Jobless bar girls become barat girls in Agra

Vijay Upadhyay
Agra. Each summer, hundreds of weddings take place in the villages around Agra from April to July and the common feature in all these weddings is a "transvestite" dancing in front of the wedding procession to the sound of folk music.

But this season, the village weddings have ignored transvestites and now feature "live" barat girls, dancing to popular Bollywood tunes on a "mobile DJ" dance floor constructed on a tractor-trolley.

These dancing girls are none other than the bar girls of Mumbai who have returned home to Agra to wait out the "dry season" after the Maharashtra Government's ban on the dance bars in Mumbai.

Over the past few months, while a number of "jobless" bar girls have taken up flesh trade to survive, hundreds of bar girls have taken a working holiday in Agra, transforming from "Bar Girls" to "Barat Girls" in a bid to cover their expenses till the bars reopen.

In almost all these wedding processions, that curiously lack a band, at least two to three bar girls in dazzling outfits and costume jewellery add to the tamasha, dancing for all their worth on a makeshift stage built on a tractor trolley. Most of them are under contract with a Chitrashala, a large number of which have popped up in the recent days on the Fatehabad Road of Agra, owing to the easily availability of these girls.

But do these bar girls really enjoy dancing at weddings? Many Chitrashala owners claim that they do, but the girls beg to differ. They claim that they are exposed to all kinds of hazards including almost regular molestation at the hands of drunk people dancing in the procession. In the dance-bars, they were under the protection of the "bouncers" who handled the miscreants at the bars.

Besides, they claimed that while dancing in the dance bars they earned as much as Rs 5,000 per night, whereas dancing at weddings fetched as little as Rs 800-1200 per night as most of the income went to the owner of the Chitrashala. However they said they were only biding their time till the ban on the dance bars was lifted in Mumbai by the Supreme Court.

But with the Supreme Court continuing the ban over dance bars in Mumbai till the next hearing of the case on July 19th, the bar girls' hope of the dance bars reopening soon have been dashed to the ground. The only silver lining in Agra, which is often referred to as the "prep-school" of bar girls, these bar girls still have three months of wedding season ahead of them, while they wait for the next hearing in the Supreme Court.

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