Mumbai Slums Inspire Indian B-Boys

Life is tough growing up in Mumbai's sprawling urban slums. But a new generation of children is finding escape from the realities of daily life through American hip hop and a love of breakdance.

Published

4 months ago

Categories

World, Arts & Society

Topics

Asia, Arts & Culture

Places

India, Mumbai

Transcript

SCRIPT: At home, his family call him Pankaj, but to his friends, he’s B-boy Sin. The 18-year-old student is passionate about American Hip Hop and breakdance. He dances whenever he can, but it’s not easy in his cramped house in Mumbai’s most crowded slum. Several times a week he heads into the city to find a better space. SOUNDBITE 1 Pankaj Shivpur (man), breakdancer (Hindi, 8 sec): "My house is very small and I don’t have much room to practice there so I come up here. And this is where my friends are too and we can practice together." His dance crew meets at the ruins of this old hilltop fort to show off their routines. They call themselves the SlumGods. Unlike the famous movie Slumdog Millionaire, these break-boys or b-boys want to show there’s more to slum life than poverty and a desire to escape. SOUNDBITE 2 Akku (man), founder of SlumGods breakdancing crew (Hindi, 18 sec): "Before we started to teach them breaking, some of the boys used to drink, get into fights and steal. But now, they are totally committed to breaking." The crew boasts dozens of core members from shantytowns across Mumbai, New Delhi and Bangalore. For many it’s more than just a hobby but a chance to compete for cash and glory in competitions and even Bollywood films. SOUNDBITE 3 Ashish Kanoujiya (man), professional breakdancer and dance competition judge (Hindi, 12 sec): "The boys from the slums work very hard and we can see how much they practice to improve. Some might say ‘oh, they’re from the slums’, but for us b-boys, it really doesn’t matter at all." India's slums are a long way from the ghettos of The Bronx where breakdancing was born in the 1970s. But like their American counterparts, for these Indian youngsters it's a cheap and funky form of exercise and fun -- and a break away from the pressures of daily life. SHOTLIST: MUMBAI, INDIA, DEC 2, 2012, SOURCE: AFPTV - VAR of breakdancer Pankaj Shivpur dancing at home - Pankaj leaving his house, walking out into Dhavari slum - SOUNDBITE 1 - VAR of SlumGod breakdancing crew meeting to practise at Sion Hillock Fort - SOUNDBITE 2 - VAR of SlumGods dancing at the fort MUMBAI, INDIA, NOV 25, 2012, SOURCE: AFPTV - VAR of a breakdancing competition - SOUNDBITE 3 MUMBAI, INDIA, DEC 2, 2012, SOURCE: AFPTV -VAR of SlumGods dancing at sunset at the fort /// ------------------------------------------------ AFP TEXT STORY: India-lifestyle-society-dance,FEATURE Break-out time for India's SlumGods by Rachel O'Brien MUMBAI, Feb 8, 2013 (AFP) - The youngsters from India's best-known slum spin, twist and flip their bodies to the hip hop beat -- but don't call them breakdancers. And definitely not slumdogs. These are the SlumGods, who want to show there is more to life in a Mumbai shantytown than poverty, squalor and trying to escape -- even if the hit film "Slumdog Millionaire" suggested otherwise. "When we heard the name we didn't like it. Why slumdogs?" asked 20-year-old Akash Dhangar, known as B-boy Akku, who co-founded the crew of "breakers", graffiti artists, DJs and rappers. "I felt very bad about it because after the movie, people started thinking this was just a dirty, unhygienic slum area," he said of his neighbourhood Dharavi, a sprawling backdrop to the Oscar-winning movie. When the film came out in India in 2009, Akku was newly hooked on b-boying or breaking, the hip hop street dance that was born in the ghettos of the Bronx in the 1970s and has since spread across the globe -- better known to laymen as breakdancing. Akku's mentor was B-boy HeRa, now 30 and living in New Delhi, who honed his moves growing up in New York's Queens before his Indian family moved back to the subcontinent in the early 2000s. Visiting Dharavi with a friend, HeRa found a spiritual home for b-boying -- "it kind of clicked", he said, and he found the youngsters there were eager to learn. "It's a community thing that people learn off each other. You've been given something and you pass it on," he told AFP. That philosophy led him and Akku to set up SlumGods, which now has 40 to 50 core members across the cities of Mumbai, New Delhi and Bangalore. The crew works hand-in-hand with Tiny Drops, a non-profit group founded by HeRa in Dharavi and his Delhi neighbourhood, offering "a space for kids in the hood" to explore hip hop dance and culture. They have inspired hundreds of urban Indian youngsters to try their hands at graffiti, rapping or especially b-boying, a cheap and funky combination of exercise and self-expression. "Dancing is in us. It's part of our culture," HeRa said, although it seems breaking has struck a particular chord with the children of Dharavi. "Indian middle-class kids are fat and in malls. These kids are lean and mean and don't have inhibitions." Their love of the culture can be seen atop the crumbling Sion Fort, a 17th-century, British-built structure that has become -- as a graffitied sign indicates -- a very different kind of "Battlefort Mumbai". Offering more space than the nearby cramped confines of Dharavi, the fort ruins have hosted dance-off contests and regular practices for b-boys and the odd b-girl, who show off their routines to tinny music from a mobile phone. As Akku leads the dancing crew, young children who crowd around to watch are shooed away by fort guards with sticks. "It's a cool space but it's informal. We want to ask the city of Mumbai if they can give it to the kids, to give them ownership," said HeRa. The options are otherwise limited. Tall and gangly B-boy Sin, as Pankaj Shivpur is known, almost fills the small room in Dharavi that he shares with several relatives as he backflips to Bollywood tunes on the television. The tiny passageway outside, where a goat, cats and children mingle beneath clothes hanging on tangled cables, offers little alternative space for the 18-year-old college student. He snatches a practice whenever he is home alone, but he goes to the fort several times a week. "It's spacious and my friends practise here too," he said. As their quest for open spaces continues, HeRa hopes Tiny Drops will grow to become a self-sustaining business; he remains suspicious of the idea of outside help and wants the communities to support themselves. One profitable sideline for the dancers is to appear in Bollywood films, which can earn them about 2,000 rupees (37 dollars) a day, although parents sometimes moan that their children are neglecting their studies, says Akku. He however sees the hobby as a good way to keep them on the straight and narrow. "Some people who were involved in drinking, bullying or stealing, they left these things when they started breaking," he said. END