Different Beats: Being a Female Tabla Player
Channel: VideoVolunteers
Date: 28/11/2016

Meet the only female tabla player to have qualified for a teaching position in colleges. Mithu Tikadar has been fighting gender stereotypes since her childhood. 

As a female musician, Mithu Tikadar is unusual in her choice of instrument: the tabla. Traditionally seen as the domain of male practitioners, Mithu constantly encounters discrimination. Her aunt told a young Mithu that she was a disgrace to all women. Undaunted Mithu decided to take up tabla as a subject for her secondary school exams. She has moved away from the suburbs and now lives in the metropolis of Kolkata. Today she's economically self sufficient and is the only Dalit woman to have cleared the nationwide test on musical instruments that makes her eligible to teach in colleges. But her struggle with patriarchal mores continue. The band in which she plays, pays her a much lower salary than fellow male musicians. Mithu is not about to give up. She is dismantling patriarchy with every beat that she drums up on her tabla.