bar dancer,
Caste,
Caste system,
dance bar,
dance bar ban,
dancers,
gender,
gender identities,
Maharashtra,
Maharashtra Dance Bar Ban,
performing caste
The Caste and Gender Politics of the Bombay Dance Bar Ban
The
Supreme Court, time and again, has faced the legal and political dilemmas of
the Maharashtra dance bar ban. The drawn-out Court episodes are reminders that
the politics around the Mumbai dance bars is far from over. For example, in
October 2015, the Court offered a Stay Order on the Maharashtra government’s 2014
legislation pertaining to dance bars. It stated that the new legislation was
not very different from the 2005 version that was held unconstitutional by the
Supreme Court in July 2013. Whether or not the ban on dance bars is lifted,
this controversial saga continues, and one might wonder at the agreements
within otherwise sparring political parties on the issue of dance bars.
This
seamless agreement can be explained through the politics of caste and gender
that surrounds the ban on dancing in the bars. The emergence and the ban of
dance bars in Mumbai can be seen as symptomatic of globalisation in India.
Dance bars emerged as a site of opportunity; for the customers to flaunt the
new wealth associated with a globalized India, and for the bar girls (a majority
of whom came from the hereditary dancing communities of North India) to gain
new employment opportunities. The demand and supply side of the dance bars
comprised of two distinct classes that sit uncomfortably into the dominant
scripts of globalisation in India. First class is the vernacular ‘new rich’ with
black money, government contracts, political connections, and religious
consumerism. This class constitutes the bulk of customers of the dance bars.
Second class comprises the low paid irregular workers; a class that is not just
poor and victim, but is surviving, fighting, and even prospering with whatever
means available. Bar girls hail from this class. Since the 1980's these
two classes have come together to create the dance bar market that can be seen
as a fly in the ointment to the ruling ideology and popular scripts of
globalization.
The
dance bar market offered its customers song, dance, Bollywood imagery and a
nostalgic appreciation of the old royal mannerisms of the North Indian tawaif
culture. It enabled customers to escape reality, feel like kings, and fulfil
the need for affirmation that the seemingly charmless capitalist economy –
while giving unprecedented cash – fails to provide. For this, the dance bars
elicited the power of musical performance in arousing feelings and the
established idiom of the Hindi film songs to attach the customers to the
bar girls and to the bar. The interviews of customers elucidate the key aspects
of the bar dance that attract them to the dance bars, e.g., the dance bars as
fantasy, drama, adventure, addiction and competition. While being very
lucrative, the world of dance bars remained almost hidden to the mainstream
public gaze for nearly two decades. As it precariously rope-walked legality
and morality in India, groups connected with the bar line were not interested in drawing attention to it and offending mainstream sensibilities.
During
the period of globalization, when the State is bowing out of even essential
services and giving way to the free reign of the market, it begs the question,
what led the state government of Maharashtra to intervene in the dance bar
market? The search for answers takes us to the politics of caste and gender.
The
bar dancers from traditional communities can be seen as performing castes:
where they redeploy their caste capital – skills of dancing, entertainment,
care, hospitality and the use of sexuality – to occupy the new market space
created by the globalizing dance bar market. In this sense, women remain within
their gender and caste orbit and seem to be ‘performing caste.' However, as
their traditional skills have gained unprecedented demand and monetary value in
the globalizing market, bar girls seem to occupy a space of high economic gain
and challenge the gender, caste, class borders by performing their caste
occupation in the global market.
The dance bar reconstitutes the relationship between gender, culture and
caste as the experience of being entertained by dancing women becomes a matter
of consumption rather than a birth right; as customers invent themselves as
kings, as men compete with each other for the attention of women, and as women
earn money directly from the provision of entertainment. In this sense, the
caste boundaries seem to be transgressed in the dance bar market, making this
market a showcase of globalization that can offer escape from traditional
structures.
Some
sections of the Bhatu caste cluster, especially the Bedias or Rajnats, have
been traditionally involved in dancing, musical theatre and sex work. Bar work
could be seen as a likely expansion or continuation of their work in the
globalizing urban centres. These communities possess the ‘caste capital’ (i.e.,
the cultural knowledge and skills of hereditary occupations that might give an
edge for similar professions in the new economic systems) for occupying the
space and opportunities of sexual economies that have been opened up by globalizing markets, as a result of which they excel in this site. They are performing their
caste-based occupation in a new setting and marking the new occupation as their
own realm. This situation can be seen as a furtherance of the caste patriarchy
– as these women remain within their orbit of caste and gender, as was pointed
out by Dalit Bahujan feminists during the debate. Yet it can also be seen as
loosening the connection of caste with class as the bar girls enter the middle
class. The relationships between the bar girl and the customer, although a
transaction between the lower caste/class female performer and the upper
caste/class male patron, was governed through the market and was not rooted in
birthright and obligation. The interviews of bar dancers explaining the
‘freedom’ experienced because of the bars, could be the testimony that these
women had come to occupy a space of high economic gains and shifted the gender,
caste, class borders by ‘performing caste’ in globalisation.
The
demand for the ban came enfolded in cultural discourses of gender rooted in
nationalism, culture and dignity of women, which can be recognised as the
ideological tools currently acceptable in Indian society. The state was called
upon to protect the family and the 'good wives', the 'helpless youth' and the
Maharashtrian/Indian culture from the dangerous lure of bar girls. In the
Maharashtra legislature, the need for the new law was justified as a need to discourage
men from going to the bars and throwing money. In this scheme, the upper
caste/class men seemed to need the protection of the state from the lower
caste/class women. The bar girls became the ‘bad women’ who danced before men
and seduced them with obscene attire and gestures, while the film actors, who
they imitated, are celebrated in contemporary India where Bollywood dance is
consumed voraciously. Bar girls were accused of avoiding honest, hard labour,
unlike the toiling good poor women, and of earning ‘easy money.' The caste system controls the labour of the lower
caste in myriad ways; it allows for extraction of free labour as is narrated in
the vast anthology of Dalit autobiographies. It also fixes the value of manual
labour at the lowest possible denominator. The dismal pay for manual work and
abysmal treatment of the worker in India are both outcomes of the caste
normativity in India. So while in the dance bar debate, the toiling women - the domestic worker, the pickle maker - were glorified in comparison to the
bar girls, no one seems to argue that the labour of these women warranties
better monetary compensation. Further, bar girls’ labour was considered no
labour at all; they were seen as just moving and shaking their bodies
obscenely. Obscenity and easy money could both be used to create a harsh public
opinion towards bar girls who had overstepped their normative boundaries and
were earning more money, power and status than their caste positionality
allowed them.
The
legal justification for the new legislation concentrated on the illegal
activities and crimes due to the dance bars. The scrutiny of the existing
criminal and civil laws related to the dance bars shows that the government was
sufficiently equipped to curb crime and revoke licences of the bars involved in
misconduct. Rather than implementing existing laws or proposing monitoring and
better functioning of the dance bars, the government proposed a ban that
stopped women dancing in the bars. The law did not ban the bars or even women
in bars in their varied forms from offering female company or sexual services.
It banned dance. By banning the musical power that performer has over her
audience and patrons, the ban on dancing closed this space of the erotic to the
lower caste women. The obscenity and easy money, then, can be seen as apparel
of the politics of caste and gender that determines the value of labour of the
lower caste women. While banning dance in bars, the state has allowed
prostitution to continue, effectively encouraging women to replace dancing with
prostitution. In this scheme, the government reinforced the right of the upper
caste men to have sexual access to lower caste women, and for free. The real
objection was not to men accessing sexuality of these women, but to men having
to pay for it. The state’s action is for maintaining the traditional
caste-based status quo between upper-caste men and lower-caste women.
The
Supreme Court’s removal of the ban must be seen as a pyrrhic victory for the 70
thousand bar dancers who lost their livelihood in 2005 and thrown out of the
market forever. There is very little chance of them returning to the bars
tomorrow and start dancing considering the loss of opportunity, age and spirit
in the past decade. Further, the Maharashtra government does not seem likely to
back off. While R. R. Patil, the NCP Home Minister who was the main force
behind the ban passed away earlier this year and the Congress, NCP government
ended in Maharashtra, the current BJP Chief Minister is reported to declare his
intent to continue on the path of total ban rather than regulation of the dance
bars. Despite progressive judgements by the Supreme Court, the question of
politics of caste and gender remains unresolved.
Sameena Dalwai teaches at the Jindal Global Law School, Delhi
NCR. This piece is drawn from her PhD work titled, “Performing Caste: Ban on
dancing in Maharashtra”
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