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 Can Can and the bar-red dancer -
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 | | Illustration: Bhaskaran |
At the plush crystal ballroom of the Taj hotel in Mumbai, the French tourism board arranged for a showing of the cabaret group Paradis Latin from Paris. Over a champagne-laced evening and in between seven courses of a French meal, we saw the magic and sensuality of the famed cabaret. The women, swanlike and attractively made up, came on stage in sequined G-strings and wearing their trademark frilly scarlet skirts and gloves. They danced, kicked their beautiful long legs high, lifted their skirts and showed their derrieres and squealed naughtily. The male dancers appeared magically from between their legs and turned cartwheels. It was a delight to watch such a celebration of the human form.
I couldn’t help but think of the cabaret artistes closer home. I guess the humble bar dancer, now in exile, would qualify as our answer to the French cabaret. What a poor second cousin! No fault of the bar dancers—just their bad luck they were born into a society that needs them but does not care for them, because that would mean acknowledging that they are a necessity of our lives. If they are not acknowledged, they cannot sublimate their sexual display into an art form, and so are doomed to a life of subhuman existence as outcasts.
In Shyam Benegal’s delightful satire Mandi, the whorehouse madam exclaims, “There is no respect for talent!” It is one of the funniest moments in the film, and there are several. The film’s villains are the moral brigades, and we end up siding with the brothel inmates.
Maybe now is the time to revive that film, as the plight of the bar dancers is somewhat similar. This comparison between the film’s rumbustious characters and the real-life bar dancers is to underline that society places them, or rather misplaces them, on the fringe. So it makes sense for a political party to throw them further into the margins to appease the morally upright and support the self-proclaimed superior posture of the majority.
Cultural concepts of morality have always decided what is to be considered profane and what high art. In ancient cultures, especially of Greece and India, the human body was depicted as a form of the Divine. This concept has always been redefined to suit the need of the times. In times of war, the body needed protection from defilement. So women were housebound. In happier times, several forms of sexual expression evolved into art forms now recognised as classical. From the court, Thumri and Kathak and temple forms such as Bharatanatyam evolved to an exalted position. Folk forms Tamasha and Lavni still flourish—as they have crossed the borderline into art, the moral brigade can’t touch them, just as they dare not touch the Khajuraho sculptures.
The French Can Can dancers with their frou frou must have faced ostracism in former times. The credit is to the French for lifting the blatantly sexual culture of Parisian low life to the higher realm of art and cultural expression.
So why this moral consciousness in India when it comes to prostitutes and bar dancers? (I reiterate the two are not necessarily mutually inclusive.) I think it is to do with our attitude towards poverty. We hate the poor, which is not the same thing as hating poverty. Bollywood stars who display more skin than bar dancers are idolised because they exude wealth. Middle class parents dream of putting their children through the Boogie Woogie grind and making it to Bollywood. At any cost. But the same efforts by a poor girl on the wrong side of middle class manners will be met with hostility. Why do we hate the poor so much? Maybe as Indians with middle class values we are driven by the need to have a moral pretence to give ourselves a more exalted position. But in our desperate and vain attempts at acquiring dignity and pride, we rob the dignity of those around. Without emptying glasses around us, our own half-filled glass seems worthless. We never gave our bar dancers a chance to turn into swans.
mahesh.dattani@gmail.com
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