Blood on the dance floor

Jabba, 28, looks much younger than his age. The Borivali resident has a shock of black hair that he carefully gels into place when he leaves for his government job in the morning.

“I’ve taken such good care of my hair, and now nobody can see it because it’s tied,” he laughs ruefully. Jabba, a transgendered man, spent his late teens and early twenties as a launda dancer in a small town in Uttar Pradesh — cross-dressing men, usually transgender, who perform for an all-male audience. The reasons for his leaving the profession cover his body — from a slash across his left wrist, to a scar on his neck, to other marks much too “shameful” to show. “It was good in its own way, though,” Jabba says defensively. “I earned well and liked dancing and…yes, it was not that bad.”

Dancing in the halls
The launda dance hasn’t been seen much in popular culture. Gangs of Wasseypur 2, releasing this Friday, has perhaps the first instance of an authentic launda dance shown in mainstream Indian cinema. The dance is performed by Prodipto Ray, an artist-animator and transgendered person, who has known Anurag Kashyap since the two worked on a graphic novel together. Ray beseeched Kashyap to let him do a ‘Helen number’ in one of his films. Ray is himself neither a launda dancer nor an actor, but performed in the movie out of a sense of fandom.

“Like most transgenders, I am a huge Helen fan,” says Ray enthusiastically. Ray shimmies and twirls on the screen coquettishly, to the strain of Electric Piya (“My beloved is loveless, luckless, and messed up”), but behind the scenes, it was a little less jovial. “I had told Anurag, scary things happen during this dance. So when the first take happened, I realised that the filming would graphic. Some of the men were practically throwing me around like a basketball!” laughs Ray.

“It was all scripted, so nothing untoward happened, but it made me quite uncomfortable. I knew what happens during these dances, but you can’t imagine the degree of vulnerability.”

Ray’s friend, a launda dancer, had told him some information about this profession, including how sometimes a ‘bhai’ would accompany the dancers, along with his “chelas”, and the dancers would get some small token of gold or silver.

“There is a lot of molestation happening to these dancers. If you lose a competition, or these drunkards find you after dark, god save you!” says Ray.

Launda dancing are a customary inclusion in most wedding ceremonies in Northern India. The dancers usually approach the ‘dance companies’, rather than the other way around.

“For most of the transgendered community, performing in these dances pays pretty well,” explains Parul Sinha, 36, an NGO worker who has been working on medical and infrastructure needs for the transgendered community. “They earn anywhere from Rs3,000 to Rs7,000 a month.” Sinha, however, points out that the profession comes with some serious concerns. “There are innumerable instances of launda dancers being molested, abused, attacked, raped or even killed. It is not spoken of by the dancers, because for many of them it is their only source of income.”

Dancing in the darkness
 “I remember the first time I was hurt,” says Jabba quietly. When Jabba was 17, a bandmaster saw him dancing with friends and asked whether he would be interested in earning money for dancing. “The very next week was my first wedding performance. I rented a ghagra choli, wore all the makeup I had, and went.” Halfway through the performance, Jabba — who was already terrified by how much the men were touching him — felt a searing pain on his thigh. “I didn’t stop then, but after the performance I lifted up my skirt and saw that I was covered in blood. Some c*****a had cut me with a razor held in his hand.”

Sridhar Rangayan is a Mumbai-based filmmaker who has devoted a considerable amount of his creative energies to exploring queer topics. It was in 2007, while Rangayan was travelling across Kolkota, that he met Santosh — a young NGO worker who told him about launda dancers.

“Santosh recounted tales to me about launda dancers — most young, naïve transgendered men — who were adored for their dancing skills, but at night would be raped and violated by drunken men from the very same marriage ceremony they had earlier dance for,” remembers Rangayan. Many of the dancers, in fact, do not even receive the money they were enticed with to begin with — the ‘bandmasters’ appropriate most of the earnings. “Many launda dancers die because of this violence, or because of contracting AIDS because of these molestations.”

Jabba also remembers incidents of being manhandled, and once, the deciding incident which culminated in him leaving the profession as well as the town — “My dancer friend and I were sleeping next to the wedding tent after we had danced. I wasn’t asleep yet, so I heard the drunk men coming before he did. I slowly rolled out of sight. They didn’t see me in the dark, but they saw him.” Jabba refuses to say what happened to his friend, just repeating ——— “They were very bad men.” The next morning, Jabba borrowed some money, packed his belongings and got on a train. “Now, I have a normal job,” shrugs Jabba. “I miss dancing, and I miss my home, but at least I am safe now.”