Sonia Faleiro's Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World of Bombay's Dance Bars has been described as one of the most original works of non-fiction to come out of India in recent times. The book captures the highs and lows of Leela, a young bar dancer who is, one moment, star of a suburban dance bar and, the next, reduced to a desperate street walker when a government ban order shuts down the bars. In this interview, Faleiro speaks of how she came to research and write the book.
You researched over five years. Did you continue as a full time journalist right through?
No, that would have been impossible, as most of the research for this book was done at night. I was lucky that my earlier novel The Girl did well and allowed me to pursue this full time. It gave me access to an agent for this book.
Beautiful Thing is non-fiction but told in a fictionalised form. Yet you must have collected a mass of data that you sifted out, when you ultimately decided to tell one personal story to illuminate an entire world.
When I started working on this in 2005, I did research for around three years and I collected a bewildering amount of information. I wasn't sure initially what kind of story I would tell. But of course, telling a personal story is just the most efficient way to get your point across. Numbers don't convey too much. If somebody tells me there were 75,000 girls, I'm going to sit here and struggle to see those 75,000 girls.
And of course, the underlying story was that the ban was not just immoral; it was basically an act of violence. These girls were introduced to professional sex work from a very young age and had no knowledge of any other profession. Bar dancing was independent of sex work. If the bar dancer chose to support herself only on bar dancing, she could; if she chose to perform sex work, that was of her own volition. What the ban did was take these women, many of whom had come out of sex work, and throw them back into sex work. And you don't see anything more violent or more aggressive than that.
How did you meet Leela?
The dance bar story was one of a dozen stories I must have followed up on that week and I called up a bar owner I knew. Leela was one of the girls I was introduced to. She was very compelling, like a Hindi film heroine. She had a very clear sense, even at the age of 19, about who she was, of what had been done to her, of her possibilities, what opportunities lay before her. And she was very honest and upfront, in some ways; and very devious in others. Why shouldn't she be? She had to survive.
How did they relate to you?
Leela was actually very proud to introduce me everywhere as her friend. She'd push me forward like I was some fancy handbag. It worked because I was very honest with them, I did not judge them. They would try to scandalise me, use salty language and see if I would react. When they realised I was not judging them, they stopped trying to get a reaction from me. Ultimately I'd sit in on their gatherings and they would forget I was there.
Are you still in touch with them?
I am not in touch with Leela. The circumstances always said this would be the case. Once it was no longer possible for me to be in continuous physical pursuit, because I did not have the tools at my disposal - primarily being how to communicate with her - then there would be no relationship. I did hear from her once, but after that never.
Most of the women in the book seem to have intuitively understood that Indian society is misogynistic.
The reason is, for them, it was a lived experience. They don't think it out. In their experience, men sell them, sleep with them or profit from them. Essentially, men represent people who will profit from them in a way that is completely to their detriment, certainly never to their advantage.
There is a sense that Priya and Leela see bar dancing as almost a way out of domestic abuse, some form of independence and freedom.
They did. Leela realised that her mother lived her domestic hell because she could not support herself. It was either the abuse of the house or of the street. They knew that money was the crux. Once she became financially independent, she could at least control some of the choices she had. So, yes, she would choose the dance bar over abuse in the house any day. Yet there was such a deep yearning to be part of a larger society, she would have to go right back to the house and have a family. A woman with a family is considered a safe person; she is not a threat to other women, to men, to marriages and therefore to morality in society. So they wanted marriage. There is a complete dichotomy. They seek the dance bar for independence from men like Manohar and yet they seek a husband and children. Husbands and children would wash away the so-called immorality of their lives and they would be resurrected, socially acceptable.
You wrote a novel first, then this non-fiction work? Have you decided to stay with non-fiction? And journalism?
I don't see myself doing journalism now. I can just do one thing, one project at a time. I have one book that's coming out next year. It is an anthology called Mumbai Noir. I have a story in that. But I also am working on my next book of non fiction.
Who are the writers in India that you admire?
In India, the one person I turn to is the photographer Dayanita Singh. She has done a seminal work on the hijras. When I started writing on the hijra community, there was virtually no writing on it. So I asked her how to handle it in a way that I felt wasn't exploitative, in a way that represented them fairly, at the same time protected your integrity as a reporter. The bottom line is to always question why you are doing something. If your answer is anything other than ‘I feel it is the right thing to do, this is something we need to see and talk about', then it is dicey.
