Photo Project: Abhyangana by Manab Das | Hyderabad Rocks and #Metoo

In 2019, at the height of the global reckoning ignited by the Me Too movement, Abhyangana emerged—not as a spectacle, not as an accusation, but as an intimate exhale. The movement had opened floodgates. Survivors across industries were naming abuse, recounting violations, and exposing systems that had long thrived in silence. Yet beneath the headlines and hashtags was another quieter, heavier truth: many stories remained unspoken, especially those buried within close-knit artistic circles, where admiration, hierarchy, and intimacy blur into dangerous territory.

It was within this atmosphere that Abhyangana was born.

For me, the project was not theoretical. It was not commentary from a distance. It was personal. Having experienced sexual abuse within my own dance circuit—a space that was supposed to nurture, mentor, and celebrate art—I carried a grief that did not easily translate into words. Dance had always been my language. But trauma unsettles language. It fragments the body. It leaves residue in muscle memory. It shifts how you inhabit space.

Abhyangana became my attempt to speak through the body when speech felt insufficient.

The project was conceived as a classical dance–based photographic performance in collaboration with photographer Manav Das. We chose the rocky terrains of Kompally in Hyderabad—not the polished cityscapes, not auditoriums or curated stages—but the raw, ancient granite formations that stand defiantly between expanding suburban constructions. These rocks, native to the Deccan plateau, carry a geological memory that predates cities, civilizations, and modern shame. They endure. They witness.

In that landscape of endurance, I stood draped in white.

White, in many cultures, is associated with purity, surrender, mourning, and rebirth. It is a color that absorbs and reflects simultaneously. The garment I wore was intentionally minimal—almost fragile against the scale of the rocks and the unpredictable wind. We did not choreograph the wind. We allowed it to intervene. As gusts moved across the terrain, they caught hold of the cloth, pulling, twisting, lifting, almost snatching it away.

That was the core metaphor.

The wind became the invisible force of violation—sudden, uninvited, destabilizing. The cloth, the only garment shielding the body, represented agency, safety, dignity. Each time the wind tugged at it, there was a visible struggle between holding and losing, between containment and exposure. Unlike staged choreography, this interaction was partially beyond control. My body responded instinctively—grasping, bracing, resisting. The performance thus became real-time negotiation with vulnerability.

Sexual abuse often leaves no visible scars. It is an imprint carried in posture, breath, reflex, and silence. It is the constant tightening of shoulders. The guarded gaze. The hyper-awareness of proximity. In Abhyangana, that internalized memory was externalized through movement and environment. The vast rocks around me symbolized the weight of silence—immovable, ancient, and overwhelming. Yet they also stood as testimony: you are small, but you are not erased.

There is also something profoundly Hyderabadi about the imagery. The city’s iconic rock formations—now endangered by rapid urbanization—exist awkwardly between apartment complexes and highways. They are remnants of a landscape that refuses complete erasure. Similarly, survivors carry remnants. Even when life moves forward, when careers resume, when applause returns, there are geological layers beneath the surface that remain.

By situating the performance in Kompally’s rocky expanse, we anchored personal trauma within a larger conversation about space and survival. Abuse often occurs within familiar territories—homes, studios, institutions—places that are supposed to be safe. Reclaiming physical space through art becomes an act of resistance. Standing atop those rocks, I was not merely performing; I was reclaiming ground.

The title Abhyangana itself evokes ritual cleansing—an anointing with oil before purification. In classical Indian contexts, abhyangana is associated with care, preparation, and renewal. Naming the project thus was intentional. The performance was not about voyeuristic display of pain. It was about the ritual of confronting it. About allowing the body to move through memory rather than be frozen by it.

Manav Das’s photography played a crucial role in this translation. The still images capture tension at its peak—the fabric caught mid-air, the body suspended between resistance and surrender, the granite looming like silent jurors. Photography arrests movement, just as trauma arrests time. Yet by documenting the performance, the images also transform it. They convert private suffering into shared witnessing.

The collaboration itself was significant. In a conversation shaped by the Me Too movement, trust in collaboration becomes political. To create art about violation requires safety. It requires consent, clarity, and mutual respect. In that sense, the project was also a statement about what ethical artistic partnership looks like.

Abhyangana does not offer resolution. There is no final triumphant pose where the wind ceases or the cloth remains untouched. Instead, the images exist in tension. That is deliberate. Healing is rarely linear. Survivors oscillate between strength and fragility. The project honors that oscillation.

At its heart, Abhyangana asks difficult questions:

What does it mean to inhabit a body that has been trespassed?How does a dancer, whose art relies on physical expression, navigate a body that carries memory of harm?How do we speak about abuse within artistic fraternities that are often romanticized as progressive but remain deeply hierarchical?

In 2019, as testimonies echoed across digital platforms, Abhyangana added a visual, embodied dimension to the discourse. It insisted that sexual abuse is not merely a headline—it is a somatic experience. It lingers in fabric, in wind, in the act of holding oneself together.

Standing among Hyderabad’s rocks, with the wind pulling at white cloth, I was not only venting pain. I was making it visible. And visibility, even when fragile, is the beginning of power.