142 / Contributions to Indian Sociology 55, 1 (2021): 140–159

strategies to prevent conversions, shifts focus to the realm of law and

governance in order to study the legal mechanisms deployed to forestall
and surveill conversions. It also scrutinises the narratives constructed in
the realms of politics and media which foment public anxiety over con-
versions; an anxiety that betrays an unequal field since conversions into
Hinduism do not elicit similar anxieties.
Since narratives are deeply embedded in the phenomenon of conver-
sion, instead of treading the beaten path of studying conversion itself,
Jenkins investigates what people are saying and writing about it. This
approach not only enables her to analyse the phenomenon of conversion
through the lens of contested meanings, it also allows her to establish the
empirical basis for her call to disabuse ourselves of the predominant nar-
rative of conversion with its ideal of a prototypical convert. Her docu-
mentary analysis of the legally-induced conversion narratives, in the
medium of forms and applications, is unique not only because she is the
first scholar to endeavour such a study in the Indian context, but also
because she demonstrates how these legal documents effectively publi-
cise an act that opponents of (mass) conversion represent as an inher-
ently private matter.
What further distinguishes this book from others in this area, apart from
its focus on mass rather than individual conversions, is its range from the
late-colonial period to the present day, its inclusion of women, lower
castes, and several religious minorities, and finally, its analytical frame-
work that deftly comprehends both conversion narratives and religious
freedom. This book will certainly prove indispensable to scholars working
in the fields of conversion, religious movements, and social change.

Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi VANLALHMANGAIHA

New Delhi
vanlal@hss.iitd.ac.in

Sameena Dalwai. 2019. Bans & Bar Girls: Performing Caste in Mumbai’s
Dance Bars. New Delhi: Women Unlimited. x + 242 pp. Bibliography.
`595 (hardback).
DOI: 10.1177/0069966720979335

In 2005, the Maharashtra government banned dance performances in

bars and restaurants all over the state. The said establishments could
 Book Reviews / 143

operate, serve food and alcohol, host music performances, but not have
women dance to Bollywood music. This resulted in almost 75,000
women who danced in these venues losing their livelihood. Sameena
Dalwai’s book studies the ‘birth and implementation’ (p. 2) of the ban.
Towards that goal, the author examines the space of the dance bar, the
profile of the dancers, the nature of sexual entertainment entailed in bar
dance, the consumers of such entertainment, the discourses of the vari-
ous state and non-state actors that constituted the debate over the ban, the
judicial response to the issue and finally, the consequences of the ban on
the lives of the bar dancers.
In reformist or abolitionist discourses, bar dancing tends to be cast in
the same terms as sex work; the primary argument being that it entails
the objectification of women’s bodies and caters to patriarchy. Dalwai
presents a sociology of bar dancing based on interviews with (former)
bar dancers, bar owners, and patrons of bar dance. For the last category,
dance bars provided erotic thrill within moral and legal boundaries: the
bars were licensed establishments and the dancers, ‘good’ women who
sustained their families with their earnings. As for the dancers, the ‘bar
line’ involved providing intimacy without the promise of sex, or what
Elizabeth Bernstein has called ‘bounded authenticity’—a genuine emo-
tional experience within the boundaries of an economic transaction.
Thus, one of the main contributions of the book is that it shifts the lens
on bar dancing from sex to erotic entertainment and in doing so presents
bar dancing as a distinct form of socially reproductive labour.
Equally distinct in this sociology is the profile of the dancers. A large
majority of them came from communities like Bedia and Nat, where
women traditionally danced in travelling troupes and tamashas, also did
sex work, and were the primary bread earners for their families. For
these women, being in the bar line meant practising their traditional pro-
fession and yet earning several times more than they would have outside
it. Bar dancing was much more lucrative than other gendered, caste-
based jobs like midwifery or manual scavenging.
Thus, Dalwai argues that although bar dancers appeared to be perform-
ing their caste role, working in the bar in fact allowed them to subvert that
role by selling their traditional skills as a highly valued commodity in the
entertainment market. The patrons could no longer claim their sexual
labour as their caste-based entitlement but had to pay for it in a competitive
market. To her credit, Dalwai shows this subversion to be not just sym-
bolic, but one that had substantial material outcomes—it enabled many

Contributions to Indian Sociology 55, 1 (2021): 140–159

144 / Contributions to Indian Sociology 55, 1 (2021): 140–159

dancers to acquire property, put children through school and negotiate

familial control more effectively. Bar dancing for these women then repre-
sented not caste oppression as many dalit moral reformists claim, but caste
mobility. This formulation is supported by the accounts of bar dancers
themselves: how they saw themselves as ‘hereditary’ performers in the
entertainment economy, as precarious labourers who had worked in other
sectors, and the factors that determined their decision to pick dance bars
instead of those ‘dignified’ sectors.
The third intervention that the book makes is about the ban itself.
Dalwai argues that the ban is neither explained by the liminality of dance
bars as spaces of entertainment, nor as the moralistic deployment of state
power against lower-caste women’s sexuality. The ban, she argues, must
be understood as backlash from the political elite against the occupa-
tional mobility of lower-caste women enabled by the dance bars.
Examining how bar dancing was constituted as a moral panic, Dalwai
shows that the vilification of bar dancers not only turned on them not
being ‘our’ women—they were Sweety as opposed to Savitri—but also
on the refrain that they took away money from ‘our’ men. Erotic dance
itself had been made respectable by Bollywood heroines, who all came
from the upper castes. The same dance form when practised by lower-
caste women in dance bars, came to be seen as obscene and offensive to
the dignity of all women.
Dalwai concludes by examining the legislative rhetoric in support of
the ban and the subsequent judicial rhetoric striking it down as unconsti-
tutional. Dalwai faults the latter for missing the caste angle. But this is
where the inadequacy of the predominantly descriptive style of the book
becomes the most palpable. It fails to convincingly show how caste was
coded in discourses of obscenity and protection that dominated the leg-
islative proceedings, or how it was erased and more importantly, to what
effect, in the language of liberal constitutional rights that structured the
judicial response to the ban. Nonetheless, the book is valuable for intro-
ducing caste into the discussion on state regulation of sexual labour.
The book will be helpful in conceptualising sexual labour without
drawing sharp distinctions between erotic entertainment and sex work,
and pushing the latter down a hierarchy of morality, which the dance bar
debate has often done. After all, as Dalwai’s account shows, what united
the Left and the Right on the ban was the notion that bar dancers lived
off ‘dishonest labour’ and ‘easy money’—the charges that confront the
 Book Reviews / 145

articulation of sex work as ‘work’. But I also hope that the book nudges
scholars theorising sex work and its regulation to finally start engaging
with caste.

Jindal Global Law School SAPTARSHI MANDAL

Sonepat
saptarshi@jgu.edu.in

Jules Naudet (translated from French by Renuka George). 2018. Stepping

into the Elite: Trajectories of Social Achievement in India, France, and the
United States. New Delhi: Oxford University Press (with Institut français).
xxii + 354 pp. Tables, appendix, references, index. Rs 995 (hardback).
DOI: 10.1177/0069966720979336

Social mobility, seen in terms of patterns and trends across countries, as

well as the experiences of this mobility in specific countries, has been of
interest to scholars from various disciplines. This book, a lucid transla-
tion from French, provides a comparative study of three countries, of
complex ways in which people who have been upwardly socially mobile
negotiate movement away from their social origins and articulate their
experience of mobility.
The comparative frame provides a useful way to study whether the
context of where mobility is experienced matters to the way that people
narrate and make sense of their experiences of moving out of their social
origins (class, caste, family, neighbourhood), and moving into the ‘elite’.
The choice of the three countries: India, the USA and France, is explained
using existing tropes (and the limits of these tropes are discussed) where
on the one hand the USA is seen as the land of opportunity, and on the
other India as the epitome of a closed society with little or no opportunity
of movement. The choice of France seems pragmatic and allows the
author to look more closely at a ‘class’ society.
Using snowball sampling and targeted advertisements Naudet selected
a sample of 160 people in ‘elite’ occupations who came from social ori-
gins ‘most removed in the social space’ (p. 56). He includes three sec-
tors: civil service, the private sector and academics. Various trajectories
of mobility are explored: from education in elite schools and universities
to the labour market, as is the departure from these trajectories across the
countries.

Contributions to Indian Sociology 55, 1 (2021): 140–159