Women should be cautious before applauding the return of Mumbai’s dance bars as a form of feminist triumph. The earlier debate about the display of mannequins was about an inanimate object inciting men to resort to crimes against women. In this case, we are encouraging women to commoditise themselves even further as objects.

Articles in the media beguilingly position these dance bars as a viable livelihood option for over 75,000 girls previously employed in them, before they were banned in 2005. However, it is a documented fact that these dance bars were a front for prostitution and trafficking. After the closure of these bars, many of these women migrated to overseas locations, Gulf countries and other cities in India. Many of them perform in illegal dance bars and others prostitute themselves in Mumbai’s red light districts.

‘Human economies’

Supporters of the dance bars fail to notice that they are validating an atmosphere where what a woman does can be priced like a service. This pricing is facilitated by a demand, emanating from a larger cultural environment that objectifies women as ‘social currencies’ with increasing and decreasing values. The concept of ‘human economies’ in the context of valuing women and how that translates to a market economy is described by David Graeber in his book Debt, The First 5000 Years .

Human Economies is a representation of the close bond shared by humans and the unconditional and irreplaceable high value placed upon human life. The existence of war, honour, taxes, markets and centralisation of the state as documented in an ancient Mesopotamian text suggests that emerging economies diminished the role of women and their bodies into mere commodities. Traditional communities such as the Tiv of Central Nigeria, Lele of the Belgian Congo and the Balinese Community considered women as the principal social currency — “to create, maintain, or sever relations between people”; essentially women become an object of exchange. The way to exchange women was by providing another woman, their value was not discerned by any unique talents or physical attributes, simply from being a creator of more lives or objects of exchange for the future.

Anthropologist Mary Douglas explained in her observations of the Leles in the 1950s: “Ask, why do you want to have more pawns? And they say the advantage of owning pawns is that if you incur a blood debt, you can settle it by paying one of your pawns and your sister remains free. Why do you wish own sisters to remain free? Ah! Then if I incur a blood debt, I can settle it by giving one of them as a pawn”.

That barter and exchange is possible when she is ‘ripped out of context’ into a generic value capable of being added and subtracted and used as a means to measure debt. Women are stripped of dignity and the traditional-modern usage of women as pawns prevents them from perceiving themselves as anything else, in both ‘human economies’, and later market economies.

Murky ecosystem

Returning to the current day context, it is appalling that women employed in dance bars are being faulted for not approaching the government for rehabilitation. . And statements that ‘being a dance bar girl is a lesser evil than prostitution and trafficking’ overlook the fact that these women also prostitute themselves if the situation so compels them. While women are encouraged to commoditise themselves as bar girls, prostitutes, models, actresses and brand ambassadors, conversely paternalistic institutions emphasise the need to protect women with multiple rules and local laws. Interestingly, both versions, in general diminish the freedom, identity and individualistic opportunities of womanhood.

Thinking cautiously before endorsing the re-establishment of the dance bars will, at the very least, subvert a murky ecosystem where the woman is a pawn for further barter and dehumanisation. The great debate about mannequins happened for all the wrong reasons whereas this debate about real women requires greater sensitivity and a better thought-out-rationale than flippant randomisations of pseudo feminist postures.

(The author is a Program Manager at the National CSR Hub, Tata Institute of Social Sciences)

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