Illicit dancing

Indeed, both defenders and opponents of the ban used similar imagery to make their case to be one of ‘saving’ the women from victimhood: while the ban’s advocates said that dance bars were a cover for prostitution and trafficking rackets, those against the ban claimed that without legal places to dance, most of these women would end up as transactional sex workers. In both sides of the debate, therefore, the dancers’ right to lifestyles that could meet the various criteria of respectability in bourgeois society was paramount.

Skilled or victim?

Anyone familiar with the history of the tawaif in North India and the devadasi in the South will spot the uncanny similarities with late nineteenth and early twentieth-century campaigns to gentrify the performing arts, turning them into palatable cultural forms that could be mobilized for the nationalist endeavor. As with the dance bar ban, in the earlier debates the art of dancing was largely if not entirely removed from its context of being a hereditary skill, and was reframed as a victimizing activity in which women were forced to flaunt their bodies and be akin to, or actually be, prostitutes. The perceived connection between dance and prostitution has been widely discussed in various scholarly works on the performing arts in South Asia. Morcom’s analysis of the dance bar ban acutely reveals how the debate surrounding female performers and dance has not actually moved on much in over a hundred years. Although what used to be the moral issue of ‘prostitution” is now the development issue of ‘sex work’ and HIV/AIDS, in many ways the debate remains framed in terms of women having improved lives if they do not have to dance. This framing of dance as part of sex work entirely denies the reality that for most of the performers, dancing is their trade, their labor, their skill, their family tradition, and indeed has been for centuries.

Woman(-identified) performers

The book starts with a somewhat disappointing introduction. While most of us who teach or present on courtesan culture have used movies to give our audience a taste of what performance may have looked like, opening a book of this caliber with an analysis of the film Pakeezah seems superfluous. However, by the end of the introduction it is entirely clear that this is a book based on rigorous and broad scholarship. Morcom includes a historical overview of female hereditary performers in chapter one, an analysis of the castes and communities of these performers in chapter two, and in the third chapter she introduces her reader to transgender and women-identified performers in a historical context. She then shifts the focus to the twenty-first century, and examines in chapter four how even sexy Bollywood dancing has made it into the acceptable realm of the middle-classes, juxtaposing this with the ongoing stigmatization of hereditary performers. In chapter five we learn about the bar girls, the ramifications of the dance bar ban, and the necessity to frame arguments both for and against the ban in terms of labor and human rights. In her final chapter, Morcom returns to women-identified performers and the way their lives and livelihoods have been affected by NGOs, community-based organizations, and an increasing globalized awareness of ‘gay rights’.

One of Morcom’s radical additions to scholarship on dance in India is that she includes in her analyses kothis, a term she never fully defines but which usually refers to woman-identified assigned-at-birth men who live as men in their daily lives but present as women when performing. Kothis are increasingly conflated with hijras (transgender women who were born assigned-at-birth men), in part because kothis’ lack of access to appropriate performing spaces leaves them in need of other earnings, which they can often acquire through association with hijras. Morcom’s inclusion of women-identified and transgender performers alongside cisgender female dancers is quite revolutionary, and very much appreciated. Although Morcom herself occasionally stumbles on terminology (her uncritiqued use of the term ‘effeminate’ is somewhat grating, and terms such as ‘transvestite’, used to distinguish from ‘transgender’, could have been explored more), her work also highlights how unhelpful ‘Western’ and development-related language can be. The term MSM (men who have sex with men) is often used in discourses on non-Western societies, allowing for the fact that the term ‘gay’ and attendant identity politics are irrelevant in many cultures. However, as Morcom points out, the term MSM nevertheless ties itself to the binary gender division of male/female, a division that many kothis do not recognize. Modern feminist discourse may want to take note of how Morcom includes all women-identified dancers in her analyses, and while she does separate her discussion into cisgender (a term which, incidentally, she never uses) and transgender performers, her narrative flows easily and inclusively, without any hint of sensationalism.

Sense of déjà-vu

Anyone working in the field of South Asian performing arts needs to read this book, as should those interested in the lives of female and women-identified performers. However, Morcom’s scholarship reaches far beyond the arts, and this book reveals the contradictory forces of modernity in illuminating yet, actually, predictable ways. Morcom herself refers to her ‘shock’ (27) at realizing that there continues to exist a dimension of Indian culture that involves hereditary female performers. However, more surprising than many of Morcom’s conclusions as to the ongoing detriment of the post-colonial project to hereditary female-identified performance is the fact that so many of us who work in this field had not realized or verbalized it before. In that sense, the experience of reading Morcom’s book is similar to watching a movie you have seen but which no longer lingers in your consciousness: a sense of déjà-vu combined with not being all that surprised at any of the revelations. Morcom shows that history unfortunately does repeat itself, though she also offers positive interpretations and analyses. This book is a unique addition to the scholarship on performance, and Morcom has written it in a highly erudite, well-researched, yet extremely readable manner.

Lalita du Perron, University of Wisconsin-Madison (duperron@southasia.wisc.edu)