Post by Bozur on May 6, 2005 21:30:23 GMT -5
MUMBAI JOURNAL
Live Clothed Girls May Be Stripped of Their Dance Jobs
By SOMINI SENGUPTA
Published: May 2, 2005
Santosh Verma for The New York Times
A client, far left, offered cash to dancers at a ladies bar in Mumbai. Men must offer money from their seats.
BUMBAI, India, April 25 - At Azad Maidan, where Gandhi once led a sit-down strike against the British Empire, another act of civil disobedience is now unfolding, this time not for the sake of self-rule but for a woman's right to dance for a living.
At issue is the fate of a peculiar Mumbai-style cabaret known here as the ladies bar. The state has said it will close the bars on the grounds that they corrupt the young, destroy the family and promote prostitution. Their defenders, an odd mix of professional feminists and pistol-packing barkeepers, have put up a spirited fight, and their sit-down strikes on a dry dirt field have brought a daily parade of night crawlers - dancers, bouncers, bar owners - to squint and sweat under the midday sun.
One afternoon this week, a dancer who called herself Shoma and gave her age as 25 cooled off with a Popsicle and raged against the politicians threatening to take away her livelihood of six years. Her family eats because of her earnings, she said; her daughter attends a private school. "Why is the government saying this now?" Shoma asked. "Maybe they want more money?"
The ladies bars of Bombay, as this city is widely known, are a curious hybrid of Bollywood fantasy and an old South Asian palace tradition in which women sing and dance for men of wealth. These are not strip clubs: the women remain fully clothed, and the men are not allowed to touch them. They are not discos: the women dance, and the men can only offer cash from their seats.
At an upscale club on a recent Friday night, a dozen women in shimmering chiffon skirts swayed their hips, lip-synched and gazed at themselves in the mirrored walls.
If it were not for the men who crowded the seats along those mirrored walls, they could have been dancing in front of their bedroom mirrors, in preparation for the high school prom. The men, meanwhile, sat along the mirrored walls, nursing beer and whiskey, fanning out their money like cards on a blackjack table and tossing it at a favorite dancer.
In one corner of the bar, a man kept his attention and his money focused on a languid young woman in yellow. She moved to the music, threw back her hair, admired herself in the mirror and responded to his invitations to come closer, each time, fattening the stack of bills in her hand. In a high-society bar like this, on any given night, it is possible to take home over $100, an unimaginably handsome sum for a working woman in Mumbai. In less elite bars, a dancing girl is lucky to take home $10.
The crackdown on dance bars comes as the Bombay police step up a broader anti-sleaze campaign, tearing down movie posters, billboards and music videos they consider to be vulgar. The latest target was an advertisement featuring a man and woman in various compromising positions, competing for an ice-cream cone.
Sanjay Aparanti, the newly appointed deputy commissioner of police, calls it his personal crusade to rid Mumbai of what he considers the exploitation of women. "Man has no right or reason to project women as a commodity," he declared in an interview in his office here the other day and then went on to compare the base nature of humans versus animals. "In the animal kingdom, the female is respected. The lioness would sit with her cubs. The lion doesn't commit atrocities against her."
The dance bars, Mr. Aparanti said, are only an excuse for men to pick up women, stay out late and ultimately destroy the Indian family.
Soliciting is not permitted in the dance bars, but it is understood that a man will try to get a woman's phone number, or try to invite her out for a meal, or perhaps then try to take her to bed. It is also understood that a woman's job is to milk his desire for as long as possible.
As for the lascivious gazes of the men, the dancing girls brushed them off as a fact of life in this trade, as in every other. "This thing happens in an office, it happens in modeling," said a dancer who called herself Bobby. "It's up to you."
In announcing the proposed ban earlier this month, R. R. Patil, the deputy chief minister of the state, told the state assembly that dance bars were "corrupting the moral fiber of our youth and culture," according to a report published in The Times of India, the country's largest English-language daily.
The government has yet to formally ban the dance bars, and some speculate that a deal will eventually be brokered, particularly given that nearly everyone pockets something from the trade. One bar owner from a Mumbai suburb, where the state has already closed some dance bars, said he regularly paid more than $1,000 to police officers in his area each month.
The head of the Mumbai bar owners association, Manjeet Singh, a well-known loudmouth with two pistols tucked against his hip and a St. Bernard sweating at his side, said he would gladly, but openly, pay some amount to the governing party in exchange for a reprieve. He had already gone public with what he said were demands for cash from high-ranking politicians. "It should be a policy of live and let live," he said.
One school of thought suggests that it was Mr. Singh's unbridled outburst that prompted the dance-bar ban. Others say it is a lowball political tactic by the ruling National Congress Party to appeal to the base of the Shiv Sena, its conservative, xenophobic opposition here - a constant refrain in the argument against dance bars is that they promote the trafficking of foreign women, chiefly Bangladeshis.
Whatever the roots of resentment, the threat of closing brought Shoma to the Maidan on a hot afternoon before work, after a two-hour train ride uptown. Shoma has been "in this line," as she puts it, for over six years, and the story she tells about her entry is a familiar one in the industry: her husband died, her daughter's school fees had to be paid, her father needed costly surgery to remove his gallbladder. She gave up a job as a housemaid and started dancing. Even these days, when business is slow, her take-home pay is twice what she earned as a maid.
At 8 o'clock that night, as Shoma arrived at work, a Hindu hymn came blaring from the speakers, and the waiters stood around the dance floor, their hands clasped in prayer. At a giant altar behind the bar, incense was offered to the Hindu god Tirupathi. Business was slow, one of the waiters said. Prayers were needed.
When the prayers were finished, the strobe lights came on and the waiters put on their ill-fitting double-breasted blazers. In a few minutes, a young woman in red walked to the middle of the room and lifted the dust from the dance floor to her forehead, in a gesture of prayer. Then she began to dance.