Malavika’s Mumbaistan: Dancing In The Dark | Mumbai news - Hindustan Times
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Malavika’s Mumbaistan: Dancing In The Dark

ByMalavika Sangghvi
Feb 04, 2023 12:28 AM IST

As anyone will tell you, lavani performances are marked by their robust ribaldry and their naughty take on a range of issues, from matters of the heart to the socio-political issues of the day. Typically, lavani is performed on a public stage, to the vigorous beats of a Dholki and the lyrics are sexually- explicit

Twenty-two years ago, when National Geographic award-winning photographer Sudharak Olwe journeyed on assignment from Mumbai to Solapur, deep within Maharashtra’s hinterland, to profile leading lavani dancer B’s story in all its grit and glory, little did he know that it would be the start of a lifelong engagement with the dance form and the community of brave, beautiful and bold women who practised it.

Malavika’s Mumbaistan: Dancing In The Dark
Malavika’s Mumbaistan: Dancing In The Dark

For the un-initiated, Lavani is a combination of traditional song and dance, originating in Maharashtra, which traces its roots to the Peshwa dynasty and is said to have been introduced by the rulers as a morale-booster for their tired, war -weary troops.

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As anyone will tell you, lavani performances are marked by their robust ribaldry and their naughty take on a range of issues, from matters of the heart to the socio-political issues of the day.

Typically, lavani is performed on a public stage, to the vigorous beats of a Dholki and the lyrics are sexually- explicit, laced with double entendre and innuendo and designed to raise temperatures and levels of excitement amongst male audiences; with its performers wearing elaborate jewellery, colourful nine-yard long saris, heavy makeup and flowers in their hair, it’s easy to see the heady effect it’s had over the years on audiences.

However, this and the fact that lavani dancers are literally ‘married into the profession’ and are expected to dedicate their lives to their craft and be supported by their (mostly married) male clients, who form a lifelong bond with them, has given the art form its frisson of notoriety and placed the performers beyond the pale of traditional family values.

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When Olwe first arrived to document the life of B, he was well aware of the societal censure and stigma that the dance form attracted from polite society.

As a photographer distinguished by his deep empathy for marginalised communities while most saw the vivacity and verve of the on-stage performances and the allure of the performers, Olwe recognised in the lavani story the pathos, poignancy, struggle and challenges in the lives of the dancers.

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“To begin with it is an endangered art form, losing out to more popular and accessible contemporary entertainment options like cinema television and OTT platforms. Audiences for lavani are steadily shrinking, resulting in an existential crisis faced by its practitioners and community,” says Olwe, in his characteristic thoughtful cadence. “Added to this, is the fact that social mores and traditions are breaking down and these days the men who enter into relationships with lavani dancers are often not dependable or even aware of the responsibilities they must fulfil such as child and household maintenance because of the relationship. Dancers tell me, that unlike in the past, today there is no guarantee that they will be cared for and supported by their paramours, once they grow old and have lost their beauty or ability to perform and have no other means of income.”

With anxieties such as this, the fact that they still manage to dance vivaciously and look beautiful (a lavani dancer is almost always impeccably made up and can give most Mumbai film heroines a run for their money), it is easy to see why the lavani story became eminently attractive as the subject of a life long engagement for Olwe and the next two decades saw him making many more trips and spending hours shooting the women on and off stage, listening to their stories and documenting the glory and ultimate decline of the community.

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This is not the first instance of Olwe’s intense, long-term engagement with a subject. Over the years, his documentation of the lives of conservancy workers, Kamatipura’s sex workers, urban victims of AIDS and of refugee children living in European camps, which have spanned many decades of shoots, has won him many awards and accolades and resulted in exhibitions in Lisbon, Amsterdam, Los Angeles, Washington and Dhaka amongst others.

Like Manto and Namdeo Dhasal, Olwe’s gaze is firmly on the disadvantaged and downtrodden; those who have slipped through the cracks of civil society and whose voices and stories are seldom heard over the cacophony of modern life.

And like Manto and Dhasal, Olwe’s approach is never one of the outsiders, but of someone roiled into the very lives of his subjects, familiar with the minutiae of their days and dreams, cognizant of their pathos and pain, even as his camera manages to capture images of startling beauty and unforgettable power in the process.

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The result of Olwe’s twenty-two-year-old intense exploration of lavani and its community is currently the subject of a month-long exhibition at Nine Fish gallery, nestled in the precincts of the New Great Eastern Mills in Byculla, which has been garnering much interest from critics, the art and photography community and the general public as well.

Lovingly curated by Gourmoni Das of Dot Line Space, an art platform whose mission statement is to ‘Create, Curate, Collaborate and Celebrate art in diverse

Forms’, Olwe’s portraits transport viewers into the intimate, hidden, behind-the-scenes world of lavani, one that is as powerful as it is poignant.

He tells me that at the exhibition’s launch last month, a troupe of lavani dancers had performed to great applause at the gallery, for an audience comprised of the city’s cognoscenti and the intelligentsia, palpably mesmerised by the iconic dance form with its distinct rural rhythm and verve.

“We had the diplomatic corps, critics, art collectors, film stars and high society present, and after their performance, the dancers changed out of their costumes into their regular clothes and met their audience on equal terms, not only as accomplished artistes of an ancient dance form but as vibrant and strong women, with lives and voices of their own,” says the man who has spent his whole life telling the stories of the marginalised, the forgotten, the overlooked, one click, one face, one portrait, at a time.

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