“Public Women” and the “Obscene” Body-Practice: A Short Exploration of Abolition Debates Nitya Vasudevan Part I: Historicising the Present

“Morality crusaders attacked obscene literature, nude paintings, music halls, abortion, birth control information, and public dancing.” (Gayle Rubin)1

“In other words we want to tackle again the problem of composing one body from the multitude of bodies…” (Bruno Latour)2

This paper tries to explore a few basic questions that are relevant to the Indian context -

- What is it about "sex" or the sexualised body on display that causes such extreme levels of anxiety and outrage? - How does "prohibition" then work in regulating this field of "visibility", that is, what can be seen and not seen, what is considered productive or nurturing and what is considered dangerous? - What constitues an obscene body? Is it a characteristic inherent to the body and practice (like nudity, or the sexual act), or is it something else?

Historicising the Era of “Proliferation” This project aims at tracking a history of the contested present moment in India. The charge of this exploration derives from the fact that the contemporary (late 80s to the present) exists in popular discourse as having seen certain shifts – the decade of

1 Rubin, Gayle. “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality.” In Carole S Vance, ed. Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality. London: Pandora, 1992, p 267-293 2 Latour, Bruno. “From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik or How to Make Things Public”. In Latour, Bruno and Peter Weibel, ed. Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy. The MIT Press: Massachusetts, 2005

1 liberalisation in economic policy is discussed as one in which "new" freedoms have been sought and equally "new" forms of backlash to this seeking have been generated (in the form of the ultra-virulent and violent right-wing proliferations). It has therefore been cast as the era of proliferations, of excess - of sexual freedom, of the desire for sexual freedom, of right-wing mobilisations in the name of a respectable Indian culture, and alongside this, of changes in levels and modes of consumption, relationships with technology and forms of mobility. Interestingly, the contemporary moment (in popular discourse) is then set off against an undefined past, ranging from colonial times to the Nehruvian socialist era to the period of Hindutva expansion3 in the country, in which these freedoms were not available to people, especially to women. And more importantly, it is during this era that “liberation” or “freedom” comes to be equated to a particular desire for, and a certain knowledge of, “sexuality”.

Similarly, the present moment is also witnessing a set of disturbing trends in relation to

3 “Hindutva” is the ideological self-description of a number of organizations that exist in the contemporary: - the Bharatiya Janata Party or BJP – a political party that was founded in 1980 and formed the ruling government between 1998 and 2004; - the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh or RSS - a volunteer “cultural” organization formed in 1925 in pre-independent India by Dr KB Hedgewar, to unite the Hindu community to work for the national cause; - the Vishwa Hindu Parishad or VHP – formed in 1964 as a non-political organization meant to unite Hindus, Sikhs and Jains under the Hindu banner, to promote Hindu ethical and spiritual values during modern times, and to protect against the “dangers” posed by Christianity, Islam and Communism; - the Bajrang Dal – it was set up in 1984 as the youth wing of the VHP; - the Shiv Sena (Army of Shivaji) – set up by Balasaheb Thackeray in 1966 in Maharashtra, which remains its primary base though it has expanded its activities – it started out with a pro-Marathi agenda and broadened to a Hindu nationalist agenda when it aligned itself with the BJP; - the Sri Rama Sene – a Karnataka-based organization founded by Pramod Muthalik, the Sri Rama Sene attacked an exhibition of painter MF Hussain’s paintings in Delhi in 2008, and attacked young women in a Mangalore pub in 2009; - the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena or MNS – a political party that was founded in 2006 by Raj Thackeray after he left the Shiv Sena on account of differences with leader Udhav Thackeray. This party is responsible for the violence against North Indians in Maharashtra in the current moment. This ideological stance (pro-Hindu) emerged during the anti-colonial nationalist movement, out of the ideas generated by leaders like V D Savarkar, who is credited with the birth of this ideology. In popular discourse, it is referred to as “right-wing” ideology, since it stands for the belief that India is a Hindu nation, and argues for an essentially Indian culture that is currently being threatened by Westernisation, Islam, Christianity, Communism, obscenity in the representational field, and degenerate ideas on sex and women. The Hindutva organizations have been the most active in articulating opposition to certain kinds of texts, ideas and bodies in the public sphere. This includes nation-wide propaganda against Muslims, regionalist assertions against Hindi-speakers or Biharis (ie. non-Marathi people in the state of Maharashtra), or non-Kannada speakers in Karnataka. 2

sexual or sexualized practices in the space of the public4. The contestations involving public space are now more than ever demanding that they be explored in relation to anxieties around the (gendered) body and sexual subjectivity.

Just as “morality crusades” (it would be unwise to give this term an atemporal currency) were not born of the contemporary era, the ideology of the Hindu right has its roots in nationalist and anti-colonial movements in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (which were opposed in many ways to the legal reforms encouraged by the British), and the concern with the regulation of sexuality has a long and highly contested history in this context. “Sex” is not a new problem, and the supposed freeing up of sexuality in the present moment (thereby casting the past into a haze of backwardness and regression), is something that is produced in opposition to what is seen as the surge in right wing conservatism.

How does one then begin to address this set of phenomena without casting them as radically ‘new’ (this turning into the kind of (anti)historical reading that renders all that went before it as fixed and as categorically different) or without giving in to the logic that claims that the present is witnessing a kind of sexual liberation, a freeing of ‘sex speech’ and ‘sex act’ from the various restrictions that have forced them to remain within a realm of secrecy? In other ways, how does one understand what Ashish Nandy calls the “language of the homology between sexual and political stratarchies” in a historicised manner?5 The paper will therefore attempt to build a history of the present, a history of this very relationship between publicness and sexuality that troubles and occupies many of us in our political fields today.

4 This refers to the 2009 Mangalore pub attack, where a group of women in a pub in Mangalore were dragged out and beaten up by members of the Sri Ram Sene, a culturalist organisation. This was followed by nationwide protest and the Facebook Pink Chaddi campaign. Afterwards, there was a series of attacks against women on the streets of Bangalore, where the women were accused of wearing revealing clothes, not speaking Kannada and being from the more affluent middle class. It also refers to the series of attacks against hijras which occurred last year, where they were accused of soliciting and were thrown out of their houses. The divisions between public and private in this case are blurred, for it is the hijra's occupation of the public sphere that ends in her being harrassed in even the space of the home. 5 Nandy, Ashis. “The Psychology of Colonialism: Sex, Age and Ideology in British India.” In At the Edge of Psychology: Essays in Politics and Culture. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1980 3

Publicness and the Field of Visibility

Returning to the three questions we started out with, the point that is at the core of this paper's argument, is that there is something that happens when a text or a body is sexualised in the public domain. This something, that manifests in the form of the state's censorship demands, right-wing outrage and violence, or even celebrations of sexual freedom and media attention, cannot be explained away by saying that “sex” is a private matter in the Indian context and that when it leaves its private context, it causes controversy. To push this further, one cannot say that it is simply the exposure of that which usually remains hidden that causes this disruption. To state this would be to do two things - a) agree that sexuality does in fact “live” in the private sphere - the paper argues against this by stating that sex is hugely a public concern, and the distinctions between public and private are precisely blurred by sexuality; b) it is also to agree that the Indian context is in fact repressive when it comes to sexuality, which is why the exposure to the sexual act or sexualised body disturbs - the paper again argues against this, by stating that one has to read the practice of censoring or prohibition or abolition as a set of transactions involved in the condition of being public.

The paper, in order to discuss the idea of the obscene body and practice in the "field of visibility", deals with the regulation of female performance-entertainment, in this case dance (in the form of the public and ‘sexualised’ performances of the devadasi, the lavani dancer and the bar dancer). The attempt here is to arrive at a framework in which an exploration of the relationship between sexuality and publicness serves to explain the above practices and how they function or "live" in this context (whether in the nineteenth century or in the contemporary).

To clarify concepts used in the paper, "publicness" is defined as the condition of being- in-the-public-eye, and includes a range of things - what is done in the name of "public interest", what is said to and on the behalf of the collective termed "the public", the lines that seem to divide the public and the private spheres (home and the world, inside and outside), and ideas of rights to privacy and laws against public display. The idea of a

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"field of visibility"6 here is linked to publicness, and its significance derives from the difficulties involved in explaining why there seem to be such frenzied and public reactions to sex and the (female) body (when it is usually thought of as relegated to the sphere of the private-intimate). The histories of these concerns in the domains of law, public health, politics, and technology demand a remapping of the field of visibility and an explanation of the logic of what can and cannot be seen, and why some bodies and texts tend to cause eruptions in the public domain. Visibility here is read as a transaction rather than a static condition – the field of visibility then is a field of transactions, and this is established through an exploration of the publicness of the body or sexuality. This is also seen as a combine that is of concern particularly to the form of the modern democracy. “While various forms of visual displays continue even in the present days, the public-ness has taken on a new meaning in modern democracies. It is now linked to political communication, legitimation and accountability of authority—aspects that were absent from previous bodies.”7 The paper means to examine these democratic processes, and also to argue that visibility is very much a part of this grid of “political communication, legitimation and accountability of authority”.

The paper distinguishes between two modes of locating the obscene object - the late nineteenth and early twentieth century mode of social reform and the mode pointed to by Ashish Rajadhyaksha8, whereby there is a split subject that views modernity as a stage of sleaze, thereby drawing various till-now innocuous objects into this theatre of corruptedness.

6 Visibility here is distinguished from visuality, in that the latter belongs in the discipline of art theory and film studies, and refers to the particular effect that the visual has, or the particular place of the visual in history or psychic states. Visibility implies a moving away from this stress on the visual object, the screen, the eye, the mirror, the art object, perspective, and so on. It implies rather what occupies the field of public vision, what it means to be seen and to see, to recognise and misrecognise. It is an attempt to work against the visible-invisible binary built up by so many activist groups - this binary, though perhaps vital to the lives of the marginalised, still acts as an end in itself, and prevents an exploration of the processes through which the "conditions of visibility" are achieved. 7 Habermas, Jurgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Massachussets: MIT Press, 1991 8 Rajadhyaksha, Ashish. “Is Realism Pornographic?” In Poduval, Satish, ed. Re-figuring Culture: History, Theory and the Aesthetic in Contemporary India. Sahitya Akademi, 2005 5

Sexuality and Nationhood: The Public-Private Divide Now, it has been established in the work of postcolonial and feminist scholars and historians9 that the idea of the nation in the nineteenth century rested on a particular imagination of the Indian woman (upper caste, a particular kind of feminist subject who inhabited the private domain, which is where her education and intelligence were to be put to use). It has also been argued therefore that there were certain ways of negotiating the public-private divide that accompanied this nation building. Partha Chatterjee has argued that, in late 19th century Bengal, the "home" became the domain of the spiritual Indian identity, a feminine sphere, while the "world" became the domain of politics, technology and economy, a masculine sphere10.

The term “public” also became crucial to the framing of the constitution. For example, in the Constituent Assembly of 1948, one of the other members requests that the term “public service” (in one section of the constitution) be replaced by “national and social service”, since “the services of the State—Government services—are referred to as public services, but national service or social service has got a wider and a higher, a more comprehensive connotation than the word public service” (H V Kamath).11 Dr BR Ambedkar replies saying, “I should have thought that the word ‘public’ was wide enough to cover both ‘national’ as well as ‘social’ and it is, therefore, unnecessary to use two words when the purpose can be served by one…”.12 It is clear from this that at this point when the constitution for the new nation was being drafted, the term “public” had changed from meaning simply the services rendered by a state, to connote something in the realm of the imagination, something much more meaningful to the newly independent nation.

9 Refer to the work of Partha Chatterjee, Tanika Sarkar, Meera Kosambi, Devika, Susie Tharu and K Lalitha, and Tejaswini Niranjana. 10 Meera Kosambi argues that that in the context of Maharashtra, well into the twentieth century, many aspects of 'home'—especially marriage-related institutions—were taken by social reformers from the socio- cultural domain to the purview of negotiation with the colonial state, and thus within the political domain. "Nor was the home simply a 'private' sphere, as I have already suggested." She goes on to argue that "In the pre-colonial scenario, the home itself had no separation of spheres other than that of male and female spaces. But the shaping of a public sphere by new social and political organizations in colonial times created social tensions within the family and fissures within the new private sphere." In Crossing Thresholds: Feminist Essays in Social History. Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2007 11 Constituent Assembly of India, Vol VII, Friday 3rd December 1948 12 Ibid 6

This newly meaningful "public" is closely tied to sexual practices and the representational arena, especially in terms of female sexuality and the ways in which it has been and is regulated. Tropes of degradation, demoralization, excess and desire, are all tied to bodies and how they perform. Concepts like the dignity of women or female modesty that should not be outraged, have their roots in colonial law, and are embedded in the Indian constitution. Whether it is the sexualised image of the woman which is discussed as early as in the 1927-28 Report of the Indian Cinematograph Committee, or the ways in which "public women" were slowly marginalised and rendered illegitimate through the colonial and anti-colonial era, there is historical evidence to show that publicness and sexuality have been inextricably tied in the narrative of the nation- state. Through the idea of the obscene body-practice, the paper tries to unpack this relationship and argues that, it is not in fact the "content" (sexuality as a positive set of attributes) that renders a body obscene. It is the transaction that takes place in entering the domain of the public, and an involvement in the very technology, economy and politics that are considered the stronghold of (nationalist) masculinity, that render that body obscene. Therefore, the declaration that something is violating Indian culture or morality then, rather than being read as a call to maintain some inner core of conservatism, should be read as a repeated enactment that tries to regulate the movements between private and public spheres13.

What Constitutes Public Interest?

The 'public' as a collective body has changed in connotation from the era of colonial rule to the postcolonial nation-state. The colonial rulers viewed the public as subjects they were ruling, whose moral education they had to foster. In the postcolonial period, the public has gained the added aspect of being the body that elects or votes, and towards which the government is accountable. Therefore, there has been a shift from the notion of

13 This is why Rajkot houswife Pooja Chauhan, as a protest against the domestic dowry violence she was being subjected to, marched out onto the streets in her underwear and bra on a Wednesday in July of 2007, carrying a baseball bat in one hand. This can be read as an act that precisely makes use of the illegitimacy of the movement between private and public. See http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Semi-nude_anti- dowry_protest/articleshow/2176007.cms 7

a public morality that involved the colonial authority dictating what was necessary for this morality to be maintained, to "public interest", which indicates a more inclusive and benevolent though not less regulatory approach to the collective (this latter does not exclude the aspect of morality, and so in some ways involves a retention of colonial approaches, which are then recast in the languages of democracy). This shift can be seen in the grammar of governance - the colonial authority generally used the term 'public' in the adjectival sense, describing morality, hygiene or opinion. The position it has attained in addition to this, as both speaking subject and addressee, has largely occurred in the postcolonial era. Why is this body called ‘the public’? It is not simply ‘population’ or even ‘collective’, because the imagination of it operates at levels of subjectivity, judgment, morality and commonality (as an attribute), not just numbers14.

The public is that body-collective which is always known to be “watching” or seeing or participating and therefore always acting, but also static in the strange way of not being a differentiated body, instead having a uniformity imposed on it, this peculiar combine deriving from the discourse of nationalism and democracy. Members of this public (who have supposedly been led astray by their politics/obsessions/sexual perversions) are also prone to acts of violence, unthinking and irrational behaviour, and disruptions of law and order. This diagnosing of the public then mirrors the discourse that wants to keep it safe, from terrorism, from militancy, from pornography, from corruption, from death, from over-population, from abnormality, from poverty.

The phrase ‘public interest’ therefore leads us to an interrogation of how the idea of a public and public-ness is conceived. Certain kinds of events or phenomena are immediately suspect because they are said to oppose public interest. But it is not just in the prohibitive function that this phrase takes on its charge, though it appears that way because of the various ‘controversies’ that the media brings us. How is it that something is described as being of ‘public interest’?

14 This is perhaps why the "mob" or the "masses" have negative connotations in most contexts in which these terms are used - the mob is seen as frenzied and out of control, the masses are unthinking and beleaguered. 8

Here we pause and consider the origins of the ‘public sphere’ as an imagined space of interaction and democratic functioning. Commenting on “The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere”15 Nancy Fraser says, “… it is central to Habermas’s account that the bourgeois public sphere was to be a discursive arena in which ‘private persons’ deliberated about ‘public matters’. There are several different senses of ‘private’ and ‘public’ in play here. ‘Public’, for example, can mean (1) state-related, (2) accessible to everyone, (3) of concern to everyone, and (4) pertaining to a common good or shared interest. Each of these corresponds to a contrasting sense of ‘private’. In addition, there are two other senses of ‘private’ hovering just below the surface here, (5) pertaining to private property in a market economy, and (6) pertaining to intimate domestic or personal life, including sexual life.” (Nancy Fraser 2003).

The phrase ‘public interest’, now gains a whole ground of connotations – that which becomes the business of the state or needs to be governed by it; that which can be seen and experienced by everyone; that which is a concern for everyone; that which is then implicated in the idea of the common good – and these connotations come together in constituting a field of objects, texts, bodies, ‘issues’ that are ‘of public interest’. Though Habermas sets up the question of the newly “public” sphere, his definition of the ways in which it functions perhaps refers only to 18th century Europe, and needs to be questioned when it comes to the colonial or post-colonial context. Indian scholars argue that it is with colonialism that the public-private divide was sought to be introduced by the British rule, and this attempt resulted in conflicts with existing older orders16.

Habermas also alludes to the Greek system, in which the private domain of the master’s domination was segregated from the public domain of “freedom and permanence”,

15 Jurgen Habermas undertakes two tasks in his theorisation of the public sphere – a) the attempt to reconstruct the public sphere as a fundamentally historical category, linked to the formation of the bourgeois society under liberal capitalism in the 18th century b) the delineation of the public as a fourth term, distinct from the state, market place and the intimate sphere of the family (Miriam Hansen). 16 Meera Kosambi, for instance, shows that the strict division between private and public spaces (which exists in Habermas's work) did not exist at all in the pre-colonial Peshwa period, with private buildings housing functions of the state, whether the penal system, military, or entertainment. Political and socio- cultural domains were also thus not divided in terms of space. Kosambi, Meera. Crossing Thresholds: Feminist Essays in Social History. Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2007 9 adding that “Only in the light of the public sphere did that which existed become revealed, did everything become visible to all.” It is precisely this idea of the public sphere as ‘revelatory’ that renders it vulnerable to such state measures and moral panics. But it would be mistaken to force this idea of the Greek polis onto the Indian context, in which birth, death, reproduction of life and labour, the service of women, are all not rendered private. Also, importantly for this project, it also needs to be emphasised that the division between public and private spheres and the relegation of “sexual life” to the latter does not quite take place in the Indian context. Whether due to the colonial underpinnings of anthropology or the nature of the colonial context itself (as a time-space of contestation centered around "difference"), sexual life is staged as “a concern for everyone”, and as “implicated in the idea of the common good”. The central aim of this paper is to explain precisely how the sexual life and the body are public concerns.17

Part II “Slipped Sisters”

If the notions of the State as to dancing are to be accepted, we would have reached a stage where skimpy dressing and belly gyrations which today is the Bollywood norm for dance, will have to be banned as inherently or invariably pernicious. We think as a nation we have outgrown that, considering our past approach to dancing, whether displayed as sculpture on monuments or in its real form. (Extract from the dance bar judgment18)

…there are certain activities which are inherently vicious and pernicious and are condemned by all civilised

17 In setting up the bourgeois public sphere as ideal for critique of the state, Habermas then reads newer forms of publicity as amounting to the decomposition or corruption of the Ideal, while still admitting that "publicity continues to be an organizational principle of our political order". Can these kinds of changes be read otherwise than as a decomposition that is linear in history? That it is not simply an inversely proportionate relationship between the expanding scope of the public sphere and the decreasing significance of its function, but that the functioning of the public sphere cannot be restricted to its functionality? That the bourgeois modern public sphere is built on older structures of affiliation, and therefore has to necessarily be seen as negotiating both older and newer forms of "publicity". Habermas reads publicity as having changed, and it now performs another lesser function. The historical role played by publicity in this context seems to have been eroded. 18 Indian Hotel And Restaurants Association (Ahar), An ... vs The State Of Maharashtra Through The Hon''Ble Minister, ... on 12 April, 2006 10

communities. Similarly, there are goods, articles and services which are obnoxious and injurious to the health, morals, safety and welfare of the general public. (ibid)

This section deals with obscenity as it pertains to histories of the performing arts and live entertainment. I refer here only to those forms that have been decidedly “female”, by which I mean various things – only women have performed them; they have been a source of livelihood for large numbers of women; and they have been “sexualized” in ways that have brought them under the scrutinizing eye of the colonial state, the social reformer or post-colonial democratic institutions.

In order to talk about the female dancer and the abolition of her practice, the paper draws from existing work to argue that the idea of the "public woman" structures the debates on abolition in the case of the devadasi system in southern India, and the ban in the case of lavani dancers and the bar dancers of Maharashtra. The public woman emerges precisely because of the nationalist construction of the educated, politically informed but nevertheless private middle class and upper caste woman. The private woman has no direct, or at least consistent, access to the official economic policy (as she is not involved in industry, or working for the British Government), and to new technologies (there was no widespread official use of the press by women, and their access to the cinema and the radio were very limited, the early films using male actors in female roles)19. The public woman, on the other hand, was constantly in contact with men outside the familial sphere (in fact these women were mostly unmarried), occupied public spaces, and was outside the bounds of private family law (these communities of women had their own codes of marriage and inheritance). These women introduced the kind of ambiguity that the discourse of modernity, whether the coloniser's notions of a morally educated and

19 This is not to say that the private woman was immobilized in terms of politics and the social sphere. It is that there were ways in which her activities and contributions were cast as private even if they were public. Meera Kosambi says of the women social reformers, “…women's socio-cultural initiatives were generally treated as 'domestic', private interventions, and are occluded within the historical archive because of the discursive marginality of the domestic sphere. Even women's public interventions were routinely relegated to the domestic private sphere and thus marginalized.” See Kosambi, Meera. Crossing Thresholds: Feminist Essays in Social History. Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2007 11 enlightened body of subjects or the nationalist notions of the divided realms of domesticity (where sexuality was supposed to be contained) and politics, could not deal with easily. Also, the element of commerce governs the discourse on this kind of dancing. It is not the dance itself that is the problem, it is the way in which the dance and the dancer are placed in an economy of pleasure, sexual relations, service and entertainment. This combine of pleasure and commerce is important here because that is what differentiates, in the dance bar judgment for instance, the dancer from the waitress working in the same bar. The former is a publicly sexualized figure in ways that the latter is not20.

This section argues that in the case of abolitions of dancing, the charges of "sex", "obscenity" or "immorality" actually referred to this realm of ambiguity where the lines between public and private, sex and art, entertainment and labour or livelihood, sexuality and property relations, were proved fragile and contingent, the underpinnings of both (colonial) rule and (anti-colonial) resistance thereby rendered problematic.

The currency this section has for the present moment in India derives from the judgment quoted above – the ban on dance bars in Maharashtra, which came into effect on July 21st, 2005, and was lifted following the final judgment in 2006. It was a case that was filed with the Bombay High Court by the Bar Owners’ Association, the newly formed Bar Girls’ Union, and a group of feminist NGOs which were invested in the lives and livelihood of the dancers and their right to practice their profession. The case was fought against the state, which had, through Sections 33A and 33B of the Bombay Police Act (as amended by the Bombay Police Amendment Act 2005), banned dancing as an activity in

20 These are of course generalisations of a particular order. Writing on the Contagious Diseases Act, for instance, shows that there was strong resistance to the segregation and ghettoisation of prostitutes in particular areas, and the famous Lock Hospital in Mazgaon that was set up to examine prostitutes for venereal diseases failed as a colonial enterprise, both due to the "irresponsibility" (refusal to co-operate with this "consensual" exercise in health governance) of the prostitutes themselves and the relationships and social networks the women were already embedded in. For example, in many of the areas where the government wanted to evacuate the prostitutes, the landlords of the houses the women occupied complained saying that the women had been their tenants for years, and this move would dislocate these relationships. See Ramanna, Mridula. Western Medicine and Public Health in Colonial Bombay, 1845- 1895. Hyderabad: Orient Longman Private Ltd, 2002 12

all bars in Maharashtra and cancelled the entertainment licences that these establishments had acquired. The bill was passed by the Legislative Assembly on 21st July, 2005 and by the Legislative Council on 23rd July, 200521.

We start by looking at abolition as an operation of the state. Abolition is a legal term that is no longer in circulation. It derives its charge from the period of colonial rule, particularly the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, when the colonial state encouraged the social reform of Indian society through the eradication of “social evils” that had led to its degeneration. The devadasi practice was one of many that were sought to be abolished. Abolition therefore addressed practices of a certain kind – filmmaking, for instance, was not something that was in itself seen as pernicious or harmful, and so was censored rather than abolished, for it was born of modernity and was a part of the theory of progress in ways that sati, hook-swinging and the devadasi practice could never be. So even though film censorship was being discussed at the same time as devadasi abolition, the two were not brought into the same conceptual realm of colonial governance. Therefore there were a range of practices that were sought to be abolished by the British government. These practices were seen as regressive and not in line with the Western ideals of a civilized life. “Abolition” is therefore differentiated from the “ban” in this paper, the latter aligned more with forms of censorship that are enacted in a contested moment (this moment possessing its own history) than with a lengthy period of reform of a practice.

The aim of this section is then to juxtapose the three instances – the abolitionist campaigns against devadasi dedication in the late nineteenth century and finally abolition

21 Extracts from Sections – 33A – “(a) holding of a performance of dance, of any kind or type, in any eating house, permit room or beer bar is prohibited; (b) all performance licences… to hold a dance performance, of any kind or type, in an eating house, performance, of any kind or type, in an eating house, permit room or beer bar shall stand cancelled.” 33B – “…nothing in section 33A shall apply to the holding of a dance performance in a drama theatre, cinema theatre and auditorium; or sports club or gymkhana, where entry is restricted to its members only, or a three starred or above hotel or in any other establishment or class of establishments, which, having regard to (a) the tourism policy of the Central or State Government for promoting the tourism activities in the State; or (b) cultural activities, the State Government may, by special or general order, specify in this behalf.” 13

in 1947; the ban imposed on lavani performance, also in the 1940s; the dance bar ban in 2005 – in order to lay out the continuities and discontinuities between these instances, and to explain the relationship between publicness and female sexuality in this context.

"The new language of sexuality conflated seduction with art (specifically the performing arts), charm and wit, reducing art to a mere vehicle for seduction, which in turn is linked to the commerce in bodies, namely prostitution. … Take for instance Vivekavathi’s plea for a ban on all dancing and music because it is sensual as a prerequisite to eliminate the attraction to dasis. The entire discursive economy of the devadasi system by this period begins to rivet around commercial sex and seduction" (Kannabiran and Kannabiran)22.

The dedication of young girls to the service of the temple was a practice prevalent from the eleventh century right up to the late colonial period, when it was abolished by the British government in 194723. “Dedication” in this instance meant that they were married to the deity, and did not live like other women, marrying and living the domestic life. They were expected to dance and perform other services in the temple. The practice had its patrons among the rulers, zamindari lords and wealthy merchants.

The problem the colonial state identified with the practice of the devadasis did not attach to the performance itself; unlike the bar dancer’s performance, dress and imitations of Bollywood dance, the devadasi, who performed her services in the temples and for patrons, was not classified as obscene in terms of her performance. It was her relationships with the men who were her patrons, her dedication of young girls to the temple (and to sexual services in exchange for patronage), and her position as a woman whose economic and public position challenged structures of masculinity and inheritance, that brought her under the eye of the colonial legal system. She was charged not with obscenity but instead faced charges of procuring and disposing of Minors for purposes of prostitution under Sections 372 and 373 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) (Kannabiran and

22 Kannabiran, Kalpana and Vasanth Kannabiran. Muvalur Ramamirthammal’s Web of Deceit: Devadasi Reform in Colonial India. Kali for Women, New Delhi, 2003

23 A lot of academic work has already been carried out on the devadasi system, and the paper will not therefore go into great detail about the history of the devadasi system. Refer to the work of Janaki Nair, Kalpana and Vasant Kannabiran, Sreevidya Natarajan and Uma Chakravarthy for insightful histories of the system. 14

Kannabiran 2003). There was a concerted effort on the part of various groups to bring about the abolition of this practice, this effort coinciding with other legal changes such as the Contagious Diseases Act24.

The devadasi system was in many ways an institution in itself – the women who were part of it were not sadharan stri (ordinary women). “Because of the fact of its entrenchment in caste society and its legitimacy in the caste order, devadasi women could not be treated on par with “degraded women” in the matter of their inheritance rights, notwithstanding their equation to prostitutes in legal discourse” (Kannabiran and Kannabiran 2003). Here itself we see a disjuncture between the legal discourse and other discourses on the devadasi. The dasis had their own rules of inheritance, with property passing on from mother to daughter, not from father to son. They were given land that was attached to the temples in which they performed, this land (the inam) becoming an important part of legal battles fought by them during and after abolition.

So what the later nineteenth and early twentieth century period witnessed was not a debate surrounding an obscene practice, it witnessed the recasting and gradual eradication of an institution that functioned according to particular social and economic codes that went against the grain of the standardised systems of law, property relations and marriage that were being instituted during the 19th century colonial rule. But it was not only the colonial legal system that was involved in this process. Muthulakshmi Reddi25, famous for her battle against this system, was part of a social reform campaign that sought to

24 Contagious Diseases Act – This Act followed a report produced by the Royal Commission on the Sanitary State of the Army in India, a body set up to enquire into the high incidence of venereal disease among the soldiers of the British Army in the nineteenth century. The report was submitted in 1864, and the Indian Contagious Diseases Act was passed in 1868 “making registration of brothels and prostitutes compulsory and also providing for the medical examination and treatment of those women found to be diseased.” For an analysis of discourse produced at this moment, see Ch 5 “The Working of the Contagious Diseases Acts”, in Ramanna, Mridula. Western Medicine and Public Health in Colonial Bombay, 1845- 1895. Hyderabad: Orient Longman Pvt Ltd, 2002 25 Muthulakshmi Reddi was part of the movements for women’s social reform in the late nineteenth century in the south. She was the first woman to practice law and is hailed as the leader of the abolitionist campaigns against the devadasis. Her stance was that the inherently pure essence of Hinduism had been corrupted through such practices, which had to be weeded out in order to return Hinduism (and therefore the country), to its former purity and effectivity, morally and socially. Kannabiran and Kannabiran mark her as rooted in the beginning of the feminist internationalism that involved campaigns against prostitution in Britain and in Indian, involving legislation such as the Contagious Diseases Act. 15

eradicate all the ills in Hinduism, thereby revealing its inner strength and glory. Curiously also fighting for abolition, but differing in its position from Reddi and the Brahmin social reformers (who did not move outside the framework of Brahminical Hinduism), was the Self-Respect Movement26, which saw the devadasi system as representative of the dominance of Brahminism within Hindu religion27. Now, the question of publicness becomes central to the ways in which these positions were taken, including the resistance to abolition that came from within the dasi community.

Personal Law and the Penal Code

For the colonial authority in the late nineteenth century28, “public morality” was aligned with the Penal Code, and the devadasi system, which had not faced a problem of illegitimacy till then, seemed to contradict and undermine public law. “The initial exercise of the courts in privileging the textual tradition over the customary or oral tradition now shifted to the privileging of Penal Law, which was based on “universal principles of the science of legislation”….” (Kannabiran and Kannabiran 2003). The early twentieth century cases on land inheritance involve extensive discussions on textual authority, with the Manusmriti and the Mitakshara legal texts being drawn on to decide the status of the devadasi in relation to the institution of the family and the division of property and wealth between the children born to the wife and to the dasi. For example, a 1915 inheritance case, after describing the relationship history of the devadasi, her son and her lover, states this as the central question – “The point for decision is whether to a child born to a woman of the class and of the antecedents I have mentioned, the text of Yanjavalkya contained in the Mitakshara, Chapter 1, Section 12, applies. The sage says:

26 Self-Respect Movement – It was founded in 1925 by Periyar E V Ramasamy in Tamil Nadu. The movement sought to abolish caste inequalities, and led to the establishment of the DMK and the AIADMK, the political parties that exist in the state today. 27 Today, those who fight against the remaining traces of the dasi system do so because it is only lower- caste girls who are dedicated and asked to perform sexual services. 28 During the early colonial period, there was no desire to interfere legally in the customs and practices of the natives. In fact, many of the early Englishmen adapted themselves to these practices and became patrons of dancers themselves. The word “nautch” derives from the interest and curiosity the practice gave rise to in the British. See Neville, Pran. Nautch Girls of the Raj. New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2009. 16

"Even a son begotten by a Sudra on a female slave may take a share by the father's choice." (Stokes' Hindu Law Books, page 426.) Manu states the law in a slightly different way (Chapter IX, Section 179).”29 The peculiarity of the devadasi's position in social relations is demonstrated by this code – “to enable an illegitimate son to lay claim to a share in his father's property, his mother must be a Sudra, must have been unmarried and must have been kept by the putative father as a continuous concubine.” The positions of the various Hindu texts were juxtaposed and then a conclusion was reached about the right of the dasi’s son to inherit property. Though this indicates the dependence on Brahmin scriptural text, there was still no moral judgment on the devadasi system, and no rigid polarisation of the codes of the devadasis and the legal system. It is only later, with the onset of the abolitionist movement and social reform on a large scale that the devadasi came to represent a “problem” for both the coloniser and the nationalist. This was obviously the point of shift towards a “public law”.

The emphasis on the universal principles of the science of legislation is significant because it points to the way in which the dasi system was being positioned, as inherently occupying the realm of habit, tradition and regressive custom as opposed to the realm of progress, enlightenment and scientific rationality. “…a practice founded on error and misconception could not constitute customary law by the mere fact of repetition. A blind adherence to usage, which was against public interest and in the process of extinction, would work to the detriment of “social progress”. The court therefore reserved the right to overrule a custom that violated “natural reason”” (Kannabiran and Kannabiran 2003). This was a structuring aspect of the abolition debates that claimed to attack immorality and obscenity – the opposition set up between reason and Western rationality, and the “blind adherence to usage” in personal and customary law. The Penal Code, or “public law”, represented movement towards a future, while personal law was described as stagnant and lacking the dynamism of the former. One instance of imagining the devadasi system as an antequated system that has no place in the future is a comment made by Sri TT Krishnamachari in the Constituent Assembly debate (1948). Regarding the question

29 Soundararajam, Minor, by his Mother and Next Friend...vs. TRMARRM Arunachalam Chetty (Deceased) and Ors on 14 October, 1915 17

of whether or not the ban on devadasi dedication should be included in the fundamental rights, he said, “…I wish most my honourable Friends in this House will not try to import into these fundamental rights age-old peculiarities of ours that still persist, bad as they are in particular parts of society, which can be made to disappear by suitable legislation in due course, perhaps in two, three or four years….this system of Devadasis obtaining in India has been abolished by legislation in Madras. There is nothing to bar other provinces from following suit and I think public opinion is sufficiently mobilized for all provinces undertaking legislation of that type. Why then put it into the fundamental rights, a thing which is vanishing tomorrow?”30 So, from an institution that was seen as an inherent part of society and its caste and religious structures, the devadasi system suddenly took on the nature of the obsolete, that which had no part in the modern fundamental rights of the citizen. The abolition was enough to take care of it.

The Problem of Liberalism

The problem with the opposition of habit and reason is echoed in Ratna Kapur’s critique of the international liberalism of Martha Nussbaum and the “capabilities approach”31. According to Kapur, liberalism cannot deny its colonial legacy and the fact that it is constituted by the narrative of linear history and progress, and a unified rational sovereign subject, this narrative needing the Other against which it is defined – either those who are a threat to this narrative (the ‘terrorist’ Muslim, for example) or who cannot be easily appropriated into its account of the unified sovereign subject (sex workers, illegal migrants, refugees, hijras, hawkers, pavement dwellers). “The problem is not that liberalism fails to live up to its own practice, but rather that failure is constitutive of the tradition.” (Kapur 2005)

30 Constituent Assembly Vol VII (1948) 31 Kapur, Ratna. Erotic Justice: Law and the New Politics of Postcolonialism. New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2005. Nussbaum espouses what she calls the “capabilities approach” which believes that the central goal of public policy is to promote the capabilities of each citizen to perform the important human functions - “…the central feature of the capabilities approach is that it shifts governmental action from what individuals should think or do, which can be oppressive and tyrannical, to a focus on how to assist individuals to think and do what they want.” So what then happens when a government is not oppressive or tyrannical but is also trying, in the liberal tradition, to assist people on how to think? Do we then blame all problems on corruption, poverty, crime, or other things that are seen as external to the core of liberalism? 18

Kapur therefore problematises Nussbaum's claim that liberalism it only needs to be taken to its logical limit in order to realise the goals of a democracy and enable the conditions in which humans can function and live. She illustrates how liberal thinkers such as John Stuart Mill (who served 35 years in the East India Company drafting policy documents), his father James Mill (who wrote a history of Indian manners and morals), John Locke (who believed that certain people did not have the capacity to reason and therefore could not be consenting individuals) and others, had as the basis of their liberal thought, racial difference, and the idea that certain peoples were not ready for liberalism and needed to be pushed to the stage at which they would be ready and worthy. Ashis Nandy also stresses that it is only the utilitarian strains of liberalism that could accompany colonialism and were therefore dominant. Only these strains enabled the narrative of progress, industrialism, rationality, and the productivity of the human being (the native in the colonies, the worker in the factory). Nussbaum is charged with ignoring this history of colonialism in her espousal of liberal thought, instead reproducing the above- mentioned dichotomy between rational 'choice' and 'habit' - “Liberalism must be used to challenge tradition and the social formation of sexual desire, to ensure that women think first before they give themselves away to another. Their desire for pleasure must be acted upon with conscious reflection and out of an exercise of choice, and not habit or tradition. It is in the context of habit and tradition that women have the most need for reason.” Kapur argues that within this logic, the third world automatically comes to stand as the location where habit and tradition are the most entrenched.

This argument helps explain the way in which the devadasi system came to be positioned in the abolition debates - as opposed to "public" law and morality; whether as that which represented the degeneration of Hinduism (in the discourse of the Brahmin social reformers), or as that which kept in place Brahminical Hinduism and stood in the way of secular and rational citizenship (in the discourse of the Self-Respect movement). In other words, it came to be positioned as habit or tradition32. In the above-mentioned

32 This does not mean that this narrative was not complicated or opposed within the debates, which were far more complex than can be captured by such generalisation or by the mere legal aspect of them. 19

Constituent Assembly debates of 1948, we come across a discussion on devadasis, in which Srimati G Durgabai, (Madras: General) remarks, “Madras has already prohibited this practice under a law passed a few years ago. It is no more in vogue there. Though some relics of that system still exist, these, I am sure, will disappear in course of time. I should mention in this connection my appreciation of the efforts put in by reformers like Mrs Muthulakshmi Reddi. It is mainly on account of her efforts that this evil is no more there.” The treatment of the system takes place through terms like “relic” and “evil”, both associated with the domain of habit and tradition.

The homology between sexuality and political stratarchies

Now, it might seem like the positions taken up by the colonial authorities, the social reformers and the self-respecters all contradict each other in various ways, and indeed they did. The link between them seems to then be that in all these instances, sexuality seems to be a significant arena in which the discourse of colonial rule, nationalism and anti-caste politics is produced. Nandy, in his essay “The Psychology of Colonialism: Sex, Age and Ideology in British India”33, locates historically the period in which sexuality became important to the political. Till then, there was no “culture” of colonialism in the Indian context. “...once the two sides in the British-Indian culture of politics, following the flowering of the middle-class British evangelical spirit, began to ascribe cultural meanings to the British domination, colonialism proper can be said to have begun. Particularly, once the British rulers and the exposed sections of Indians internalized the colonial role definitions and began to speak, with reformist fervour, the language of the homology between sexual and political stratarchies, the battle for the minds of men was to a great extent won by the Raj.” This "homology between sexual and political stratarchies" seems to structure the ways in which the abolition debates took place. The work of Tejaswini Niranjana34 on the anti-indenture campaigns and the figure of the female indentured Indian labourer in the Caribbean, deals with precisely this homology.

33 Nandy, Ashis. At the Edge of Psychology: Essays in Politics and Culture. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1980 34 Niranjana, Tejaswini. Mobilizing India: Women, Music, and Migration between India and Trinidad. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006

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Nationalist discourse seemed to require the disowning or "abolition" of this figure, ending in the anti-indenture campaigns led by Gandhi in the first decade of the twentieth century. The existence of the female indentured labourer, who was sexually involved with the white ruler, whose occupation of the categories of "modernity" was different from the Brahmin woman at 'home' in India, and who came from various groups, be it lower-caste dancing troupes, widows who wanted to escape their segregated existence, or sex workers, could not be appropriated into the nationalist ideal of the middle class upper caste woman. “At the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, a political campaign was undertaken – mobilizing “a wider public than any previous protest” against the colonial rulers – to dismantle a system that was said to be turning Indian women into prostitutes. As Gandhi wrote, “The system brings India’s womanhood to utter ruin, destroys all sense of modesty. That in defence of which millions in this country have laid down their lives in the past is lost under it.”…In this case, by ending indenture and providing the conditions for chastity, women would cease to be available, for instance, to their white employers in the colonies. Thus, nationalism could refuse menial status for Indians versus the colonizer.” (Niranjana) The campaign therefore had nothing to do with the rights of these women who became labourers, it had more to do with the mobilisation of people in the name of a public morality and female 'modesty' that were tied inextricably with opposing the coloniser and denying him the Indian of menial status.

While for Gandhi, Indian womanhood held symbolic value and was to be rescued from the ways in which the modernising colonial rule had exploited and degraded it, for the self-respecters it was a question of putting in place an anti-erotic ethic, in order that the unequal structures of Brahminism could be undone and a conjugality based on comradeship and companionship, not casteist distribution of resources or "public lust", could be established in its place.

The Devadasi’s Claim on Publicness Unlike Indian widows or even sex workers, in terms of their political position, “the devadasi system...occupied a public, even political space, so that writing within that space opens out to view the large interesting economies it contained. Part of the project of

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abolition sought to shrink that space and its potential, yet another part sought to shift it from one realm to another within the public, and there was stiff resistance to both trends from within the community, not all the resistance evocative of any defense of obscurantist traditions”. The devadasi occupied “the outer margins of respectability in the independent national imaginary. In an environment where the division between private and public was rigid, women’s entry into public life was far from easy. Devadasi women entering public-political spaces alongside “respectable” women threw up more dilemmas that were not easy to resolve.” There was the “tendency among men to assume that only “slipped sisters” could participate in public functions in public places" (Kannabiran and Kannabiran 2003). This is in reference to the devadasi women's participation in the freedom struggle, claiming political citizenship as a right. Their status as 'public' women was a major part of the problem they posed to both the British and the freedom struggle. They could not be included in the latter as women who by their very chastity and refusal to sexualise their bodies, defied the white rulers (though the devadasi women were different from the sex workers in terms of their relationship with the white male coloniser). The devadasi system as an institution was embedded in the public domain in such a way that these women could not be easily deployed as 'private' bodies in the nationalist discourse. The dasis who resisted abolition and claimed political citizenship sidestepped the moral question being raised as central to their lives “asserting instead, that the centre was the public space they inhabited, on the stage and in temples, and the art they embodied, their “private” lives being completely marginal to questions of citizenship as they saw it.”35 Unlike the middle class upper caste women who were positioned as figures whose sexuality was consigned to the private realm and whose political participation depended on this consignment, the dasis were there precisely as women whose sexuality was seen as public.

35 Kannabiran and Kannabiran 2003. In a recent discussion I attended on the devadasi practice in Tamil Nadu, the speaker seemed to understand the life of the devadasi as split into her public world of dance and art, and her private world of sexual practice. The discussion therefore made this separation rigid and tried to reclaim the realm of performance while carefully avoiding questions of the sexual contracts made by the dasis. This separation of art from sex is problematic, since the two were tied to each other and often meant crossed over between public and private realms. 22

As Niranjana points out, in the case of the nautch girls and the lavani dancers, this led to the physical segregation of women in space. Where there was earlier an opportunity for middle-class upper-caste women to interact with women from the lower castes and classes, who visited their houses to perform, this kind of interaction was increasingly discouraged and the private spaces of the home were cut off from these 'other' women who were no longer allowed entry on account of them being viewed as obscene or promoting lascivious practices. She discuses the case of the panchali performers in Bengal - “There was a concerted attempt by the bhadralok in the late nineteenth century…to eliminate from the andarmahal, or women’s quarters, the panchalis, or folk songs described as “filthy” and “polluting” by missionaries. This description was echoed by Indians, too, like Shib Chunder Bose in a book titled The Hindoos as They Are: “The Panchali (with female actresses only) which is given for the amusement of the females…is sometimes much too obscene and immoral to be tolerated in a zenana having any pretension to gentility….Much is yet to be done to develop among the females a taste for purer amusements, better adapted to a healthy state of society.” By the end of the nineteenth century, panchali performance had disappeared.”

There then seems to be a process through which the a certain arena of entertainment and performance, a domain of women with its own production of knowledge and pleasure, was acted upon by both the coloniser and the Indian nationalist in the process of modernising India. This brings us to yet another practice that was recast and eroded as a result of colonial and nationalist discourse and the problem of public sexuality - the lavani tradition of the Kolhati women of Maharashtra. Lavani is a form of eroticised song-and-dance that is performed by women in Maharashtra. The shringarik lavani speaks of love and sexual desire and is considered the most bawdy of the lavani performances.

The Recasting of Lavani in Maharashtra As the case of devadasi abolition shows, the period of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century saw shifts in the way the performing arts were imagined. With the rise of the middle classes, existing forms of performance came to be recast, resulting in the

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marginalisation of those elements which were considered obscene or not in tune with a certain idea of art, dance or theatre. Nandy points to the emulation and internalisation of British Victorian middle class culture that this period found in the Indian middle classes, even in their resistance to colonialism. “It is not an accident that the specific variants of the concepts with which many anti-colonial movements in our times have worked have often been the products of the imperial culture itself and, even in opposition, these movements have paid homage to their respective cultural origins.” Nandy's position seems to imply a determined and homogenously emulative resistance to colonialism, deriving fully from the “an attempt to explain the West in Indian terms and to incorporate it in the Indian culture as an unavoidable experience”. While this account is blind to the ways in which imitation as a condition is unfaithful to that which it imitates, and cannot explain then the contradictions that inhabit this condition, it does help understand the shifts that took place.

The lavani tamasha is a performance that is wholly carried out by women, usually of the lower castes. Sharmila Rege, writing about the lavani performers of Maharashtra36, points to the major changes that took place in the 1850s in the Deccan as a result of colonialism and British market forces - two new social categories, the middlemen and the middle classes, came into being, affecting “the face of the lavani tamasha and its construction of female sexuality”. She argues that the first Marathi play by Vishnudas Bhawe of the court of the Raja of Sangli was popular among the audiences of Bombay and Pune and “with this, the middle class, upper caste theatre was placed in opposition to the folk tamasha: “Bhawe’s plays are of native origin, from the early classic dramas of Hindoosthan. They are void of everything approaching licentiousness and indecorum and are images of the moralities in which the Christian Church in older times used to rejoice (Bombay Times, Tuesday, 8 March 1853; emphasis added).”” This had its impact on existing forms of theatre and performance - “the classical drama...was portrayed as ‘moral’ whereas the tamasha (folk theatre) and its lavani were condemned as licentious and immoral. The female roles in the plays were performed by males dressed as females.

36 Rege, Sharmila. “The hegemonic appropriation of Sexuality: the Case of the Lavani Performers of Maharashtra.” In Contributions to Indian Sociology, Vol 29, No 1 & 2, 1995 24

The patrons of the theatre were the new, Western-educated middle classes, modeling themselves on the lifestyles of the British officers. Between 1860 and 1880, several English and Sanskrit plays were translated into Marathi. The nachee (dancing girl)/nartaki (dancer), tamasgir (performer)/kalakaar (artist) dichotomies intensified as the upper castes displaced the lower castes from their hereditary sphere of the performing arts.” According to Rege, there was a hierarchy that was established, with Victorian theatre being the most highly respected, followed by Marathi theatre and then by the form of the tamasha. The tamasha troupes then sought to desexualize the form, giving pride of place to the vag37, and marginalising the sangeet barees38, which were the troupes of Kolhati women performers. Speaking of other forms such as the thumri and the kotha (performed by the Lucknow courtesans) which have been discussed as subversive in terms of gender norms39, Rege says, "The lavani, by contrast, is a public performance (as against the exclusive performance of thumri, for instance), and comes closer to the nautanki in that the performers are generally of the Untouchable castes, the female performers being seen as no better than prostitutes (Hansen 1983). Viewed within the overall perspective of the intersection of caste and gender...the shringarik lavani became one of the modes of constructing the bodies of lower caste women as constantly either arousing, or satiating, male desire. This construction was crucial to the pre-colonial Peshwa state’s appropriation of the labour of lower caste women through the institution of slavery. With the embourgeoisement that followed the establishment of colonial domination in Maharashtra, the tamasha of the Mahar and Mang castes began to centre around the vag or spontaneous folk theatre, thereby marginalizing the performance of shringarik lavani. New kinds of troupes emerged, composed of women of the Kolhati caste and devoted to the performance of the lavani. These troupes, known as sangeet

37 Vag – The performing art units recognized by the state programmes were called kala pathaks, the main kala pathak being a dholki-baari (song, vag, mime and dance). The dholki-baari and the sangeet-baari were the two kinds of tamasha, and the lavani fell under the second category. It was with the refinement process that the dholki-baari gained prominence, and the sangeet-baaris (at least in the ways they used to operate) were forced to recast themselves. The vag is a significant part of the dholki baari. It is the theatrical portion of the tamasha, and gained respectability and prominence as it was yoked to the national project. 38 Sangeet Baari – The sangeet baaris were the counterpart of the dholki baaris, and consisted mainly of women’s troupes, and performances involving song and dance. 39 See Oldenburg, Veena Talwar, “Lifestyle as Resistance: The Case of the Courtesans of Lucknow”. In Feminist Studies, Vol 16, No 2, Title: Speaking for Others/Speaking for Self: Women of Color (Summer, 1990), pp 259-287, Feminist Studies, Inc 25

barees, soon came to be labeled as obscene and immoral.” The lavani tradition again was supported by certain social conditions - the Kolhati women were the bread-winners of their families, dancing and prostitution being their caste-based profession. They were nomadic, which meant that they constantly engaged with public spaces in ways that other women (and even men) did not. They did not marry and the men of the community depended on the women for sustenance. The women were also reputed as possessing knowledge of cures for sexually transmitted diseases and impotency. So, again, it was not an isolated 'obscene' practice that was involved in this shift, it was a certain kind of social formation with a unique relationship to the public domain, which was appropriated.

The viewing of the lavani tamasha as obscene and immoral led to the Bombay State imposing a ban on lavani tamasha in the 1940s, on the basis that it was a simply a veil for prostitution and therefore a danger to public morality. A curious development that took place was that while the lavani troupes were being marginalised, the tamasha became a popular form in the new Marathi cinema that was trying to compete with the new national form of the Hindi cinema. In this cinema, lavani was a packaged representation, using the skills of the actual lavani performers in order to produce representations of them as lascivious and titillating objects of male desire. It was a form of appropriating their skill, the form of the lavani, and the sexuality of the performers. They had no control over these representations, which seemed to necessitate their marginalisation as women who previously actively occupied the public sphere and public spaces. This curiously mirrors the dance bar debate, in which the dancers drew on the example of the Bollywood “item numbers”40 that they were simply imitating in their dances. This is a case in which the representations are deemed acceptable to the public's morality, but the dancer's performances are charged with obscenity and the ability to deprave or corrupt. It is also that in the case of the dancers, the practice is seen as closely linked to and in fact leading to “realized” sexual behaviour, in the form of prostitution, whereas the cinematic representations of them were seen as controlled by censorship and therefore not tied directly to commercial sex. Therefore, the "lavangi mirchees" (red hot lavani chillis) in

40 This is the popular name given to the song and dance numbers in which women in revealing clothes dance to what are usually upbeat songs. 26

the films were deemed desirable at the same point of time at which the actual troupes were being deemed obscene. In fact, as the troupes fell into the hands of middlemen contractors, the women were expected to imitate the dances and movements and songs found in the films in order to please crowds. This resulted in their alienation from their own art form (Rege).41 In the dance bar case, the accusation thrown at the dancers and the bar owners is that the kind of dance performed requires no skill and cannot be considered an art form like other classical dances are.

The case of the lavani performers and the 2005 dance bar case are both located in Maharashtra. There seem to be several links between the two historically. One obvious link that draws our attention and refers to the above de-sexualisation of the tamasha theatres or troupes through the marginalisation of the 'obscene' sangeet barees - the dance bar ban did not apply to tamasha theatres. “The Rules made, are for licensing and regulating places of public amusement other than cinema and performance of public amusement including melas and Tamasha. They are meant to uphold public decency, morality and public order. Regulating performance by licensing is an essential part of public order” (submission of Advocate General on behalf of the State)42.

To requote Section 33B, “nothing in section 33A shall apply to the holding of a dance performance in a drama theatre, cinema theatre and auditorium; or sports club or gymkhana, where entry is restricted to its members only, or a three starred or above hotel or in any other establishment or class of establishments, which, having regard to (a) the tourism policy of the Central or State Government for promoting the tourism activities in the State; or (b) cultural activities, the State Government may, by special or general order...” By this time, tamasha theatres had gained enough respectability to be considered

41 Veena Talwar Oldeburg, in her essay “Lifestyle as Resistance: The Case of the Courtesans of Lucknow”, says of the tawaif, “Their style of entertainment was widely imitated in other Indian court cities, and their enduring influence on the Hindi film is all too patent.” The relationship between the tawaif and Hindi cinema (both in terms of performers and descendants of the tawaif tradition entering the film industry, and films that were inspired by the figure of the tawaif) is well-lnown, and one imagines that they had more autonomy when it came to representations and their role in the industry than the lavani performers, since the courtesan culture was held at high esteem, while the lavani was seen as part of low culture.

42 Indian Hotel And Restaurants Association (Ahar), An ... vs The State Of Maharashtra 27 a site for cultural activities by the State Government. Tevia Abrams notes that “It emerged as a discrete form in the late sixteenth century from a variety of earlier entertainments…. Although the “raw” strain of the form is still popular today, a certain refinement was effected in recent years to bring Tamasha, as more wholesome “family” entertainment, closer to the tastes of the middle and upper classes. This refinement has led to the development of a sophisticated variety of Tamasha called Loknatya or people’s theatre.”43 And here, in the state’s efforts to refine what was previously a “bawdy” form of entertainment in order for it to then serve the purposes of nation-building, lies the crucial idea of publicness. The “loknatya” was a “people’s theatre”, which was meant to access the Indian public and spread socio-cultural messages. The lawyers arguing against the ban stressed this point – “Section 33A discriminates between artists i.e. girls dancing in bars and Thamasha theatres and at the same time discriminates between viewers visiting dance bars and Thamasha performances. Although the performance of dance is prohibited in dance bars such an activity, howsoever vulgar and indecent, can go on in Thamasha theatres. Dance in three starred and above hotel and discos are not prohibited. The same girl may dance either in Thamasha theatre or any other exempted place….”

It is clear from the above extracts that the dance bar is then placed in a category separate from cinema, mela and tamasha theatre, as a place of public amusement. Erotic dancing was therefore no longer formally associated with the tamasha theatre, or, rather, the central commercial element in the tamasha was no longer the lavani or any other form of dancing that was the prerogative of women. “As the drive to national liberation developed, more shahirs and their Tamasha troupes began to include appropriate patriotic themes in their songs and dramatic vags. By the 1930s, tamasha had become a viable medium for anti-British propaganda, especially after the British authorities had banned the current urban Marathi theatre productions which were, for the most part, quasi- historical plays containing subtle messages of dissent. The folk form was exempt from precensorship because it was the least suspect of all vehicles.”44

43 Abrams, Tevia. "Folk Theatre in Maharashtrian Social Development Programs." In Education Theatre Journal, Vol 27, No 3, Popular Theatre (October 1975), pp 395-407, The Johns Hopkins University Press 44 Ibid 28

The other historical link between the lavani and today's dance bars is the fact that there was migration of women to the cities in search of livelihood and employment after the delegitimisation and ban imposed on several of the older forms of dancing. Historically, the setting up of dance bars in Maharashtra, specifically Bombay city, to serve the purposes of entertaining the large labour force of migrants, the “traders, the sailors, the dockworkers, the construction labourers and the mill hands”45, seems to coincide with the gradual decline in patronage suffered by established communities of dancers such as the Kolhati women, over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. “As the demand grew, women from traditional dancing/performance communities of different parts of India, who were facing a decline in patronage of their age-old profession, flocked to Mumbai (and later to the smaller cities) to work in dance bars. These women from traditional communities have been victims of the conflicting forces of modernization. Women are the primary breadwinners in these communities. But after the Zamindari system introduced by the British was abolished, they lost their zamindar patrons and were reduced to penury. Even the few developmental schemes and welfare policies of the government bypassed many of these communities….The dance bars provided women from these communities an opportunity to adapt their strategies to suit the demands of the new economy” (Flavia Agnes 2005).

Banning the Dance Bar

The dance bar thus came to occupy its position as the underbelly of the era of industrial development in the context of Bombay, taking its place in the 'play houses' that were meant not only to entertain the male customers of bars, but also to boost the liquor sales and therefore the revenue the government collected through taxation on the sale of liquor. The dance bar case is therefore tied closely to the liquor policy of the government, which shifted from the mode of "prohibition" to that of "permit" in the 1960s (Flavia Agnes 2005). The 2006 judgment therefore explores in detail the meaning of the "permit room" (the room where liquor is served to the customers, which is set apart from the area

45 Agnes, Flavia. “Hypocritical Morality”. http://www.indiatogether.org/manushi/issue149/bardance.htm 29

designated for "public amusement")46. Besides the question of liquor revenue, which in itself sets the dance bar apart from the cinema theatre and the mela, it also involves the history of how and why the dance bars were set up, in and around the play houses and the red light districts of Bombay. The bar dancer, therefore, is a figure who, like the lavani dancer, is set apart from the nartaki or the kalakaar (the dancer and the artist). Flavia Agnes points to how she seems to be more dangerous a figure than the sex worker in how she threatens notions of culture and publicness. Writing about the various groups that were invested in the ban, she says, “Interestingly, the Gandhians seem to be only against the dancers and not against the bars that have proliferated. Nor have they done much to oppose the liquor policy of the State, which had encouraged bar dancing. The antitrafficking groups who had been working in the red light districts had not succeeded in making a dent in child trafficking in brothels that continue to thrive. But in this controversy, brothel prostitution and trafficking of minors has been relegated to the sidelines. The sex worker is viewed with more compassion than the bar dancer, who may or may not resort to sex work.” Sex work is seen as an institution in ways that bar dancing is not, it is seen as deriving from the historicity of the “prostitution” of centuries of pre-colonial and colonial rule, while the legacies of dance are not connected to the bar dancer (which is why an intervention such as Flavia Agnes’ is all the more important as it draws the connection between the figure of the bar dancer, the colonial and postcolonial state, the traditions of dancing, and the “homology of sexuality and politics”). Sex workers are also seen as already delegitimsed47, while the bar dancers are part of licensed establishments but are at the same time offering their bodies to be sexualised.

46 For instance, the contention of the bar owners in that case is that Section 33A does not apply to their establishments because: "If the room approved for sale or consumption of liquor is construed for the purposes of convenience as "Permit Room" or "Beer Bar", only the designated "permit room" or "Beer Bar" room will be covered under the prohibition contemplated by the impugned amendment. The petitioners members do not have any dance performances in the room assigned for sale and consumption of foreign liquor or beer. Dance and music are performed only in the remaining portion of the place of public entertainment excluding the said permit room and as such the impugned amendment would not apply to them as their establishment is excluded from the definition of eating house by Section 2(5A) of the Bombay Police Act, 1951 and consequently the declaration as prayed for" - Indian Hotel And Restaurants Association (Ahar), An ... vs The State Of Maharashtra 2006.

47 It is of course not true that the sex workers are more victimised than the bar dancer – the Sonagachi sex workers in Kolkata set up the Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee in 1995 and demanded the legitimisation of their profession through medical benefits and enforced condom use. So, it would be wrong to cast the sex worker as victim and the bar dancer as her own agent. 30

A similar comparison can be made of pornography and obscenity. Pornography is illegal and therefore has established circuits of illegitimate production and distribution; obscenity is definitely that which causes more concern, because it possibly exists in objects that do not belong to the genre of pornography48. Sex work is mired in the question of legality, the debate centres around legalisation, rehabilitation, and recently, organisation into unions. Bar dancing is mired in questions of obscenity, which tries to concretise its claim in the charge of prostitution but fails. The bar dancer therefore is more slippery as a figure. Because of this, sex work is not taken into consideration in discussions on public amusement and order. It is an activity that takes place in the ambiguous public-private space (public as far as it is commercial and takes place in brothels or red light areas, privates in so far as it takes place between two consenting adults in a space that is not for public view), while bar dancing comes under the category of public amusement49.

Agnes' article refers to the first judgment that came out on July 21 2005, as a result of which dancing was prohibited in all bars in Maharashtra, and in one stroke 75,000 bar girls lost their jobs. She speaks of the language with which the dancers were discussed in the House while the Bill was being discussed, and notes the disrespect with which those who uphold the “dignity of women” discuss the dancers, their bodies and profession. It is also a moment when the ruling Congress party members, the BJP members and those from the Left-wing parties all seem to hold the same view - that bar dancing is obscene and degrading to women. Political rhetoric in this instance seems to be embedded in the language of cultural nationalism and protectionism (the latter involving the borrowing

48 Malhotra, Namita Aavriti and Nitya vasudevan. “The State of Desire and other flights of fantasy.” Unpublished Article. 49 The question of whether the brothel is a private or a public space in the eyes of the legal machinery is, of course, significant - does the law treat it as yet another establishment that is raided because of the commercial nature of its activity? Does it invade it in ways that are similar to other establishments? How has the brothel negotiated the public private divide historically? These are unfortunately questions beyond the scope of this paper.) "The bar dancer is being made out to be the cause of all social evils and depravity. Even the blame for the Telgi scam is laid at her door; the news story that Telgi spent 93 lakhs on a bar dancer in one night is cited as an example of their pernicious influence. The criminal means through which Telgi amassed wealth fades into oblivion in the fury of the controversy. Is it her earning capacity, the legitimacy awarded to her profession, and the higher status she enjoys in comparison to a sex worker that invite the fury from the middle class Maharashtrian moralists?" (Flavia Agnes)

31 and the displacement of feminist language in order to uphold the "modesty" of women, this being a constant occurrence in the Indian context, especially in the era of liberalisation).

The final judgment came out in April 2006, and it overturned the previous one, lifting the ban on dance bars. Looking at parts of this judgment enables us to not only read the processes of legal change, but also the relationship between obscenity and performance in the current moment.

The Liberal Judgment The dance bar case represents an example of how the language of rights now informs charges of obscenity in the Indian context. The dance bar case reveals the progressive positions that are upheld in the courtroom. The parties opposing the ban argued on these counts in relation to the bar dancers50: a) the right to freedom of expression (that dancing constituted expression and the ban violates this fundamental right); b) the right to life (that the dancers' right to life and health is violated by the ban); c) the right to livelihood (that dancing in this case qualifies as a livelihood, and the ban violates the dancers' right to it) d) that the distinction drawn between dance bars and other establishments is arbitrary and not justified by the evidence presented. In the final judgment, the court, while it denied the validity of the first two arguments, upheld the latter two, and declared that the state had not established any nexus between the object of the petitions (to ensure the dignity of women and the maintenance of public morality), and the ban on the dances performed by these women. Interestingly, the closing statements of the judges included references to the history of dance as a form of entertainment and livelihood in India, as part of “cultural tradition”. It also makes specific mention of the lavani performances – “Undertaking dance performances by ladies for a living, is not and cannot be said to be inherently pernicious or harmful to the general public. In fact ladies undertaking dance performances for the entertainment of men, is part of the cultural tradition of Maharashtra e.g. Lavnis, Tamashas, etc.”

50 The bar owners added other arguments relating to the applicability of the law to their establishments. 32

Women dancing to entertain is also then framed as a state-sponsored activity, dance bars in particular having been in existence for two decades. “The performance of dances in places of public entertainment were expressly permitted/licensed under Section 33(1)(wa) of the Bombay Police Act and the Rules framed thereunder. Dance performances have been conducted by ladies in the prohibited establishments for the past twenty years. The Government of Maharashtra expressly permitted/licensed and even encouraged the establishment of such dance bars. The closing hours have been extended from 12.30 a.m. to 1.30 a.m. to 2.00 a.m. The Government in exercise of its appellate powers had granted performance licences even in 2005 when the amending Act came into force. The number of such licensed dance bars had increased from 24 in 1985-86 to 210 in 1995-96 to 2500 in 2005. 75,000 women, earned their livelihood by undertaking dance performances in such places of public entertainment. These women supported families, children and dependents. The petitioners members do not perform dance in the area demarcated and notified under the Bombay Prohibition Act. The direct and immediate effect of the impugned legislation would be to totally prohibit this lawful profession/calling of undertaking dance performances in places of public entertainment and thus deprive these women of their livelihood.”

The judgment also raises the question of why it is at this particular juncture that the ban has been called for, the case therefore not being treated as an atemporal scrutiny of a possibly obscene practice. “Neither the Act nor its objects and reasons nor the Government's affidavit indicates what changed in April, 2005 or why it was suddenly decided to totally prohibit dance performances which had been specifically permitted for the past twenty years.” The combination of these elements leads us to believe that the processes of the law do not treat the practice of dancing in isolation from the economies it is embedded in, whether of state-sponsored commercial activity, or of the independent lives of the women concerned. To add to this, the case is denied any relevance to the category of “public order” – “‘Public order’ no doubt also requires absence of disturbance of a state of serenity in society but it goes further. It means what the French designate order publique, defined as an absence of insurrection, riot, turbulence, or

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crimes of violence. The expression 'public order' includes absence of all acts which are a danger to the security of the state and also acts which are comprehended by the expression ‘ordre publique’ explained above but not acts which disturb only the serenity of others. In what manner dancing by women in dance bars results in increase in crime which would constitute a threat to public order atleast is not discernible. Inebriated men, whether in dance bars or other bars are a known source of nuisance. The State has not cancelled the liquor permits to remove the basic cause of the problem….If drunk men fight or involve themselves in criminal activity, it cannot result in denying livelihood to those who make a living out of dance." Public order is therefore not to be defined lightly. Curiously, the phrase public morality does not seem to play a significant role in the final reckoning. Public morality is taken care of as long as the dances that are performed are not of an obscene nature.

Placed on the “Stage of Sleaze” What explains the way in which the law treats the bar dancer, in comparison with the devadasi and the lavani dancer? While the State that filed the case did so precisely on the grounds that the dancing was obscene, the fact that a total ban on all dancing was being sought made it impossible to scrutinise the dances performed and point to those that were actually obscene. The legal system therefore loses clear focus of the object in question, the bar dance, and is consumed by questions of whether a complete ban on dancing is warranted, this question constantly slipping past the object itself. This seems to be a characteristic part of obscenity law cases, the slipperiness of the object. In the case of censorship, the evasiveness derives from the fact that the real concern lies not in the text or image but elsewhere51. While the case of devadasi abolition and of the ban on lavani dancing historically occupy slightly different positions (one embedded in social reform discourse, the other undergoing a recasting at the time of the rise of the middle classes in Maharashtra), the dance bar ban sits on par with censorship cases in its slipperiness vis a

51 This “elsewhere” includes the text’s encounter with the public, the public’s encounter with technology, financial transactions in the form of sale and distribution, and the new forms of subjectivity produced in all these encounters or transactions. This is what I have argued in another (unpublished) paper, on obscenity law and censorship in the Indian context, titled “The Slippery Slopes of Obscenity Law: Censorship and the Staging of Body as Text.” 34 vis the charge of obscenity. Of course, the dance bar involves the lives and the practice of 75,000 women, and one cannot overlook the role that feminist groups have played in opposing the ban and bringing in the question of rights (which was conspicuously absent in the two previous cases) as central to this case. What is different in this case from the devadasi abolition context, is the ground on which the bar girls stated their defence. The devadasis who opposed the abolition, the Devadasi Sangams and the Madras Presidency Devadasi Association set up in Madras and other places, had to portray themselves in a role that was both sanctioned by religious custom and acceptable to the changing ideology (of the self-respect movement and so on). The sanctity of marriage became a central issue, with rituals such as the tying of the tirupottu and the dedication to iswaran being held up to demonstrate this sanctity at the centre of the practice - “...the devadasi way of life beginning to speak for itself, to demand that its legitimacy be recognized and acknowledged using the same vocabulary and categories by which it was being increasingly denounced and denigrated" (Kannabiran and Kannabiran 2003).

The dance bar case is significantly different in the light of this moment in colonial history. This is not a case of abolition, it is not part of a bid to reform a society. While the period of social reform in the nineteenth century saw specific practices labeled and classified as degenerate and as backward, the last few decades have seen practices that are seemingly innocuous charged with obscenity by political ideologues, concerned citizens or organizations. In the case of the bar girls, there is no context of ritual, scripture or marital relations that the practice is embedded in, which is why one is tempted to compare it to contemporary censorship cases rather than to other practices that are surrounded by debate, such as hook-swinging or body-piercing, practices that accompany religious and community belief in primarily rural India, and which the law does not interfere with beyond a point. There is no realm of the sacred that the bar dancer can possibly occupy. Ashish Rajadhyaksha argues that in the writings of the former Minister of Culture in Maharashtra, Pramod Navalkar, modernity becomes a “stage of sleaze” where there is a split between the one viewing this society as critic and ideologue, and the one participating in this shameful modernity. The bar dancer firmly belongs to this “morbid stage of sleaze”. This kind of position seems to have become possible only in the

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post independence era, where there is the conspicuous absence of the colonial ruler whose subject the Indian man or woman is. It therefore seems to inhabit democracy as a political form. It is not that the colonial period did not see the birth of Indian nationalism and the emergence of strong movements (like the Self-Respect Movement) that organized themselves around ideals of their own, and it is not that these ideals were fully determined by colonial discourse on Indian society. What is significant is the mode of operation, one in which specific practices are targeted for abolition as unwanted elements, thereby causing conflicts both between ruler and ruled, and the colonized themselves; the other in which it is not a specific set of practices but a broad range of possibly obscene practices that comes to the fore in cases such as this. To push this further, these instances of ban or censorship also then seem to lack the historical depth that the devadasi dedications and the lavani performances possess (where a tradition of performance can be charted, both the abolitionists and the anti-abolitionists drawing their charge from this very narrative of historical and even mythological existence). There is no traditional form that the bar dance lays claim to in its defense (though it might draw on various dance forms in practice). It lays full claim to the "modern" itself, to its own contemporary moment and the practices that abound, such as the item numbers of Bollywood, the sweaty and sexualised Dandiya Nights in which young boys and girls dance together during the Navratri festival, and the Discotheques full of young and old dancing bodies. “While the hue and cry about the morality of dance bars was raging, in Sangli district, the home constituency of the Deputy Chief Minister (DCM), a dance performance titled 'Temptation' by Isha Kopikar, the hot selling 'item girl' of Bollywood, was being organized to raise money for the Police Welfare Fund. The bar girls flocked to Sangli to hold a protest march. This received even more publicity than the performance by Isha Kopikar who, due to the adverse publicity, was compelled to dress modestly and could not perform in her usual flamboyant style. The disappointed public felt it was more value for their money to see the protest of the bar girls than to witness a lack luster performance by the ‘item girl’” (Flavia Agnes 2005). In this aspect, this case is different from even censorship cases like the MF Hussain case52, where the defence included the

52 MF Hussain is a Muslim painter whose paintings of Hindu goddesses and Indian actresses in the nude have run up against Hindutva violence and outrage time and again. A recent judgment involved his painting 36 invocation of the Kamasutra and Khajuraho as ancient Indian art forms or texts which gave the present sexualised nature of art its authenticity. Here what is claimed is that in the Indian context, women dancing to entertain is in itself a tradition that has been supported by the state in the past. There is no possible moral stand in this case, and no textual authority to fall back on.

Conclusion: The paper has attempted to delineate the various ways in which “public women” are constituted, and how their practice has been sought to be regulated by the colonial and the postcolonial legal system. From the time of social reform movements to the present struggles with censorship, the public woman remains an anxiety. This is why many scholars have also looked to them for alternative routes to understanding “autonomy” and “resistance”, in order to not have to fall into frameworks of liberal feminist internationalism. Veena Talwar Oldenburg says of the Lucknowi courtesan, “It was precisely because they were not expected to be in purdah, they reasoned, in another classic reversal of patriarchial logic, that they chose to block the gaze of men. It was an extension of the autonomy they enjoyed in their living space and their jism (bodies), unlike “normal” women whose bodies were the property of their husbands and who were secluded but lacked privacy in their own homes. The latter were kept in purdah to maintain (and increase) khandani izzat, or family honour; for them to show their faces in public would bring disgrace to their families. “Ah, but our case is just the opposite,” said Saira, “men long to see our faces….While we walk freely and anonymously in public places, looking at the world through our nets, they are deprived because we have blinkered them. We do not, as you know, bestow anything on men without extracting its price.””

______

“Bharat Mata”, which was brought before the court for obscenity. This judgment is now a landmark in obscenity law, because of the views it expresses on freedom of expression and artistic dissent. See Maqbool Fida Husain vs Raj Kumar Pandey, 8 May 2008. www.indiankanoon.com 37

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