The two men, almost identically dressed in checked lungis and white cotton vests, stared hard at our faces, as if in doubt or suspicion. Our taxi driver honked, impatient to be done with the ride. Then one of the men limped forward towards us, mumbling that a couple does not come seeking a sex worker in Sonagachi. The friend accompanying me was a man. I had deliberately picked him to accompany me in my ‘sting operation’ at Sonagachi, so that he could pose as a client in the brothels. But the men in the lungis were still suspicious.
We ignored the comment and instead asked the man our question again. Standing very close by now and peering into our taxi window, his eyes fixed on me, he told us to get off the taxi there, which we did.
He pointed to a lane behind us, which he said would take us to Sonagachi. There would be plenty of people in that area to help us around, he said, and take us to Neel Kanth.
In the research for my trip to Sonagachi, I had read that the brothel Neel Kanth was something of a mystery. One person who wrote about Neel Kanth mentioned that it was ‘hidden’ and extremely difficult to locate. Another wrote of it as an elusive brothel that housed the Agrawalis (girls from Agra), who were apparently descendants of the courtesans in the Mughal courts. The Agrawalis were the wealthiest and most influential community in Sonagachi, we had heard. Their community had a norm that barred male members from earning a living. Men would be supported by their sisters. One particular person had written passionately about the beauty of the Agrawalis, especially their white skin, in a blog. In fact, we had also read a contradicting report that said only a lucky few had seen the Agrawalis as they did not step out of Neel Kanth and were picky about customers.
We set off on our search. It was a wet, muddy road—even though it had not rained—lit up with the lights in the six-storey buildings sticking to each other on both sides of the narrow lane. With each step we took, pebbles and small stones turned over and made a crackling sound, which was drowned out by the music floating out of shops and the general cacophony. Every few metres, women stood in groups of three or four.
‘Are you here to work?’ one of them asked me in Bengali.
‘I am here just accompanying him,’ I replied, pointing to my friend.
‘Why accompanying?’ she giggled. ‘Does he want to try me out? Ask him. I am around for a few more hours.’ She had guessed by then that my friend did not comprehend the language of our conversation.
‘Where will you go after that?’ I asked.
‘Home.’
‘You don’t stay here?’
‘No, no, this is my day job. I go back to my husband. I have two children at home.’
‘Ah, okay. Would you know where the Agrawalis are?’
‘They live in expensive flats around here,’ she said, pointing to the buildings.
Her answer did not help at all. The road ahead curved to the right and then branched off into several narrower streets. We randomly took a turn into a street where there were only residential buildings, with women and men sitting on plastic chairs and charpoys outside, but the ambience did not seem very familial. Hardly had we stepped into this street when a small, feeble man dressed in a crushed white cotton dhoti and a cream-coloured old, half-sleeved kurta came hobbling towards us. He was bald and the skin on his face was dark brown and wrinkled.
‘What type are you looking for?’ he asked my friend, his beady eyes searching his face.
‘We are looking for a girl to do a threesome with us,’ my friend replied, putting his arm around my shoulder.
‘All types available,’ the man continued, without pausing to comprehend what my friend had just said. ‘High class, low class, Marwari, Nepali, Rajasthani, Baangali, Agrawali . . .’
‘Can you take us to Neel Kanth?’ I asked, ecstatic that he had mentioned the Agrawalis in his offer.
‘Yes, Neel Kanth is right here. Come, follow me,’ said the man to us.
He took us through dark, dingy, nameless, criss-crossing lanes with buildings. Each building seemed to have a winding staircase, and was made up of small single rooms only, partitioned by curtains. It was intriguing and disturbing at the same time because of the questions they raised about the abundance of sexuality in India and the disrespect for it. How much violence and abuse will take place when the curtains are drawn, thanks to the centuries of sexual repression? As we walked, I looked at the men and women around me and wondered how many had lied at home and come here looking to get or to give sexual pleasure? How many were sex workers under the legal age of eighteen? Were they duped and forced to work here? The exchange of sexual services for money in India is legal for adults, although soliciting in a public place, owning or managing a brothel and child prostitution are crimes. Also, it is legal only if sexual services are provided in a private residence, but many brothels thrive illegally in India, and pimps, such as the man leading us, do business.
‘This building here has Marwari girls,’ our pimp told us, pointing at the building next to us. ‘And this one here has Nepali girls,’ he continued excitedly, pointing at another one.
‘Okay, let us take a look at the Marwari one,’ I said.
We met more than fifty sex workers at the Marwari, Nepali and Bengali buildings during the course of the evening as we walked to Neel Kanth. Among these, I could speak in detail to only about two dozen women. I asked them where they came from, why they were here, and the attitude of their customers. Most of the others wanted us to get to the point and agree on a price.
The diversity at Sonagachi, I found, was as astonishingly and perversely stratified as in the rest of India. Class and community ranking here underpinned even the common objective of sexual pleasure. Girls belonging to the same caste, class or regional community lived in the same building, separated from the rest who lived in similarly culturally homogeneous groups. Sex workers hailing from different regions in India moved to live with their community here because it gave them a greater sense of comfort and community support. Some of them were brought here by deceit, but slowly, they adjusted. Consequently, the residents of different buildings in Sonagachi spoke languages that were each distinct from the other. Every building reflected the native culture of its inhabitants. The ghetto effect in the area reinforced community stereotypes. Each girl in the business was acutely aware of not only her professional but also her cultural, linguistic and regional identity, and used these different strands according to the profile and taste of a potential customer to earn her living. If the customer spoke her language she would speak to him in it. If he had a fetish for women from her region, then she would accentuate her cultural affiliations, they told me. There were no inhibitions among them to be exhibitive of cultural and ethnic origins, or to use those as a differentiating factor from the rest for profit.
They were not poor any more, but they all had once been so. Customers of all backgrounds came to Sonagachi. The girls labelled ‘high class’ had higher rates and offered better rooms, whereas ‘low class’ girls meant a budget score on a straw mat. Many of these customers were married, the girls told me. A few had peculiar sexual fantasies while others were violent. There were cases of abuse and some of the girls said they had been beaten. The majority of the customers did not like protected sex. Business on most days was lucrative, and so, they told me, they did not care about the occasional violence or the dangers of catching a deadly virus. Money was the only factor that drove them to become sex workers. As we spoke, the children of some of the girls I met peeped into the bedrooms.
India’s rapid but unequal economic growth has had a profound and mixed impact on the personal lives of millions. It has all happened too quickly in India, and in uneven patches of extreme wealth and heartbreaking poverty that connect with each other in spaces such as Sonagachi. The great urban migration has meant that the lower layers of India’s stratified society are forced to mix with the rich, but the discrepancies and inequalities remain. Those with new wealth but old patriarchal thought processes are pitted against a vulnerable and impoverished
mass of people in locations such as Sonagachi.
Yet, they have ready access to sexualized content on television or the Internet. The search volume index for the word ‘porn’ on Google has doubled in India between 2010 and 2012,20 one in five mobile users in India wants adult content on their 3G-enabled phones, and there is an increased consumption of affordable and accessible pornography among men and women such that seven Indian cities rank among the top ten in the world for online porn traffic.21 Most of these Indians watch porn secretly to quench their sexual curiosity. All this chaos and confusion inevitably lead to sexual frustration.
Violence, especially of a sexual nature, is often an extreme expression of this frustration and weakness of Indian men. Look at the role models they have—in contemporary culture, sadly, it is the aggressive and obsessive Bollywood hero, refusing to take no for an answer, who influences the values of these young people. Moreover, if large numbers of India’s youth remain unemployed, and labour trends continue to show young people withdrawing from the workforce, violence, including sexual violence, will continue to thrive.
While the perpetuators of sexual violence clearly use unacceptable outlets for their frustrations, the sex workers in Sonagachi tolerate it in return for money. Sex is one of the oldest professions of the world, but in India, because of inequalities and inherent social hierarchies, it is sexual violence, including rape, that is rampant on the streets and even more so in the brothels.
Poverty breeds overpopulation and overpopulation again breeds poverty and ignorance. The poor have a lack of awareness about family planning, and also need more hands to earn or at least help out at home. So they often give birth to more babies than they have the resources for, making the whole situation worse. The other three main reasons for our population growth, besides poverty, are the high fertility rate of women, the decline in the mortality rate, and the lack of other sources of entertainment such as television (or even electricity) among India’s poor.
We have, in the past, tried various contraceptive measures. The intrauterine contraceptive devices in the 1960s allegedly failed, and the backlash against Sanjay Gandhi’s disastrous experiment of compulsory sterilization in the 1970s brought down the Indira Gandhi government and set back the country’s family planning efforts by decades. The mainstay of India’s family planning policy currently is to reduce women’s fertility—not solely by devices and female sterilization, but also by improving health, education and literacy. However, the baffling results of India’s National Family Health Survey 2015–16 show that the use of contraception did not correlate with the increased literacy rates in those regions.22 For example, the report showed that between 2008 and 2016, in Kerala, the state that has the highest total literacy rate, condom use plunged by 42 per cent but the usage of condoms in the same period doubled, and the use of oral pills rose four times in Bihar, which has the lowest total literacy rate in India. This is perhaps because sex education is not part of the school curriculum in India, and so literacy levels do not correspond to the awareness of the topic. In terms of education at home, Indian parents also usually avoid any conversation related to sex, including advice on the use of condoms or guidance on oral birth control pills.
It is no wonder that the report shows that over the eight years from 2008 to 2016, as India’s population surged, the use of contraceptives declined by almost 35 per cent, while abortions and the consumption of emergency pills—both having hazardous side effects—doubled. Worryingly, our men are becoming more reluctant than ever to use contraceptives—the use of condoms has declined 52 per cent, and vasectomies have fallen by 73 per cent during this period. Meanwhile, women remain largely unaware of the benefits of regular oral contraceptive pills. Even the meagre usage of oral birth control pills fell 30 per cent between 2008 and 2016, further surrendering the control of family planning to the men, who, as we know, are not keen on using condoms.23
We are yet to successfully introduce the simplest of contraceptives, female condoms, in India. During my time at the Jindal Group, I tried to do so. In partnership with Hindustan Latex Family Planning and Parenthood Trust—a public sector enterprise known for its odd and long acronym, HLFPPT, and for being the largest condom distributor in India—I designed, and got manufactured, sleek, strong condom-vending machines with our own company-manufactured steel. I had learnt that all past attempts by the government to place condom-vending machines in public had failed on account of two main reasons: one, vandalism of the earlier flimsy vending machines that were made of tin, and two, people’s reluctance to buy condoms in public. Moreover, all these condom-vending machines only sold male condoms. But what about women? Why do women need to depend on the good sense of their male partners to avoid getting pregnant? I managed to convince HLFPPT to sell female condoms in India at a heavily subsidized rate, which still turned out to be around three times the price of the male condom. Together, we placed our first few tough, steel vending machines in private corners of public spaces (including men’s and women’s toilets and near ATM machines) in New Delhi.
The consequences were striking—more female condoms than male condoms were purchased by men and women over the first three months. A subsequent anonymous survey revealed that much of that was because of the initial curiosity about what a female condom looked like, since no one had ever seen it. Two, the women eventually felt it inappropriate to have such a product sold in a public space. One morning, a group of women decided to cover the vending machines placed near the ATMs with tape and chart paper. Ultimately, the women, not the men, lobbied to remove the machines altogether.
How can India’s population stabilization programme get anywhere without shedding its double standards and inhibitions about sex? I disagree with anyone who says that the attitude to sex is changing, because it is not changing fast enough or widely enough. I am not just talking about cities, but also about villages and small towns like Nizamabad, and slums such as Sonagachi. Overall, in India, we do not talk about sex; ironically, we have the largest population among all countries except China.
The dichotomy, hypocrisy, irony—call it what you want—around sex has been in India’s past (as we have seen earlier in this essay), and continues to flourish in the present. Historically, it’s been a mixed bag of some progressive and a few extremely conservative views on sex, and sadly, the latter have survived, to the detriment of our physical and mental health. Abortion has been legal in India for over forty years now, yet unsafe abortions persist. Masturbation, which most sexologists consider to be healthy elsewhere, is considered by most in contemporary India to be obnoxious, if not an illness. Sexually liberal societies do not tolerate rape, violence against women, child molestation and sexual harassment, which are all rampant in India. The chaste man and the virgin woman are considered the gold standard. These definitions of ‘bad’ and ‘good’ stem from a deep sexual repression and mistrust of anything and everything sexual.
As we continued on our journey through Sonagachi, guided by our untiring pimp, we met children playing on the roads or sitting outside the rooms where their mothers were working. There was another group with kites in their hands and one more bunch singing Hindi songs on the pavement. The children looked as if they could belong to any of the hundreds of other unfortunate slums in our country, but the truth was that in a society with such double standards towards anything sexual, they were, unfortunately, growing up in the lowest and most despised levels of existence in India. Their abnormal upbringing had been worsened by skewed representations of them on television and films. One of the sex workers had told me earlier in the day that there were angrez filmmakers who had come to Sonagachi and represented the children in a way that was not true.24
What will these children grow up to be like? Will they be politically astute citizens and decisionmakers in policies that concern and affect them? Or will they be obliged to take up prostitution in order to repay the community for bringing them up? Do they have alternative choices? Some children are not aware of their m
others’ profession, while some young girls are being prepared to join the same line of work. Growing up in an environment where double standards, superstition, and frustration meet poverty and desperation, the opportunity to grab on to something that gives you identity and purpose is a dream.
Leaving the children behind, we walked to a three-storey building a hundred metres away. It was crowned with a faded yellow cement moulding and had paint peeling off its turquoise blue walls. It was located next to a wide open gutter that was overflowing with black fluid and floating plastic.
‘The famed Neel Kanth,’ announced our pimp, pointing proudly at the dilapidated building.
References
Adams, Jad. 2010. Gandhi: Naked Ambition (London: Quercus Books).
Brisk, Zana, and Ross Kauffman. 2004. Born into brothels: Calcutta’s red light kids. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfWSRRRUIJY.
Connellan, Michael. 2010. Women suffer from Gandhi’s legacy. Guardian, 27 January.
Das, Gurcharan. 2002. India Unbound, first edition (New York: Anchor Books).
Dutt, Apoorva. 2015. How and why number of young Indian couples getting divorced has risen sharply. Hindustan Times, 4 January.
Gandhi, Mohandas K. 1940. An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments With Truth (Boston: Beacon Press).
Gandhi, Mohandas K. 1948. An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments With Truth (Courier Corporation).
Gandhi, Mohandas K. 2013 reprint. Hinduism According to Gandhi (New Delhi: Orient Paperbacks).
Keer, Dhananjay. 1954. Dr. Ambedkar: Life and Mission (A.V. Keer).
Mishra, S.N., ed. 2010. Socio-economic and Political Vision of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar (New Delhi: Concept Publishing).
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