Buskers vs Cops: Varun Dagar case calls for serious look at rights of street performers in India

Dancer Varun Dagar performs in Connaught Place in central Delhi. (Image source: Instagram/varun_dagar03)

Last week, Delhi-based busker Varun Dagar uploaded a reel to Instagram, something he does frequently. But this wasn’t another one of his popular dance or song performances, which the former India’s Best Dancer contestant enacts on the streets of Delhi, and which gather thousands of likes. This was real-life drama.

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In the clip, Dagar is being pushed and shoved by some parking lot attendants in Connaught Place. “Chal!” they shout at him. One guy grabs Dagar’s stuff, including his guitar case, mishandling both. “Roz ka kaam ho gaya hai,” a voice rues off-camera.

While this reel caught fire after actor Rajesh Tailang reposted it on Twitter, this is not the first time that Dagar has had a run-in with the authorities in Connaught Place. In January, he’d posted another reel where you see a policeman escorting him into an autorickshaw. “Iss tarah le gaye aur kahi baar. Dukh hua par koi nahi zindagi hai,” he wrote in the caption.

With at least three incidents of recorded footage, Dagar has been especially visible as the object of Delhi police’s ire, but he isn’t the only one. Another popular busker, Anshul Riaji, had been interrupted mid-performance—also at Connaught Place—by a policeman who asked him to pack up his guitar and leave.

Why do these street performers, who more often than not elicit interest and appreciation from bystanders and passersby, bother Delhi’s cops?

The perception of buskers as beggars is a contributing factor. A busker, unlike a traditional performer on stage, leaves a box, cap or cloth open in front of them: a gentle unspoken request to give them money as per the viewer’s discretion. It isn’t uncommon for their viewers to enjoy their performance, even record them for their own social media likes and dopamine-shots—but the buskers' relationship with their audience is never transactional.

A busker leaves a box, cap or cloth open in front of them: an unspoken request to give them money as per the viewer’s discretion. (Photo: Mart Production via Pexels)

Another reason that is often cited: It is the cops’ job to keep the peace. They say they object to people performing in this manner as a crowd gathers, giving pickpockets and anti-social elements an opportunity for mischief, TOI reported. Also bothered by the buskers are the New Delhi Traders Association, whose members own and operate many of the shops in Connaught Place.

“We are not against performances by artists,” a police official told TOI. “Our only apprehension is that it is a commercial centre and not a cultural hub. Holding such activities will lead to unnecessary chaos, especially when the performances are held next to the entrances of shops.”

Skeptics might wonder about the authenticity of their intent; but perhaps due consideration also needs to be given to the question of whether a space as open, historic and central as Connaught Place can be reduced to just a commercial centre. Who decides who takes space in a public place? Is there no space for artistic endeavours in the marketplace? What’s the line between art and begging—and who’s to decide?

The general wisdom is to opt for regulation. It has been unclear whether busking is actually illegal in India—there is in fact no law to govern the scope of performing for free or donations in the public realm, nor to prevent them.

Perhaps due to its absence, law enforcers often reach for the 1959 Bombay (Prevention of Beggary) Act to stop street performance; and sometimes even invoke the outdated Dramatic Performances Act of 1867, brought into effect by the British over a century ago to, ironically, control seditious theatre in India as the movement for independence and sovereignty gathered strength.

It is unlikely that the buskers of Connaught Place—and really anywhere else in the country—have revolution on their minds. Theirs is more the realm of experimental expression that melds entire universes of performing arts; and all of this for survival.

Watch Dagar or Deepak Upadhyay move and you might wonder if they wouldn’t fit right in with a contemporary dance troupe of the sort that the late, great Astad Deboo would have groomed.

Even when they sing songs from Bollywood movies or original compositions armed with just a guitar or a mouth organ, it is a  demonstration of craft. As it has been for centuries really, in a country where a multitude of folk forms of music, dance, theatre or naatak have, in fact, thrived on the streets. And in a world where the division between high and low forms of art—classical music and barbershop quartets, thumri vs manganiyar, ballet vs break dance—is always as concrete as it is arbitrary.

Not all art forms are created to be performed under the proscenium arch. Others aren’t allowed under it, but do find their own venues—the disco club, the ’hood community centre, the club, under the village tree, in front of a restaurant, in the local train, on the banks of a river.

The metropolis is where the modern busker was born, and regular people performing in parks, the subway, on street is often a core feature of the world’s most attractive cities. Bands and solo artists dot all of the London Underground. In Barcelona’s Latin Quarter, as in a lot of Europe, string quartets sit in folding chairs with their cellos, violins and bass.

Regular people performing in parks, the subway, on street is often a core feature of the world’s most attractive cities. (Photo by Brett Sayles via Pexels)

In New York, where busking (and its opposers) is as old as the great big city itself, an actual ban had been put into effect in 1936, only to be taken down in 1970. If this hadn’t happened, hip-hop would never have been born, let alone become the force that it is today. While that kind of phenomenon comes once in a millennium, to allow art to flow freely through the veins of a city is still the starting point.

Perhaps the only way to navigate the very strange idea of “public nuisance” in a country that allows religious or wedding programs to go on loudspeaker late into the night, is to create some guidelines, or consider a legal framework for busking—the spaces they could inhabit, the hours they could entertain. Because, chancing upon a solo shirtless dancer moving to some melancholic music on your rounds of Connaught Place’s concentric circles may or may not be to your taste, but it certainly isn’t criminal.