The youngsters from India's best-known slum spin, twist andflip their bodies to the hip hop beat -- but don't call them breakdancers. Anddefinitely not slumdogs.
These are the SlumGods, who want to show there is more tolife in a Mumbai shantytown than poverty, squalor and trying to escape -- evenif 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 crewof “breakers”, graffiti artists, DJs and rappers.
“I felt very bad about it because after the movie, peoplestarted thinking this was just a dirty, unhygienic slum area,” he said of hisneighbourhood Dharavi, a sprawling backdrop to the Oscar-winning movie.
When the film came out in India in 2009, Akku was newlyhooked on b-boying or breaking, the hip hop street dance that was born in theghettos 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 NewDelhi, who honed his moves growing up in New York's Queens before his Indianfamily moved back to the subcontinent in the early 2000s.
Visiting Dharavi with a friend, HeRa found a spiritual homefor b-boying -- "it kind of clicked", he said, and he found theyoungsters 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, whichnow has 40 to 50 core members across the cities of Mumbai, New Delhi andBangalore.
The crew works hand-in-hand with Tiny Drops, a non-profitgroup founded by HeRa in Dharavi and his Delhi neighbourhood, offering “a spacefor kids in the hood” to explore hip hop dance and culture.
They have inspired hundreds of urban Indian youngsters totry their hands at graffiti, rapping or especially b-boying, a cheap and funkycombination of exercise and self-expression.
"Dancing is in us. It's part of our culture," HeRasaid, although it seems breaking has struck a particular chord with thechildren of Dharavi.
"Indian middle-class kids are fat and in malls. Thesekids are lean and mean and don't have inhibitions."
Their love of the culture can be seen atop the crumblingSion Fort, a 17th-century, British-built structure that has become -- as agraffitied sign indicates -- a very different kind of "BattlefortMumbai".
Offering more space than the nearby cramped confines ofDharavi, the fort ruins have hosted dance-off contests and regular practicesfor b-boys and the odd b-girl, who show off their routines to tinny music froma mobile phone.
As Akku leads the dancing crew, young children who crowdaround to watch are shooed away by fort guards with sticks.
“It's a cool space but it's informal. We want to ask thecity of Mumbai if they can give it to the kids, to give them ownership,” saidHeRa.
The options are otherwise limited. Tall and gangly B-boySin, as Pankaj Shivpur is known, almost fills the small room in Dharavi that heshares with several relatives as he backflips to Bollywood tunes on thetelevision.
