president of the Bharatiya Bar Girls Union (BBGU), Varsha Kale,

Categories Interview Money and Sexuality

Interview: Varsha Kale on the Dance Bar Girls’ Movement in Maharashtra

·May 15, 2017
·Shaifali Agrawal

We interview the honorary president of the Bharatiya Bar Girls Union (BBGU), Varsha Kale, on the occasion of dance bars reopening in Maharashtra after being banned for 11 years by the state government.

Ms Kale shares what the profession of bar dancing entails, why the Government’s decision of banning dancing in bars on the pretext of morality is faulty, and what it is about the profession that brings all the political parties and middle class men and women to oppose it. She details the efforts and campaigns undertaken by the state government in 2005 to turn the whole of Maharashtra against bar dancers.She also talks about the traditional tribes of performers the bar dancers have hailed from, and the way the profession made the women leave their roots and branch out to other fields. She shares her hopes and expectations about bar dancing resuming after more than a decade, and her refusal to accept the claim of the police that it is going to give rise to anti-social activities.

Listen:

Cover image courtesy Twitter

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bar dancers·Maharashtra·performers·Varsha Kale

Article written by: Shaifali Agrawal

Shaifali, currently volunteering at TARSHI, works as an independent journalist, interested in art, culture, and gender. She is an alumna of Indian Institute of Mass Communication (IIMC), Delhi; and can be reached at shaifalihere@gmail.com and on Twitter:

In Plainspeak publishes two issues with a theme every month.
A cross-cutting theme across all forthcoming issues in 2021 is how we can expand safe, inclusive sexuality-affirming spaces.

THIS ISSUE:

June – Representation and Sexuality, I Issue – June 15, 2021
Drawing from the oft-discussed conundrum ‘If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?’ we ask: How might we be truly and meaningfully seen and heard, especially if we do not find accurate or adequate representation in mainstream discourse? Representation is a broad term – it might mean political legitimacy of our gender identity and sexual orientation, ethnicity, religion and so on, inclusivity in decision-making processes, highlighting narratives of identities and communities which are marginalised, and portraying sexuality openly and authentically. Our lived experience as well as what we are told by way of religious and/or moral tenets, popular culture, and even advertising, shape the way we look at and interact with our socio-cultural-political milieu. And, while representation may influence how we perceive things, we are not passive consumers of it – we can bring to it a critical eye, point to what’s missing, and if we don’t like what’s on offer we can demand or create other representations. In the June issue of In Plainspeak we explore how representation (and even misrepresentation, or none at all!) may affirm or violate our sexual rights and the assertion of our individual and collective identity.

July – Sexuality and Self-care
People in caring roles, people like us, activists, human rights defenders, home care providers, health care personnel, amongst many other care-givers, tend to work tirelessly. Immersed as we are in the immediate demands of care-provision, we often have very little time and energy to take care of ourselves. Public health emergencies like the current COVID-19 (and HIV and AIDS forty years ago, and still counting) and socio-political, human-made and natural disasters add to our already heavy burden. For those of us who work on fraught issues of sexuality and sexual rights, with the very nature of our work looked askance at, self-care can seem like an indulgence, a frivolity, especially given the current capitalisation of the ‘wellness industry’ (an oxymoron, to begin with). However, self-care, in its truest sense, is not a commodity, but a radical act rooted in the politics of inter-connectedness. If in doing the work that we do, we flounder in eddies of tiredness, hopelessness, dejection or apathy and consequently have nothing joyful left to offer to ourselves or to another, what’s the point? What’s the Point of Revolution, if We Can’t Dance? ask Jane Barry and Jelena Djordjevic in their 2008 book on sustaining the wellbeing of women human rights activists.
What is it that we do for ourselves to keep going, to take care of ourselves, to practice intentional self-care? Exercise? Meditate? Get enough sleep? Reach out to our friends? Practice saying ‘no’? Build solidarity with others? Enjoy the pleasures that our body gives us? What else? The July issue of In Plainspeak dares us to dance, to transmute dejection to delight, and to tell our stories of how in caring for ourselves we expand the possibilities of caring for others and realising our vision of a world where all people enjoy their rights.

For future issue themes, click here.

Would you like to contribute? Send an email to blogeditor@tarshi.net with your idea. Do take a look at our submission guidelines!

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