South Asian History and Culture

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Calcutta cabaret: dance of pleasure or perversion?

Aishika Chakraborty

To cite this article: Aishika Chakraborty (2022): Calcutta�cabaret: dance of pleasure or

perversion?, South Asian History and Culture, DOI: 10.1080/19472498.2022.2045144

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/19472498.2022.2045144

Published online: 27 Feb 2022.

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SOUTH ASIAN HISTORY AND CULTURE
https://doi.org/10.1080/19472498.2022.2045144

Calcutta cabaret: dance of pleasure or perversion?

Aishika Chakraborty
School of Women’s Studies, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India

ABSTRACT Keywords
The 1970s dawned upon unanticipated political reversals in Bengal – the Cabaret; Miss Shefali; erotic
violent spate of the Naxalite movement, followed by the Bangladesh labour; apasanskriti; moral
Liberation War and a fresh flux of refugees from the other side of the policing
border – together triggering disruptive turmoil within its already volatile
landscape. While the National Emergency of 1975 witnessed a severe
crackdown on civil liberties, Bengal voted to power a new Left Front
government in 1977, eliciting a radical turnaround in political culture,
redefined in terms of progressive and anti-capitalist movements.
By the late 1970s, the cultural politics of the state, however, gained
a new twist when a new polemical rhetoric called ‘apasanskriti’ or pervert
culture came to hold its sway over the official discourse on culture,
imbricated with obsessions on sexual morality and cultural decadence.
The protracted tussle between culture and corruption, pleasure and pol­
itics was nowhere as stark as it was in the realm of commercial theatre,
where ‘obscene’ cabaret dancing in ‘mundane’ family dramas invited
strident flak and threats of state censorship for allegedly selling sleaze
on stage.
One name that emerged as a visceral symbol of moral decadence was
that of ‘Miss Shefali’ – the iconic cabaret queen of postcolonial Calcutta.
Sitting within the critical interface of the second and third wave feminist
movements, my paper locates Shefali as a conscious agent of the politics
of pleasure, whose erotic dance had torn apart the binaries between
good/bad, victimhood/agency, coercion/choice, challenging simulta­
neously the dominant stereotypes of the nation. Played upon by
a patriarchal system that consumed her body, Shefali too claimed to
have consumed the market economy by resisting, twisting, and subvert­
ing it. If the power of desire serves as an antidote to the theory of
commodification, Shefali dared to be ‘bad’, turning her dancing body
into a site of fantasy and pleasure. As the crusade against apasanskriti
by the liberal democratic state shut out many such bodies-marked as lewd
and libidinous-from the gentrified spaces of performance, this paper
privileges the voices of disenfranchised dancers who talked back against
the moral policing and sexual double standards of the leftist intelligentsia
and the state, for denying them rights to livelihood, occupation, and erotic
labour in a changing market economy.

Introduction
On 20 May 1983, Jatin Chakravorty, the Minister-in-Charge of the Public Works Department of the
Government of West Bengal, kicked up a storm by refusing to give permission to Usha Uthup, the
reigning pop-singer based in Calcutta, to perform at Mahajati Sadan, one of the many state-run
auditoriums of Bengal. Playing the culture cop, the minister called her songs ‘a slight on Bengal’s

CONTACT Aishika Chakraborty [email protected]

© 2022 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 A. CHAKRABORTY

cultural tradition’, as he objected to the obscene manner the pop singer ‘swayed her hips while
singing’.1 In an interview given to a leading daily, Ananda Bazar Patrika, he claimed that ‘songs and
other performances of Disco are perverted culture or apasanskriti and the tastes of those persons
who sing such songs are very low and those who listen to such songs are also depraved’.2 Using his
discretion as the chair of the board of trustees of the said hall, Chakravorty declared that he would
not allow apasanskriti to run amok at any Government-run auditorium. He further suspected secret
hands of the reactionary establishment behind the spread of such loud and raunchy music, which
was given a boost during the Emergency to degrade Bengali culture, a conspiracy that was aimed to
kill ‘our noble tradition’ and ‘to tender the Bengali youth backboneless affecting their moral fibre’.3
The minister’s crusade against apasanskriti, however, bluntly backfired. In a prompt riposte,
Usha Uthup, who had by then a nationwide following with a record number of Bollywood hits to
her credit, moved the court filing a defamation suit against Chakravorty. With unmatched resi­
lience, Usha countered the moral censure of the politician. ‘I was a cabaret4 artiste. A cabaret artiste,
according to a lot of us, is someone who strips in a nightclub but it is not true’.5 In fact, and quite on
the contrary, the burly voice of Trinca’s nightclub snapped back, ‘cabaret (actually) means a floor-
show which I am’!6 Making an Indian traditional sartorial identity including the sari, bindi, gajra,
and bangles a part of the performance, Usha smashed the prototype of a nightclub singer. With
a voice that was meant for ‘bad girls’ of Bollywood and slotted for item songs, she ventured to sing
Rabindrasangeet before national and international dignitaries. Carving out a new style in cabaret
Usha also set herself a class apart from her contemporary cabaret performers of Park Street. In the
court records, it was further pointed out that she never danced, while singing nor did she allow
anybody to dance at the time of her musical programme either on the stage or in the Hall.7
The legal proceedings unfolded a new discourse on culture, redefining pop and jazz as
a subversive alternative to a dominant classical tradition. Far from being vulgar or decadent, it was
argued, Usha’s unique timber had offered the nation new versions of pleasure, sexuality and desire,
dismantling the dominant sonic politics of femininity. Usha’s entry into Bollywood music fittingly
coincided with the rise of Latin American and African strings and drums as they together made
‘disco’, the quintessential beat of the 1980s, integral to the nation’s soundscape.8 Subsequently, the
Court adjudged the decision to ban her songs arbitrary, irrational, unreasonable, and contrary to the
policy of the State Government.9 Citing Article 19 (1) (a), the judicial bench adjudicated that ‘no
Minister or Statutory Authority can appoint himself the guardian of the citizens’ mind and arbitrarily
and capriciously decide what song a person can sing or what type of dance a person can dance, and if
one does so he would be reducing the freedom of speech and expression guaranteed under the
Constitution to a mockery’.10 The damage suit further mentioned that the minister’s charges of
apasanskriti or pervert culture that provoked organized mob demonstrations by the cadres of the
Revolutionary Socialist Party, held within the precinct of Rabindra Sadan to disrupt Usha’s show, was
tantamount to a denial of natural justice. As the petitioner is a singer by profession, denial of such
rights to use of a public hall by a public authority for the purpose of holding shows was considered an
infringement on her fundamental right to practice her profession. Drawing a quick curtain over the
entire issue, Justice P. C. Barooah of the Calcutta High Court quashed the ban on the performance of
Usha Uthup in state-run or private halls of the state. Chakravorty found himself embarrassingly out-
of-the-way, even within the Left Front. On 7 July 1983, the Home Secretary of the Chief Minister
issued a prompt disclaimer saying that there would be no restrictions on staging musicals except on
cabaret, snake dance, and belly dance in state-run auditoriums.11
The verdict that unequivocally set the songster free of any charges of apasanskriti, however,
remained ambiguous about the constitutional rights of equality, freedom of expression and occupa­
tion of her fellow cabaret artists who danced the nights away in the city’s nightclubs. While Usha
Uthup (Iyer), by birth a Tamil Brahmin, with her expensive taste for Kanjivaram saris and Western
tunes, could push her case to the court, cashing on her affluence, influence, education, and national
fame, the erotic dancers from poor refugee Bengali families performing at similar entertainment
venues of Calcutta could not, seeped as they were in obscenity, dirtiness, and the horrors of sexuality.
SOUTH ASIAN HISTORY AND CULTURE 3

Usha, by dint of her class-caste status, could have smothered all charges of perversion raised against
her but apasanskriti as an obsessive moral preoccupation of the leftist state and intelligentsia
continued to raise its controversial heads throughout the last decade of the twentieth century.
And one name that emerged as a metonym of cultural and visceral decadence was
‘Miss Shefali’ nee Arati Das, the refugee girl from East-Pakistan who rose to become the
iconic cabaret queen of Calcutta’s classiest nightclubs during the 1960s-70s. If the crusade
against apasanskriti involved a simultaneous reproduction of a progressive Bengali culture in
sync with the nation's unsullied moral order, Miss Shefali dared to be bad. Situating at the
critical interface of second and third wave feminist movements my paper celebrates the
subversive journey of the queen of Calcutta cabaret as I foreground her as a conscious
agent of her desire and pleasure, mapping her inimitable cathartic gestures that thwarted
the dominant stereotypes of the nation by troubling the leaky binaries between coercion and
choice. Based on personal interviews and archival research, my paper also turns the search­
light on the many unexplored journeys of pseudonymous cabaret girls from Calcutta, who
walked through dimly lit pathways of pleasure before being routed out of the spaces of
performance. Years after their eviction they talked back against the moral policing and sexual
double standard of the democratic state, which had denied their rights to livelihood, occupa­
tion, and cultural expression, by calling out their dance of pleasure as obscene acts of
perversion.

‘I am a dancer, not a prostitute’12: third-wave or otherwise

Shadow and substance mingle. The music is just right and the spotlight is on, dead centre, of a quickly deserted
dance floor. The cymbals crash as Shefali sways it from the wings to thunderous clapping. The smile is tired, the
eyes are heavy with sleep but the glimmer on the cheek sparkles and the lids are washed in electric blue dust. . . .

. . . She knows that she is a sure winner in her hula costume of a sensational grass skirt and with a flaming red
hibiscuses tucked behind her ear. Shefali glides lazily from table, tousling a head, daintily picking out
a handkerchief from a coat pocket, blowing a kiss, making eyes, all the while gyrating her swiveling hips in
the motion of a Hawaiian dance. “Hello darling” she whispers huskily to a rather shy looking young man, the
odd fish among the regulars . . . .

. . . Almost sure that her magic has worked, sexy Shefali waves him goodbye and moves on to another table . . . 13

Overlooking Nil Pukur, the dewy-eyed pond on Jessore Road in North Calcutta, stands the
florescent green building where Miss Shefali spent the last years of her life. The letterbox down
the stairs carried both her names – the ordinary Arati Das, choosing to keep her more celebrated
exotic self (Miss Shefali) within brackets. The small flat that opens to a dark doorway displays on its
pillar a framed black and white poster of Chowringhee, the blockbuster stage-play that once hit the
jackpot of Calcutta’s commercial theatre with her sensational cabaret, while supposedly vitiating the
sacral space of theatre by her insalubrious presence.14 Vintage porcelain dolls in a showcase point
towards her long association with patrons of the White Town. Some old photographs here and
there: a framed one with the matinee idol Uttam Kumar rests on the table and one with Siddhartha
Shankar Ray, the erstwhile chief minister of West Bengal hung on the plastered wall. They make
loud claims to legitimacy, calling out for her place in the middle-class domain of Calcutta culture.
The iron trunk under the bed has in store more magic moments–the Hawaiian grass skirt, which
she flaunted in the Lido Room of Firpo’s, or the sheer blue georgette pyjama that once shone on the
theatre billboards of Hatibagan. Body memoires wrapped up in old newspapers and naphthalene
balls.
4 A. CHAKRABORTY

A poster of the play, Chowringhee highlighting the full dancing body of the cabaret girl surrounded by cropped
up images of her leading co-actors: Author’s personal collection

‘So . . . what do you want to know’? (ki jante chao balo?) Seated like an empress on a faded plastic
chair, the cabaret queen of yesteryears would ask me every time. How did Calcutta make an exotic
‘Miss Shefali’ out of the half-starved refugee girl, Arati Das? How many Shefalis had appeared on the
same night on different stages of Calcutta? How had she moved from one night to another, from
upscale nightclub to the psychedelic revolving stages of theatre, from art-house cinema to one-wall
shows or folk theatres? Branded with obscenity, how did she break apart many stereotypes,
countering the familiar tropes on sexual objectification and commodification?
Born Arati Das in March 1947, the youngest daughter of a penniless refugee family from East
Pakistan, Shefali spent her childhood in abject poverty in a riverside shanty in North Calcutta. Her
graduate father became jobless with the dislocation, forcing her mother to work as a cook in nearby
households. To escape the hardship, 11-year old Arati took up the job of a full-time maid in an
Anglo-Indian household in Calcutta’s Chandni-Chowk area.15 A handsome salary with ‘bed and
board’16 and some frightening nights of sexual molestation kept the young Arati awake in her sleep.
Here she met Vivian Hansen, the famous jazz singer of Mocambo restaurant, who offered her the
job of a cabaret dancer at the Firpo’s Hotel – a job that by its very description defied all norms of
sexual morality. She shut her eyes to the moral condemnation and waltzed through shaky ground to
earn honour (ijjat) and some extra indulgence in life.17 Given the subtext of sexual labour implicit
in this profession that demanded open seduction and semi-nudity, Shefali’s choice of becoming
a nightclub dancer had baffled a senior police officer at Lalbazar, who had given her some well-
meaning advice before the issuance of the cabaret licence. To that unsolicited advice the dauntless
girl, who was yet to touch her teens, had retorted, ‘If you can look after me just like your daughter
and take care of my entire family, I will never dance, I promise you!’18
An instant show-stealer, Miss Shefali became the first cabaret dancer of colour in a Calcutta
nightclub, a space where race, class, caste, and gender were densely imbricated. ‘Without knowing
the barebones of cabaret what did you dance and how?’ I would ask, to which she answered with
a large grin,
SOUTH ASIAN HISTORY AND CULTURE 5

Dance! That was the one thing I had loved since my birth! I needed nothing else if I could dance. I was a quick
learner and practiced day and night with utmost rigor. I simply danced my heart out.19

Was this pleasure of dancing the secret of her meteoric rise? How else did a nobody like her go on to
displace the entrenched Eurasian dancers of that circuit and curve a niche for herself? Either before
or after Shefali, no other dancer had been able to embody in quite the same way the changing
dynamics of a time, encapsulating in herself the desired cocktail of fantasy, desire, and erotic
pleasure. In the absence of ‘genuine’ or ‘authentic’ cabaret dancers the European nightclubs also
found it cheaper and easier to keep the nights alive through this young aspirant who adapted herself
with astonishing compliance in an alien world of exotic pleasure. As the first Bengali cabaret dancer,
trained under European dancers, she hit the road with some extraordinary moves, setting a new
trend in Calcutta cabaret from the 1960s. The act of transferring and transmitting an alien exotic
style onto her body remained a tortuous one; yet her magnetic charm was such that ‘an entire
generation of nightclub-hoppers of cosmopolitan Kolkata succumbed to her oomph as she gyrated
to the moves of Cha Cha Cha, Samba, Charleston, Can Can, Arabian Belly, Oriental, Rumba and
Hawaiian’.20
Was it a matter of choice or sheer compulsion that led her to breach the line of morality? Was it
a desperate call to eke out a mouthful or an orgasm of her desiring body? Can a figure like Shefali
ever challenge patriarchy, male dominance, and social control, or does she remain a pawn at the
hands of patriarchy?21 Feminists are still divided to settle the fate of erotic dancers. They are yet to
decide whether exotic dance is a road towards empowerment or just a one-way trip to hell! While
radical feminists oppose exotic dance on grounds of commodification and sexual objectification,
others distinguish between the agency of a female wilfully using her body and a male acting upon
her body.22 In her influential work on exotic dance in American nightclubs/strip-joints Judith Lynn
Hanna argues that the way dancers’ power feeds into male-dominated systems, remains unantici­
pated sometimes by a purely feminist perspective. While the feminist second wave considers
dancers as infantilized, hapless, and exploited victims of patriarchal lust and avarice, the third
wave feminist lens tries to project female agency through the art of seduction.23 The exotic dancers’
experiences of power, pleasure, pain, and exploitation cannot be flatly reduced to the binary
opposition between liberation and exploitation. In her auto-ethnographic study R. Danielle Egan
sets down the nuanced and paradoxical facets of dancers’ experiences as she observes that women in
the clubs slipped between easy binaries – neither victims nor conscious agents. Some dancers do
believe that they are engaged in strategies of subversion; but such sporadic acts of resistance, Egan
asserts, rarely change the structural inequities embedded in the nightclubs.24 Katherine Frank,
herself a stripper and a feminist scholar, however, considers exotic dancing as a highly performative
act that involves a conscious, creative, and sometimes pleasurable kind of reflexive masquerade.25
Here, power is unequivocally tilted in favour of dancers as they claim to possess not just personal
agency but active control over their clients. Far from being perverse deviants, pawns of patriarchy,
or alienated and disaffected workers, echoes Jensiné Martha Anahita, dancers are active agents who
create and maintain a great deal of personal power within the environment of the strip club. In this
stylized, naturalized, and ritualized public display of sexual acts, erotic dancers hold the power to
subvert, seizing it for themselves, and making money from it.26
And, if male gaze turns her into an object, a dancer too returns the gaze of her clients and
patrons. In analysing the social and psychological stakes for the male heterosexual consumer,
Michael Uebel’s ‘Striptopia’ traces the relays between power and powerlessness, feminism and
antifeminism, utopia and dystopia within a broad psychoanalytic framework. Uebel argues,
‘Strippers, in my experience, tend to have an acute understanding of sexual power and
pleasure, so that for them the pairs of sexual inequality/equality and sadism/masochism do
not necessarily form violent hierarchies, but rather points on a reaching continuum of erotic
relationality. They experience power in terms of its fluctuation, its inherent reversibility, and
their lives and jobs seem to dramatize this’.27 Uebel begins with the famous ‘hammer
6 A. CHAKRABORTY

argument’, forwarded by Milan Kundera who contends that the male glance arguably rests
‘coldly on a woman, measuring, weighing, evaluating, selecting her – in other words, turning
her into an object. What is less commonly known is that a woman is not completely defenseless
against that glance. If the male gaze turns her into an object, then she looks back at the man
with the eyes of an object. It is as though a hammer had suddenly grown eyes and stared up at
the worker pounding a nail with it. When the worker sees the evil eye of the hammer, he loses
his self-assurance and slams it on his thumb’.28 Kundera’s ‘hammer analogy’ captures the very
essence of the incredible lure and power of erotic dancing. ‘The dancer calls the customer’s
erotic bluff, forcing him to exchange his fantasies of mastery for those of submission’.29
Miss Shefali too declared herself the winner in a struggle for power. She saw her dance as an act of
subversion. She repeatedly tried to assert that she had the power to sell fantasy, to strike against
patriarchy–making it pay for her sexual performance. But did too much cashing in on a sexual body
reinforce the same objectified constructions that oppress women? Did she feel the stigma of her
objectified sexuality? I wish to draw from Nina K. Martin who argues that this tyranny of sexiness
makes sexiness not an option, but a mandatory requirement for women.30 There can be no pleasure,
thus claim the radical feminists, when pleasure is contaminated by masculinist fantasies of domina­
tion. The existence of sexual inequity guarantees the degradation of the desire for pleasure and the
pleasures of desire, and hence the ruin of the psychic and social well-being of women. Fairly thus,
Martin finds contemporary feminism (whether or not aligned with a wave) a site of contradiction.
‘The socio-historical inequalities of sexual representation produce a weighty problem for contem­
porary feminists, third-wave or otherwise’.31 Martin acknowledges that linking sex-work or exotic
dance with feminist empowerment is not an easy feat and ‘ . . . .third-wave feminism must continue
to simultaneously confront and embrace contradiction in its focus on sexual liberation and agency’.32
Notwithstanding the actual control or the illusion of control Shefali had over her image or
whatsoever power she wielded on the dance floor, it did not change the lack of control she had over
how her image was perceived or consumed. In her interviews, the triumphant tones of the cabaret
queen were sometimes weighed down by bottomless vulnerability, helplessness, and insecurity. Yet,
as a dancer Shefali almost always celebrated the power of her hyper-feminine sexualized body with
which she performed and negotiated the meanings of power on the dance floor.33 ‘When my co-
stars talked filthy about my dance I went on to expose more. With every passing day I lowered the
waist line of my ghagra (skirt). Come and see what you want to see! I cared a damn about your
moral stand’!34 Her autobiography anticipated the third wave’s normalization of the commodifica­
tion of bodies, valuing the body as the most treasured personal asset.35 Shefali claimed, ‘I have
a beautiful body which can even stop the heartbeats of my audience for a few seconds. My body is
my asset. Why should I feel ashamed to flaunt that’?36
During her heyday at the Oberoi Grand in the early 1970s Shefali joined the commercial theatre
shipping her exotic cabaret into Bengali melodramas, straddling two worlds of entertainment in two
Calcuttas on a single night – from the theatre haunt of Hatibagan to the Oberoi Grand Hotel of
upscale Esplanade. From the hounding whistles passed by the urban proletariat thronged at
Biswarupa or Rangana she arrived straight before the wealthiest elite at Prince’s – where rights of
admission were reserved. As she darted across the seething crowd of young, middle-aged, and
elderly men in shirts, dhotis and lungis in North Calcutta to catch the first beat of the live orchestra
in the classiest nightclub of the city, she had to escape the greedy hands and thousand eyes of the
swarming crowd. Her words reflect the fear and anxiety surrounding the body itself, ‘they desired it,
and not only with their eyes. They wanted to smell it, touch it, lick it and even grab it if they only
had a chance’.37 She has to remind her voyeurs as well as herself, ‘I was a cabaret dancer in a hotel.
But no one can touch my body without my wish! As long as I remain on the dance floor you can see
my bare breasts, bare legs, waist, navel, watch them as long as you are allowed to. But do not dare to
touch my body! I am a dancer, not a prostitute’!38
SOUTH ASIAN HISTORY AND CULTURE 7

Sex, sleaze, and scandal: the cabaret girls of calcutta

Cabaret arrived and began to flourish in major hotels and pubs in the colonial cities of India during
the First World War. Existing historical literature on colonial dance and music has pointed out that
by the 1920s, Calcutta emerged as the epicentre of the distribution of western cultural forms as the
city’s nightclubs, being the oldest and classiest entertainment hubs of India, hosted cabarets from all
over the world. In the final decades of British rule in India, significant shifts occurred within the
imperialist-elitist musical aesthetic along with changing attitudes towards race and social intermix­
ing. The arrival of African American musicians around this time led to a growing popularity of jazz
in upscale hotels and cafes. Bradley Shope, writing on the public consumption of jazz in India,
argues that the construction of new for-profit dance clubs and cafes had challenged the colonial
hierarchy of club culture in commercial spaces of the city and opened new possibilities in the shared
experience of public life.39 But colonial clubs continued to enjoy eminence as important venues of
the elite’s social life, finds out Stephane Dorin, as they played their role in the diffusion of Western
jazz and blues.40 The Second World War, particularly the entry of the United States into the war,
however, ushered in some discernible breakthroughs in the music scene, as Calcutta greeted Allied
soldiers with new entertainment venues, soon to be filled with the rhythm of military brass bands
and cabaret nights.
Arathoon Stephen’s Grand Hotel, situated at the heart of the Esplanade, became a popular
hangout for resident Europeans. Leased out to the Punjabi hotelier, Mohan Singh Oberoi in 1939,
the (Oberoi) Grand got a major lift during the War where around 4000 American soldiers were
stationed and would party frequently.41 Calcutta, the winter’s city of the empire, was soon to emerge
as a theatre of the movement of Indianization of jazz, thanks to the tutelary figure of Teddy
Weatherford and his Anglo-Indian wife, Lorna Shorland, who led a band at the Grand Hotel
from September 1940. Despite the culmination of nationalist movements and the devastating
famine of 1943, nightclub culture never skipped a single beat during these troubled times. Arjab
Roy argues that after independence the Indian bourgeoisie appropriated the White Town culture
and invested money on this same social space for its iconic status. It was a time when Blue Fox
featured Pam Crain and its jazz band was led by Louis Banks Brotherhood; Mocambo hosted Vivian
Hansen.42 Delilah, a French lady, owned Moulin Rouge where she also sang and her daughter can
caned with her troupe during Christmas. There were special cabarets, duet dances and even drag
shows at Mocambo, Magnolia, and Moulin Rouge. The Grand hosted Prince’s and Casanova where
cabarets and musical turns were constantly arranged.
While European and Anglo-Indian dancers dominated the night-time economy well into the
1950s, Firpo’s found an excellent proposition of keeping Cabaret alive through a Bengali refugee girl
whom they rechristened as Miss Shefali. The tall, fair-skinned, hazel-eyed dancer with her knee-
length black hair and with a desired amount of sex-appeal stood out as the new exotic and racial
Other, ensuring a huge turnout of foreign clientele every night. While her body image conformed to
the hegemonic cultural ideals of an exotic dancer, Shefali soon carved out her own decolonized
cabaret that no longer depended on white colonial recognition.
The end of 1970s, however, witnessed a fading popularity of club culture. A slowdown in
industrial growth and employment, changes in popular tastes, and emergence of alternative sites
and forms of adult entertainments – all can be counted as possible reasons for its decline.43 Blue Fox
closed down and Mocambo stopped musical performances, Firpo’s too closed its Lido Room as
Shefali moved to the Grand’s Prince’s. The period also signalled unanticipated political reversals –
the violent spate of Naxalite insurrections, followed by the Bangladesh Liberation War triggering
displacement, forced migration and refugee exodus from the other side of the border. Together they
ushered unprecedented turmoil into the political landscape of the city.
Yet, no matter in whichever way the ultra-left naxals chose to rise up against the vestiges of
bourgeoisie culture – by annihilating feudal landlords and smashing the statues of renaissance men,
curiously they spared the clubs, bars and discotheques that adorned the fashionable lanes of
8 A. CHAKRABORTY

Calcutta. Sumanta Banerjee, an ex-naxalite turned social scientist, remembers that not a single
assault was made on the modish clubs, bars, restaurants, and discotheques of Park Street or
Chowringhee, which were the haunts of the most affluent class of people.44 The nightlife continued
to thrive amidst rabid violence and cabaret experienced a new spin altogether at this strange time.
By the next decade cabaret entered into a phase of rapid ‘plebeianisation’.45 While the global neo-
cabaret movement draws on the aesthetics of decadence, Calcutta produced its own stock of cabaret,
reflecting the socio-sexual excess, profligacy and licentiousness of an emerging middle-class audi­
ence. The rising competition between the restaurants and nightclubs over their need to provide
entertainment at lower prices and the mushrooming of ‘sex theatres’ in the city’s north led to new
openings of cabaret joints. Shefali led the way, once again, taking cabaret to its downhill journey. As
she hit the jackpot at Bishwarupa theatre with her sensational portrayal of the stripper Connie in the
blockbuster play Chowringhee, the city witnessed a new hybridized cabaret theatre with new and
raw recruits catering to a wider clientele.
In a special issue featuring the cabaret as its cover story, Rabibar, a Hindi magazine with an all-
India circulation, observed that ‘cabaret, the most sensuous of all dance forms, is born in Indian
hotels. It is a fusion of the French cabaret with an American style, even though there are enough
traces of Indian classical and folk’.46 With a simple stunt of nudity, the city flaunted a cabaret that
was sensual, hybrid and yet, home-grown. As the slow and sinuous moves of Shefali turned out to
be inadequate many new ‘Misses’ turned up to hit the stage with yet new thrills. Contemporary
media observed that cabaret girls, trained in classical styles like Bharatanatyam or in Indian folk,
presented a wide variety of fusion – Middle-Eastern, Arabian belly dance and Oriental – all
packaged together in a so-called cabaret number. Rabibar reported,

This is the nighttime scenario of almost every city of Hindustan - colourful dancing parlors, pairs of lustful
eyes, the clinking sound of beer glasses, laughter and screams. The aggressive advance of western culture
pushed traditional Indian art and culture to the verge of extinction. Cabaret, which originated in France, today
has transformed into all things obscene, indecent and salacious. Cabaret show that once began with Cha-Cha-
Cha has turned out to be something else, especially after 10.30 PM in the night. It is not about the dance
anymore but about the fleshy meaty body, to get a taste of which people from all over the city pour in.47

Rupa (name changed), a trained bharatanatyam dancer, chose to take up nanga naach (nude
dancing), sporting a bra-and-panty twister on the wooden floor. Rupa ascribed the rise of cabaret
to the fading popularity and non-marketability of traditional Indian dance. ‘Classical dance is no-
longer in demand’, Rupa had complained, as it ‘lack(s) the desired amount of titillation and sex
appeal’.48 Rabibar added that without any formal training in cabaret, dancers fathom the bottom
line–that those body moves, which please the audience are the best kind of moves.49 The ‘bottom-
line’ seemed to have rested on a simple economics of sexual labour, which made booming business
in burgeoning pubs of the city. Cabaret offered a secure option for the future, even if the future
meant a very short span of time for many dancers like Rupa. During the 1970s, Rabibar reported
that the average monthly income a cabaret dancer made with her dance was around Rupees 2000 to
Rupees 3000.50 Dancers traversed the country as part of their hiring services with in-between stops
at major cities. The agreement customarily lasted for 3 months for a contract-fee of 300 rupees, but
most often, the contract was renewed and extended. Hoteliers explained, ‘At the end of the contract,
cabaret girls are free to move out of the hotel – starting her journey from Chennai’s Natraj Five-Star
to Kashmir’s Oberoi Intercontinental – there is no dearth of Cabaret fans. If they are in Calcutta
today, their subsequent stop might be Hyderabad or Bombay. Because as strip-tease–peeling off the
last bit of wear from the body has become a crucial feature of Cabaret, the number of admirers of the
dance form has gone on to increase significantly’.51 The trend indeed followed the route-map of
itinerant cabaret girls of colonial times who once danced their way around the world, navigating
across the globe and then stopping at select cities of the world. Tied with several Indian hotels those
transnational dancers donned exotic names and performed at upscale pubs of metro cities as per
their chain programmes.
SOUTH ASIAN HISTORY AND CULTURE 9

In October 1982, Society, a leading lifestyle magazine, reported, ‘For better or worse, Calcutta
still remains the citadel of cabaret queens in India and the best of the lot prefer to perform here,
in the congenial security of restaurants in sleek five-star hotels, where you can only give them the
glad eye, but as a rule, cannot touch’!52 Once the bastion of Anglo-Indian dancers, Calcutta’s
nightclubs had by this time been stormed by Bengali girls, many coming from poor low-income
families. Drawing on comparisons with their counterparts in Paris or Rio de Janeiro or New York
or Berlin, reporters offered immediate and first-hand accounts, ‘some of the acts are rather
daring, as it takes much more than just displaying a lot of oomph and flesh to keep the audience
enthralled and coming back for more’.53 During the early 1980s, the rates varied between Rs 550
and Rs 1500 per night. The customer profile also varied enormously – from the foreign tourist to
the lonely executive from outside on a flying visit to the city, or the moneyed Marwari business­
man who booked for a one-night stand. While Hotel Hindustan spoke highly of its impeccable
and world-class cabaret shows, the Park Hotel claimed to draw the maximum number of foreign
clients for the innovative floor shows staged at its nightclub, Sujata. Referred to as the ‘Grand
Dame of Chowringhee’, the Oberoi Grand always boasted of its iconic status as it claimed to have
catered the true and authentic European cabaret to national and international audiences. Grand’s
Prince’s had someone which no one else in the city had – the one and only cabaret queen –
Miss Shefali.
While Miss Shefali, even during her waning days, could boast of her rating as the numero uno of
Calcutta’s cabaret, another struggling refugee girl, Jayasree (Sarkar married to Ghosal) from
Barishal (Bangladesh), more popular as Miss J, emerged as her fierce competitor. Miss J who
claimed to have received her training under the great Indian modern dancer, Uday Shankar,
presented a magnetic blend of Eastern and Western styles.54 ‘I dance because that’s my trade.
I work hard on it and as long as I can, I can keep this belly away from gnawing hunger’.55 Tied with
Park Hotel, J was also a regular name in theatre where she created a furore by ‘pulling down her hot
and sexy G string on stage’ without the permission of the theatre producer.56 Contemporary
reporters noted the amount of vim and oomph she put into her performance. ‘Miss J’s shows are
more vigorous. Lots of loud and quick paced music for her to wriggle to, as she sweats it out,
undaunted, moaning, sighing, whispering sweet nothings to the men’.57 The reporter describes,
‘Arms, legs and hair fly all over the floor as Miss J dances on, cajoling the musicians to quicken their
beat. Lots of whistling as she strikes a posture and holds it for a few seconds. And when the hands
slip surreptitiously into the strings of her loin-cloth, the place is plunged in darkness. You only hear
wild panting as the music softly dies’.58
Miss Meenakshi, with her relatively short but stunning career, was also rated among the classiest
and hottest numbers of the city who carried herself with inimitable flair from nightclubs to theatres.
Apart from flaunting solo numbers, she lived things up in stunningly choreographed duets with
a male partner.

Together, they do a jungle or a fire dance, complete with authentic costume comprising of brief little bits of
leopard skin wrapped around their bodies and real fire hoops and torches to play with. While they leap around
and let out primitive yells and jumps through the lit-up rings, their ritual takes on masochistic sexual
overtones. Simulated beating and scratching and writhing in agony are an integral part of their time. The
girl falls at the feet of her man, only to be kicked harshly as he pins her down on the floor and they roll around
together, keeping perfect time with the music.59

Increasingly, cabaret appeared as a creative way to make money, an informal-contractual occupa­

tion for some urban middle-class girls who came from diverse socio-economic backgrounds.
Trained in Kathak, Bharatanatyam, Odissi, and some forms of Western styles, Miss Papiya was
one of the most sought-after dancers by the hoteliers and theatre producers. Papiya also made her
name in super-hit theatres like Samrat O Sundari60 after Miss Shefali, had the experience of dancing
in Hotel Hindustan, Ritz International, Great Eastern, and also at Oberoi Grand. Papiya’s solo
numbers were no less titillating.
10 A. CHAKRABORTY

A bit of Khajuraho and Konark thrown in to make the cocktail nice’n desi. It works, and how! Sometimes, of
course, for variety she does an Arabian Nite belly dance or a can-can number but she gets the loudest taalis
when she begins sexily unknotting her sari. The crowd identify with the act and her ‘Indian’ dances often bring
the roof tumbling down!61

Vulgarity was, however, an absolute taboo for Miss Jemy or Rakhi Mukherjee who had given up the
job of a cabaret dancer in a hotel when asked to strip on stage. Tied with Calcutta Ordnance Club,
Jemy also ran her own dance troupe called Casanova. Married to a government employee, Rakhi
claimed that she had never danced only for money. ‘Yes, my earnings help the family but that does
not mean that we will go unfed if I stop dancing’.62 Tall, fair, and fluent in English, another high caste
Brahman dancer was Miss Bobby aka Rina Bhattacharya. Tied with Hotel Hindustan she frequently
accompanied Shefali in the year-end parties at Oberoi Grand. With some super-hit plays in her
credit, Bobby also had the rare privilege to dance with Uttam Kumar in Bengali films like Raja Saheb
(1981)).63 Despite having a wider exposure in the industry, Miss Bobby spoke against the relentless
slander and stigma suffered by cabaret dancers. Speaking to the Bengali magazine, Bartaman, she
said, ‘I was denied admission in a celebrated dance company because I am a cabaret dancer. Park
Hotel refused my membership in their swimming club and Calcutta Tennis club also turned down
my application’.64 Exotic dancers had come under fire from several institutions, and some were even
shunned by their own family members as cabaret was considered as deviant and immoral.
Mrs. Krishna Das (Miss Chaitali) was introduced to the profession by her famous sister-in-law,
Miss Shefali and had thus enjoyed full support of her in-laws. Though she lived under the
formidable shadow of the cabaret queen, Chaitali became a celebrity in Hatibagan theatres, for
which she acknowledged ‘didi’s (Shefali’s) network’. Chaitali acted in super hit plays like ‘Piu-Kaha’
and also appeared in sizzling item numbers in Bengali films like Faisala (ei rat sudhu rat noy/ this
night is not just another night), where the song was rendered by the reigning pop singer Usha
Uthup. Chaitali had travelled extensively all over India, from Mumbai pubs to the one-wall shows of
Bihar and UP. Chaitali recalls that she quit because, ‘I had to marry off my daughter one day and
I did not want my son to know about my real profession’.65 Apart from moral policing by the state,
the biggest problem for these dancers that came up in the interviews was the social stigma attributed
to their dance. Hanna reminds us, ‘Stigmatization of dancers can easily bleed into their private lives
as well’.66 The dancers were not only stigmatized but their civil liberties were also threatened. Even
though financially rewarding exotic dancing was always considered immoral and improper. As they
said, their job ‘pays well but costs dearly’.67
A closer look at the class-caste composition of Calcutta’s cabaret girls reveals that a thriving
majority of dancers came from poor refugee families, belonging to Hindu high or intermediary
castes.68 While in most parts of India, erotic dance has been historically linked with low caste
women’s sexual labour,69 Bengali girls were mostly recruited from poor, middle class but high-caste
families.70 There was also a small fraction of girls like Pam Dhar, who hailed from a well-heeled
urban family, and considered cabaret as a unique performance art, no less stylized and inventive
than erotic classical gestures or the popular moves of Bollywood dance.71 Miss Bobby in an
interview given to Bartaman Dinkal claimed that, ‘To me cabaret is an art. I respect my profession
and I spend a lot on my personal training and grooming. People travel as far as Konark and
Khajuraho to get a taste of the erotic and the amorous. Then why do they find our dance vulgar’?72
In a similar breath Miss Papiya had hit back, ‘Tell me, what is the difference between my Indian
dancing and Protima Bedi’s’?73 Miss Shefali, who was already a cut above her contemporary
dancers, had retorted, ‘How many Kalpana Iyers and Bindus can think of working with a director
like Satyajit Ray’?74 And yet, the queen of cabaret knew it deep inside that a couple of cameo
appearances in Ray’s movies would not allow her entry into the Bengali film industry.75 However
hard she craved for it Shefali could never become the ‘Helen of Bengal’.76
In their interviews, the dancers highlighted their personal choice, agency, subjectivity and, above
all, a desire to be in this exciting world of adult entertainment, simultaneously drawing lines
between dancing and other ‘degraded’ or ‘vulgar’ forms of work like sex work/prostitution. They
SOUTH ASIAN HISTORY AND CULTURE 11

considered their dance as ‘dance’, as an entertainment or artistic expression. Dance, for them,
remained a medium of gaining ready money and visibility in the cultural world. While cabaret girls
clearly denied any association with the ‘dirty’ work of prostitution, those around them thought
otherwise. Things took a critical turn when the state drive against apasanskriti targeted these erotic
dancers as the visceral symbols of sexual perversion and started to force them out of existence.

Apasanskriti: desire, decadence, and democracy

Despite every possible attempt from the progressive Left-front government to nurture a ‘good or
healthy art’ (sustha sanskriti) the allure of apasanskriti seemed irresistible. A series of articles
published in Ganashakti, the organ of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), reflected an across-
the-board unanimity about the moral ills associated with erotic dance as the ideologues identified
certain associated and vicious global and local forces like bourgeoisie capitalism, American imperi­
alism and feudalist reactionary forces, particularly those represented by the erstwhile Congress
regime. On behalf of the West Bengal Democratic Writers’ and Artists’ Association, Narayan
Chaudhury wrote against the hegemonic culture of consumerism that had permeated into the
spaces of Bengali culture. Porn literature, licentious plays, lewd cabaret, the rage of sex and violence
in films, cacophony in Bengali songs were identified as the signs of Apasanskriti.77 Abdul Rasul’s
treatise on apasanskriti identified cabaret dancers as the instruments of perversion, used by
reactionary forces to play havoc with the traditional fulcrum of Bengali culture and ethics.78 The
‘commodification’ discourse resonated even more strongly with the women’s wing of the
Communist party. Voicing against the exploitation of women for the pleasure of heterosexual
male clienteles in a consumerist economy, Kanak Mukhopadhyay, a veteran communist activist,
made a clarion call to all women activists of the party to thwart the forces of cultural perversion or
apasanskriti.79 Drawing from Marxian analysis of women’s subordination in class-based capitalist
systems, the polemical discourses suspected secret hands of American capitalism behind the spread
of this libidinous sub-culture that exploited and commodified women’s bodies.80 The feminist
debate that pitched women’s morality against women’s livelihood paradoxically locked women
within the controlling frame of the ‘good girl’.81 Critics of radical feminism thus counter these
moralizing discourses that come dangerously close to patriarchal discourses of moral turpitude,
which portray women as the protectors of chastity and virtue in heterosexual relations.82
While one of the most enduring criticisms against apasanskriti turned on a strident critique of
American capitalist forces, in a curious coincidence America witnessed violent and organized
demonstrations against exotic-erotic dance clubs for selling lustful dancing bodies in order to run
a multi-million dollar business. Hanna’s ethnographic survey shows that during 1980s-1990s there
were more than 500 attacks on dance clubs in which hundreds of local and state governments used
the coercive power of regulations to limit exotic dance, to force it out of existence, or to prevent new
exotic dance clubs from opening. Spearheaded by the Christian Right Activists, this movement
ventured to wipe out the alleged ‘moral cancer’ from the cities, criminalizing erotic dance as a kind
of non-marital, non-heterosexual, consensual sexual expression.83 It was feared that the female
dancing body had the potency to unsettle the patriarchic status-quo, especially through nudity,
fantasy, and lust. Orthodox Christians in America, much like the Communists in Bengal, under­
mined exotic dance clubs as sinful strongholds of modern American liberalism. While in America
the battle over ‘public morality’ and the ‘right to dance’ reached the Supreme Court, the Left Front
in Bengal took a more underhand line of attack to evict the cultural outlaws from the public spaces
of performance.
The reason behind a similar crackdown on the infamous ‘Combat Zone’ in the city of Boston in
the early 1990s was apparently real estate. Jessica Berson argues that the state suddenly realized that
some of the most valuable land was occupied by its least-valued citizens and, as a consequence, the
city of Boston razed and demolished the controversial adult entertainment area that hosted
establishments like Naked i Cabaret along with several porn shops, peep shows and strip joints.
12 A. CHAKRABORTY

The ‘Combat Zone’ was marked out as cancerous, nasty, as a repository of unruly, debased and
unmanageable identities and practices associated with working/low class proletarian culture that
threatened to contaminate the wider town centre.84 A growing disgust towards particular bodies
and spaces helped to create binaries along class lines, reinforcing social distinctions of hierarchy and
taste that infused everyday life, a cultural politics that was directed towards vulgar and pervert
popular culture.85
The run-down area of Calcutta’s Hatibagan theatres evoked similar sordid memories of the
harmful and insalubrious presence of cabaret dancers. Saikat Majumdar in his investigative article
titled ‘Ashes of Pleasure’ argues, ‘It was the stretch of Central Avenue that was to be avoided like a fatal
disease; the sidewalk you just had to stare at from the passing bus because you were supposed to look
away’.86 As a Calcutta boy, he could distinctly remember the chill that went through his spine when he
first saw a board with ‘a strange sort of menu’ offering ‘Bombaywalli (the Bombay girl): Rupees 900,
Dilliwalli (the Delhi girl) Rupees 800’.87 In the 1990s as theatre owners tried desperate tactics to win
back audiences, the genre became even more suspect in the eyes of the government and middle-class
people, who now began to stare at the old playhouses with the same fear and curiosity they reserved for
the red-light districts. While his middle-class sensibilities dissuaded Majumdar from entering the hall
whose billboards featured giant cut-outs of plump, ageing dancers in glittering undergarments he
clearly remembers the enthusiastic audience was comprised not merely of truckers and rickshaw-
pullers but also of high-school boys from middle-class families.88
Bordering on the physical boundaries of Sonagachi, the city’s red light area, the historic
Minerva theatre staged regular carnivals of cabaret dance during the 1980s-1990s.89 While by
the 1990s there was a rise and overall acceptance of sexual content in Indian popular culture,
especially in Bollywood cinema and commercial advertisements, it is intriguing that only the
cabaret /erotic dancers performing in pubs, nightclubs and theatres were singled out as easy
targets of attack. The answer perhaps lies in the social hierarchy of the consumption of sexual/
cultural entertainment in which cabaret is associated with a ‘gendered underclass’.90 The drive
against apasanskriti thus not simply marginalized the uncultured other but also recreated and
reproduced a hegemonic (middle-class) Self of gendered and classed respectability.91 The sexual
entertainment venues with striking underclass appellations were seen as threats to the moral
geography of the city, as a continuous source of discomfort to the middle-class family
neighbourhoods.92
Yet, contemporary newspapers and magazines pointed towards the fact that cabaret enjoyed
unprecedented popularity among a cross section of the Bengali middle class. The dance that once
enchanted the new Indian bourgeoisie signalled a complete moral upheaval for the common middle
class by the 1980s. Once reserved for the exclusive audience of five-star hotels, cabaret turned out to
be everyday pedestrian culture. Not merely did the semi-urban proletariat take a train to arrive at
the heart of the city to watch the porn theatre at Rammmohan or Pratap Mancha, cabaret enjoyed
a massive following among the city folk at large. Those who could not afford a visit to the expensive
restaurant suddenly found it much cheaper and more respectable to buy a five rupee ticket and walk
into a theatre hall to watch the bikini-dance on a psychedelic revolving stage. Society drew attention
to the new cultural trend, ‘The Bengali babu has, of late, become quite liberated’! ‘ . . . most
weekends, after his tired routine as a clerk, he goes to watch a play where Shefali or Papiya are
performing.’93 The cultural entourage of the bhadralok often comprised of his little kids, his wife,
and his mother as the entire family together took delight in the cabaret theatres. The middle class
discovered, as if all of a sudden, that ‘beyond their repressed universe there exists the exciting,
lascivious and rip-roaring world of the cabaret–delightfully sinful and outrageously outré.94 When
thrice-a week cabaret carnivals at Minerva and Circarena proved inadequate, new halls like Klem
Brown and Mohit Mancha came up overnight to meet increasing demands for ‘exclusive’ cabaret
shows in theatres. Sometimes, libraries like Boy’s Own Library and Rammohan Mancha (Library)
were converted into rough and ready auditoriums to stage suspense thrillers with sizzling cabaret
SOUTH ASIAN HISTORY AND CULTURE 13

numbers. What started as an innovative expedient to make up the financial loss of professional
theatre to revamp its sluggish economy turned out to be ‘cancerous’ and ‘sleazy’. In order to save
theatre, cabaret had to be crossed out, sooner or later.
The discourse on apasanskriti was vested in a language of culture and morality. Cabaret, though
originating in Euro-American popular culture, betrayed in its metamorphosed Bengali incarnation
signs of cultural decadence – wanton, consumerist, immoral and obscene. And, no matter how
much of the cabaret dancers’ power or vulnerability, affluence or poverty, choice or compulsion
came up through their personal narratives, the leftist state and Bengali intelligentsia while fighting
against the vulgar mass culture hardly took account of the lived experiences of these flesh and blood
women. Their dance, devoid of any legitimacy, was not recognized as ‘work’ and dancers who
allegedly earned ‘easy money’ by gyrating in skimpy costumes, were not considered ‘proletarian
enough’!95 If sex, sexiness and sexuality were tabooed subjects, then the dancing body encapsulating
them all was considered the source of the scourge, and it was needed to be routed out.
A clampdown was already on the cards. If not through legal censorship then perhaps in a more
sinister manner – the state came down hard on cabaret dancers. A steep hike in entertainment taxes
including a heavy excise on alcohol and service tax indirectly forced many hoteliers to shut down
their pubs that mostly ran on the live dance and music shows. Militant trade unionism of the Left
parties led many iconic restaurants like Sky Room and Blue Fox to shut down on Park Street without
having any moral allegations against them.96 While business was running dry in bars, cabaret’s next
refuge, the commercial theatre also came under direct moral scrutiny. In November 2001, on Diwali
night, a massive fire gutted Biswarupa theatre, bringing 300 years of theatrical history to rubble.97
This was the third such ‘accident’ of fire that had razed a historic hall after Star Theatre and
Rangmahal Theatre. While sabotage has not been proved conclusively, the ‘accident’ might not have
been mere happenstance. Media reports also indicated at a promoter-owner nexus. The fire had set
on in the dead of night. The chief of the detective department smelt a rat, ‘It seemed flames had
engulfed the hall from all four sides, which is intriguing’.98 The chances of short-circuit had also
been ruled out as power supply had been cut off long ago in this hall. The destruction of three halls
in less than 2 years appeared too much of a coincidence. While the spark was often attributed to the
‘fire crackers’ of Diwali night, the Mayor of Calcutta, Subrata Mukherjee representing the All India
Trinamool Congress, hinted at acts of sabotage. Mukherjee blamed it on the Left Front govern­
ment’s double standard that patronized and subsidized the group theatre movement while down­
grading and demoting the historic remnants of commercial theatre.99
Saikat Majumdar picks up the thread at this point, ‘if fires and real-estate interests obliterated the
physical relics of professional theatre, the art form’s demise in the popular consciousness is
a fascinating example of high-minded art pushing out low-brow competition: in this case the
theatre of political conscience pushing out the theatre of decadent entertainment’.100 The suspicion
of professional theatre also squared with the ongoing crusade against apasanskriti, which targeted
lowbrow and vulgar cultural patterns, associated with the ‘poor’ taste of the ‘low class’. As the
curtain came down over the psychedelic melodramas of North Calcutta, one of the chapters of
Calcutta’s decadent past came to an end, ‘a past that failed, indeed did not even try, to adhere to the
aesthetic vision of social progress imagined by the leftist culture’.101

Conclusion
On 15 August 2005, every dance bar in Mumbai was ordered to close down by the Maharashtra
Government. The motion was tabled by the deputy chief minister, R. R. Patil, who stated that dance
bars had to be banned as they were ‘corrupting the moral fibre of our youth and culture’.102 The
minister expressed further concern over the state’s security as women working in this bar line are
all, he surmised, migrants from Bangladesh and Nepal. While his claim is yet to be substantiated
with hard facts, a survey carried out by the Research Centre for Women’s Studies, SNDT University
and Forum against Oppression of Women point out that West Bengal stands second, next only to
14 A. CHAKRABORTY

UP, in supplying bar dancers to Mumbai.103 My own research on Mumbai dance bars has
confirmed the fact that Bengali girls comprise a staggering majority in the bar-line as the first
flux of immigrant dancers were presumably consisted of the evicted cabaret dancers from the
Calcutta nightclubs and commercial theatres. One more time, the ban evicted them, forcing many
into prostitution. While the All India Bar Girls’ Union took to the streets in protest against the loss
of livelihood, claiming bar work as ‘work’, the Hindu nationalist state played the morality card,
calling it a cultural and moral breakdown of the nation. Some of these moral disquiets reverberated
old anxieties around apasanskriti, as coined by the leftist state of West Bengal who perceived in the
dancing bodies of cabaret girls the impending doom of their culture.
On 6 February 2020, after a prolonged illness, Miss Shefali died in her sleep at her North Calcutta
home. The 72 year old spinster was survived by a community of erotic or illicit dancers who now
struggle as waitresses or crooners or sex-workers in the dimly lit nightclubs of Calcutta and
Mumbai. The law did not ban bars or sexual services attached to it; it just banned ‘dance’.104
Questions arise: How exactly do we describe these dancing bodies? Which identity would fit them
best? Reactionary or radical? Bourgeois or proletariat? Are they marketers of their own erotic
pleasure or commodities in a global market economy? On what moral and legal grounds can the
state force out or punish a labouring dancing body that works for a living? What happens to the
body that sells sexual fantasy when the night of pleasure is over? Torn between pleasure and
perversion will a dancer ever be able to reconcile the tussle between power and fragility?
We need to archive the answers.

Notes
1. ‘Singer Usha Uthup gets ban threat for “promoting a decadent culture” in Bengal’.
2. ‘Usha Uthup vs State of West Bengal’, 1.
3. ibid.
4. Cabaret is the unique and titillating genre in which artistic experimentation and expression meet social
commentary, political criticism, and popular culture. In earlier days, cabarets were performance venues. They
were places of spectacle, but also places of intimacy where people could smoke, eat, drink, and were
entertained.
5. Usha who began her career as a nightclub singer in 1969 ruminates about the uniqueness of her cabaret show
where she turned her traditional Indian identity as her strength even though sari was never considered
a desired outfit for a nightclub singer. ‘I broke certain notions. People expected a girl in a short black dress
there and they found me’. Tripathi, ‘A solid base’.
6. Ibid.
7. ‘Usha Uthup vs State of West Bengal’, 5.
8. Mukherjee, ‘The Architecture of Songs’. In examining the morphology of Bollywood music, Mukherjee
also observes a paradigm shift in music aesthetic occurred during the time which has been enacted
through the deployment of sharp /shrill electronic sounds as well as the overall restructuring of the mise-
en-scène.
9. ibid.
10. ibid.
11. ‘Usha Uthup vs State Of West Bengal’, 2.
12. We may problematize her claim to dissociate her dance from prostitution and her way of exceptionalizing her
erotic labour by simultaneously degrading other forms of sexual labour; but, in this paper I have chosen to re-
present Shefali in her own words. As a section of feminist scholars seeks to equate exotic dancing with sex
work, Miss Shefali and many erotic dancers I have interviewed, refused to see themselves as sex-workers or
prostitutes. Dance, for them, was a medium of gaining respectability and wider visibility in the cultural world.
Immensely proud of her own career and repertoire, Miss Shefali distanced herself, especially during her later
years, from contemporary bar dancers who, according to her, earn their living primarily by sex work and do
not know how to dance at all.
13. Chatterjee and Chatterjee, ‘On a cold night’, 79.
14. Written by Bengali novelist, Sankar (Manisankar Mukhopadhyay), Chowringhee (Esplanade) is a semi-
autobiographical fiction set within a five-star hotel Shahjahan, located in the heart of Calcutta’s Esplanade.
The novel offers a first-hand account of the city’s night-time pleasure from the narrator’s (also named Sankar)
viewpoint who works as a receptionist at Shahjahan. The plot thickens in its dance pub named the Mumtaz
SOUTH ASIAN HISTORY AND CULTURE 15

Bar, where Connie, a stripper from Scotland, arrives straight to take the city by storm. When Chowringhee was
made into a play in 1970, Miss Shefali’s cameo appearance as Connie became a sensation on stage, changing
the future course of theatre forever.
15. In post independent Bengal, the downward trend in job opportunities, accompanied by large scale immigra­
tion from the bordering East Pakistan led to an unprecedented increase in unorganized labour force under
conditions of stagnant investment. Recent researches have demonstrated that most refugee women, particu­
larly those living in the sprawling slums of the city, ended up in the lower rungs of the service sector as
domestics, which emerged as the only available and the acceptable area of work for destitute refugee women
and girl children. Chakravarty and Chakravarty, Women, Labour and the Economy.
16. The expression ‘bed and board’ has been coined by Deepita and Ishita Chakravarty to denote the increasing
need of both food and shelter asked by poor refugee women who in their frantic search for survival offered to
work even in lieu of salary in this trying time. According to 1951 census, 42 percent of refugee women joined
the domestic service, and some of them received very little or no wage at all, see Chakraborty ibid. Arati was
apparently lucky to obtain both (salary and shelter) from her Anglo-Indian employer.
17. Shefali insisted that the job of a hotel dancer earned her dignity and honour along with huge sums of money.
18. Personal interview with Miss Shefali, 7.5. 2015.
19. Personal interview with Miss Shefali, 18.9. 2017.
20. Dasgupta, ‘Of love, lust and Miss Shefali?’
21. Prabha Kotiswaran’s nuanced reading of sex-work points at this incongruity as she puts forward that cultural
appreciation of sexual commerce does not preclude feminist considerations of coercion and exploitation of
women. See Kotiswaran, ‘Labours in Vice or Virtue?’
22. Hanna, ‘Dance and Sexuality: Many Moves’, 232.
23. Hanna, ‘Empowerment: The Art of Seduction’.
24. Egan, Dancing for Dollars.
25. Frank, ‘Thinking Critically about Strip Club Research’.
26. Anahita, ‘Dancing on shaky ground’.
27. Uebel, ‘Striptopia’? 13.
28. Kundera, The book of laughter, 209.
29. Uebel, ibid, 4.
30. Martin, ‘Porn Empowerment’, 39.
31. ibid.
32. ibid, 36.
33. Far from being problems or victims, dancers sometimes enjoy formidable power, presence and agency. Anna
Morcom’s path-breaking study on present day bar dancers of Indian dance also draws our attention to the
very lack of victimhood of the celebrity erotic dancers who dare to dance at the face of contemporary Indian
culture, going to the extent of embarrassing or even threatening the proud, glorious or gilded essence of the
nation. Morcom, A. Illicit world of Indian Dance.
34. Personal Interview with Miss Shefali, 7. 5. 2015.
35. Martin, ‘Porn Empowerment’, 31.
36. Personal Interview with Miss Shefali, 18.9. 2017.
37. Shefali, Sandhyarater, 126.
38. Ibid, 42.
39. Shope, ‘The public consumption of Western music’.
40. Dorin, ‘Jazz and race in colonial India’.
41. Personal Interview with Malay Ghosh, 3. 10. 2019.
42. During 1960s and 1970s many famous musicians performed in Calcutta; Golden Slippers, Prince’s, Mocambo
and Moulin Rouge hosted revellers until 6 in the morning. The culture of musical productions and
performances in Park Street produced a number of professional musicians and singers like Benny Rozario,
Carlton Kitto, Louis Banks, Nandan Bagchi, Usha Uthup, Lew Hilt and others. Even in the turbulent 1970s,
the nightlife of Park Street had few competitors in India. See Roy, ‘Confronting Epochs’.
43. Ibid,
44. Banerjee, In the Wake of Naxalbari. 236.
45. I draw this coinage ‘plebeianisation’ of dance from Sameena Dalwai’s insightful monograph on bar dancers of
Mumbai. See Dalwai, Bans and Bar Girls.
46. Narad, ‘Cabaret Katha’, 6. Translated by Shivangini Upadhaya.
47. Ibid, 6.
48. ibid.
49. ibid.
50. Ibid, 8.
51. Ibid.
52. Chatterjee and Chatterjee, ‘On a cold night’, 76.
16 A. CHAKRABORTY

53. See above 32., 77.

54. Personal interview with Jayanta Sau, 6.2. 2020
55. Chatterjee and Chatterjee, ‘On a cold night’, 81.
56. Nandy, ‘The Lonely Life’, 8.
57. Chatterjee and Chatterjee, ‘On a cold night’, 79.
58. ibid.
59. Chatterjee and Chatterjee, ‘On a cold night’, 79.
60. Written by Bengali novelist Sankar, Samrat O Sundari, Kolkata: Dey’s Publsihing, 1980 is another landmark
play that mirrors the inner world of Calcutta’s commercial theatre. The author maps the historic trajectory of
Bengal’s theatre, unpacking the sinister power-politics embedded historically in the theatre industry. Directed
by Samar Mukherjee the play was choreographed by Miss Shefali who also played the role of Lipika, a cabaret
dancer turned actress, appearing in a semi-autobiographical character. The theatre ran for more than five
years at Circarena, India’s first arena stage that boasted a spectacular revolving round stage.
61. Chatterjee and Chatterjee, ‘On a cold night’, ibid.
62. Guha, ‘Who will marry girls like us’! 15.
63. Majumdar, ‘Ashlil Nacher’, 14.
64. See above 32., 16.
65. Personal interview with Miss Chaitali, 7.4. 2020.
66. Hanna, ‘Toxic Strip Clubs’, 92.
67. See also Egan, Dancing for Dollars.
68. Contemporary Bengali films are replete with images of such women from poor/refugee bhadralok families
who were forced to take to prostitution to survive in these dire times. Satyajit Ray’s Pratidwandi (1970), Jana
Aranya (1971), Yatrik’s Hotel Snow Fox (1976), Sushil Mukherjee’s Rodono Bhora Basata (1981) foreground
the predicaments of the time that led many respectable women to turn to prostitution and hotel dancing.
69. Sameena Dalwai charts the historical process of caste governance in Maharashtra where society was regulated
under the discipline of the caste order through Brahmincial political dominance. In the context of Mumbai bar
dancer, it is her occupation and her caste that together mark her ‘bad’ woman. Economies of caste and gender
predetermine the lower caste women’s labour value, and will actively work to correct any deviation from the
norm; then state intervention can be called upon to maintain order through the use of legislative power.
Dalwai, Bans and Bar Girls, 14.
70. Though recent research reveals that caste-based politics enjoyed a full-bodied life in West Bengal and upper
caste /upper class retained their hegemony in almost every sphere of life there is also no denying that India’s
partition (1947) and massive transfer of Hindu refugees from the other side of the border led to smear, to
a certain extent, these long-established caste-based hierarchic orders in Bengal. The dislocation and abject
destitution forced many high-caste Hindu women from uprooted refugee families to turn to lowly menial
works and clandestine or open sex work to earn their livelihood in dire times.
71. Mukhopadhyay, ‘Kolkatar Cabaret’, 139.
72. Ibid, 15.
73. Chatterjee and Chatterjee, ‘On a cold night’, 81.
74. Ibid, Shefali appeared in the first two sequels of Satyajit Ray’s famous Calcutta trilogy. She was cast as a nurse
who moonlights as a prostitute in Pratidwandi (1970) and performed herself, i.e. appeared as a cabaret dancer
at Firpos’s Lido room in Seemabaddha (1971). Her cinematic characterizations too placed her well beyond the
legitimate sexual-moral space of the middle class, reinforcing and pointing at her real-life sexual
transgressions.
75. Sharmistha Gooptu observes that ‘Calcutta’s cabaret culture both enthralled and repulsed the middle class
bhadraloks, and several films of these years showed middle class women becoming cabaret girls, or being
generally compromised. A star no less than Suchitra Sen played the cabaret dancer in Fariad (1971), one of her
later films, where she is a young wife and mother who gets forced into a life of degradation’. Gooptu, Bengali
Cinema, 262.
76. Shefali often complained about the class politics in the film industry that shut out a real cabaret girl like her
from their hegemonic cultural domain. Even when at the peak of her career she was offered good roles but
then cast out of the project without any apparent reason.
77. Chowdhury, Sanskriti, Shilpa O Sahitya.
78. Rasul, Sanskritir Katha.
79. Mukhopadhyay, ‘Apasanskriti Rodhe’.
80. ibid.
81. Contrary to some feminists who oppose exotic dance on the ground that it reduces the female body to
a commodity, others argue that women’s bodies are mobile, and subjectivities are multiple. In exotic dance,
dancers straddle a slippery line between subject and object, being both salesgirl and commodity in one’. See
Schneider, The Explicit Body in Performance.
82. Egan, 112.
SOUTH ASIAN HISTORY AND CULTURE 17

83. Hanna, ‘Toxic Strip Clubs’, 20–41.

84. Berson, The Naked Result.
85. Hubbard and Colosi, ‘Respectability, morality’, 3.
86. Majumdar, ‘Ashes of Pleasure’, 2014.
87. ibid.
88. ibid.
89. Personal interview with Miss Chaitali, 7.4. 2020
90. Hubbard, and Colosi, ‘Respectability, morality’, 3.
91. In his study on Mumbai dance bars, William Mazzarella draws our attention towards a divide between two
classes of audience: the person visiting a fancier hotel stands on a different footing and cannot be compared
with people who attend the popular, cheaper dance bars. Mazzarella, 490–491.
92. Hubbard and Colosi, ibid.
93. Chatterjee and Chatterjee, ‘On a cold night’, 79.
94. Nandi, ‘The Lonely Life’, 13.
95. Similar arguments had been tabled by the leftist leaders of Maharashtra Legislative Assembly, for details see
Dalwai, Bans and Bar Girls.
96. Shefali, ‘Sandhyarater’.
97. ‘Arson act in History heap’.
98. Biswas, ‘The Fires of Bathos’.
99. Ajkal, 2 July 2001.
100. Majumdar, ibid.
101. ibid.
102. Rajan, ‘Dance Bar Girls’, 471.
103. Report on Women Working as Dancers in Dance Bars, 9.
104. Dalwai, Bans and Bar Girls, 231.

Acknowledgments
I thank Miss Shefali, the cabaret queen of Calcutta, for sharing with me the untold stories of Calcutta’s cabaret—her
memory will be eternal.
I thank Madhurima Mazumdar and Sneha Chatterjee for assisting me in the works of transcription and translation.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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Report
SNDT Women’s University, Mumbai and Forum Against Oppression of Women, ‘Background and working
Conditions of women working as dancers in dance bars’, Study conducted by Research Centre for Women’s studies,
Mumbai, 2006.