Mr. Tanwar grew up expecting to raise goats, but in 1996 a restaurateur approached him asking for “strong boys” to stand at the door of his new establishment. The scene was particularly shocking for men from villages like Fatehpur Beri and neighboring Asola, places so conservative that adult women do not leave the house without permission from their husband or mother-in-law.

“Initially it was very difficult for us to see — this new tradition of drinking alcohol, the non-vegetarian food and the girls,” he said. “We are simple people. We do not have much money.” He shrugged, thinking it over. “Now I feel that they are the rich people, they have the right to have fun.”

It would be hard to imagine any Indian social mores that were not being violated at the Sahara Mall in Gurgaon, outside Delhi, on a recent weekend night. Outside the row of nightclubs, where wall plaques read “drugs and ammunition strictly prohibited,” wiry men offered their services as “party organizers” and women in tight dresses agreed to dance with the club’s mostly male patrons for 500 rupees, or about $8.

“Only horrible people come here!” yelled one man, who said he worked for Johnson & Johnson, trying to make himself heard over the music. “We are horrible people!”

Among their co-workers, the bouncers are famous for their discipline. “There is something in their genes,” said Bishar Singh, 29, who was working the door at a club called Prison. “They don’t drink. They don’t smoke at all.”

Back on the outskirts of Fatehpur Beri, drinking sweet, milky tea out of tiny cups, older men nod in recognition; that is what their family, members of a subgroup of the Gujjar caste, is known for. Omprakash Tanwar related a local legend dating to the mid-19th century, when two British men passing on horseback made rude remarks to village women harvesting a field of mustard. Outraged, the village men are said to have pulled the foreigners off their horses, yoked them to a plow and forced then to plow the field. When British reinforcements arrived, the story goes, they surrounded the village and shot all the young men they found.