ꦚEvery evening, before going to work in a nearby nightclub in Delhi, Mehrunissa Shaukat Ali splashes thick black eyeliner across her lids like war paint. She wanted to be an army officer, but her father objected. “I should have insisted, like I insisted that I will be a bouncer,” she says.
🃏Ali is India’s first woman bouncer, holding an India Book of Records award. She considers herself lucky to be able to work in a job she loves, giving credit to her mother who supported her choice to become a bouncer. “Women can do anything they dream about, but it is hard for them to achieve their dreams without parental support, or without the support of even one parent. Their support is important so that you don’t feel isolated and alone,” she says.
The 36-year-old was only 15 when she started looking for work. She wanted to join the army or be a police officer. She recalls how even in the blistering July heat she would stand outside on her house’s balcony in Saharanpur in Uttar Pradesh ♊with her six brothers and sisters. “We would stand out in the heat just to give them a salute,” she says. But when the time came to give the entrance exams for the Indian army, she was told by whomever she asked that “the army doesn’t take girls, only boys.” And she rues the fact that she believed them.
ও“I wish I had done my own research and filled out the form. Instead, I listened to the other people—it was a mistake,” she says with a hint of regret.
💫She was visiting Delhi with her family and came across a group of “tall and strong” men in uniforms. “I thought they were police officers or something,” she recalls. After enquiring she found out that they were bouncers. “I didn’t know exactly what that was but having lost out on being in the army, I was determined to join the job,” she says.
🌳This time she didn’t let anyone deter her. She was sixteen when she joined a security company in Delhi as a female security guard. At that time, there were no women bouncers, and the inequality almost choked the life out of her. Men were called bouncers but women were not. “Often people would say things like, ‘what’s the point of a female bouncer? It’s not like she can fight and even if she tried to, one slap from a man and she’ll be finished.”
Ali remained determined. She remembers one of her first work trips to Jaipur for the IPL where the male bouncers were given chicken and mutton for lunch and dinner and the women were given vegetables and puri. “I didn’t eat for two days till my senior came to ask me what happened, and then I replied: why are the women being given different food ꦑfrom the men? Are we less than them?” The senior, to his credit, immediately ordered that catering for both genders should be the same. That was her first victory, she believes.
🤡She attributes her wins at the workplace to her ability to do her job well. “My seniors would laugh at me often like I was crazy. But then they would say that even if she is crazy, she does a good job, so call her a bouncer if that’s what makes her happy,” she says.
⛄Eventually, she got all the rights she wanted—equal pay, equal titles and equality in the treatment of men and women in her workplace. Now, she owns her security company in which she employs both men and women; it’s called the Mardaani Bouncer Company.
🍌But this was a long road, filled with threats and condescension. She recalls getting threats from men in the club and at events. Recently, she says she caught a couple in the washroom of a club she works at. The man asked her: “Is your life precious to you, or not?” Ali says she doesn’t fear these threats and replies in kind. “I told him straight that everyone has to die but like you, I cannot die in the washroom,” says Ali.
💖She points to her hefty arms, muscular legs and solid upper body. “I worked out a lot when I started this line of work. It wasn’t to get fit. It was to show people and the world that women are as strong as men,” says Ali.
Avantika Mehta is a senior associate editor based out of New Delhi
This article is a part of Outlook's March 11, 2025 issue 'Women at Work', which explores the experiences of women in roles traditionally occupied by men. It appeared in print as 'The Keeper’.
