Dance on the dark side

Many years ago when Indian journalism was in its teens and Pritish Nandy was revamping the Illustrated Weekly of India, I went to him with an idea. Could I write about Mumbai's mean streets, its sleazy underbelly and its low life? My inspiration was the Lou Reed song 'Walk On The Wild Side', that unforgettable anthem to those who existed on the margins of New York society, its drug addicts, transgenders, street walkers and male prostitutes. As a rookie journalist, I knew Mumbai had an equally, if not more, riveting after-dark tale to tell and I was itching to get my teeth into the story. To Nandy's credit, he bought the idea.

My aide-de camp was my friend, a prominent right wing politician of the city who shared my fascination for Mumbai's underbelly. Each evening, we would set off in his car and enter a world that lay just below Mumbai's surface - but was imperceptible to the normal eye.

In the shadowy crevices of some of Mumbai's most celebrated highways, I learnt how to spot the street walkers; I saw how the city's most renowned children's parks would blossom into gay carnivals, alive with furtive glances and dangerous desires as night approached and I witnessed how its popular beachfronts would turn into landscapes of covert sexual activity.

But what truly blew my mind were the concentric circles of sleaze and crime that existed in Mumbai's inner city, in the red light areas of Foras Street, the bylanes of Kamatipura and their sleazy dance bars and stripper clubs.

Here, life was being lived on the edge and in the raw, and what was most fascinating was that most Mumbaikars were hardly aware of their city's night-time pursuits.

Why am I telling you all this? I am telling you this because knowing what those places and people are like, I can see why someone like Maharashtra's home minister, R R Patil, in trying to clean up the city would first attack the dance bars.

I've been to those dance bars. The girls are beautiful and cheerful and could give many Bollywood stars a run for their money. It's not the girls that Patil is probably objecting to. It's their customers. Salaried men who blow up their entire month's grocery budget on a pretty face, criminals who meet in the comfort and privacy of the bar's smoky back rooms, unchecked quantities of alcohol and drugs, black money and hawala being circulated and converted.

For a man like Patil, Mumbai's nightlife must be a red flag and its dance bars the first touchstone of attack. And his long and systematic campaign to abolish dance bars from the state of Maharashtra was strengthened by news that the state government would uphold an amendment to overrule a Supreme Court nod to allow dance bars to function.

Not only is this a huge blow to the people whose livelihood the bars ensured, but also, in my opinion, it is not going to achieve the clean- up the moral police hopes for.

Legalising, streamlining and empowering the dance-bar girls will. They are not criminals - only women who have no other opportunities available. They deserve better.

It is ironic that their ban has been upheld not even a month after the great writer and Poet Laureate of America Maya Angelou's death. She had worked once as a nightclub stripper and a bar dancer but with affirmative action, she had transformed and evolved into one of the most iconic women of her time. Some one should tell Patil her story.

Malavika Sangghvi is a Mumbai-based writer malavikasangghvi@hotmail.com