Under an equal sky
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COMMENTS 
Classical dancer Alokananda Roy’s dance project for prisoners serving life sentences in West Bengal’s correctional institutions helps build self-esteem and gives the prisoners hope and purpose
Under a star-lit Kolkata sky, a group of men and women brought the curtains down on the evergreen Kishore Kumar song, ‘Aa chalke tujhe/Mein leke chalu/Ek aisi gagan ke tale/Jahan gham bhi na ho/Aansu bhi na ho/Bas pyar hi pyar fale/Ek aisi gagan ke tale’. This was no routine recital. It was staged by the inmates of Presidency Correctional Home. The silhouettes of gun-toting security personnel posted along the scalloped watchtowers brought this reality home.
For over a year now, a project on dance therapy for people serving life sentences in the correctional home, initiated by noted classical dancer Alokananda Roy, has been helping lifers emerge from their acute depression.
Presidency Correctional Home has around 2,000 inmates. Two-hundred-and-sixty-three are men serving life terms; the women lifers number 37. Roy teaches them to dance and sing, helping them put up a series of spectacular shows inside and outside the prison walls.
Filmmaker Judhajit Sarkar has filmed these interactions closely. The first part of his film, called Faces,delves into the lives of the inmates to establish their identity which, in prison, is just a number, a mere tag ‘serving life imprisonment till death’.
Inspector-General, Correctional Services, West Bengal, B D Sharma, says: “Various Supreme Court judgments have ruled that a person in custody does not become a non-person. S/he enjoys all rights of an ordinary citizen except liberty.” Yet, often confined in sub-human conditions, prisoners serving life sentences have very little joy in their lives, especially when those outside distance themselves from them. It hurts them most when their own family members shun them for fear of being stigmatised.
As they prepare for a regimented life inside prison, vocational training plays a major role. This series of dance workshops has helped them get in touch with their latent talents, injecting a sense of hope where other forms of counselling have failed. They get back a bit of the trust they have lost -- in themselves mostly!
“For me, working with the lifers was never a conscious decision. It was not that one fine day I was motivated to work with them,” says Roy. She was more interested in teaching dance to juvenile delinquents inside jails. But a programme she held on International Women’s Day inside the Presidency, on March 8, 2007, gave her access to the dank dreary world of the incarcerated. She met a few women inmates and learnt that their children were allowed to stay with them only until they were around six years old. Then they were sent away to various homes.
Once Roy got permission to carry out the project, she concentrated on her art. She says: “Dance never lets you down. We all have a rhythm which is like our heartbeat.”
Things didn’t change overnight. It was not easy to get a motley group of hardened offenders interested in the project, for dance is often considered effeminate. “I started with martial dance exercises for the men,” Roy explains. “Initially there was a very thin line separating us, and I found that they hardly ever smiled,” she says. “What I had predominantly in mind was acceptance. I was not unduly interested in their past.”
Encouraged by the success of cultural shows such as Brotherhood Beyond, Roy picks her themes well. The group is currently performing Valmiki Prothibha -- the Tagore dance drama that traces the transformation of Ratnakar the dacoit into the fine poet Valmiki, after a brush with Goddess Saraswati, the Hindu deity/muse of learning.
Vicky Akkara, 28, a Presidency inmate who has played substantial roles in Roy’s shows, identifies with the story. “I had everything going for me,” he says. A rugby player and an ex-student of a well-known college in the city, Akkara threw it all away for a luxurious life, indulging in every possible crime in the book. “I realise that nothing can be rushed,” he says. “Everything has its time and place.”
Meanwhile, Mohammad Majid dreams of a good education while Borun Dulay has had no news of his wife and sons whom he misses terribly.
“I have been able to record only a bit of the transformation that has taken place in their lives,” says filmmaker Sarkar who is now concentrating on the lonely life of Akkara. The latter speaks into the camera explaining how much the dance workshop has softened him. He was never religious but now he has started praying to god. “It is like the constant drip of water on stone. The form of the stone changes.”
Roy who has been dancing for the last 50 years does not follow any special strategy when it comes to teaching the convicts. “Depending on the individual need, I have a process in place.” But she does find the women prisoners more difficult to crack. “Maybe the social structure makes them so,” she says.
The subject of prison reforms is a huge one, where cultural therapies have not yet been established as a rehabilitation tool. But they can make people more socially interactive. And, for the convicted, it helps them get on better with the other inmates and with society at large. Even the wardens who were initially sceptical about the ‘song-and-dance routine’ say it has improved relationships between them and the inmates.
Sharma wants to increase the scope and application of cultural therapy through dance, and maybe other art forms as well, in correctional homes all over the state. The Midnapur Correctional Home, he says, has had so much success with the cultural therapy project that its Chhau troupe is now one of the best in the country, putting up several performances. Dance workshops have been initiated at the Howrah Correctional Home too; the next will be Alipur Correctional Home.
“Who knows if I will ever get out of here,” says the beautiful Munmun who has murder charges against her. Who knows? But until she does she can at least ask for an equal sky under which they are all one big family getting ready for the next performance -- designing props, sewing costumes, and wondering if those on the other side of the fence enjoyed the performance as much as they did. The self-respect is back.
Infochange News & Features, June 2009