Moderate Mahila Mandate: How Tanvi Geetha Ravishankar’s rendition of Besharam shows why women must go dancing into 2023

In an era where we fetishize opinions we don’t own, the weekly ‘Moderate Mahila Mandate’ presents unadulterated and non-partisan views on what’s happening to women in India today.

It was the 90s. I lived with my family in a government colony in Mumbai. My ICSE exams were going on. I had been studying like a maniac. One evening, to unwind, I put on Madonna’s Vogue and began to dance in my room. Within two minutes my parents received a call on our landline. It was a ‘concerned’ Aunty checking in to ask why my parents were ‘allowing’ me to dance during my exams. Did I want to fail? Did I want to be a blotch on my brilliant IRS parents? Tch, tch, tch.

When I got a 90% in those exams, and won a gold medal in English, the same Aunty came home to check my report card. She wanted to make sure we were not ‘lying’. Unconvinced, she even went to my school to crosscheck my results. She couldn’t believe that someone who could have friends, someone who could have a social life, someone who was an extrovert, someone who could––tch, tch, tch!––dance unabashedly, could also be a good student.

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Smiling women, happy women, glamorous women, and dancing women have always been low hanging fruits to patriarchy. Even Helen, the dancing diva of India, was never cast as the lead because dancing meant you possessed no depth. Dancing meant you had no capacity to be a serious wife, serious mother, serious daughter, or a serious woman. Dancing was even the anti-thesis of the feminist.

It doesn’t help that misogyny can simply not let women be. Media presents women’s appearance to us in a way that invites further scrutiny. It trivialises women. It nudges women and men to judge women’s appearance in a performative way. It discourages us from identifying with women in the public eye. Shashi Tharoor and Raghuram Rajan are objects of respect and desire; can you think of a woman in power who is both?

Feminism in India has never been solely about women, but tied to pre-eminent issues like colonialism, independence, development, and the conflicts that we’re seeing in democracy today. Due to this, knowledge on women has always been at the margins. A woman is therefore seen to exist only in binaries­­––either as an abla nari or krantikaari, a devi or daayin, a virgin or whore, a dancer or a sati-savitri. But maybe we don’t want to be your devi or your daayin, your abla nari or krantikaari … maybe we just want to be ourselves?

And, is it ultimately about the looks, or the ability to tell women what to do about their looks? To make sure we know we’re being watched. Why else would women allow themselves to be cut open, have acid put on their skins, pluck their hair out of their skin? To preen and please society? Because it’s always the private submission of women that we seek. I mean if the Finnish Prime Minister couldn’t escape it, taking a drug test for dancing that no other PM has had to take, who can? Right? Wrong.

Think about it. When fashion influencer Tanvi Geetha Ravishankar recreated Deepika Padukone’s steps from the _Besharam_ song, WE loved it, didn’t we? It showed us that we should all be besharam girls, owning our bodies, our space, our movement, the way we choose, to hell with the detractors! I can’t think of a better way to welcome the new year than to be our most authentic unapologetic selves!

Dance is used as an interpretive strategy to underscore either victimization or celebration of women. But that’s a smokescreen. Dance is ultimately about a more complex range of cultural representations of gender identities. In fact, through aspects of choreographic structure and style, a woman’s agency is actually created in dance. If you can dance without taking alcohol or drugs, in abandon, anywhere, anytime, for the pleasure and not the performance, you are truly happy with who you are.

I innately knew this as a teenager even back in the 90s when girls could only exist in modular binaries of the ‘good girl’ or ‘besharam girl’. I was neither. So, prepared to be annihilated, I never stopped dancing. I got called ‘slut’, ‘loose character’, ‘dumb’ and all kinds of slurs for it, but I never stopped dancing. I learnt Bharatnatyam and Shiamak Davar and the fox trot, and I put them all to good use, losing myself in music and dance. I danced my way into medical college and then out of it because my brilliant IRS parents were the only Indian parents in history to talk their child out of becoming a doctor. Because while we should not have to earn our meritocracy by performative appearance, we shouldn’t be dismissed for it either. For isn’t that what 2023 should be all about?

Meghna Pant is a multiple award-winning and bestselling author, screenwriter, columnist and speaker, whose latest novel BOYS DON’T CRY (Penguin Random House) will soon be seen on screen. 

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