The Vulgarity Of Twerking. Or Is It Just Misogyny?

That's a rhetorical question. We all know the answer.

This is Proneeta Swargiary, a contestant of India's Got Talent S8. Even though the season aired almost 2 years back, I keep seeing clips of a certain episode circulating online. Today I write to bring attention to a specific performance that seemed to garner quite a lot of criticism from the judges and negative comments from netizens.

In the aforementioned performance, she dances to a Marathi song, Wajle Ki Bara, in Lavani style. Lavani is a classical dance style of Maharashtra, India. She also happens to fuse elements of twerking and belly dancing with Lavani in her performance.

Let's focus on what everyone is fixated on. Her twerking, obviously. Kirron Kher, one of the panelists, deprecated her performance because of how “vulgar” it was due to the twerking. The following is a rough translation of her comments, “You're an amazing dancer. You were amazing when you performed Lavani but I object to the twerking. When you put your backside out and only move that section it looks vulgar. You don't need to do that (twerk) to get attention to your great dancing. Without twerking you can go right ahead in any competition.”

So not just did she find her performance vulgar, but also accused her of attention seeking because she infused twerking with the Lavani. Almost like she wants to keep twerking and Lavani separate. This sentiment was also resonated by netizens, who took offense to her “sexualising” and “westernising” a “pure” Indian dance form.

Let's delve deeper into Lavani. Lavani is originally a music genre from Maharashtra, which combines singing and dancing. The lyrics of Lavani songs are usually erotic and sensual in nature. In fact, Lavani popularised into two different kinds of performances, one of them was called Baithakichi Lavani, in which one woman would perform privately for selective audience, mainly men, away from the village. The lyrics of the songs would be sexual, featuring explicit puns. Lavani is the only dance form which expresses women’s desires and romantic emotions very expressively and unabashedly, without any binds from society. It is so ironic how society is so hell bent on using a dance form known for embracing women's desires against a woman embracing her artistic desires. It goes against the spirit of Lavani, but who cares? I have only written about this specific subcategory of a much bigger culturally significant dance form to point out the audiences’ ignorance about the dance as well as their skewed definition of purity. Is purity as simple as sexual and non sexual? Is sexual a quantitative and objective quality? And now that we have delved deeper into Lavani, is it also “impure” now? If it is, do we not respect and protect it as our culture anymore?

Twerking popularised during the 1990s but it is rooted in the an ancient dance called Mapouka which originated in Côte d'Ivoire in West Africa. A dance for celebrations, women would shake their buttocks rhythmically to the beat of a drum. But after the colonization of Africa and spread of “Christian” values, it was deemed inappropriate. Wikipedia does define it as a “sexually provocative” dance, although there's no other evidence apart from the “shaking of the buttocks” to support that claim.

Thirdly, imagine if instead of twerking, she would've mashed Lavani with, let's say, hip hop. Would she be attacked then? Wait, don't bother imagining. It has been done multiple times by multiple people, and not just with Lavani, many other Indian dance forms, many available on YouTube itself. From dancing to hip hop songs, dressing in hip hop fits and performing Lavani and vice versa to straight up fusing two unrelated, even contrasting dance styles to form a cohesive beautiful performance, creativity has never known lesser bounds. Yet when it's a woman, who decides to fuse Lavani with twerking, she deserves to be butchered to pieces right? From calling her vulgar, accusing her of tainting classical dance forms to even slut shaming her, netizens have been utterly ruthless. The question lies, do you wanna protect your culture that you don't even care to educate yourself upon or do you just want to use that as an excuse to attack talented and ambitious women online?

Proneeta’s response to Kirron Kher's rather offensive takes was honestly simple and to the point. She compared the butt movement of twerking with the eyebrow movement of classical dances like Bharatnatyam etc. When no one bats an eye when the eyebrows are utilised to express, why single out butt movements? Clearly the bias lies in eyes of the watcher and represents her thoughts and beliefs more than the dancer’s.

Mallaika Arora Khan's reaction to Kirron Kher's opinions

I would also like to bring attention to Mallaika Arora Khan, the silver lining in the panel, who vocally expressed her dissent from Kirron Kher’s opinion, supporting Proneeta and motivating her against losing her high spirits. Even she was slut shamed in the comments, simply because she wasn't being disrespectful to a foreign culture and a bigoted misogynist. How dare a woman have opinions, that too against the patriarchy? How dare she?!

---

Aww you read till the end, thankyou so much! See you in my next blog <3

Also please share the post and subscribe if you find my blogs fun and informative ^^