Calcutta cabaret: dance of pleasure or perversion?

ABSTRACT

The 1970s dawned upon unanticipated political reversals in Bengal – the violent spate of the Naxalite movement, followed by the Bangladesh Liberation War and a fresh flux of refugees from the other side of the 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 politics 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 simultaneously 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 subverting 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.

Keywords:

• Cabaret
• Miss Shefali
• erotic labour
• apasanskriti
• moral policing

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).

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.

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 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 immigration 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, particularly 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.

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.

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.