Dancing through patriarchy:garbaas a means of resistance in Abhishek Shah’sHellaro

The medium of dance can offer routes other than textual and verbal for expressing women’s oppression and also their resistance to it. The folk dance of garba in the Gujarati film Hellaro (The Outburst, 2019) directed by Abhishek Shah is an exemplary instance of this. Further, the present essay traces the history of this dance form to explore the filmic reversal of the traditional understanding concerning garba. Garba changes in the film from being a ritualistic and religious performance to a recreational one, thematically linking women’s leisure as a mode of resistance to patriarchy. Moreover, such an understanding of garba serves to highlight women’s negotiation of agency in their everyday lives through nonverbal cues, as in the film.