Book Review: Dance like a Trans
1 min read
Team Kitaab reviews Dance like a Trans by Raghav Chinivar (Niyogi Books, 2026), noticing how it leaves us with that double act of occupation.
Some lives refuse the clean architecture of a beginning, a struggle and a triumphant end. Manjamma Jogathi’s is one of them. Born Manjunath in Bellary district, she grew up watching village theatre and temple performances before finding herself inside the world she had once watched from the margins. The passage from Manjunath to Manjamma is not simply a change of name or gender. It is a journey through abandonment, ritual, performance, poverty and self-invention. By the time she becomes the first trans woman to head the Karnataka Janapada Academy and later receives the Padma Shri, the distance travelled is enormous. Yet achievement never quite erases what it has taken to arrive there.
Raghav Chinivar’s Dance Like a Trans is attentive to that cost. The book could easily have become an inspirational biography: a persecuted child, an unconventional vocation, institutional recognition, a national honour. Instead, its more interesting impulse is to keep the losses visible. Family, childhood, social belonging, economic security, even a stable sense of self—none can simply be recovered because success eventually arrives.
