GOVERNING SEXUALITY, CONSTITUTING STATES

Bharatiya Bar Girls Union (Indian Bar Girls Union), Nityananda Hall, Mumbai, field observations:

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In a large hall in Mumbai on an overcast July afternoon in 2005, some one hundred women have gathered to react to an imminent statewide ban on dance bars. The bar dancers are young, mostly in their midtwenties, dressed neatly in salwaar suits, trousers, and saris. Several dance bar owners are also present, not far from where I sit, but it's the women's voices that reverberate throughout the hall as each steps to the microphone. One woman wonders how bar dancers could be robbed of their jobs because of what they wear while performing, since the women in Hindi films (aka Bollywood) and discos dress so much more revealingly. Why, then, doesn't the government take notice of the film actresses? What about the women who perform in discos? Another woman counters state officials' accusations that dancing in bars is "easy money," lamenting the hardships of the work, the need to take loans from taxi drivers at times, among other indignities. Other bar dancers are intent on distinguishing themselves from sex workers. Many of them wonder about the government's claim to be "helping them" by closing the bars.

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With less than a month to go before some seventy-five thousand bar dancers lose their jobs due to a hastily passed state law, women's concerns, anxieties, and anger are palpable at the union meeting. Mere months before, a prominent elected official unexpectedly proposed such a ban on dance bars — where fully clothed groups of women danced to popular Hindi film songs for a male clientele — initially applying only to the state capital, Mumbai, but then encompassing the entire western Indian state of Maharashtra. It is puzzling, the women note, that state officials singled out dance bars over brothels, Bollywood, and bars and discos at posh hotels. Even though the bars had been a staple of the provincial state's nightlife for over two decades, subject to regulation, and a significant source of revenue, officials were now stridently condemning these bars for "corrupting rural youth" and "damaging the (state's) culture."

Urging attention to these inconsistencies, the bar dancers at the meeting ask why dance bars, why now, in order to understand (and overturn) the regional state's edict. But interpreting the Maharashtra state's capricious actions is not easy, not least because of the confoundingly arbitrary discourses justifying the ban. The initial allegations of cultural depravity soon give way to criticisms that dancers are mak