There is a particular kind of applause that arrives too late to undo anything, and yet arrives exactly when it must. I kept thinking about this as I closed Dance Like a Trans about how an award ceremony can be both a beginning and a summing-up, a single evening asked to hold the weight of an entire life.
I spent over a decade in banking, where we are trained to measure risk before we measure anything else; what a person stands to lose, and whether the loss is survivable. Reading Manjamma Jogathi’s story, I found my old instincts stirring, and then failing me entirely. Because how do you audit a life in which everything was staked? Name, family, certainty, the simple comfort of being legible to the world; Manjamma lost each of these, one after another, and what she kept in exchange was something no ledger has a column for: herself.
From Manjunath to Manjamma
Dance Like a Trans: From Jogathi to Padma Shri (Niyogi Books) is the biography of the transgender folk artist Manjamma Jogathi, drawn from the author’s long conversations with her. It begins in a small town in Karnataka’s Bellary district, where a child named Manjunath watches village plays and temple performances from the edges, always watching, always slightly outside the frame, while a womanhood the world refuses to see struggles quietly for expression.
What follows is not gentle. Ostracised by family, consecrated into the Jogathi tradition _ a path at once ceremonial and stigmatised, sacred and shunned in the same breath – Manjamma’s early years read like a chronicle of doors closing. And yet the book never lets you look away from the stubborn, flickering thing at the centre of it all: the dance. Jogathi Nritya becomes her language when every other language has been taken from her. The stage, as this book so movingly insists, can be a homeland.
One of the quiet triumphs of Chinivar’s telling is the way the pronouns shift. The early chapters speak of he, because that was the identity the world enforced; slowly, as the inner woman flourishes, the narration turns to she. It is done without fanfare and it is devastating in its simplicity. The prose itself transitions alongside its subject. I cannot remember the last time a grammatical choice made me put a book down and sit with it.
The Long Road to the Ceremony
I will confess that the chapters I read fastest were the hardest ones: the hunger, the humiliation, the years of performing for audiences who wanted the art but not the artist. But the book earns its ending precisely because it does not hurry through the wilderness. When Manjamma rises to lead the Karnataka Janapada Academy as its first trans woman president, and when the Padma Shri finally comes, the moment lands with the force of everything that preceded it. This is not a fairy-tale reversal; it is a culmination. The award ceremony felt, to me, like watching a lifetime of struggles walk onto a stage and take its bow at last – every slight, every closed door, every night of doubt, gathered into one folded moment of national recognition.
The publisher calls this no neat tale of triumph, and they are right. The losses are not redeemed by the medal; they sit beside it. That honesty is what lifts the book from inspiration-shelf fodder into something truer and rarer.
The Author Who Did Not Stay for the Applause
And then there is the story wrapped around the story. Raghav Chinivar, an engineering dropout who once dreamt of cricket, who left corporate life in 2008 and found his calling on long train journeys across India, a book always open in his lap did not live to see this one published. Dance Like a Trans is his first book and his last, built through countless conversations and shared meals with Manjamma, who has written with great tenderness about the young man who trained under Mukund Rao and gave her story its shape.
There is something almost unbearably fitting about it: a book about losing everything and leaving something behind, written by a man who left only this behind. Two lives braided into one spine. I finished the final pages holding the book a little more carefully than when I began.
Read it for Manjamma’s extraordinary journey from the margins of a Bellary town to the Rashtrapati Bhavan. Read it for the pronouns that transition with their subject. Read it, above all, as proof that identity is not a luxury one purchases when it becomes affordable; it is the one asset some people must risk everything to hold.
The half star I withhold is a small quarrel: I occasionally wished for more of Manjamma’s own voice on the page, longer stretches in her words rather than about them. But perhaps that longing, too, is the book working as intended. It sends you out looking for her performances, her interviews, her dance. Few biographies manage that.
My Rating: 4.5/5
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