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The 1970s dawned upon unanticipated political reversals in Bengal – the violent spate of the Naxalite movement, followed by the Bangladesh Liberation War and a fresh flux of refugees from the other side of the border – together triggering disruptive turmoil within its already volatile landscape. While the National Emergency of 1975 witnessed a severe crackdown on civil liberties, Bengal voted to power a new Left Front government in 1977, eliciting a radical turnaround in political culture, redefined in terms of progressive and anti-capitalist movements. By the late 1970s, the cultural politics of the state, however, gained a new twist when a new polemical rhetoric called  ‘apasanskriti’  or pervert culture came to hold its sway over the official discourse on culture, imbricated with obsessions on sexual morality and cultural decadence. The protracted tussle between culture and corruption, pleasure and politics was nowhere as stark as it was in the realm of commercial theatre, where ‘obscene’ cabaret dancing in ‘mundane’ family dramas invited strident flak and threats of state censorship for allegedly selling sleaze on stage. One name that emerged as a visceral symbol of moral decadence was that of ‘Miss Shefali’ – the iconic cabaret queen of postcolonial Calcutta. Sitting within the critical interface of the second and third wave feminist movements, my paper locates Shefali as a conscious agent of the politics of pleasure, whose erotic dance had torn apart the binaries between good/bad, victimhood/agency, coercion/choice, challenging simultaneously the dominant stereotypes of the nation. Played upon by a patriarchal system that consumed her body, Shefali too claimed to have consumed the market economy by resisting, twisting, and subverting it. If the power of desire serves as an antidote to the theory of commodification, Shefali dared to be ‘bad’, turning her dancing body into a site of fantasy and pleasure. As the crusade against  apasanskriti  by the liberal democratic state shut out many such bodies-marked as lewd and libidinous-from the gentrified spaces of performance, this paper privileges the voices of disenfranchised dancers who talked back against the moral policing and sexual double standards of the leftist intelligentsia and the state, for denying them rights to livelihood, occupation, and erotic labour in a changing market economy.

Calcutta cabaret : dance of pleasure or perversion?