Bring on the Wah! Wah! Girls

The classical mujra dancers of 16th-century India have been turned into pole dancers in contemporary Britain, writes Tanika Gupta, whose new musical plays with the theme
1/3
Tanika Gupta1 June 2012

In a marble-floored inner courtyard in 16th-century Mughal India, surrounded by carved walnut doors draped with exquisite tapestries, men lounge on embroidered silk cushions, smoking hookahs, while live musicians entertain them and sandalwood incense fills the air. Enter a beautiful, bejewelled woman — all eyes are on her. She shimmers in bright silks and brocade, with a sparkling nose-pin; her eyes are thickly kohl-rimmed and her hands and feet decorated in vermillion. She is a mujra dancer.

Mujras were courtesans who performed for their wealthy patrons. Skilled in the kathak dance form (wearing dancing bells on their feet and tapping out fast rhythms and performing breathtaking pirouettes in time to the tabla beat), these women were also accomplished singers and poets. Well versed in the art of flirtation and seduction, they often became the lovers of their patrons.

In today’s Britain, however, a more sinister form of the mujra has sprung up. Underground and secretive, young women dance in crowded private rooms where they are paid in hard cash. Gone are the days of perfecting the classical dance and art forms — now it’s all about gyrating hips, Bollywood tunes and sometimes even topless dancing.

In Leicester, Birmingham, Bradford and London, teenage girls are lured and paid to dance in crowded rooms full of men. These are still called mujra clubs but the exploitation of the young women is shameless. I spoke to one, Sameena (not her real name), who had been invited to dance for a private audience. She went with three friends.

“We were taken into a smoke-filled room in Stratford, somewhere around the back of the Olympic stadium, and asked to dance. It was packed with men who all watched us. We danced for four hours without a break. They wouldn’t let us go and we started to get frightened. Eventually we managed to get out. They paid us £300 each in cash. They asked us back but I never returned. It was horrible.”

In the hands of organised gangs, impoverished young women are lured over from India and Pakistan with promises of fame and a film career. It is a thinly disguised ploy to force them eventually into prostitution.

Abha Paya works with Jagori, a Delhi-based group that monitors sex workers across India. “The sex industry is growing phenomenally and it often hides behind traditional forms of music and dancing,” she has said. “We have evidence that mujra dancers are being trafficked from India to countries such as Britain and Canada. Networks that traffic women to the West are well organised. There is a chain of traffickers, from the lowliest sort working in the villages, who will make a few hundred rupees out of it, to businessmen in the big city who are growing fat on the trade. Prostitution often takes place behind a veneer of tradition.”

Another, more modern tradition harbouring a darker side is the Bollywood movie. In the West we tend to think of it as glitter, songs and dances, set against a backdrop of idealised romances and high melodrama. In fact, many of these films have a strong storyline and deal with important subjects such as rape, domestic violence, class and caste, religion and poverty — as well as the well-trodden storylines of star-crossed lovers and estranged families.

Courtesans have always been a favourite theme, and classics such as Mughal-e-Azam, Pakeezah, Umrao Jaan and Devdas have all drawn from this world, with issues of honour and love, where heroines are tragic but their dances and songs are poetic and magical and the cinematography is sumptuous. Many of Bollywood’s best-known actresses (Rekha, Mina Kumari, Madhuri Dixit and Aishwarya Rai) owe at least some of their success to playing beautiful mujra dancers in such movies.

This blending of subject and form is something we found we could use in Wah! Wah! Girls, a World Stages co-production between Sadler’s Wells and Theatre Royal Stratford East, a new musical written by me, choreographed by Javed Sanadi and directed by Emma Rice.

Our protagonist, Soraya, struggles to run her own classy, traditional mujra club called Wah! Wah! Girls in today’s East End, where we follow the lives and exploits of the dancers. When a new girl, Sita, turns up, Soraya’s world is turned upside down. “Vah! Vah!” (as it’s pronounced) means “Well done”; in the Indian subcontinent, instead of applauding the performer, audiences call it out to show their appreciation. My original title was Mujra Girls, but when Sadler’s Wells googled that it came up with porn sites, mainly of sexualised images and videos of Asian women dancing to Bollywood tracks, so we had a rethink.

I have drawn on dimensions of the Bollywood tradition, which takes its influences from almost every dance form — Indian classical, samba, salsa, Latin, jazz, as well as 21st-century club classics — and Wah! Wah! Girls celebrates both the ancient form of mujra and contemporary styles, in a score by Niraj Chag. The aim, for all of us, is to capture the fusion of contemporary London life with Asian, Afro-Caribbean and East European neighbours each finding their voice.

Although the women in our club are not sex workers, their lives can be better understood in the context of how mujra has evolved and how some contemporary men abuse the tradition. Ours are empowered modern women who celebrate their lives through dance and song. Wah! Wah! Girls is a woman-centred script and we wanted to give it all the glamour, great songs and dances from the old films but also the vivacity of the East End and the energy of today’s new India.

Wah! Wah! Girls is at Sadler’s Wells’ Peacock Theatre, WC2 (sadlerswells.com; 0844 412 4322) May 24-June 23.

For the latest shows and events visit our Going Out pages.

Create a FREE account to continue reading

eros

Registration is a free and easy way to support our journalism.

Join our community where you can: comment on stories; sign up to newsletters; enter competitions and access content on our app.

Your email address

Must be at least 6 characters, include an upper and lower case character and a number

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account

* Required fields

Already have an account? SIGN IN

By clicking Create Account you confirm that your data has been entered correctly and you have read and agree to our Terms of use , Cookie policy and Privacy policy .

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in