Break-out time for India's Slumgods
MUMBAI: 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 kids 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.