To a Different Drum

Last Sunday's Mumbai Mirror column:

The figure of the dancer has been the object of hypocritical censure, both in Indian society and Hindi cinema, for much too long. Surely, dance deserves something better?

When a self-taught dancer and choreographer makes a film about dance, surely one is justified in expecting some insight, or at least some feeling for dance? It is likely that Farah Khan is too preoccupied with ringing cash registers to listen to less celebratory noises coming from people like me - and anyway, as the fans/trolls never tire of telling us critics, I should have "left my brain at the door." But every film, especially one watched by as many people as Happy New Year, is a window to the way we think. By putting a bar dancer and a dance competition in the same movie, HNY held out the tantalizing hope of a bridge between two worlds that are usually kept far apart - the legitimate middle class dream nurtured by Nach Baliye and Dance India Dance, and the shadowy, subaltern domain of the 'ladies bar'. But then it went to reinforce the existing divide, even more starkly.

Perhaps I should back up a little. Dance is as much a child of Hindi cinema as music - but it has always received stepmotherly treatment. As a society, we nurture a deep-rooted set of moral judgements about dance. In the traditional framework of South Asian life, a woman who performed in front of men - whether her actual performance was erotic or not - was seen as sexually available. Patriarchy thus divided women into those who were marriageable - and those who could perform in public.

Through the 19th and 20th centuries, nationalist reform attempted to 'cleanse' our classical performing arts, hunting down the tawaifs and devadasis who had been its most professional and talented practitioners, and bringing in middle class women to rid dance and music of its earlier taintedness. But as the ethnomusicologist Anna Morcom has argued in her recent book Courtesans, Bar Girls and Dancing Boys, the taint did not disappear. All that happened was that a sanitised sphere of classical performance emerged, populated by middle class people, while traditional performing communities were pushed into a more illicit zone.

More recently, as part of the packaging of Bollywood as a global cultural export, Bollywood dance has also achieved a new social legitimacy. Middle class women, diasporic and resident Indians, take classes in Bollywood dance. Weddings (even among communities that would have baulked at the idea two decades ago) now include a revamped version of the traditional North Indian 'sangeet': where typically, the young women perform specially choreographed items, but 'everyone' dances -- often even the bride. There are discomfiting moments in which here too, women feel compelled to put their bodies on display -- but on the whole, there is certainly something wonderful about this unprecedented freeing up of physical expression.

And yet, some 75,000 women performing the same kind of dances, clad in similar blingy saris and lehngas, in Mumbai's dance bars, were deprived of a livelihood for nearly a decade by a state heady with moral outrage. The ban was eventually lifted last year after the Supreme Court ruled against it, but the pro-ban lobby tapped into what was clearly a popular form of hypocrisy, distinguishing between different kinds of dancing women. Popular Hindi films don't just reflect that hypocrisy; they fuel it.

A complicated version of the patriarchal divide about dance has always been in play in cinema. At one level, especially in the early years, acting was itself a disreputable profession, considered wrong for girls from 'good families'. Then there was the question of image. While film audiences (like reallife audiences) wanted to watch women dance, the heroine's virginal image couldn't be compromised. She was, for the longest time, only allowed to skip around a bit, and invariably only with the man she was going to marry: the hero. Barring the rare (though crucial) tragic courtesan roles: Pakeezah, Chandramukhi, Umrao Jaan, the heroine wasn't usually a professional dancer. She couldn't be a tawaif, or a cabaret dancer. An early way around this hurdle was the filmy trope of 'cultural programme' -- where the heroine's dancerly talent could be showcased in the safe, civilised confines of an auditorium.

The bourgeois acceptance of dance went alongside the rise of classically trained dancers like Waheeda Rehman, Vyjanthimala, and later Hema Malini, Jaya Prada and Meenakshi Sheshadri. More recently, the focus is on a dance contest: Dil Toh Paagal Hai, Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi, and now films like ABCD and Mad About Dance embrace more physically strenuous, professional practice. But films featuring bar dancers - and there have been many, from Madhur Bhandarkar's Chandni Bar to Benny Aur Bablu to Hansal Mehta's recent CityLights - do not dare suggest that they might actually enjoy their work. Or that it might involve any skill at all. This makes Mohini a radical departure. For her, dance is a passion: "Eajy lagta hai Mohini ka dance? Eajy nahi hai. Dance ek pooja hai. Art hai, art."

But then the film undercuts the pride she takes in her dance, by labelling her as a "saleable woman" and never apologising. It insists on a sob story that 'drove her' to this work -- denying, like most media coverage, the fact that most bar dancers were Bhantus, from North Indian communities where women have traditionally danced for a living, and where lack of patronage had begun driving them to sex work. It reinforces the idea that she only deserves respect if she dances for the country. And even when she does get what she wants -- a dance school where little children touch her feet -- it makes that seem cloying and ridiculous. The wait for a braver cinema carries on.

Book Review: Courtesans, Bar Girls and Dancing Boys: The Illicit Worlds of Indian Dance

Courtesans, Bar Girls and Dancing Boys:
The Illicit Worlds of Indian Dance.
By Anna Morcom. 298 pp. Hachette, 2014.

In Kamal Amrohi’s Pakeezah (1971), a nobleman enters a train compartment and becomes entranced by the beauty of a sleeping woman’s uncovered feet. He leaves her a note that says: “Aapke pair dekhe, bahut haseen hain. Inhen zameen pe mat utaariyega, maile ho jayenge.” That poetic injunction, telling the beloved that she is too ethereal to descend to earth, has become cinematic shorthand for nazaakat, for the delicacy of old-world romance. But it is also a metaphorical message to the tawaif, whose very profession involves placing her feet on the ground. The dancing girl is being told that dancing defiles her.

The social history of Indian dance has been hugely defined by that idea of defilement, and Anna Morcom’s book, Courtesans, Bar Girls and Dancing Boys: The Illicit Worlds of Indian Dance, is the first rigorous academic investigation into how this history informs our present. Morcom shows how dance and dancers in India are located in a grid of class, caste and gender, a grid whose traditional moorings have been realigned but not erased by modernity. 

The Indian performing arts, she argues, emerged in a patriarchal framework where the dynamics of power and sexuality were inseparable from those of social status — men never perform for women, nor high status women for lower status men. Those who performed were lower in status than their audience: in terms of gender (by being female, or being effeminate males) and often also caste. Dancing in public, particularly, has long been treated as a coded signifier of sexual availability — even if, as in most instances, the male audience’s sexual access to the performer’s body remained theoretical.

An ethnomusicologist by training, Morcom’s rich combination of archival research and ethnographic fieldwork is especially valuable in a field satiated with opinions but starved for real research. The book’s first chapter is historical, describing how the Indian performing arts were transformed by a combination of Victorian morality and nationalist reform. In what are known as the Anti-Nautch campaigns, colonial administrators and nationalists came together in their distaste for what they saw as feudal sexual mores. The discourse of social reform was used to stigmatise devadasis and tawaifs, their identity as skilled cultural practitioners subsumed by their perceived sexual dangerousness. 

In a remarkable double move, the marginalisation of these women paved the way for upper caste/upper class women to enter the “reformed” performing arts (from which the earlier dynamic of transgressive sexuality was now carefully erased). If women from tawaif/devadasi backgrounds wished to perform in public, they had to first perform respectability, by abandoning the mujra, moving out of the kotha and, ideally, marrying — thus converting themselves from “Bai” into “Begum”, or “Devi”.

This part of the story is perhaps familiar. But Morcom’s real revelation is that “nautch” did not disappear. “Rather" [she writes], "it went underground, involving far more prostitution, less ‘choice’ and a lower status for the women involved”. It is this process that ended up creating the “illicit worlds” of the book’s title.

The first such illicit milieu that Morcom explores is that of hereditary female performers, the majority of whom belong to a set of interrelated tribes or communities collectively identified by the term “Bhatu”. Drawing on colonial ethnographers like William Crooke and her own interviews in Tonk, Sultanpur and Pune, Morcom discusses some of the better-known Bhatu communities: Nats, Kanjars, Bedias, Kolhatis and Deredars/Gandharvas. Very briefly, she asks some crucial questions of each, such as whether the men were also performers, whether the community does other kinds of work too, and the extent to which dance as a livelihood has given way to sex work.

This is the background for what is one of the book’s most important arguments, laid out in a later chapter on dance bars: that the vast majority of Mumbai’s estimated 75,000 bar girls in 2005 were Bhatus of one sort or another, and that the campaign against Mumbai’s dance bars thus “represented a continuation of the history of exclusion of these hereditary performing communities from a livelihood and identity of dance.” Given the powerful discursive similarities — the appeal to rights and the “liberation” of women on one hand, and protection of “morality” and “Indian culture” on the other — as well as the actual continuity in the communities targeted, Morcom argues that the pro-ban movement needs to be examined as “Anti-Nautch II”.  

Further, for most of these women from communities such as Nat, where performing arts had ceased to be a livelihood since Independence, “dancing in bars had been a form of rehabilitation from sex work”. Crucially, Morcom points out that even English-language journalists and writers critical of the ban were content to produce narratives of women having been “driven to dance”, sometimes in conjunction with bargirls who, Morcom suggests, knew that a simplistic “majboori” narrative would get them more sympathy than the truth. In sum, even the well-intentioned continue to display a blindness to this complex, chequered history.

The other “illicit world of dance” Morcom addresses is even less acknowledged: that of dance performances by transgender males or female impersonators. Men dance as female in all sorts of non-elite traditional contexts — Nautanki, Ramlila, wedding shows and wedding processions, launda naach/Bidesiya in Bihar, and all-male Lavani performances called Binbaikacha Lavani. Some only perform femininity when dancing, but many others identify as kothis, and dance is an important part of this transgressive sexual identity. Morcom’s detailed accounts of kothis open up a new space for discussion of how performance and sexuality can be linked, though again, as with dancing women, cross-dressed male performers are not necessarily providers of sexual services.

The one “non-illicit” chapter is about the rise of Bollywood dance as a middle class activity that can even be proclaimed as a profession. Morcom persuasively contrasts this new public legitimacy with the continued illegitimacy and shame that haunts the bargirls. Yet, she sees some hope for wider attitudinal change in the middle class woman’s ability to perform Bollywood dances without stigma.

This is an ambitious book. The writing — especially the introduction — occasionally feels repetitive, clunky in an academic way. But thankfully Morcom rarely uses theory as a crutch. Her arguments are thoughtful and emerge organically from her fascinating material. Though the book’s vast and varied canvas can often make it feel like several separate books, Morcom has done an enormous service by bringing these worlds to notice. Most importantly, she has given us a lens through which we must begin to connect the highly visible forms of Indian public culture — whether the classical arts or Bollywood — with these profoundly invisibilised ones.

A truncated version of this review was published in the Asian Age.

Bring On The Dancing Girls

An essay published in Tehelka magazine in November 2009.

The figure of the tawaif continues to haunt popular culture, but what sent the real ones into obscurity?

From Umrao Jaan to Pakeezah to Chandramukhi, the figure of the tawaif has been a figure of fascination in the popular South Asian imagination: the bejewelled, sensuous dancing girl with a golden voice – and almost always, a golden heart. To our Hindi-film-overloaded eyes, therefore, it may seem strange for an instant to look upon the black and white images of women who populate The Other Song, Saba Dewan’s film about tawaifs, looking out of the frame at us with a gravitas we do not expect.

But the gravitas is ephemeral. In one revealing moment, the camera pans an old album, with the moving finger on screen stopping at a pleasantly plump face. The grainy voice of an old sarangi player says, “Yeh Rasoolan Bai hain.” The filmmaker asks, “Kya yeh hamesha itne saade kapde pehentin thi? (Did she always wear such plain clothes?)” The reply is brusque and quietly ironic: “Mujra naach toh karna nahi tha. (Well, she wasn’t going to dance the mujra.)”

Rasoolan Bai gave up the mujra – the expressive, sometimes suggestive kathak-based dance that accompanied the tawaif ’s music – in 1948. At the same time that she moved out of her kotha and into a gali ka makaan in Banaras, the woman whose aching songs were perhaps India’s most famous renditions of the thumri stopped performing in her own city. The timing is remarkable. As India and Pakistan entered independent nationhood, the thumri was taken out of the kotha. A musical genre whose very form — intimate, expressive, always sung in a first-person female voice — had emerged from the courtesan’s salon, had, in order to survive in the bright light of modernity, to move into the concert hall, the radio station, the cinema. And in order to be heard in this new world, the tawaif herself had to become a ganewali or – in even more Sanskritised form – a gayika.

The most famous of such successful metamorphoses is that of Akhtari Bai Faizabadi into Begum Akhtar. The courtesan who had achieved fame in her teens became a respectably married lady, even giving up her singing career for years, “only to emerge into the public domain transformed into a national symbol iconic of the courtly musical culture which had shaped her,” writes scholar Regula Qureshi. But the nation exacted its toll. In order to be the voice of a new India, Akhtari Bai had to live a double life – her newfound respectable status was dependent on dissociating herself from every shred of her past, while the power she had over her audience, what independent scholar and historian Saleem Kidwai calls “chemistry”, derived in large measure from that very past.



Saba Dewan’s fascinating film, The Other Song, derives its name from a similar instance of doubling, of a repressed erotic self. Told by a respected Banarasi musician called Shivkumar Shastri that Rasoolan Bai had once recorded a different version of her famous Bhairavi thumri “Lagat karejwa mein chot (My heart is wounded)”, Dewan set out in search of the lesser-known variation. As she asks musician after musician (and later, tawaif after tawaif) if they’ve ever heard the version that goes, “Lagat jobanwa mein chot (My breasts are wounded)”, without success, we begin to see glimpses of a hidden world, a world whose frank sexuality and often joyful bawdiness were pushed deep below the surface, often by its own practitioners. Song after song turns out to have had its lyrics altered to suit ‘respectable’ tastes – from soibe (sleep) to jaibe (go), choli (blouse) to odhni (veil).

The tawaifs of North India (like South India’s devadasis) came from hereditary performing communities. According to historian Katherine Butler Brown, the term tawaif was first used to describe communities of female singers and dancers in Dargah Quli Khan’s Muraqqa’-i-Dehli (1739-41). But it was not until the early 19th century that it became a catch-all term. Even then, Brown argues, before 1857 there was always a distinction made “between elite tawaifs who were highly cultured, highly refined, models of etiquette and masters of performance genres, who might only have had a single sexual patron in their lifetime; and tawaifs who were less talented, less well trained, and thus more dependent on sex work”

BUT AFTER 1857, when British Crown Law came into effect throughout India, all tawaifs were criminalised alongside common prostitutes, with court judgements stating that singing and dancing were ‘vestigial’ activities while their real income came from prostitution. Meanwhile, the rising middle class, “influenced by Victorian values and empowered by colonial law, increasingly dismissed the tawaif as immoral and decadent, and began various moves to ‘rescue’ Hindustani music from them,” says Brown. The campaign for a national music — cleansed of its associations with tawaifs and Muslim musicians — aimed to make it appropriate for middle class women. In a stunning double move, the very processes that enabled ‘respectable’ women to come out of purdah worked to invisibilise the highly skilled, often highly educated, women who had been ‘in public’ all along: the tawaif.

With the decline of the feudal patronage that had sustained the kotha and its arts, many tawaifs explored other options. All India Radio (AIR) in its early days was almost entirely dependent on the ganewalis, as were recording companies: it was tawaifs like Gauhar Jan who were the first gramophone superstars. But in the early 2000s, a skilled singer like Saira Begum (one of the women from tawaif backgrounds that Dewan shot with) gets a recording slot at AIR in Banaras because of a zealous Italian pupil, only to be humiliated with a ‘musical theory’ examination she cannot possibly pass.

As the new guardians of music locked it up and shut the door, women from tawaif backgrounds entered first the theatre company, and later, the movies. “Cinema becomes a part of tawaif history, documenting tawaifi arts we’d never get to see – and also providing a way for the tawaif to reinvent herself,” says Kidwai. “And this reinvention was both on screen and off it. If Hema Malini in Sharafat wears plumes and a tiara to do a mujra, one can’t complain of inauthenticity: many real tawaifs like Siddheshwari learnt to sing in English – even if it was Twinkle Twinkle Little Star!” The tawaif’s remaking of self, as Kidwai points out, could take more radical forms: such as in the case of Nargis, whose mother Jaddan Bai prepared her for a cinematic career by teaching her everything except how to sing. The stardom of Nargis – the ganewali’s daughter divorced from the gana – demonstrated one route by which the tawaif could make it in the modern world. (It is tempting to conclude that this was the necessary obverse of the rise of the playback singer – the disembodied female voice who retained respectability by never being seen on screen.)

Cinema, though, isn’t an accessible career for most women. The two other films in Saba Dewan’s trilogy address more subterranean worlds of female performance. Delhi-Mumbai-Delhi (D-M-D) centres on Riya, who dances in a bar in Mumbai but is from Delhi, while Naach is about girls who dance to Bollywood numbers on massive, rickety stages in the town of Sonpur, between Muzaffarpur and Patna, during the annual cattle fair. For Dewan, the differences between these categories of women outweigh any similarities. Her D-M-D protagonist Riya, from an ordinary working class background, may have gained confidence and decision-making power within her family, but she remains wage labour. “The tawaif was much more her own mistress: the owner of the space, the person who paid the accompanists,” says Dewan.

Whether we like it or not, though, the tawaif remains the imagined reference point. “There is an attempt to recreate the mujra past, mediated via Hindi films,” acknowledges Dewan. “In Bombay bars, the girls wear so-called Indian costume – ghaghra choli, partly because it’s easier to get license for ‘Indian dance’, but also because it fits the audience’s appetite. The man there wants to imagine Rekha dancing for him, at least.” Even the filmic bar dancer draws on the pure tawaif of the 1970s Hindi movie: Tabu in Chandni Bar must remain chaste while working in a bar, just like Asha Parekh in the kotha of Main Tulsi Tere Aangan Ki.

But the relationship between bar dancers and tawaifs runs deeper. Ethnomusicologist Anna Morcom estimates that 80-90 percent of Mumbai bar dancers, “by informal accounts”, are hereditary professional performers from tribes like the Deredar, Nat, Bedia and Kanjar. They have also been the target of a moral campaign eerily similar to the Anti-Nautch campaigns of a century ago. In 2005, a ban on dancing in Mumbai bars made 75,000 such women redundant. It is still in force.

In early 20th century India, it was dance that seemed to lie at the root of moral opprobrium. The tawaif gave up the mujra to acquire respectability as a concert singer or actress. But in a newly-globalised India where ‘Bollywood dance’ is now a legitimitised ‘cool’ activity for the urban middle classes – think NRI/urban weddings, Shiamak Davar classes, TV shows like Boogie Woogie and Nach Baliye, feeding back into films like Dilli-6 or Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi – how does dance re-acquire its immoral connotations when performed by women in bars? That is a new double standard that will take longer to resolve.

From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 6, Issue 44, Dated November 07, 2009