Dear You, 

To trace back, when you started almost 14 years ago as a dancer, you were far too naive to know the history and baggage the body of a female performer carries.

Coming from an urban middle-class family, your choice of profession was considered appalling. From facing family disapproval (your father didn’t talk to you for three years) to societal stigma - you were reminded, again and again and again, “girls from respectable homes don’t dance and perform” and solemnly told, “good men (read: bourgeois morality) don’t marry naachne-walis.” A derogatory word for female dancers; the choicest abuse of righteous patriarchs. 

Over the years, as you moved into choreography, pedagogy, and curation, such remarks did dwindle, but popped open a bigger can of worms.

It made you experience this complex narrative of agency and identity through varied lenses of discrimination - respect for the urban, literate, articulate (in Indian context - English speaking) performing body vs the rural, non-institutionalised performing body; the hierarchy of the class & caste; the demarcation of high arts and low arts; the approbation of mental intelligence over physical intelligence & embodied knowledge.

Grappling with it all, nevertheless, even as of today, each time you step onto the stage, you feel the collective gaze shifts and you carry the weight of the silent dishonoured history of female dancers.

Thank you for sharing, after knowing your story, I want to confess - my story is eerily similar to your story.

Caught in this self-mutilating double bind of being both the postcolonial and the metropolitan expat in Europe, I don’t know which voice to speak from - the voice of the privileged or the voice of the oppressed. 

Yours faithfully, Me