exhibited aggressive demeanor. “I was advised to let them be.” She remembers running into Indrani Mukerjea, one of the more high-profile inmates at Byculla, in jail since 2015 for the alleged murder of her daughter Sheena Bora, and recalls her, as one of those, who kept to herself. “We didn’t really interact when I visited,” she recalls.

For the sessions, she chooses music, which she feels, “will inspire”. “I do teach Bharatanatyam, but I incorporate other dance steps as well, that they all can do.”
In March, when the lockdown was announced, Deepak Pandey, Inspector General of Police (Prison), South Region, Byculla, facilitated the online classes. “I didn’t want to disrupt the momentum, so we continued the classes twice a week.  Pandey was very enthusiastic about introducing [Rabindranath] Tagore to the inmates, so in May, I taught them to dance to one of his songs, explaining the meaning of the words, as I went along showing them the mudras. The kids were most happy about being part of this, coming closer to the screen, to show me how they had perfected the steps. It was just lovely to see.”

Roychowdhury who recently published her book, Dancing with the Gods (Roli Books), co-written with Mondipa Mukherjee and Sutapa Sengupta, where she explores her understanding of the mythological heritage of Bharatanatyam, has taken a short break from the virtual classes, but says, she will resume soon. “It [dance] gives them [inmates] a lot of happiness, and in that moment, they forget their environment and the situation they are in. That happiness helps them aspire and dream of bigger things. I am hoping, maybe in the future, we could do something revolutionary, where we could get some of them to perform at a festival. It’s a dream, and there might be many hurdles on the way, but I know it’s not impossible.”

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