Finding Their Feet

Lifers learn to dance in a Kolkata correctional home

- Lesley D Biswas

In central Kolkata, on an evening in late June, a dancer parted the black stage curtain of the Satyajit Ray Auditorium and peered at the audience he was about to perform for. Beside him, a policeman stood guard with a service rifle.

Moments later, that performer, along with nine others, trooped onto the stage and began an hour-long show. Wearing costume masks, pleated pyjamas and long-sleeved kurtas, they performed a dance that incorporated steps from Bharatanatyam, Kallaripayatu and Manipuri styles, enacting the plight of birds threatened by environmental destruction. The dancers spread their arms wide, like wings, and depicted the life cycle of a bird, from birth to gruesome death. Their grace belied the fact that they were all amateur dancers.

With the exception of Chirantan Bhaduri—the choreographer and director of the troupe—all the performers were serving life sentences at Kolkata’s Dum Dum Central Correctional Home. For the past five years, about a dozen lifers have been rehearsing dance every morning for about an hour. Bhaduri’s troupe has performed over 55 times— including at the 2013 Kolkata International Film Festival.

According to the West Bengal Correctional Services Act, one function of prisons is “to adopt measures whereby a prisoner confined therein may not fall prey to the depriving mental attitude.” Bhaduri told me that a key objective of imprisonment is “to reform and convert offenders into citizens fit to reassimilate within the folds of society.” The dance programme at Dum Dum seems to be serving both of these purposes: giving participants an enriching distraction from prison life, and often, with that, a more positive attitude towards the future—even a glimmer of hope that their sentences might be cut short.