Sharma’s murder is not the first crime against female folk performers in the state. Internet fame has just made things worse.
Chandigarh: Mamta Sharma’s murder is not the first instance of a heinous crime being committed against female folk performers or raginis in Haryana.
Sharma, 40, a popular singer from Kalanaur town, used to perform live at religious gatherings. She was found Thursday with her throat slit and her body abandoned in the bushes in Baniyani, the home village of chief minister Manohar Lal Khattar. The police are still looking for a motive.
The chilling murder comes as a grim reminder of the daring daylight killing of 20-year-old Harshita Dahiya alias Geeta in October. Dahiya was returning from a programme in a village when the car she was travelling in was stopped by unidentified assailants and her co-travellers asked to step out. Dahiya was shot from close range and died on the spot.
Dahiya’s brother-in-law, notorious gangster Dinesh Karala, who was lodged in jail at the time, confessed to getting her killed. Dahiya had alleged that Karala had raped her; her mother, a witness to the rape, was allegedly murdered by Karala in 2014. Dahiya was the prime witness in her mother’s murder.
Dark underbelly of folk performances
Significantly, Dahiya was the first to bare the dark underbelly of the world of folk performers in Haryana, where young singers are competing to make it big through the social media.
Loosely called ‘ragini’ singers, this new crop of singers and dancers performs something very different to the original poetic rendition of a ragini. The new popular ‘ragini’ performances are more in the category of ‘swang’ or theatrical singing, where a lead female performer dances to live or pre-recorded songs.
Apart from drawing huge crowds in rural stage shows, videos of these shows command millions of views on the internet.
Over the years, the lyrics have become overtly lewd, the dance gestures raunchy, and the crowds, which used to have fair smattering of women and children till a few years ago, now largely consist of men.
Vibha Sharma, associate professor at Aligarh Muslim University who researched extensively on female swang performers for the 2017 book Performance, Feminism and Affect in Neoliberal Times, explains the pressure this new kind of fame brings.
“Female singers/dancers lead vulnerable public lives. They are directly exposed to the onslaught of a brutal, harsher face of a patriarchal society, more so than other working women. Society looks at them as the women they are on stage, without realising that they are merely performing an act,” she says.
“As a result the softer or emotional side of their personalities is never understood. If anything goes wrong, they are left to fend for themselves.”
Many examples
In the weeks before she was killed, Dahiya was constantly updating her Facebook page with video posts about receiving death threats from those who were jealous of her rising fame as a singer and dancer. In one of her last videos, she hurled the choicest abuses at those who she thought were threatening to kill her.
Earlier this month, another Haryanvi singer and dancer Aarti Bhoria complained to the Rohtak police that she had received death and rape threats. She alleged she was being threatened at the behest of a rival singer.
The hugely popular folk performer Sapna Chaudhry, 27, who made it to Bigg Boss 11, had attempted suicide in 2016, after she allegedly made uncharitable remarks about Dalits in one of her songs. A case was registered against her, and she apologised publicly for the song. But when online criticism against her continued unabated, she consumed poison.
Lalita Sharma, who married a taxi driver in Uttar Pradesh and went on to become a ragini sensation there, was killed along with her husband in 2015. Three men who had been domestic workers in their house were arrested for the couple’s murder, witnessed by their six-year-old son.
In 2012, Binu Chaudhry, a 29-year-old Ragini singer from Rohtak, was murdered while she was on a trip to Haridwar. Later, her alleged paramour was arrested for getting her killed.