Reporting from the Red Light
Follow one CLP journalist's personal and ethical journey through Kolkata's Red Light Districts.
Sex and the City of Joy
White House Morality Threatens Kolkata's Sex Workers
Kolkata, INDIA--The smells of jasmine perfume, fried food, bidi smoke, and liquored breath mingle in the thick humid air. Watery pink and white neon lights from Hotel Welcome, Dream House, and Love Lotus shine in the eyes of women lined up in turquoise saris or red mini skirts and the customers jostling to admire them. Backlit in shadowy doorways, young girls beckon into the night with childish voices that betray their pre-pubescence, despite alluring gestures and deep purple lipstick.
Suddenly the mood shifts here in Sonagachi, Kolkata's largest red light district, as an angry chant rises from the far end of the narrow street. The girls scramble to cover their faces with flimsy scarves and pimps in lungis and tank tops rush to their sides as thousands of women round the corner. Illuminated by torches that send billows of black smoke into the inky sky, they stride forward with arms linked and a straw effigy of President Bush held high screaming, "We demand sex worker's rights!" and "George Bush, you can take our funds but you cannot take our fight!"
A Visit to Kolkata's Red Light Districts
The tradition of Kolkata sex workers taking control of their lives is as old as its first red light district. Five miles away, in the slums surrounding the Kalighat temple, one of the holiest sites in Hinduism, lies the birth place of the city's sex industry. Hundreds of years ago, widows and other socially outcast women would migrate here hoping for room and board from temple priests. While they were given a little food and a place on the floor to sleep, resident priests and upper caste men who visited the temple often required sex as a form of payment. Recognizing that demand for sex far exceeded the returns they received, these women began a community alongside the temple and started charging for their services, and organized prostitution was born.
"Hundreds of years later the life of a widow or rape victim hasn't really changed," explains Urmi Basu, who founded an organization called New Light five years ago to provide support for sex workers and their families in the Kalighat community. "Usually you're here because you've been abused or thrown out, or you were sold as a child when someone came to your poor village and said 'come with me I'll find you work in the city' and then you end up locked up in a brothel getting beaten and not seeing a cent."
While most recent media attention on sex work in Asia has focused on issues of underage trafficking and slavery, it is often more subtle social factors that push women into the trade. The fight for legalization of prostitution as a means to expose trafficking, as well as improve the lives of sex workers, is usually ignored.
"It's better to have a bad reputation than to be considered virtuous and be beaten every day," says Arti Pandey, 22, (name changed on request), whose story well illustrates how prostitution can be a refuge from abusive families and limited economic options.
At 14 Pandey was married off to a man 20 years her senior who had designs on inheriting her ailing father's government job and a cut of his pension.. When another sister's husband got the position instead the abuse began. After learning from her three year old son that her husband was plotting to tie her up and feed her into a ceiling fan as a form of retribution, Pandey ran away and began to support herself through a series of nursing and housekeeping jobs, hoping that one day she would be able to get back on her feet and regain custody of her child. But everywhere she went threats and demands for money followed, and her angry in-laws succeeded in getting her turned out from every stable situation she found in Kolkata.
It was a trip to Mumbai that changed the course of her life. There she met a friend who was working in a brothel and encouraged her to do the same. The wages the friend earned along with the promise of meeting interesting foreign men enticed her, and within months she was making a decent living. When a police raid returned her to Kolkata a year and a half later, she attempted to resume 'legitimate' work in a low-paying garment factory. But her in-laws soon found her out and began insisting that she return to them, for what Pandey saw as a life of further abuse and slavery.
"I realized that if I was going to live on my own I would have to return to the trade," - a move that would sever her ties to mainstream society and by extension the in-laws - "this is one way you can choose to live your life, if you don't mind the work you can make a good living."
She also liked the idea of staying close to her son, if only by proximity or through gossip that filters down to her. She still dreams of a reunion when he is old enough to leave her in-laws house by choice.
Last summer she met Shanti Chowdray (name changed), who helped her find a room and set her up as an independent operator in Kalighat. Chowdray, a former sex worker who is now employed at New Light as a peer educator, introduced Pandey to the organization. At their office in the heart of the Kalighat red light district, she receives regular check ups, learns about safe sex practices, gets free condoms, and has access to counselors and childcare. Even more important is the sense of non-judgmental support that the community of sex workers centered around New Light provides.
"I am nobody's moral police," says Basu when asked about her opinions on sex work, "I don't want anyone forced into this business, but if a girl is 18 and wants to become a prostitute there is nothing I can do about it. I want her to respect herself, have high self-esteem, and improve her life in any way she can."
Basu has used her upper-class education to show the women of Kalighat how to make their trade safer and more profitable, whether it's encouraging them to display HIV Free certificates, insist on condom use, or demand higher pay in an area where women normally charge between 20 and 50 rupees (.50-$1) per client. "I tell them there is nothing wrong with what they do, sex is for pleasure and you provide pleasure. Respect yourself and your customers will too, then you will be in a better bargaining position to charge more."
Back in Sonagachi, DMSC (Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee--Unstoppable Women's Alliance Committee), another NGO, is taking a more militant approach to the problems facing sex workers. The entire organization is made up of current or former sex workers and their families and believes in lobbying hard in favor of the legalization of prostitution in India. Here, current law does not explicitly state that prostitution is illegal, but criminalizes solicitation and the running of brothels, or renting rooms to sex workers. DMSC maintains that any criminalization of sex work reinforces harmful stigmas, creates a black market where child prostitution and trafficking can thrive and promotes a climate where the protection of women who work within the industry cannot be ensured.
"When the sex trade is forced underground you have hooligans and corrupt police extorting our money, beating and raping us, and forcing us into unprotected sex," says Bharati Dey, program director for DMSC and a sex worker herself.
Urmi Basu (right) with Arnab basu and student.
Photo: Alex Stonehill.
Dey entered the trade at 20 and immediately became a leader against organized crime and police corruption and an advocate for her fellow sex workers. She recalls a time before DMSC was active in her community when gang rapes of prostitutes and severe beatings of their best clients by area hooligans were a common occurrence. The anger and oppression of her colleagues came to a head one morning in 1999 when a spontaneous mob of sex workers descended on a local gangster that had been terrorizing them for years and beat him to death. While DMSC doesn't condone such violence, they see it, along with exploitation and disease, as being inseparable from sex work as long as the industry remains illegal.
A new Indian law under consideration as an amendment to the Immoral Traffic Prevention Act (ITPA) seeks to prosecute the customers of prostitutes. Such criminalization and localized police raids in red light districts have been linked to a decrease in condom use as the resulting scarcity of customers forces impoverished sex workers to agree to abusive or unsafe sex in order to support themselves.
Another concern regarding these legal issues is insistence on language that equates prostitution with trafficking, denying the important role that of-age and by-choice sex workers can play in its eradication. DMSC has organized sex workers in red light districts throughout the state of West Bengal and set up self-regulatory boards to oversee conditions in these communities in an attempt to improve wages and root out child prostitution and trafficking.
DMSC is not immune to criticism and visible child prostitution on the streets that surround their main office is an obvious indicator of the limitations of their self-regulatory boards. It is estimated that one third of the 9,000 prostitutes in Sonagachi are under 18. DMSC's lack of emphasis on programs that provide exit strategies from the trade may not acknowledge the coercive socio-economic forces that lead women into the industry in the first place and an unsettling conflict of interest is presented when the leadership of an organization profits from the business they are attempting to reform and regulate.
Despite these concerns DMSC remains the most active and influential group working with sex workers in West Bengal. The loyalty they inspire among their constituents is clear in the informal family-like atmosphere of their offices and the banners and signs carrying their logo that are proudly displayed throughout Sonagachi. Their ability to mobilize thousands of women from one of the most stigmatized and vulnerable sectors of Indian society to march proudly through the streets to demand their rights is proof of the trust they have earned and the empowered movement they have ignited.
As dynamic as the movement for sex workers rights in Kolkata has become, its success may still rest on the whims of powerful outside forces. Tonight the women of Sonagachi are marching in solidarity against a new menace, one that they cannot confront face to face but which threatens to take away what gains they've made.
Bush administration policies have begun to cut funding from any international organizations that condone prostitution and don't promote abstinence as a first defense against HIV and AIDS. Strengthening alliances between the American and Indian governments have sparked fears that Indian laws will move to further criminalize prostitution, and the possibility of diminished international funding from government organizations looms as a shadow over projects like DMSC and New Light. Now it is not only the stigma of family and their own society that they must endure but also the moralizing of a government and people that they will never meet.
May Day Protest, Sonagachi, Kolkata. Photo: Alex Stonehill.
For those working on the ground in places like Sonagachi or Kalighat, the first concern is that funding cuts and further criminalization will simply drive the sex trade deeper underground. While the Bush Administration has been lauded for its efforts to abolish sex trafficking, organizations like DMSC or New Light often provide the only effective oversight in communities where trafficked women and children are being sold.
Furthermore, these programs have proven to be effective in promoting safe sex and slowing the spread of HIV and AIDS. DMSC statistics report current condom use in Sonagachi at 89% and that HIV infection rates among sex workers have stabilized at around 5%.
"We are the gatekeepers," says Roma Devnath, supervisor for DMSC's Anti-Trafficking Project and a second generation sex worker, "If you eliminate us then HIV and AIDS will spread to the whole of society. Eventually it will even spread to the society of George Bush himself."
Protecting funding for organizations that support sex workers tops the list of demands for tonight's protest, but the anger and passion in the faces of these women who have little education and fewer resources and have fought desperately for dignity and recognition is not inspired by politics or policy. It is indignation at the moral judgment that they are subjected to whether by their own families or the leadership of a foreign land. And as the torches touch to George Bush's cardboard face it is that indignation that is fueling the fire that burns his effigy tonight.
This article originally appeared in $pread Magazine and has been reprinted in the Indypendent. The audio blog has aired on Listen Up! Northwest and Yin Radio.
© 2007 The Common Language Project
