On most Saturday evenings, the rock-strewn mud lot known as Jambori Maidan in South Mumbai teems with kids playing cricket. But one night last February, a crew of workmen shooed away the players so they could erect a stage for a dance performance by a round-faced man in a pink sari.
Inside a makeshift makeup tent made of flapping white sheets and bamboo poles, the man, Anil Hankare, offered well-meaning advice to his backup dancers, who were all women.
“One foot in jail, one hand in your wallet,” he cautioned a young woman who was telling him about her boyfriend. “Tea without milk!” he called to another with a dark complexion. “Apply more face powder.” As he spoke, Hankare was undergoing his own dramatic transformation. Stripping down to his underwear, he pinned on a dense black wig, slipped into a red bra, then a pink sari, applied makeup and piles of jewelry. When he was done, almost two hours later, he appraised the now voluptuous figure staring back at him in the mirror and said, “Enough. Mustn’t make the girls jealous.”
Hankare is a founding member of Mumbai’s first all-male lavani dance troupe, which recently celebrated its tenth anniversary. Lavani is a folk dance, traditionally performed by women for men. The popularity of Bin Baykancha Tamasha (or Performance Without Women) and other female-impersonation groups in Mumbai suggests that the city may slowly be getting comfortable with flamboyant expressions of male sexuality.
Mumbai is relatively liberal compared to the rest of India. Last month, Queer Azaadi Mumbai, an L.G.B.T collective, successfully held its fifth-annual gay-pride parade. The city hosts an annual queer festival, and clubs host invitation-only gay nights. Still, until 2009, when the Delhi High Court struck down a law criminalizing homosexuality, the Mumbai police infamously hunted down gay men in public parks and threatened to arrest them for breaking the law if they didn’t submit to their demands for money and sometimes sex.
The city’s gay culture is dominated by young, English-speaking men, many of who work in call centers and find partners online. Financial independence makes it easier for them to live separately from their parents—still a cultural anomaly in India—and to express their sexuality more openly. In contrast, Mumbai’s working-class gay men live in chawls (or tenements), in single rooms that they share with as many as a dozen family members. They start work while still in high school, and marry within a few years of graduating. Family pressure to have children is fierce. Fearful of being ostracized, they keep their sexual identity secret. Most of these men don’t have the money or confidence to visit gay clubs, and they find partners in public parks and have sex in public toilets.
These men speak the local language, Marathi, and reject the term “gay.” Instead, they prefer the concepts of kothi and panthi, depending on whether they see themselves as feminine or masculine, respectively. “Kothis,” said Vikram Doctor, a journalist and organizer of the pride parade, “are queens—flamboyant, bitchy, and out to shock people.” The panthis are their consorts. It is the kothis, effeminate men, who are drawn to lavani as performers, while panthis form a core part of their audience.
Although lavani (which means beauty) dates back to the seventeenth century, it is disdained even now by the urban middle class for its sensual movements and suggestive lyrics. It’s an energetic dance, performed to the beat of a dholki (hand drum). The dancer lip-syncs songs of desire that often cross the line from the romantic to the erotic. In one popular lavani song, the dancer likens herself to a mango, “cheap and juicy”; in another she begs, “take it slow, take it slow, my body is already wet with sweat.” Bhushan Korgaonkar, who co-directed “Behind the Adorned Veil,” a documentary from 2008 on the dance, says that lavani’s primary audience is working-class men, both single and married. They keep obsessive track of performance dates, and share information via group messages on their mobile phones. And they always attend performances in packs. “They’re respectful of the dancers,” said Korgaonkar, “but they’re definitely attracted to them.”
Women are a small, but significant part of Bin Baykancha Tamasha’s fan base. In fact, Hankare’s friend Anil Vasudevan, who conceived of the troupe, describes their performances as “family friendly.” “We are innovative,” said Vasudevan, from his apartment in Mumbai. “But what we do is art. Women find us skillful, not sexy.”
The real artistry may be the transformation of men like Vasudevan—who is sixty-three, bald, and mustached—into voluptuous, thick-haired women. Lavani dancers perform in a traditional nine-yard sari, and curviness is essential to the persona—dancers are encouraged to accentuate their breasts and bottom. This exaggerated femininity would be a challenge for most men to successfully imitate without appearing like drag queens, but Vasudevan and his troupe pull it off. “To pass for a woman you have to look like a woman,” Vasudevan said. “So I chose men willing to grow their hair, wax their arms, and shape their eyebrows. Men who would act like women, pout like women, and wink, suggestively, like women.”
And yet, when they’re onstage it isn’t their impersonation of women that is striking, but their form. They’re gifted technicians, and their deft footwork and elegant hand gestures reveal their background in Indian classical dance.
Hankare’s audience that evening greeted him with hoots and whistles. After the performance, several male audience members tried to push their way into the makeup tent. Standing around in only his sari petticoat, Hankare was, by then, effecting a reverse transformation, and would soon appear like just another man. He is of middle age and modest height, and has a high, gentle voice and a ponytail.
“I should keep a stick handy,” he said, only half joking. “The men get very excited.”
Although members of Bin Baykancha Tamasha have come out as kothi to friends and pursue sexual relationships with other men, they are not willing to publicly associate with L.G.B.T causes. Vasudevan refers to himself as a “bachelor”, and speaks admiringly about Bal Gandharva, a presumably heterosexual nineteen-hundreds theatre star who impersonated women so well that his image was used to sell women’s fashions and cosmetics. Bal Gandharva was married, as are four of the eight full-time members of Bin Baykancha Tamasha.
Arranged marriage is the norm for kothis, according to Naz Foundation International, an advocacy group on male sexuality. Even kothis who were aware of their attraction to men since they were very young marry to avoid social stigma, and to fulfill their obligation to produce heirs. It isn’t clear whether their wives know of their husbands’ sexuality when they get married. For those who find out later, divorce is still economically and socially damaging enough that it’s not really an option. As One unmarried member of Bin Baykancha Tamasha said, “Before I marry I want to meet my wife to be at least once, and talk privately with her. She has to understand that I have facials and wear my hair long and sometimes dress like a woman. Only if she accepts this, will I marry her.”
Abheena Aher, a transgender activist, has her own dance troupe—the more recently formed Dancing Queens. She has performed with members of Bin Baykancha Tamasha, and wishes they would embrace L.G.B.T causes, just as Dancing Queens has done. But the members of Dancing Queens are a decade younger than the members of Bin Baykancha Tamasha, and their experiences have been different. They speak English and use the Internet. Aher is aware of this. She is also aware that Mumbai’s seeming tolerance extends only so far. Kothis are thrashed by the police for having sex in public places; they are blackmailed by local goons, and they live in fear that their family will become estranged from them, perhaps even deny them a share of the property. “Life is easier for those who remain silent,” said Aher. “The private discomfort may be more, but the public harassment is far less.”
Gay-rights activists see the success of Bin Baykancha Tamasha as a validation of working-class gay culture. But attention on the troupe has revealed many of the challenges that kothis still face, even in comparison to privileged gay men. In fact, according to a member of the troupe, there is only one place that the lives of Mumbai’s two sets of gays even intersect: on the bus that transports executives to and from the call centres. “Some nights a performance will end so late we miss the last train home,” he said. “So we wait for a call-centre bus. When there are seats available, the driver stops for us, even though he isn’t supposed to. He’s in it for the cash, but for ten or twenty rupees we get to go home in luxury.”
One afternoon I visited Hankare at his house in a low-income residential area in the Mumbai suburb of Andheri. The door was open, and the room, in which Hankare was reclining on a bed reading a film magazine, was a burst of color—pink ceiling, flower-patterned floor tiles, pictures of celebrities torn out from newspapers on the walls. When he’s not at work, Hankare dresses like a man, in jeans and T-shirts, but he wears his nails long and painted purple. Hankare put aside the magazine, and called for his wife to make us tea. “I didn’t invite my wife for our first few shows,” he said. “Then she came along, and soon afterwards brought her parents. They were shocked. But they understand me, and admire my skill.”
It’s been a year of huge successes for Hankare. He appeared on a reality show and had small parts in a Hindi film and a TV advertisement. After ten years with Bin Baykancha Tamasha, he can finally support his wife and their two teen-age children through dance. In contrast, before he joined the troupe, he spent his days drearily, managing a telephone booth. When I mentioned the word kothi, Hankare looked around quickly to make sure that we weren’t being overheard. Lowering his voice he said, “that word makes people uncomfortable. Some kothis flirt openly with men, handing around their phone number like they’re handing out sweets. Their behavior embarrasses women. It embarrasses me.” Then Hankare answered an unasked question. “I’m not a kothi,” he said. “I’m just a man who wears a sari in pursuit of the art he loves.”
Sonia Faleiro is the author of “Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World of Bombay’s Dance Bars.”
Photograph by Yogesh Chiplunkar.
