Before the stretches, before the kicks, before anyone has even taken off their shoes, Shiva strikes the berimbau (a single-string bow instrument with a belly and a metallic twang) first. Conversations stop midway. Someone picks up the pandeiro (a small hand drum with metal jingles, like a tambourine). Another student starts clapping. Then the singing begins in Portuguese, low at first, before the rest of the room answers back.
This is how Capoeira starts. Not with fighting. With music.
Inside Casa de Capoeira, on the third floor of a narrow Shahpur Jat alley, eight students form a circle called the roda. Traffic noise bursts up from below. Students arrive carrying helmets, office bags, and water bottles still warm from the Delhi heat.
Two participants step inside the circle while one person plays the pandeiro. Around them, the class is a mix of students, corporate professionals, creatives, and a few foreigners, aged 18 to 40. They pay R4800 a month as dance fees. A kick glides past a face without touching it. A cartwheel creates distance. The ginga, Capoeira’s constant swaying motion, keeps both bodies moving like a conversation rather than a fight.
The basics
“We don’t fight in the roda,” says Shiva, 38, who has run Delhi’s only dedicated Capoeira school for a decade. “We play. It’s like chess. You have to understand the other person.”
Shiva came to Capoeira through Delhi’s street-dance scene in the mid-2000s. He tried breakdancing, contemporary, jazz – anything that would keep him moving. Nothing stayed with him until Capoeira did. He moved to Mumbai and trained under Reza Baba Massah, an Indian, known as Professor Baba, the man widely credited with introducing the Afro-Brazilian art to India. Some training days lasted ten hours.
“The goal was always Delhi,” Shiva says. “There was nothing here then. I wanted to bring the culture back.”
The history
Capoeira was born centuries ago on Brazilian sugar plantations among enslaved Africans forbidden from practising combat. They disguised self-defence as dance, hiding kicks and takedowns inside rhythm and acrobatics. Songs carried histories because many practitioners could neither read nor write. The roda became both performance and resistance.
Professor Baba discovered Capoeira accidentally in Israel in 2000 after hearing drums from a nearby academy. Curious, he walked inside and attempted a cartwheel. The room erupted with cheers. He returned to India in 2005 and began teaching from beaches, living rooms, and borrowed halls across Mumbai.
“Nobody could even pronounce Capoeira then,” he says. “Forget understanding it. Today, his students teach across India, just like Shiva in Delhi.
The flux
Akash Pakshi, an architect, has been in Shiva’s studio for ten years. He arrived as a student and never really left. Capoeira, he says, gave him something no gym ever had: friendships across generations and a community that ignored status outside the roda.
But even inside the roda, hierarchies quietly exist. Advanced students move with an ease beginners struggle to imitate, and not everyone stays long enough to understand the slower philosophy beneath the acrobatics. Some arrive chasing flips they saw online and disappear within weeks when repetition replaces spectacle.
“It’s a culture of movement within a box,” Pakshi says. “A way to express your body that you can’t find anywhere else.”
He once trained for hours daily until an injury reduced practice to an hour. He says this like someone describing an old friendship that has changed shape rather than disappeared.
The practice remains fragile in India. Capoeira has no universal governing body, allowing inexperienced performers to market themselves as instructors after minimal training. Shiva believes many social media reels misrepresent Capoeira, turning it into a spectacle rather than discipline. “People see one flip online and think that’s Capoeira,” he says. “But the art takes years. Patience is the hardest part. He also describes teaching for a long time as lonely and misses being a student, constantly learning new things.
That tension sits at the centre of the art in Delhi. Capoeira asks for surrender in a city obsessed with speed and outcomes. There are no medals hanging on the studio walls, no promises of transformation in 30 days. Only repetition, rhythm, and the trust built when two people choose to express each other in a non-contact way
A decade on, Capoeira is not as popular as Zumba or a Bollywood workout; it still exists on the edges of Delhi’s fitness and dance culture. Shahpur Jat’s rents, meanwhile, keep climbing. Many come expecting aggression and leave confused by the music, the language, and the slowness required to learn properly.
Still, every evening, the roda opens, the berimbau starts with a twang. Students clap in rhythm. Portuguese lyrics bounce off studio walls in a city far removed from the plantations where the art began centuries ago. Outside, traffic squeezes through Shahpur Jat’s narrow lanes while café music spills into the night. Yet somehow the circle still holds.
By the end of class, the music softens into conversation. Students pack their bags while absentmindedly humming songs they barely understood when they first arrived. Shiva places the berimbau carefully against the wall. The gourd is still warm.