During the 1960s and ’70s, Miss Shefali (1947-2020), born Arati Das, was Calcutta’s leading cabaret performer. Originally from Narayanganj in eastern Bengal, she was only a few months old when her family relocated to India after Partition. However, their life in Calcutta was steeped in poverty. To ameliorate the circumstances of her family, she took up paid-employment while still a child—first, as a maid, and later, a dancer in a posh restaurant.
At eleven years of age, she started working in an Anglo-Indian household, as a domestic help. There, she picked up a few dance moves. Reminiscing about her early life during an interview, she stated that,
The family lived like the Europeans. They would throw parties every day and there would be music and all of them would dance. I would watch them from behind the curtains and practice the moves … A guy called Vivian Hansen would frequent their house. One day I asked Vivian if he could get me a better job and he asked me if I could dance. I said yes! … [H]e took me to Firpo’s. The manager asked me to show him some dance moves, and I was hired! … I was only 13 then, too young to understand what was happening. But I knew that I would get good money and get a house for Ma-Baba. [i]
[i] Miss Shefali’s interview with Paoli Dam (and Kushali Nag) entitled “Shefali to Paoli,” in The Telegraph, August 28, 2012.
Miss Shefali was the first Bengali cabaret performer.[i] In her memoir Sandhya Rater Shefali (Nightfall Jasmine/Nightfall Shefali), she notes that to work as a professional dancer she was required to obtain a license from the Calcutta Police. Desperate to keep her employment at Firpo’s Restaurant, she gave the police a false profile claiming she was an orphan living with her uncle’s family and needed the job in order to escape the ill treatment she suffered there. One of the officers tried to dissuade her with, “You’re a girl from a Bengali family, why would you dance in a hotel? … It’s more respectable to work as a maid!” (Sandhya Rater Shefali 20).
The officer’s raising the issue of respectability in the face of Miss Shefali’s resolve to give her parents a comfortable life captures the dilemma many refugee women faced. The economic devastation stemming from Partition-related displacements together with the loss of male breadwinners in the sectarian riots surrounding the political division of the subcontinent had forced many middle-class women and girls to seek paid-work. Employment in the fields of education and medicine (not including nursing) was deemed respectable for middle-class women but few met the educational requirements for teachers or doctors. To enable refugee women develop skills suited to different occupations, governmental and non-governmental bodies including the All India Women’s Conference, the All Bengal Women’s Union, the Nari Seva Sangha (Association for the Service of Women), and the Mahila Atmaraksha Samiti (Women’s Self Defense Society) stepped in.
However, jobs were scarce, and the competition was tough. Given the situation, some women opted for “stigmatized” professions in entertainment.
In fact, West Bengal’s entertainment industry benefited immensely from the involvement of displaced middle-class women. Like Miss Shefali, jatra (Bengali folk theater) artistes Jyotsna Dutta (1940-2002) and Bina Dasgupta (1952-2005) also built successful careers in the performing arts. Celebrated as jatra samragni (empress of jatra), Jyotsna Dutta joined “Muktakeshi Opera” a troupe comprised of Partition refugees, as a child artiste; she was the first woman to essay a female-lead in jatra. (Women’s roles in jatra had thus far been played by female impersonators. Jyotsna Dutta got her first opportunity to play a major female role was when she replaced female impersonator Nandadulal Adhikari who was absent from work that day. It was for a paltry sum of 25 paisa.[ii])
Bina Dasgupta, lauded as jatra lakshmi or the prosperity-goddess of jatra owing to the income her performances drew, had had to quit school repeatedly to make a living in jatra, as a way to provide for her family. Similarly, national honoree Sabitri Chattopadhyay (b. 1937) started her career in cinema working as an “extra” in crowd scenes and dance sequences to help feed her family.
Elusive Respectability
When cabaret dancer Miss Shefali complained to the police about recurring episodes of street harassment by strangers upon her return home from her shows late in the night or in the early hours of the morning, she was told, “What girl from a bhadralok family stays outside the home at that hour!” (Miss Shefali 2014: 60). Her complaint received no attention from the police because their protection duty, seemingly, extended only to bhadra/decent girls who returned home on time, while “Shefali [had] dared to be ‘bad’, turning her dancing body into a site of fantasy and pleasure.”[i] Writing about Miss Shefali, Priyanka Dasgupta notes that, “Appreciation for her dance came from various quarters. … But respect? That was a tricky space. She courted success, money, glamour and scandal. But respect never came easy” (The Times of India, February 9, 2020). While unconventional career paths seldom led to respectability, few women were stigmatized in the way Miss Shefali was. She was branded “bishkanya” or “poison-woman” (Miss Shefali 2014: 169). More recently, she has been inaccurately labelled a “‘prostitute-bar dancer’”[ii] (Ray 101). While an impatient audience shattered chandeliers at Calcutta’s Grand Hotel because Miss Shefali arrived late for her floor show, bhadralok respectability eluded her. Her performances at exclusive venues like Firpo’s Restaurant and the Grand had kept her at a distance from the middle-class, but her involvement in professional theater changed that. And although theater-goers packed the playhouses—Chowringhee and Saheb, Bibi, Golam (King, Queen, Knave) ran for 1000 nights each and Samrat o Sundari for 1200 nights, together with her other commercially successful plays—moral outrage and accusations of “apasanskriti” or “perverted culture” poured in.[iii]
What was difficult for the Bengali middle-class to stomach was Miss Shefali’s boldness. She did not apologize for choosing cabaret dancing as a career nor make excuses for her costumes. Only on her first day as a dancer, when she barely thirteen, she had been upset about her outfit, but she made peace with it, “I cried when I wore it. … Then I thought, okay, this is my profession and I must not feel bad” (Miss Shefali 2012). Nourishing her resolve to advance her career and her love of dance was her confidence: “I was sure of one thing, even as an 11-year-old when I went to work in an Anglo-Indian household — that I feared nothing” (quoted in Kar, 2020). Her courage, fame, large paychecks, her projected apathy to slanders offended the morality police and the self-appointed custodians of Bengali culture. The ruling Left Front government of the state of West Bengal blamed her for “promoting ‘obscenity’ in Bengali theatre”[i] (Bhattacharya 97). And the stigma remained long after the footlights had been turned off. Despite appearing in a few films, including Satyajit Ray’s Pratidwandi (The Adversary, 1970) and Seemabaddha (Company Limited, 1971), Miss Shefali never received substantial offers for roles in films or television serials. Further, she was rarely invited to serve on jury panels for dance competitions despite her training and talent in Hula, Charleston, Can-Can, Blues, Samba, Twist, Cha Cha Cha, Arabian Belly Dancing, Indian folk- and classical dances—Kathak and Bharatanatyam.
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Even her presence in Satyajit Ray’s Pratidwandi caused a protest. In the film, Miss Shefali was cast in a small role as a nurse and part-time sex-worker. The image of the nurse at home entertaining clients provoked the Nurses Union to protest against the film’s screening, stating that such a nurse-prostitute conflation demeaned the women in the profession. Satyajit Ray explained to the members of the union that “‘one unpleasant nurse does not make every nurse a negative character,’”[i] and issued a press-statement to mollify them. The outrage expressed by the Nurses Union was not only about the on-screen representation of nurses, it was also triggered by the fact that it was Miss Shefali doing the representing.
One of the unkindest cuts came from her family. After she retired from professional dancing and theater, Miss Shefali decided to move to her family home. With the surplus from the substantial funds she sent home monthly for the upkeep of her family, her father had bought a plot of land and built a house, and also acquired other pieces of property. Early in her career as a cabaret dancer, Miss Shefali had had to reassure her mother with, “There’s nothing bad about what I do, nothing dirty. … There’s no sin in being a cabaret dancer. It’s a respectable job just like any other” (35). However, her family needed no convincing when it came to taking financial help from her. By the time she retired, her parents had passed away and her brother and his family were living in the home. But it was not the homecoming Miss Shefali had anticipated:
Perhaps [my staying there] really inconvenienced them. They didn’t like that I had lots of visitors daily. … In the beginning, people would come to see me because they had heard that I was unwell. Then there were those I had worked with for long years and who were like family to me. And when they came, I couldn’t confer with them on the street; they were invited in, served tea and snacks, and I’d chat with them. Finally, there were people who came to solicit me to participate in shows. … My brother and sister-in-law didn’t approve of any of it. Their main objection was why were so many outsiders flocking to the house. This led to frequent clashes. … The quarrels, the wrangling escalated so much that I moved to the ground floor. Eventually, I moved out of the house. (Miss Shefali 2014: 196)
Miss Shefali’s brother and sister-in-law fearing the loss of their bhadralok respectability on account of Miss Shefali’s “notoriety” and the residues of her former life, by way of her associates coming to see her, ultimately forced her out of the home built using her funds.
The Bhadramahila Code: Clothing, Sexuality, and the Architecture of Respectability
The ideation of women’s respectability traces its genealogy to the socio-cultural reforms around the bhadramahila beginning in the nineteenth century. During much of that century, the practice of purdah (seclusion) had kept elite Hindu Bengali women confined to the interiors of the home; their inaccessibility (and sexual unavailability) was considered a symbol of their honor. But by the late nineteenth century, the social landscape was transforming rapidly with the emergence of the bhadramahila in the public sphere. With that came the question: How was she to conduct herself in public? The crafting of bhadramahila respectability by cultural nationalists included (but was not limited to) educating her; refining her speech which involved culling her vocabulary of words newly considered unsuitable/coarse; and developing her wardrobe because her public presence required her to be appropriately dressed. Her attire was to serve as more than a covering for the body, it was also to be a signifier of decency and her virtue. Since, the prime virtue was chastity, the bhadramahila was never to dress provocatively.[i] The experiments by cultural nationalists to formulate an appropriate outfit for the bhadramahila is what sociologist Himani Bannerji calls the “moral-sartorial project”[ii] (170). Bannerji notes that women’s lives in the public sphere and at home were ordered around the concept of “lajja” (shame/modesty) which defined not only their clothing but also their speech, behavior, and even, their sexuality. Further, “Lajja, simultaneously the pivot of nationalist female ethics and culture, serves as a subjective regulator of female physicality or sexuality. As an internalized censor, uplifted to virtue, it is the most personal, therefore moral, way of constricting and controlling women” (184-85).
It is the breakdown of this sartorially-marked linkage between respectability and asexuality (or non-sexuality) that made Miss Shefali cry upon seeing her dance costume before her first dance performance because, “The full-length dress left bare an arm on one side, and a leg on the other. It also had a very low neckline” (Miss Shefali 2014: 27). A teenager, she understood the semiotics of dressing in this sexually provocative manner. For similar reasons, her playing the nurse-sex worker in the film Pratidwandi and willingness to appear on screen in scanty clothes, smoke a cigarette, make suggestive conversation, and laugh out loudly (off-screen), actions considered improper for a bhadramahila since they singly and collectively violated the code of lajja, marked her as abhadra/indecent.
But bhadramahila respectability was comprised of more than appropriate attire and social comportment. The woman’s work-site also weighed in on the question of respectability. The reason a woman working as a teacher in a girls’ school was well-regarded while another working as an entertainer was not, is because while the former worked with children within the enclosed premises of an educational institution and among female colleagues, the latter’s occupation situated her in the public eye, in spaces inhabited by adult men. This public exposure made a woman vulnerable to violence, it also questioned her morality and made assumptions about her sexual availability—if she is willing to work in a predominantly male environment, what else is she willing to do?
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For women who chose careers in the entertainment industry, recuperation of their reputation was sometimes possible through marriage. It had happened to jatra-artiste Bina Dasgupta whose marriage to actor-director Arun Dasgupta with his “true upper middle class respectable lineage,” had enabled her to “shed off a number of features associated with the ‘fallen women’”[i] (138). Bishnupriya Dutt and Urmimala Sarkar Munshi note that: “Not only does [Arun Dasgupta] tutor the new actress, but also marries her legally and gives his protégé the social and middle-class credibility; almost an unprecedented event in the jatra” (138). Bina Dasgupta’s relocation from “the squalor of Chitpur with its erotic locations and associations” to “the ideal domestic set-up in a large house built in the new middle-class area in Salt Lake” (138) maps the rise in her financial stability and social status.
But marriage was not for everyone. Miss Shefali was apprised by one of her wealthy admirers that, “I’ll give you anything you want. Anything! But I can’t marry you. Because, my family will never accept you. A cabaret dancer will never join our family” (Miss Shefali 2014: 92).[1]
[1] Miss Shefali’s interview with Paoli Dam (and Kushali Nag) entitled “Shefali to Paoli,” in The Telegraph, August 28, 2012.
[1] Arati Das was re-christened Miss Shefali by her employers at Firpo’s Restaurant. See Sandhya Rater Shefali. Transcribed by Sirsha Banerjee. Calcutta: Ananda Publishers, 2014.
[1] Ms. Jyotsna Dutta: Prima Donna of the Jatra. Natya Shodh Sansthan, Kolkata. 1998. Video creator: Asit Basu. <https://archive.org/details/dni.ncaa.NSS-ACC_12143_VC_243_NSS_DIGN_17-VHS> Accessed August 27, 2022.
[1] Aishika Chakraborty in “Calcutta cabaret: dance of pleasure or perversion?” South Asian History and Culture 14:2. 2023. 167-185.
[1] Examining the representation of the anonymous nurse in Pratidwandi, Panchali Ray writes, “the ‘prostitute-nurse’ is performed by Ms Shefali, a ‘prostitute-bar dancer’, whose body language and presence is open, available, and sexually forthright” (101). See Ray’s essay “Caring or Whoring? Nurses and the Politics of Representation, Colonial to Contemporary Calcutta” in Kolkata in Space, Time, and Imagination v.2. Anuradha Roy and Mellita Waligora (Eds.). Primus Books. 2020. 89-112.
There is no evidence that Miss Shefali was a prostitute. In her interview with Paoli Dam, Miss Shefali repeatedly dissociates herself from prostitution with, “a lot of people came to me and urged me to work with them. But I realised that they wanted to lure me to a dirty profession. I hope you understand what I mean by dirty. … [A]s a cabaret dancer, I just had to wear revealing clothes and dance, [but] nobody could touch me. … … I told Ma and Baba that I was not doing anything dirty” (The Telegraph, August 28, 2012). Also, Miss Shefali danced in upmarket restaurants and posh hotels, not in bars.
[1] See Chakraborty. Op. cit.
[1] Spandan Bhattacharya in “Transgressing Boundaries, Transforming Film Culture(s): Tales of Bedeni and the Constructs of Female Performer Figure in the 1990s Bengali Cinema” in BioScope 13:1, 2002. 94–116.
[1] Bijoya Ray quoted in Priyanka Dasgupta’s article in The Times of India (February 9, 2020), entitled “Of love, lust and Miss Shefali: Why did Ray’s Bengal find it difficult to accept its Queen of Cabaret?”
[1] Partha Chatterjee notes that at this time of anticolonial nationalism, the modern woman was required “to display the signs of national tradition” (9) in The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton: Princeton UP. 1993.
[1] Himani Bannerji in “Textile Prison: Discourse on Shame (lajja) in the Attire of the Gentlewoman (bhadramahila) in Colonial Bengal.” The Canadian Journal of Sociology/Cahiers canadiens de sociologie 19:2. Spring 1994. Special Issue on Moral Regulation. 169-193
[1] Bishnupriya Dutt and Urmimala Sarkar Munshi in Engendering Performance: Indian Women Performers in Search of an Identity. New Delhi: Sage Publications. 2010.
[1] Early in her career, Miss Shefali received a marriage proposal from her first love, an American, but she turned it down because she was concerned that if she abandoned her profession and settled in the US, her parents would suffer without her financial support; second, having found fame on the dance floor, she was reluctant to give it up (2014: 85-86).
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