The bar girls of Mumbai have just one question for the government that decided to shut down their way of life in the name of morality this week: what does the sarkar think they?re going to do for a livelihood?

Suketu Mehta?s Maximum City devotes an entire chapter to this peculiar Mumbai institution that employs an estimated 75,000 or so women as dancers and entertainers at Mumbai?s seedier bars.

The bar girl?s status is somewhere between the Japanese geisha or the performer at mujras on one hand and the plain vanilla sex worker. Mehta sums it up: ?On a good night a dancer in a Bombay bar can make twice as much [from customers? tips] as a high-class stripper in a New York bar. The difference is that the dancer doesn?t have to sleep with the customers, is forbidden to touch them in the bar, and wears more clothes on her body than the average Bombay secretary does on the broad public street.?

Like the modelling world and the film world, the world that bar girls inhabit is not particularly innocent; their profession lies uneasily between the world of the artiste and entertainer and the world of the prostitute. But most of the bar girls in Mumbai are proud that they can set the limits on what they will and won?t do. They have a measure of independence that separates them from the high-priced call girls with discreet mobile numbers in Delhi, a measure of dignity that the women who ply their trade in the lanes of Sonagachhi are denied. Some are dancers, just that; some are dancers with boyfriends; some will sell what they have to offer for as much as they can get. The point is that the choice is theirs.

The noises the government has made over the past week are fine, upstanding noises. We?ve heard speeches about the need to uphold the dignity of women. We?ve heard assertions that the existence of bar girls is against Indian, or at any rate, Maharashtrian, culture. The government has promised to provide all Maharashtrian girls employed in this profession with alternative employment. But Mumbai is a city of migrants; the ratio of migrant to local women in the bar trade is very high. And the assumption that Maharashtrian women need and deserve more ?protection? than other women is viciously insulting.

On the subject of morality, does the sarkar seriously believe that bar girls will find jobs as typists, sales clerks, or well, junior government employees? Quite aside from the social stigma, there?s the matter of salary: it?s like asking a successful model to give up her five-figure fees. The bar girls union has launched an agitation because they fear, quite rightly, that the closing of these bars will force most of them into prostitution.

Some argue that it is unfeminist to support a job as demeaning and dependent on exploiting women?s sexuality as the bar girl business. I?d say it?s pretty unfeminist to take away a working girl?s dignity and livelihood while leaving her with precious few choices about how to earn a living in future. If anyone should be making decisions about dancing in bars for a living, it should be the dancers. Not the men who?re happy to let ?morality? leave these women in limbo.