THE GRAMMAR OF KOLKATA ‘EYETALKING’
Though little known, Kolkata’s dance bars are among the city’s most common forms of nightlife. The business is exploitative, but the bars themselves are addictive, spectacular, even dreamlike.
ASSIGNATIONS BETWEEN CUSTOMERS AND DANCERS ARE ARRANGED BY NOTES WRITTEN ON NAPKINS, WHICH ARE FERRIED BY ‘FLOOR BOYS’ FROM THE AUDIENCE TO THE WOMEN ONSTAGE. THE NOTES USUALLY RESULT IN A CUSTOMER’S OR A DANCER’S CELL PHONE NUMBER. THE KOLKATA BARS DO EVERYTHING POSSIBLE TO AVOID THE LABEL ‘DANCE BAR’. A SIGN OUTSIDE MIGHT ONLY ADVERTISE “LIVE SINGING”. MANY IDENTIFY THEMSELVES AS A “BAR AND RESTAURANT” AND NOTHING MORE. OTHERS SIMPLY SAY THEY ARE A “FAMILY RESTAURANT” UNTIL A CERTAIN HOUR OF THE EVENING
Adecade ago, Kolkata bar owners started hiding something. The pleasant and quiet bars of Chandni Chowk, the historic business district, suddenly built stages, installed lights, and hired female performers. The proprietors told the local press of a surge in “popular demand” for “live entertainment”. A more likely explanation is the roughly 75,000 ‘bar girls’ who lost their jobs in Maharashtra after that state’s dance-bar ban around the same time. Varsha Kale, the honorary president of the Bharatiya Bar Girls’ Union, estimated in an interview that 13,000 Mumbai bar girls were from Kolkata, and that most of them returned to Bengal after the ban.
Then and now, the Kolkata bars do everything possible to avoid the label ‘dance bar’. A sign outside might only advertise “live singing”. Many identify themselves as a “bar and restaurant” and nothing more. Others simply say they are a “family restaurant” until a certain hour of the evening. The most that employees tend to say is that they work at a “singing bar”, asserting that there isn’t any dancing going on even if it is happening in a room behind them. I encountered such false denials at Esplanade Bar and Restaurant, Night Queen’s, and Chung Wah, among other establishments.
The Kolkata dance bars’ attempt to be inconspicuous has succeeded. Unlike their forebears in Mumbai, whose tales of prostitution and crime were widely romanticised and deplored, Kolkata’s dance bars have remained obscure. Many affluent residents of the city are unaware of their existence. Experts in sex work are often just as ignorant. Souvik Basu, a programme coordinator at Sanlaap, which focusses on the destructive consequences of sex work, told me flatly that “there are not many dance bars in Kolkata,” adding, “There might be, but we haven’t seen much.” Mystery about what exactly goes on at Kolkata dance bars is central to their legal situation and appeal. Places of both insecurity and independence for their performers, and of apparently criminal enterprise for their proprietors, dance bars are also a ritualised and spectacular and entrancing form of entertainment for men across Kolkata. They exemplify the misery and allure of the city’s long decay.
“YOU HAVE TO ADJUST”
Though they seem not to be a focus of Kolkata law enforcement, dance bars appear to break the law trivially and gravely. A routine visit to practically any Kolkata dance bar will show that they fail to abide by a number of regulations imposed on them by the Calcutta High Court. Its order to install metal detectors and its ban on stripper poles, for example, are both flouted by most bars.
Sources among dancers, policemen, and activists – most asked to be anonymous out of fear for their safety – asserted that dance bars also commit more serious crimes. One dancer, whom I will call Abhranila, told me that trafficking is common. “Most girls arrive [at dance bars] through agents. Because they leave their cities and come here, they don’t know anything about the place.” These “agents,” she added, frequently torture girls in what she called the “initial days”. “In the end you have to adjust,” Abhranila said repeatedly.
Though it may not be mandatory for individual dancers, sex work is reportedly a common feature of dance bars. “You’ll find hardly any singing bars that only make money on singing,” said a dance-bar regular I will call Samir. “They make money on the girls.” Rajeev Sarkar, a social activist and one of Kolkata’s few experts on dance bars, agreed. “The real thing is prostitution and women trafficking,” he said. Abhranila, whose boyfriend was present during our interview, also said that sex work is widespread, though she contradicted herself about its frequency and seemed uncomfortable with the subject. In March, Kolkata’s most powerful dance bar owner, Jagjit Singh — who police have estimated to own as many as 50 bars, and whose company plausibly claims to operate the largest chain of restaurants and bars in West Bengal — was arrested. He remains imprisoned without bail and faces charges that include human trafficking. Sources, however, said they have had concerns for years about a lack of official action against dance bars resulting in part from an ill-conceived division of labour between the police and the excise department. “Police will act on the violation of law and order,” one cop told me, “but the excise has the specific duty to control or regulate those dance bars … Excise was not so helpful, and they are not thinking in the same manner.” It is a paradox that the West Bengal excise department must monitor dance bars while also depending on their continued existence. In January, the state government’s debt was reported to be ~3.34 lakh crore. As officials have removed regulations on the hours bars can stay open and allowed them to open their own retail liquor shops, the tax intake that comes from alcohol has been projected to increase nearly ~200 crore in two years. Officials see alcohol as such an important source of potential revenue that, in January, West Bengal set up a state-owned alcohol distribution business.
ENJOY YOURSELF, OR ELSE
Kolkata’s dance bars operate in a state of seemingly willful neglect, but they do not behave with impunity. Instead, they ply their trade through innuendo and code. Customers and dancers communicate by ‘eye-talking’, the term used to describe the way a woman holds a man’s gaze to show interest, or look up or out to indicate places they might go to meet alone. Assignations between customers and dancers are arranged by notes written on napkins, which are ferried by ‘floor boys’ from the audience to the women onstage. The notes usually result in a customer’s or a dancer’s cell phone number. A deal is struck through Whatsapp without official involvement from the bar and without an obvious act of solicitation, which is illegal.
The floor boys are also in charge of distributing tips of anywhere from ~10 to ~2000, which they either throw over the girl’s head, so the money rains down on her as she dances, or hand over slowly, one bill at a time. They always make sure to point out the customer who gave the tip, demonstrating he can be relied on for cash. According to Samir, dancers usually sleep with a customer only at their own discretion. Money given as a tip could ultimately result in sex, but it could also result in nothing.
Such ambiguity is typical of Kolkata dance bars. Everything about them is designed to put a bargoer into a daze or a trance. The music pulses and thumps loudly enough to render conversation impossible. To talk at all, it is necessary to scream into your interlocutor’s ear, creating the impression, from afar, that everyone is whispering. Two, three, four, even five disco balls whirl above the stage, showering the room with flashing, multicoloured lights. Smoking inside is universally permitted, but the windows are boarded up such that cigarette fumes form a kind of permanent fog.
All this creates a kind of sensory overload, an addled feeling in which the world of mundane concerns outside the bar and its dancers falls away. As in a theatre, the stage is at the front of the room, with all other objects positioned as much as possible in its direction. The dancers often wear shiny medals, sequins, or glitter. They dance to and sing a variety of sorts of music – Western hits, such as Sia’s Cheap Thrills, and songs by artistes such as Honey Singh and occasionally old Bollywood and Bengali tunes – but all of it evokes romance or sex. In this environment, exposed midriffs or arms or feet are capable of provoking rapt attention.
Sitting in the crowd, it is not always clear what even the most dogged clients are seeking. Over the course of one night at Glo Bar, a dance bar off a highway in North Kolkata, a portly middle-aged man continually, for over an hour, gave the same woman in a blue dress ~100 rupee notes one at a time while dictating what music the bar should play and when the woman should dance. Was he suggesting his interest in a rendezvous later, or was he enacting his fantasy right there in the dance bar?
The uncertainties and self-enclosure of dance bars, and the fears and appetites they provoke, resemble nothing so much as a dream. The names of dance bars reflect this otherworldliness: Mercury, Venus, Galaxy, Glo, Night Queen’s, Golden Inn. The juxtapositions in the old design of the first-floor of Night Queen’s distinguished it as the most surreal dance bar. Drab, cheap furnishings sat below framed prints of the classic paintings “The Mona Lisa” and Pierre-Auguste Cot’s “The Storm”; women spun and swayed atop a stage that had a narrow aquarium around its perimeter, such that the droopy fish nearly bumped into each other going through the cloudy water of their cramped passageway.
In the midst of these strange visions, some men seem to reach a kind of ecstasy. They stand up in their chair, pound the table in front of them, clap and wiggle and gesticulate, cigarette in hand, a drink and a fat stack of bills in arm’s reach. Others embrace, hold each other’s faces, and loudly sing along to favourite songs together.
Abhranila said that many dancers are not immune to the dreamlike quality of dance bars. “It’s quite adventurous for us too. We had called people of our fathers’ age ‘uncle’ till now, and suddenly we are calling them ‘jaanu’ (darling). That’s quite an adventure, isn’t it!” The allure of dance bars is not, for Abhranila, limited to the dancer’s point of view. “There’s so much glamour,” she said. “What you get to see at the dance bars for those four or five hours, you won’t get to see anywhere else.” Many patrons, she said, develop an addiction. Some eventually go bankrupt from attending the bars too often. If, one night, the music ever stops at a dance bar, a pointed awkwardness descends on everyone inside. It is like a spell has been broken.
I used to live in Kolkata, and when I left my office in Chandni Chowk at night, I heard the plaintive singing, and saw the neon lights, and wondered what happened inside. Like other young men, I was drawn to dance bars out of a murky curiosity. During most of my visits to them, fellow patrons like Samir were happy to see me, a foreigner, drinking where he drank and watching what he watched.
At other times, however, my presence aroused the darker forces that lurk behind dance bars. After I sat down with a friend at one of the dance bars inside Kingston Hotel, owned by Jagjit Singh, men at the bar started throwing bar snacks at our heads. When I would turn around and look at the crowd assembled there, they would only stare in return. One emissary came to our table, asking us to give him ~2000 to be distributed among the women as tips. We refused. Another man approached, and we questioned him about the peanuts flying in our direction. “I’m sorry for that,” he said, and continued in a manner that was jolly and foreboding at the same time, both offering the opportunity for pleasure and suggesting the issuance of a threat. “If you enjoy yourselves,” he announced, “we’ll all enjoy ourselves.”