“I even begged them not to get dancers,” he complained. “But they were insistent that a wedding function remains incomplete without whores dancing.” He had little sympathy for Hina’s predicament. “I never met the dancer who was hit by the bullet,” he said. “We do not have any business with her and I am not at fault.”

The man who had shot her was Ajit Patel, Singh said. He’d spent “five or six months in jail” and was now out on bail.

What happened to Hina is an accidental occurrence in northern India, common enough for someone like Sudhir Singh to brush off with relative unconcern. India’s English-language media even has a deceptively innocuous phrase when reporting this kind of incident: celebratory firing.

According to a study by investigators associated with the Global Burden of Disease Study, released in 2018, India has the third highest number of firearm-related deaths in the world. I haven’t found any reliable data of how many of these are due to celebratory gunshots. But even back in 2014, when I was on the crime desk of a national news agency, I used to receive an item related to celebratory firing every alternate day.

Those three-paragraph news snippets came alive for me three years later. In 2017, I was at a wedding celebration in Kabrai in Mahoba district, part of the Bundelkhand region. The alliance was on the verge of being called off by the groom’s family because there were no dancers. After the entertainment was hurriedly arranged, I saw the dancers being touched inappropriately by men as shots were fired in the air. When I talked to the local cops about it, I was told to shut up, and made to sit in a police jeep until midnight.

As dance shows have come to serve as a status symbol at festive occasions in parts of North India, so has celebratory firing. “Having a gun is a status symbol for people living in small towns and the countryside,” Vikram Singh, former director general of police in Uttar Pradesh, said. Men at these events boast of the number of bullets fired.

Along with charges of attempted murder and harbouring offenders, Sudhir Singh and Ajit Patel were also booked under the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act. This is unsurprising because celebratory firings are also tied to caste assertion. Many who can afford to show off without risk of being persecuted indulge themselves, and Vikram Singh surmised that at least three-quarters of all gun-related incidents in the state can be traced to one upper caste community, the Thakurs.

Like much that’s wrong in Uttar Pradesh, the culture of celebratory firing is also a top-down one. As in the case of Hina’s assaulters, the practice has spread to non-dominant castes. “Generally, men with a deep-rooted inferiority complex pretend to be superior by brandishing guns or organising dance shows in their village,” Dr. Krishna Dutt, clinical psychologist at Lucknow’s King George Medical University, said. “Though this trend was started by dominant caste people, others too have started keeping guns or organising orchestra dances to signal their masculinity.”

A common factor across social boundaries is political power—so common, in fact, that it can even surmount gender differences. In a video that surfaced on social media in June 2021, Archana Singh was seen firing celebratory shots in a courtyard. Archana Singh is a zila panchayat member from Sultanpur, and the sister of former assembly member Chandrabhan Singh. In October 2020, a singer was injured by accidental fire during a birthday party organised at the residence of Bhanu Dubey, vice president of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s youth wing in Ballia district. The singer survived only because of timely medical treatment.

But then pistols started becoming prominent in Hindi films of the late 1980s and early 1990s, B.K. Singh told me. Heroes and villains, often cops and gangsters, would have a pistol tucked at their waist. It started as a fashion statement, B.K. Singh said, but then people started using it on festive, “happy” occasions, where alcohol is almost always in the picture.

Vikram Singh found that illegal arms were being produced in “almost every household” in some villages in western Uttar Pradesh, cheaper than the ones officially made at the gun factories in Munger, Bihar. (Ganesh Prasad, a veteran journalist who covers Bihar, tells an interesting story about Munger’s own history in this regard: Mir Qasim Ali, the nawab of Bengal in the early 1760s, established a factory in the area since the soil was rich in potassium nitrate, source of what is called soarra in the local dialect, a key ingredient in gunpowder.)

That night, the dancers began performing at 7pm. Hina and Puran Lal, used to celebratory fire at weddings, weren’t rattled by the gunshots to begin with. But soon it became clear that the frequency of the firing had reached dangerous levels. Puran Lal grabbed the microphone and requested the guests to stop. The entreaty fell on deaf ears.

A video tweeted by NDTV correspondent Alok Pandey captures the moments before the shot. The music suddenly stops. As the dancers look around to figure out what’s going on, a gunshot sounds. A slurry voice can be heard saying “Goli chal jayegi agar ye gaana chal jaaye…toh ek do fire aur ho.” Another bullet or two will be fired if this song is played. “Sudhir Bhaiyya, tu maar,” is heard in the background. Fire the bullet. A couple of seconds later, another gunshot pops. A dancer in an orange lehenga, with her back to the camera, clutches her face and falls to the ground.

Later, police officials stated that the incident occurred in the course of a heated argument between two persons. I learnt that the investigating officer in the case had been transferred. In fact, the final report in the matter was yet to be filed as of mid-March this year.

Sudhir Singh told me that he did not remember any such conversation addressed to him. “A majority of people that night were drunk,” he said. “All I remember is a dancer falling on stage after being hit by a bullet. I remember people shouting Ajit’s name when the incident happened, and nothing more than that.”

Hina, the youngest of seven siblings, had always known that she would work as a dancer after marriage. She knew women who’d started performing as teenagers and continued for as long as they got work. “Our family was so poor,” she said. “We didn’t know anything other than dancing.”

Her immediate family had never danced at marriages or other functions, but “I have seen distant relatives earning a livelihood from it,” she explained. “My father and brothers brought us food by doing daily wage jobs or other means, including begging.”

In her teens, she learnt dancing from the women around her, and began to dance professionally after she was married to Puran Lal. The work excited her. The colourful dresses, the makeup, the dance moves: she was fascinated by all that.

In communities like Hina’s, it is normal practice for men to seek out and manage event bookings for their wives. The men also often travel with their wives to events. “My wife earns and I eat,” said Rohit Kumar, from Jhakra village in Lakhimpur Kheri district. “I also take care of bookings for dance parties like marriages and other functions, across North India.”

His wife Sonam Devi is 20 years old, and has been dancing for four years. “The profession of dancing has passed on from mothers-in-law to their daughters-in-law and this has been practised for ages in India,” Kumar said. “My mother, who has now retired from this profession, is tasked with the upbringing of my two children, since my wife and I have to travel frequently.”

Kumar grows sugarcane and paddy on an acre of land he owns in the village. But it is simply not enough. “I never attended school because in our community, wives manage the household expenses,” he said. “The land is not enough to meet our requirements when the family is big.” Before the pandemic, Kumar’s family was able to earn about ₹20,000 to ₹25,000 a month. It’s now come down to ₹5,000 to ₹10,000 a month.

The men travel with their wives because, among other reasons, the safety of the women is under threat at these gatherings. Another resident of Jhakra village told me that he takes along a katta, an unlicensed country-made pistol, when he travels with his dancer wife.

“Once, during a performance, people from the village chief’s family came and asked my wife to sleep with them,” the man, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said. “When we protested, they touched her on the hip. One man groped her while another tried to overpower me.”

When the other dancers intervened, the man said, one of the village chief’s party pointed a gun at his head. The man who had groped his wife went on to bite her cheeks. “That was the day I decided to keep a gun, for our safety,” he said.

When I asked him how he managed to procure the katta, he said he started by making enquiries after the incident with the chief’s men. A friend of a friend offered to help: the weapon would cost ₹10,000 for which he needed an advance of ₹2,000.

“About a week later, I received a message to reach the market and follow a man on a motorcycle,” the man said. “When I reached a secluded place, the man with the motorcycle showed me the gun. He started telling me how he had arranged it with difficulty, so the gun would cost ₹12,000. That was ₹2,000 more than the agreement.”

But the man paid the amount. “We do not have any other livelihood,” he said, “but that does not mean our wives will get naked with any man just for money.”

She had been sexually assaulted by drunk men at several functions in her two-decade career as a dancer. “There is no such thing as a good audience,” she told me. “People get excited seeing us dance and then things happen in excitement, even crime.”

The reality is that there are very few options for the women outside of the work their community is associated with. “The Nat community totally depends on the woman to earn bread for the family,” said Chandralekha, a social worker and former sex worker from Nat Purwa village, about 70km from Lucknow.

Nat Purwa has something of a reputation. For centuries now, sex work has been a traditional occupation in the village. In the old days, zamindars from neighbouring villages patronised the Nat community’s entertainment in return for sexual favours.

“The community women are either into traditional prostitution or into dancing,” Chandralekha said. “All girls and women from our community who dance are often called prostitutes and men do everything to get into their pants.”

Chandralekha now guides the young girls of her village about alternate sources of income and how they can take help from the state government’s Department of Social Welfare. With the help of NGOs, Chandralekha has established stitching and handicrafts initiatives in Nat Purwa. She said she encourages women to drop sex work and participate in these ventures.

In Jhakra village, I met Kamala Devi. Also in her sixties, Kamala Devi started working as an orchestra dancer when she was 14 years old. She has now quit the profession. “I was a newly-wed girl when my first performance was scheduled. I was happiest in my early days and kept on doing it even after giving birth and managing my household,” she said. “In my time, too, the profession was not looked at with respectable eyes but it was not this dangerous because there were not so many guns.”

Community dynamics required girls to take up the profession, she suggested. “The men of the community do not believe in taking up jobs,” she said. “They engage in farming, but we are a landless community and at the lowest rung in the caste hierarchy.”

The groom’s family, which hired the dancers for that fateful performance, is yet to pay any of the women.