Bans and Bar Girls: Performing Caste in Mumbai’s Dance Bars

01 January, 2020

Sameena Dalwai

In August 2005, the Maharashtra government banned dancing by “bar girls” in over a thousand dance bars in Mumbai, effectively leaving around seventy-five thousand women without livelihoods. In this book, the lawyer and author Sameena Dalwai weighs up the legal arguments for and against the ban, and argues that this move was influenced by globalisation and an increasing moral panic, but also largely by caste bias against the predominantly oppressed-caste women who danced in bars.

Women Unlimited, 242 pages, Rs 595