How India's Breaking Community is Fighting for Space One Beat at a Time

Before Prabhu Deva made street dance palatable for Bollywood, before ABCD (Any Body Can Dance)gave breaking a three-hour narrative arc for us to see the B-Boying community up close, there were dancers like Kartik ‘Smoke’ Mehta. The veteran breaker whom we met recently remembers the early 2000s with unvarnished clarity, "People think breaking in India is new because brands only discovered it recently. But for us, this started twenty years ago, copying moves off pirated CDs, practising on concrete, getting chased out of malls. We weren't trying to go viral or make careers. We were trying to exist. Breaking became a way to claim space in a city that didn't give young people, especially working-class kids, much room to breathe."

On January 31, 2026, when the FUJIFILM Undisputed Breaking Championship arrived in Delhi for its inaugural India qualifier, that twenty-year history materialised. 333 solo male breakers, 50 women, 42 crews, and 29 juniors converged at Worldmark 1, Aerocity. As ArunBabu, Associate Director, FUJIFILM India, reflected, "There is a diasporic representation here. People from all over India, from the streets, from the tier-one cities, to everyone's tier." That geographic and class diversity, rarely acknowledged in mainstream Indian cultural discourse, formed the foundation of the championship.

The Floor Decides Your Future

A member of Tandav Crew,RAWDR, who has participated in multiple international and national-level competitions but started at a chawl in Girgaon in Mumbai, articulates what international standards obscure: "International judges talk about 'clean floors' and 'conditioning' like those are neutral things. But in India, the floor you train on already decides your future. Most of us are practising after work, after college, after family duties. No recovery, no physios, no visas. So when Indian breakers still show up internationally, that's not mediocrity, that's resilience." The championship's free admission and open registration directly addressed these barriers. 

For Chetan ‘Drifter’ Kumar, a member of the OSV Crew, that inclusivity carries explicit political weight: "Breaking is physical dissent." Your body is literally saying, 'I will take up space.' That's uncomfortable in India, especially if you're poor, brown, loud, or non-conforming. Every time we cypher in public, it's already political. Battles make that confrontation visible."

This created what organisers from the UndisputedTeamdescribed as a rare meritocratic space, "Without any gender bias, without any culture bias, without any community bias, without any religion bias, you can come, you can perform, you can express yourself, and you'll be judged based on your skills, not by any of the things that I said. That is the best part."

Staying Is the Hardest Move

Chandra 'Phoenix' Pal, a B-Girl, mentor and part of the Arms Crew who qualified for the finals in the championship, identifies the invisible battles, "For women, the hardest move isn't a power set, it's staying. You're questioned, stared at, sometimes straight-up discouraged. Families worry, crews police behaviour, and the streets aren't always safe. So when you see Indian B-Girls still standing here, battling on this stage, understand that they fought systems before they fought opponents."

The crew battle victory by Indian All Stars, featuring Wildchild, Tornado, and Flying Machine, demonstrated institutional validation and finally met grassroots talent. Roshan Singh, a crew member from Solo Men, explains their deeper function, "Crews aren't just dance teams here, they're families. We share food, travel costs, injuries, and losses. When one person gets an opportunity, everyone benefits. That's how we survived without institutions backing us."

The organisers from Undisputed contextualised the intergenerational significance, "Today you can see we've got kids from the age of five up to adults, all generations, and those memories will allow us to connect those generations. It allows us to bring the analogue actions of breaking with the analogue process of Instax, and those two worlds merge beautifully." That fusion, an ephemeral movement captured as a tangible memory, resonated particularly with a community whose contributions have often gone undocumented.

Yet geographic inequalities persist. Sourabh Chakma, who comes from Meghalaya, notes, "Most people still think Indian breaking is only in Delhi or Bangalore. But there are insane breakers in the Northeast, in small towns, in places with no events at all. Travel is expensive, exposure is unequal. Championships like this don't fix everything, but they crack the door open."

Recognition Without Sanitisation

Breaking's Olympic debut at Paris 2024, judged using Undisputed's Trivium system, created legitimacy alongside tension. Dharmendra ‘Demon’ Verma,part of the Khatarnaak hip hop crew, who follows the global circuit closely, warns, "The Olympics gave breaking legitimacy, but it also made people want to sanitise it. Suddenly, there's talk of uniforms, formats, and behaviour. But breaking was born from rebellion, from communities that didn't fit into polite society. If we lose that rawness to look 'sport-ready', we lose the culture."

Corporate partnerships require careful navigation. Verma offers cautious optimism, "We're always cautious when corporations show up, because hip hop has been extracted before. But platforms matter. Free entry matters. Letting crews exist without filtering them into 'marketable' versions matters. If brands listen instead of just branding, this can actually be a turning point."

Organisers from Undisputed echoed that shift, "Coming to India across our global platform and our global series for us just feels natural, and it's something that we see, and we wish to do more often. Breaking is an opportunity for us as a partnership to celebrate."

When Yuina and Ryoga from Japan took the solo titles, it wasn't defeat but calibration. Japan's decades of infrastructure development meet India's real-time ecosystem-building. Yet 333 male registrations, crews from small towns, and international judges taking Indian talent seriously signal transformation. 

As organisers noted, the community remains "very energetic" and "crazy about dancing and trying to express ourselves." That unbridled expression, refusing containment by conventional definitions of Indian dance or culture, might be precisely what allows breaking to thrive here: not by asking permission, but by claiming the floor and making presence non-negotiable.