Review: Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World of Bombay’s Dance Bars (2010)

I distrust biographical studies that soak in too much psychographic subtlety, as much as, that

other egregious genre, biographical fiction- as though there were a difference between their

performative horizons: both paint the object in the biases of the subject who vanishes under his

narration, gesticulating strategically with the objects of analysis, when the narrative demands it

independently of the objects’ self narrative. We are all subject to violence, who live, as someone

somewhere is, always-already; what is a possibility once, after all, is a necessity for ever. The more

idiomatic and transparent the narrative of a witness to violence greater the risk of the contamination of

deeds by intentions, things by thought not mediated by the singularity of experiential being; in the self-

subsistent sufferings of others there is seldom room for the others who are spoken of: they await their

subjectivation by external description. There are only insular narratives because only one may speak

before any meaning is negotiated; the lone subject of experience, already a partisan to her reactive,

first-hand knowledge is, paradoxically, the only one who can tell what it is that is her conditional being.

Biography must of necessity betray these commitments to fidelity if it must defray the cost of an

audience’s total ignorance by paying for their enlightenment the great sacrifice of happenstance

objectivity in the currency of personal impressions.

This biography of the marginalised bar dancers of Bombay, now Mumbai, commits to this pious

legerdemain a respectable dedication, spanning five years of first hand research that bespeaks at least a

taste for reactive induction on part of Sonia Faleiro. The recreated chatter of pimping parents in cahoots

with the police, the salesmanship of wayward fathers selling seal pack virginal daughters to lecherous

rural lords and the rapes of mothers by sons are coloured with the verbalisations of the subjects’

idiomatic hinglish. The bootiful Leela and her sordid escapades in the badlands of rapine, exploitation

and repression are followed through with the hawk-eye of a respectable South Mumbai authoress.

Already, the idea is romantic: how much more romance in the tracing, mapping and pointing out of the

jagged lines that make up the lives of whores and eunuchs who survive despite all. Mentored by the

rapscallion Gregory David Roberts of Shantaram fame, and feted by social butterfly and imbecile Shobha

Dé, Faleiro’s taste for what reviles her is exemplary and her panache in sublating the shit and gruel of

the assorted misfortunes into an artistic exercise is nothing but noticeable.

The shaggy book, no mean feat for a mere two hundred and eighteen pager, is garrulous with

the vacillations, evasions and gossip of the main sufferer Leela and her comrades in the bijness of

copulation without exploring any of the larger social tendencies which ground the institution of

prostitution as it has come to be repudiated by forces larger than the ambitious politician she passes

verdict on- an opportunistic chief minister of Maharashtra, who took umbrage at the possibility of moral

corruption of society was not responsible for the Indian notions of purity which predated him and

allowed a culture of lundchoos [cocksucking] whores and dirty hijras [eunuchs] punished for their mere

existence. As though these cocksuckers were driven to their exploitation by a passion for seminal virtues

and their obverse vices, regulated by the ritual and lore of Indian culture; dire necessity as a factor is

focussed on, to Faleiro’s credit, but her analysis of the cultural patina which envelopes the flesh of the

matter is conspicuous by its absence. She is carried away in embodying the petulant whore and her

bitter sweet resentment against her family, cops, men, society and her eunuch friend by dissecting their

dialect.

The end impression I gathered from the book was that of a shaggy dog passing itself off as an

academic undertaking but lacking the bite of the former and a studiousness that barks shy of analytical

depth. It is a book to be read in two hours and consigned to forgetfulness, a specimen of what is going

wrong with allegedly academic works of biographical intent.

My Rating: 1 ½

Work Cited

Faleiro, Sonia. Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World of Bombay’s Dance Bars. New Delhi, India:

Hamish Hamilton, Penguin Books. 2010. Print.