Politics of the Leg and the Peg

To an Englishman, bars do not dance, period. But, dancing bars, as people from Mumbai understand it, do rock. To those who live in this metropolis, bars where young girls and women dance, are characteristic of their city. And they dance a very routine folk dance that is folksy only in Bollywood movies. A vigorous throwing of the hips, some very angular exercises of the upper limbs, and a few classical dance steps that have angles melting erotically into glides.

This is the staple pop-erotic seduction offered by the dance bars of Mumbai. From the very young to some almost-old women dance on stamp-size floors, to Bollywood songs. But the odd hours these women are in the act is what is crucial. They start a couple of hours after offices close, and continue into the early hours of the next morning. There are enough people in this city that will pay through their noses, just to see these damsels sway. There are others who are willing to gamble away an entire month’s earnings in quasi patronage, throwing their money in denominations of Rs 100 or Rs 10, around the gyrating hips, or the swiveling heads of the garishly draped bar girls.

So when Mumbai’s new police commissioner chose to lead his entire army of constabulary and officers to raid these dancing bars, or dance bars, in an election year, not many asked why? Most asked, why now? But, the best informed asked, “But of course, but for whom?”

The reason is really simple. These bars have been running in this city for years together. They provide employment to many, and pass on the extraordinary over heads they incur to their customers. A beer that costs Rs 48 in a wine shop, and charged Rs 90 in a bar, costs a dance-bar customer anything between Rs 150 to Rs 250. That is because, in a dance bar, the waiter-to-table ratio is at the very least 1:1; they employ beefy young men who may be, and in most cases are, teetotalers, to usher out politely but firmly, a customer drunk to combustion.

They employ, besides, young men to deliver the girls who dance provocatively to the ogling post-business hours’ market of men, to their modest homes in the labyrinthine alleys of the city’s impoverished districts. But, only 90 per cent of the girls who dance in this city’s dance bars are delivered safely to their homes. Ten percent, and we are being very licentious here, are hired out as prostitutes, treated to either dingy hotel rooms, or empty homes, and serviced as commercial sex workers. And, in more ways than one, are paid premium rates over your regular hooker. The reason, of course is, that the hours spent swaying to catch somebody’s eye, the hours of pre-coital play in a public domain, are overhead costs passed on to the customer already softened with booze at five times the market rate.

So, when one does the maths in reverse, if one assumes the city cops’ 700 bar girls from 52 bars is ten percent of those who are actually CSWs, there are a few things that are not part of the commonly believed truths about them. Most are not exploited women, most are not forced into the profession, and few are there without chance of escape. Most are the privileged among the underprivileged. Let us not confuse them with the pathos of the individual biography. Many are there by force of circumstances, but like all donation college engineers, they make a mark, and grow ahead of the others of their ilk, due to the conspicuous conspiracy of opportunity, looks, and catching the wave on the crest. And in the starved and willing-to-pay-for-sex market, winsomeness plays a huge part. This is especially true of a market where the majority are checking out a chance to get out of the system, and its own brand of degradation, by finding the first good client, lover, boyfriend who can buy their ticket to mainstream society.

Those who play the market know it. But they are in the business because everybody involved knows the rules. This subaltern market exists and thrives the same way as many other city enterprises do, in the faultlines between the good, civilised society and the poor, wretched one. It exists and grows like moss, over moist cracks in the edifice of any metropolis. And it is the truest coalition of the willing.

It is well known that most of these bars grease the palms of those who are authorised to prey on them. As is the nature of this business, most of the involved tread the very thin line when it comes to the law. It is also true, that most of the laws that the Mumbai Police use to book them have been formulated long before this business took off, and despite their newly bared teeth, are essentially laws that were used to threaten the bar owners. It is this threat that was used to extort protection money from these bars by local policemen.

So, when the new commissioner raided the bar in a fell swoop, it was so much the same thing that has happened across the city every now and then. Only the scale was different. No police commissioner has ever led his entire brass in one coordinated, strategic pincer move against a set of girlie bars. And it stretches credulity to believe that the new commissioner thought up the game plan only to clean up the city. For one, the bars are soft target. They are also moneyed. Though it is clear that a police raid means no money for cops, it could mean using state machinery to apply the squeeze. Elections are still only hotting up.

(The Mumbai police have raided some more bars after a fortnight of the first raid on February 25. This piece was published in The Free Press Journal, Mumbai on March 17.)