The democratic promise of dance music has been undone by its commercialisation—but it can still be reclaimed.
There is a story that the dance-music scene likes to tell about itself. Chances are you’ve heard versions of it before or even relayed them yourself. In this story, the dance floor is an egalitarian utopia where those who are marginalised—by class, race, gender or sexuality— can find joy and liberation through movement. It is a tale of renegade raves, of Do It Yourself collectivism, of constant tussles with the police, the State, and conservative morality. In this telling, dancing is an act of resistance: bodies reclaim space, music dissolves difference, pleasure transcends into radical politics.
This mythical tale of unruly resilience obscures a more tangled reality. Although the global electronic music industry makes up only a part of the vast dance-music ecosystem, its scale gestures towards some of the contradictions at play. Valued at $12.9 billion, according to the global thought leadership platform International Music Summit’s Business Report 2025, this industry is enmeshed in the logic of neoliberal capitalism.
The genre’s biggest global stars—predominantly cis-het white men in the West—pull in five or six figures, playing to tens of thousands at festivals that are essentially brand ecosystems financed by venture capital and private equity. Forces that represent or are allied with the State appear not as antagonists but as regulators, sponsors, or policing forces. Dance floors may trade on the rhetoric of promised freedom but they operate firmly within systems that reward exclusion, gatekeeping, and managed risk.
This friction between the dance floor’s origin myth of egalitarianism and its commercial reality is evident across the world, but nowhere is it as sharp and visible as in India.
Here, dance music’s supposed equitable ideals collide head-on with a society deeply segregated by caste, class, religion, gender, and sexuality. Notionally, clubs and festivals offer you the freedom to “truly be yourself” and to push and bend the boundaries of identity and selfhood but only if you can afford to drop a day’s minimum wage on a single beer. Music from the margins may find its way onto the decks, but only after being depoliticised and filtered through a tightly knit network of savarna, upper class DJs, bookers, and tastemakers.
“I haven’t really seen a truly mixed crowd on a dance floor, one that cuts across class and caste borders,” said Calcutta-based musician and designer Shoumik Biswas, a non-binary artist who produces leftfield electronica under the moniker Disco Puppet. “There’s always an inherent barrier to entry. The maximum inclusivity you can really get away with is to make space for all kinds of people within a specific economic bracket.”
WHAT DO WE think of when we think of a dance floor? This deceptively simple question lays out the pecking order of India’s dance-music scene almost instantly.
In India, the dance spaces that receive attention by way of media coverage, brand sponsorships and archival legitimacy tend to be nightclubs and music festivals accessible largely to the English-speaking elite. These are treated as the primary sites of dance music culture even though they represent only a narrow slice of how and where dancing actually happens in the country. Rarely acknowledged in this record—except as spectacle or kitsch—are roadshows, festival processions and community halls, spaces where the dancing is often more intense, joyful, and unrepressed than anything you would encounter in bars around South Delhi, Bandra in Bombay, or the hidden gatekept spots of Bengaluru.
This separation has always been indefensible, but it was, perhaps, somewhat easier to grasp about a decade ago when the music in these spaces sounded very different from what played in a garden variety club. But today, the sonics of electronic dance music has permeated all across the Indian soundscape. You can hear bass drops at Chhat Puja celebrations in Bihar, keening synths blare out over truck public address systems at Ganpati pandals, and even devotional songs now come repackaged as psytrance remixes.
And yet, these spaces are regarded as gauche sites of lumpenproletariat excess at least by the globalised urban elite. Their music is treated as unwanted noise, and the revellers as unruly, disruptive crowds. Even Bollywood DJs like Lijo or Kawal may play to tens of thousands, but their names will never appear on a Sunburn lineup, nor will they get glowing profiles on global dance publications like Resident Advisor, unlike, say, the electronic music artists Oceantied or Kohra.
Indian producers, DJs and music journalists like me can valorize the block parties in New York or Sao Paulo that birthed our favourite music genres, but you would be hard-pressed to find any of us at their most authentic Indian analogues—Ganpati processions and Ambedkar Jayanti celebrations. The occasional crossovers—such as the electronic music producer and DJ Nucleya launching his 2015 debut album at a Ganpati Visarjan event—are the exceptions that prove the rule. These are one-off incursions more akin to a cultural safari than a true breaching of boundaries.
“We all know that there’s a blatant worldwide bias in terms of what life has value and what life does not, and that’s just as true for the music scene,” said Delhi based Taru Dalmia, who performs reggae and dancehall music as Delhi Sultanate. In 2015, Dalmia and Begum X—his former bandmate from the Delhi-based band, The Ska Vengers—built BassFoundation Roots, their own Jamaican-style sound system. This system is essentially stacks of custom-built speakers that can be set up anywhere with enough space such as a park or a street. Dalmia wanted to escape the “social control” of the club ecosystem and take his politically charged dance music to wider audiences. He hasn’t abandoned commercial spaces altogether, but he has also made a deliberate effort to reach more informal, community-rooted spaces.
“In India it’s a compound of colonial hangovers, the present power structures and older hierarchies,” Dalmia told Object. “Which is why a Gaddar [the late Telangana musician and Marxist revolutionary] could draw hundreds of thousands of people and that’s not valued, but some upper-class, upper-caste acculturated person will do an event and it’s high art or whatever.”
The irony is that club culture increasingly appropriates its sonic vocabulary from these spaces. Take for instance, the thunderous Nashik dhol, indispensable to any Ganesh Chaturthi procession, rooted in the craft of Muslim artists of the city that gives it its name. Recently, the dhol found its way into the oeuvre of Baalti—the US based Indian producer duo comprising Mihir Chauhan and Jaiveer Singh—when they melded it with their UK bass sound. Within India, producers and DJs routinely mix folk sounds and gully-rap vocals with dubstep or drum-and-bass, firing up dance floors across elite clubs in metro cities. (I should note here, in the interest of full disclosure, that I have recently started programming music at a bar in Bandra myself.)
“When the white man is interested in [these sounds], then only will Indian dance music’s gatekeepers appreciate it,” said Tushar Adhav, a member of the Mumbai-based rap collective Swadesi. Adhav makes socially conscious grime and hip-hop music as Bamboy and dubstep as Kaali Duniya. He is one of the few Dalit, working-class artists to breach the industry’s citadel, helped along by a barnstorming roadshow set for the Boiler Room, a UK-based online dance music broadcaster and promoter.
“Until and unless you mix this music with something that the coloniser does, these people won’t accept it,” he told Object. “And even then, it’s difficult. My Boiler Room set went viral, but after that nobody booked me. I had to start my own IP [Intellectual Property offering] and put on shows myself.”
In many ways, sound travels more freely and expansively than ever before. But its reception is tethered to familiar prejudices. We listen to it, clenching the same old hymn sheet in our hands.
ANY ILLUSION OF equity ends at the door. Dress codes, couple-only policies, astronomical entry charges, and an unspoken agreement on who belongs by gender, class, caste, or even “vibe”. These mechanisms are often justified under the vocabulary of safety and crowd control, but they operate as powerful tools of exclusion. India’s club culture is built on the architecture of profiling, whether or not its custodians admit it.
“I personally don’t believe in the concept of couple entry or stag entry,” said Aneesha Kotwani, a Mumbai-based DJ, music strategist, and occasional gig promoter. “Everyone has the right to buy a ticket and come and have a good dance.”
It’s a simple idea in theory. But in practice, it has been surprisingly difficult to execute. In the winter of 2025, Kotwani recalled, a venue at which she was organising a Diwali party insisted, days before the event, on scanning attendees who had already bought tickets and denying entry to men who didn’t “fit the profile”. A long back-and-forth ensued before an uneasy compromise was brokered. Those who had already bought were allowed in, but those trying to pay at the gate were profiled before they gained entrance.
“I feel like most promoters or organisers don’t have these conversations beforehand, and so profiling is left to the discretion of the venue,” Kotwani told Object. “We really need to have this dialogue and be more intentional about the kind of experience we’re creating and how we can ensure there’s no discrimination and that these events are open to anyone.”
Safety is a concern, and a very real one, particularly for women or for sexual minorities. But the solution, Kotwani contends, is more vigilance on the dance floor, not outright exclusion. This is the approach that Nevil Timbadia—co-founder of the Bandra bar, venue, and nightlife fixture Bonobo—champions too. When Bonobo opened in 2008, it broke with convention by having no dress code. Anyone could enter, no matter what their attire. It was among the few places in Mumbai that hosted regular LGBTQ+ parties and events long before the country’s Supreme Court overturned a colonial-era law that criminalised gay sex.
“Our only rule is that people be respectful,” Timbadia told Object. “And that goes for everyone, whether they’re customers or bar staff. You treat everyone the same way, no matter what their background or, say, their preferences. If anyone behaves inappropriately, we make sure to intervene immediately, asking them to leave if necessary.”
Even so, not everyone can spend their evenings at Bonobo, because very few people can afford it. The financial realities of trying to run a nightlife space in a city like Mumbai, where real estate prices are the stuff of legend, impose their limits. “Anybody can walk in, but say for example, they look at the prices, maybe they feel awkward and leave,” said Timbadia. “That’s not something we can help. But at least we are not the ones dictating whether they’re welcome. People can come in, watch a gig for free, and not buy a single thing if they don’t want to. That’s totally fine.”
Most bars and clubs operate differently. For fans—and even artists—from marginalised communities, the club door is yet another reminder of who holds power, and who is expected to fit in. A few years ago, before Adhav became a known name in the scene, entering venues for hip-hop gigs made him anxious, he recalled. “Because these were hip-hop gigs, once you were in, it was fine, because everyone inside is like my brother,” he said. “But entering—that always felt uncomfortable. And I never felt like I could go back to those places for a non-hip-hop event. We thought that if we went for a jazz gig, we’d be asked to leave.”
Bouncers did in fact try to prevent him from entering gigs sometimes because of how he looked or dressed. At one performance in Khar around the late 2010s, a western suburb in Mumbai, the profiling escalated to violence. “I was beaten up a bit by the bouncers,” Adhav recounted. “But the thing is that the bouncers’ brothers and friends are people who rap with us. So it was very weird for them too. I don’t blame the bouncers. It’s the system that’s the problem.”
This kind of gatekeeping gets more insidious and ruthless when decisions about who gets to play are made. Most of the dance-music scene stakeholders Object spoke to said that line-ups for club shows and festivals were controlled by a small clique of upper-caste, upper-class interlocutors, most of them men. A majority of the artists who make it to these line-ups are friends, or friends or friends, or familiar faces from a party or a bar—people from the same socio-economic class.
“One of the problems is that we are not able to go and sit with them because we can’t afford to live the way they do,” said Ganesh Murthi, a member of the Mumbai-based Ambedkarite rap crew Khabardar Revolt. Murthi also makes drum-and-bass and grime music as C4GE. He is the first Indian producer to be featured on the British bass music brand UKF’s YouTube channel, and has reportedly released tracks with international labels such as London’s Beats In Mind and Russian imprint Mathematica Records. But he struggles to find gigs in his home city.
“It becomes a filter—whether you can gel with them, talk like them, go to afterparties, and do drugs with them,” Murthi said. “And even when they do offer a slot, they expect you to play for free while they’re paying lakhs to the international headliner. That also becomes a filter, because they can afford to play for free and we can’t.”
THE LANDSCAPE IS bleak but not altogether irredeemable. Despite, or perhaps because of, the Indian dance-music scene’s glaring inequalities—and its capture by a privileged, largely apolitical elite— true believers in the dance floor’s democratic promise are now finding new ways to push for it.
The act of dancing together, of moving in time to a singular rhythm, can break down social and political boundaries. In endlessly fractured times, it offers us a salve, a rare way to build bridges across the chasms that divide us. But first we have to get everyone onto the dance floor.
One model tries to level and reshape high-end venues. LGBTQ+ parties organised by groups such as Gay Gaze, Dude Party India, and Girlfriend, Girlfriend create safe spaces for queer revellers and their allies to express themselves without fear of social censure or violence. The parties often take place in venues that cater largely to upper-class clientele—but an organiser interviewed by Object said they try to make sure they’re open to as many people as possible.
“Whenever we talk to a new venue, we make sure to explain that this is a safe space and that everyone should be allowed in,” said Madhav of Dude Party India, who has been hosting LGBTQ+ parties in Bengaluru for seventeen years. “We never ask anyone about their caste, class or religion.”
Some artists and promoters go further. Adhav and his crewmates in Swadesi, for example, run a semi-regular night called Low End Therapy at venues such as AntiSocial Mumbai and the G5A Foundation for the Arts. Tickets cost 140 rupees—a clever play on the beats per minute for a regular grime track—and bouncers are specifically told not to bar entry to anyone based on their appearance. Last year, Adhav launched an annual Independence Day event called Right To Dance. Inspired by processional roadshows, he invited rappers, producers and musicians from marginalised backgrounds to join him and perform tracks considered too vernacular, uncool, or political to be allowed into sanitised clubs and curated festivals.
For Adhav, finding space for his music—and his people—in the club is vital. It’s a way of tearing down the invisible walls that seek to determine where his community belongs and where it doesn’t. “My mom has never come to see one of my shows because she’s scared that she won’t be allowed in,” he said. “So events like Low End Therapy are a way to change that. We need our people in every space.”
Other artists have chosen to step out of the club altogether and create their own dance floors from scratch. They have led on musical forms that have always had one foot in the streets. Swayampakula Balasubramaniam, or Dakta Dub, built the Monkey Sound System in 2022, a Jamaican-style sound system. He wanted to bring his spiritual-included dub and reggae music to people from varied circles. Over the past few years, he has done free shows at Hyderabad’s parks, literary festivals, and even its marathon. Bala, as he is popularly known, said his audience was rarely homogenous, ranging from burkha-clad students and working-class men to French immigrants. “Everyone is equal on the dance floor,” he added. “Gender difference, social difference, all of this disappears when you’re dancing.”
Dalmia has taken his BassFoundation Roots sound system across the country, organising dances at a school in Mumbai’s Dharavi slum community, a DIY music festival in rural Assam, and a protest against authoritarianism and communalism at Delhi’s Red Fort. He also hosts regular open-air shows in cities such as Srinagar, Jaipur, and Imphal. “Dancing in unison to a rhythm can help us feel like part of a group, subsuming our individual identity in that of a group,” Dalmia said. “In the society that we live in, things are increasingly getting very individualised, and we’re alone in many ways. So I think that the music, and even people just going out and getting hammered and dancing together, fills a deep need to transcend ourselves and to dance freely and lose our inhibitions. And it opens up a lot of political possibilities.”
Unlike many theorists and critics whose idea of dance politics begins and ends on the club floor, Dalmia is clear-eyed about its limits. The dance floor can thread disparate people into a community, he concedes, but one needs to find other ways of mobilising that community for lasting change. “If you’re a part of a society where we’re all competing against each other, music can give you temporary relief from that, but it can’t counter the dominant social and political forces by itself,” he added. “Music can create solidarities and energise us, but there needs to be a larger cultural movement to build on that and make it permanent.”
Perhaps this is why the sound system and dance floor are the locus around which Dalmia is trying to build a vibrant, politically engaged community—but they aren’t the only axes of connection. At the dances that he organises, he also hosts a book club, where attendees can read and buy literature about Ambedkarite politics or the history of reggae. The shows he organises also include visual and performance artists as well as politically dissident conversations.
And ephemeral as it may be, the solidarity of a dance floor lowers the entry barriers for collective action. In early 2020, as protests against the National Register of Citizens and Citizenship Amendment Act were gathering steam, North-East Delhi witnessed days of targeted mass communal violence—over fifty people were killed, a large majority of them Muslims. Four electronic artists—including Arjun Vagale and Monophonik—put together an EP to raise funds for relief efforts, and all the proceeds went to the Self-Employed Women’s Association or SEWA. Indian-American modular-synth producer Arush Jain also released a single to raise funds for victims of the violence.
Soon after, during the first wave of the global pandemic, when the State all but abdicated its responsibility of migrant workers and labourers caught between lost wages and the struggle to travel home, India’s independent music community mobilised with surprising alacrity. Artists, labels and promoters released benefit compilations, hosted livestream fundraisers, and funnelled proceeds toward relief efforts. One such fundraiser—a 14-track compilation called S O S—reportedly raised close to 100,000 rupees in under 24 hours.
These moments did not transform the scene overnight. They did not suddenly make dance floors egalitarian. But they revealed something important: that the infrastructure of dance music—its mailing lists, WhatsApp groups, social media reach, and sense of community—could be harnessed for a unified endeavour in times of crisis.
But that these moments felt extraordinary because they were rare was an indictment in itself. “Previously, the community has watched more quietly—when Kashmiris’ rights were evoked, when Muslims are killed for practising their faith, when casteist atrocities happen weekly,” wrote the music writer and curator Dhruva Balram in the music publication DJ Mag. “The same fervour with which the community has risen at this moment must be carried into the next six months, into the next year, and the years after that.”
Spoiler alert: it wasn’t.
The industry’s inertia is stubborn. And in its face, it would be easy to declare the dance floor a failed promise. But to do so would mean overlooking its peculiar power. Dance floors assemble people quickly. They generate intimacy, affect, and fleeting forms of solidarity. What they do not automatically generate is justice.
Consumption is not resistance. Streaming radical music in an expensive venue changes little on its own. But dance floors do create readymade communities—communities that forge connections, cultivate awareness, and mobilise towards action—only if we have the intention and the will.
“The more we dance together, the more this educates people and hits their subconscious in a way. It helps us create dialogue and conversation that can help us grow without using force or a struggle,” said Adhav. “Even if we have political differences, the point of the dance floor is all about love and one-ness. ”
And what if we don’t make use of that power by pushing for truly egalitarian dance floors?
“Then it's an impoverishment,” Dalmia concluded. “You only talk to people who are of your class and who share your interests. It’s one less opportunity to try and carve out a little bit of freedom.”
Illustration by: Sunbeam Studios
