Mumbai, Sept. 23 -- Shakuntalabai Nagarkar, the irrepressible doyenne of lavani and a recipient of the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award in 2008, passed away at 66 at her home in Nimgaon, a sleepy hamlet outside Ahilyanagar, after living with cancer for several years. The lives of women of the Sangeet Bari (a traditional lavani performance circuit in Maharashtra) have been preserved less on paper than through memories and performances, and Shakubai, as she was fondly called, left her own mark with characteristic elan. By the time her life and artistry found their way into a documentary film, book and theatre, she had spent decades mastering and transmitting the form. There was a particular relationship Shakubai established with her audience when she performed. You could be sitting in a roomful of people and feel that she was performing just for you. She would catch your eye, tease you, and for those few minutes you were instantly a paramour. On stage, she did this with complete aplomb; outside it, she was an unassuming, almost shy, presence. When I first encountered Shakubai in Sangeet Bari, the documentary theatre play put together by Bhushan Korgaonkar and Savitri Medhatul in 2013, I was struck by her gestures and entreaties: her eyes would flicker mischievously and the performance would transform as she drew us in with a delicious mixture of immodesty and comic flair. That play brought Shakubai and her cohorts before urban middle-class audiences, who were a world apart from them, but the show still carried traces of Shakubai's mainstay-a traditional baithak built around the beautifully tenuous relationship between performer and patron. When actor Shernaz Patel handed Shakubai the Best Actress trophy at the Mahindra Excellence in Theatre Awards in 2023, she acknowledged her work in Korgaonkar's Lavani Ke Rang, and her mastery not just of her form but of the craft of performance too. Lavani artists are often celebrated for their command of shringar, but what Shakubai possessed was a far more expansive understanding of performance. She could lampoon Brahmin priests and boorish customers, become a young girl playing hopscotch, and then, in a rare unguarded moment, sing about unfulfilled desire without any self-parody. Her crowd work was as impeccable as her comic timing; she could be a winsome coquette and an imperious schoolmarm within the same performance, charming and roasting the audience with ease. In 2020, doctors diagnosed Shakubai with cancer and told her there was little they could do. Yet, the years that followed were, as she confided to Korgaonkar, among the best of her life. She travelled to different places with him, conducting workshops, performing one-off lavanis and appearing in theatre productions, experiencing a world beyond the traditional confines of the lavani world. For Shakubai, this expansion offered a different kind of independence: the freedom to travel, to be recognised as an artiste in her own right, and to exercise a different kind of agency over her own life. She continued performing almost to the end. Her last public performance in April 2025 was at a wedding celebrating a same-sex couple's 30th anniversary. There was one final, private baithak just over a year ago, a quiet coda to a life spent performing. Shakubai is survived by three children, one of whom, Shraddha, has taken on the mantle of her mother's lavani legacy, sharing the stage with her and, in the final years, becoming both her companion and primary caregiver....