At times, depending on how regular the patrons were, they were even permitted to shake a leg under the strict watch of bouncers.
The culture of dance bars started modestly in Khalapur, in Raigad district, around 75 km from Mumbai, in the early 1980s.
The first such bar was 'Baywatch' which functioned quietly at night. Around 500-600 dancers and bar girls were brought from different parts of Mumbai and Thane in airconditioned buses to the venue in late afternoons.
The strategic location of Khalapur made it a favourite with the revelers, it was just off the Mumbai-Pune highway, and a vehicle disappearing into the rural darkness was hardly noticed or missed.
After earning a bundle - ranging from a few hundred to a few thousand rupees - many of the dancers would return by the same bus early morning the next day and reach home before sunrise; the 'others' who stayed back with patron-customers would make their own arrangements to go home.
The move soon picked up and spread like wildfire in Mumbai and Thane. At one point of time, there were an estimated 3,000 such night-bars employing over 75,000 dancers, but other estimates pegged the figure at around half a million.
Crores of rupees literally used to be blown up in these dance bars and there were some attractive dancers like Tarannum who was even raided by the Income Tax department.
Some of the top-end dancers used to arrive to 'work' in snazzy chauffeur-driven vehicles, with their own private armed security and an assistant to collect their earnings -- currrency notes showered on them by patrons.
