by Ira Trivedi
A bizarre set of circumstances led to the downfall of the ancient tradition of the courtesan, cultivated through the centuries. At the time of the Indian Revolt of 1857, it was discovered that one in every four British soldiers was infected with venereal disease, and more British casualties occurred because of disease than combat. The battle to reduce European mortality rates had to be fought on the hygienic front to ensure a healthy European army for the strategic needs of empire. It became imperative that the courtesans and prostitutes of Lucknow, along with those in the other 110 cantonments in India (and in several towns in Britain) where European soldiers were stationed, be regulated, inspected, and controlled.74
To keep their army healthy, the British began regulating prostitution. The Indian Penal Code of 1860, drafted by Lord Macaulay, was the first legislative document that put prostitution under nationwide law. Though the law did not ban prostitution, it restricted it in such a way that it became virtually impossible to carry on the trade. According to the law, ‘if a prostitute solicited customers in a public place or where a brothel is established and if this causes annoyance to the persons living in the vicinity, this would amount to public nuisance punishable by imprisonment’. In addition to this restrictive law, the provisions of Britain’s Contagious Diseases Act of 1864 were incorporated into a comprehensive piece of legislation, requiring the registration and medical examination of all prostitutes in cantonment cities of the Indian empire. This act placed the wealthy tawaif and the common street prostitute in the same bracket making it mandatory for them to face medical examinations under similar conditions. With their aristocratic patrons slowly losing financial sway, and the British branding them as ordinary prostitutes by enforcing registration, the tawaif culture began dying out. The courtesans appeared in the civic tax ledgers of Lucknow in 1858-1877 where they were classed under the occupational category of ‘dancing and singing girls’, despite being the city’s highest taxpayers with the largest individual incomes.75
Fortunately, the arts of the tawaifs did not die with them. By an ironic twist of fate, the bourgeoisie appropriated the song and dance forms of the tawaifs. Today, in India, classical dance is primarily a middle- and upper-middle-class phenomenon, and it is common practice for children from these households to grow up practicing these song and dance forms.76
Several memorable and heart-touching Bollywood films have been made featuring the downfall of the exquisite Mughal courtesan. The most famous of these films are Pakeezah (1972) and Umrao Jaan (1981). Both movies are set in the period immediately after the annexation of Awadh by the British, at a time when the courtesan played an important role in the cultural fabric of the city. These films bring to life the pitiable but prosperous lives of these tawaifs; beautiful women living in luxuriant boudoirs graced by well-to-do men, who with the deterioration of their culture have no option but to attempt to live a ‘decent’ life by marrying a man who will take care of them. As I was to discover, these nuptial desires have persisted.
THE PIMP AND THE PROSTITUTE
I am at Ramlila Maidan, a short walk away from GB Road, with my new friend Mohsin. On my maiden visit to GB Road, I had found Mohsin, smartly dressed in a crisp white shirt, smoking a cigarette at a paan shop, and he had helped me find my way to Kotha 36. Mohsin works as an AC repairman by day and as a pimp at night, and over the days he has helped me navigate my way through GB Road. Today, Mohsin has agreed to introduce me to his ex-girlfriend, Vimla, a sex worker at GB Road.
At the Maidan, Navratri festivities are in full swing and the grounds are packed with thousands of revellers. A rickety Ferris wheel is the prime attraction, along with other jerry-built theme-park rides, which add metallic shrieks and groans to the noise and confusion that surrounds me. A long procession of chariots is passing by; atop each chariot are people dressed as characters out of Indian mythology. On one sits a man painted blue—this is Shiva; on another chariot is a man carrying a large bow and arrow—this must be Arjun. The most joyous shrieks emerge from the crowd when a chariot carrying the quartet of Ram, Lakshman, Sita, and the monkey god Hanuman pass by. Even Mohsin, who is Muslim, gives a hoot of delight. He tells me proudly that Hanuman is a friend of his. I assume he’s referring to the man dressed as Hanuman. He also reveals that the woman dressed as Sita, who is meant to be the paragon of virtue in Hindu mythology, is a sex worker in real life.
Mohsin is insisting that we go for a ride on the dilapidated, dangerous Ferris wheel.
‘No, Mohsin, I can’t,’ I say sternly after noticing that the Ferris wheel, which is run by a shuddering, squeaking generator, looks and sounds like it could break down any second.
‘Iraji, if you don’t go, I won’t introduce you to Vimla.’
‘Mohsin, I’m sorry, this Ferris wheel is not safe.’
‘Iraji, if it was not safe, why would the police ride in it?’
Mohsin’s observation is not unfounded, the Ferris wheel has many groups of gleeful khaki-clad policemen squeezed into its seats.
‘Mohsin, I can’t,’ I say with trepidation.
‘No story then,’ he insists stubbornly, walking away from me.
‘All right, let’s do it,’ I say running after him.
I am pretty desperate to meet Vimla. I have been visiting GB Road regularly over the past few weeks, but I have had no luck with the sex workers as they are all suspicious of me and refuse to open up. Mohsin is my last hope to try and get someone to share insights into what life as a sex worker on GB Road is like. On the Ferris wheel, we spin round and round, going much too fast, while all manner of nerve-wracking noises seem to suggest that the whole contraption is about to fall apart. Mohsin shrieks and giggles like a girl, while I clutch the handles and keep my eyes squeezed firmly shut. At one point, the daredevil Mohsin stands up on his seat, letting go of the railing. I nearly faint, thinking that this is the end for him, but he stays put and right before we halt, he jumps off and lands with a thud. No one protests, and he lies in the dirt whooping with delight. I get off the Ferris wheel with a spinning head, and promptly throw up all over my shoes.
As I steady myself, Mohsin announces Vimla’s arrival.
Vimla is not beautiful. She is twenty-nine, about my age, but looks far older. Her face features a violent purple patch of acne and crooked, yellow teeth. Her lips are dry, scorched and papery. Despite these physical shortcomings, there is something attractive about her. I can’t put my finger on it, but it has something to do with the confidence with which she carries herself and her easy manner of speaking. She is dressed conservatively in a polyester salwaar-kameez and is wearing minimal make-up.
At sixteen, Vimla ran away from her abusive husband and her hometown in Bengal. The first person she met when she got down from the train in New Delhi was a pimp who told her to take a walk with him to GB Road. It’s been thirteen years since that day, and she still hasn’t left. Vimla has a three-year-old daughter; she shows me a hazy picture on her cell phone. She doesn’t know who the father is, but she says that some of her daughter’s physiognomy—the fair skin, large nose and thick hair—points to a Punjabi father. But she has had sex with hundreds of Punjabis, so it’s impossible to say which one.
Vimla tells me that the sex trade at GB Road is not what it used to be and neither is the clientele. She explains that Delhi is changing, as are its sexual needs. GB Road will never ever go out of business; it hasn’t in the past two hundred years, and it isn’t likely to in the next two hundred. There will always be men willing to pay for sex, and someone who will be willing to give it up for cash. But she has seen a transformation. In her early days, many men would come—rich men, handsome men, foreign men and powerful men—who left healthy tips. Now the clientele at GB Road consists of rickshaw drivers, coolies, druggies, and young boys whose ‘dicks have barely gone hard, whose hair hasn’t come, and who come in all of two minutes’. GB Road was once the only place for paid sex in this city; this is no longer the case. ‘Everyone,’ Vimla says, ‘is a randi [prostitute] or a
dalal [pimp], and everywhere there exists a kotha [brothel]. Men,’ she says, ‘want polished young girls who speak English, whom they can have in posh hotel rooms, like they show in the movies.’
Vimla explains to me how GB Road is organized. Madams are generally former sex workers who have risen up the organizational hierarchy to secure a managerial position in the brothel. The madam, which is what Vimla hopes to be one day, looks after the upkeep and maintenance of the brothel, and maintains informal contracts with sex workers. Pimps, like Mohsin, take care of the outside world, soliciting clients. Everyone is apparently losing business with the decline of GB Road and the rise of a new breed of prostitution.
I ask Vimla how she felt about relaxing laws relating to sex work in India, a much-debated issue, and if this would help her business, or make her and her daughter’s life better. Vimla considered the question for a moment, and then said to me with a shrug that it didn’t really matter. When men wanted sex, no laws of any kind would stop them. Where there was money, there were always women, and since there was more money today, the quality of women had gone up. As for her life, even if she were a legal tax-paying resident like the prostitutes of yesteryears, she would always remain a prostitute, a randi, to the world. Men would still harass her; she would still be contained within the world of the brothel.
‘Would legality give me izzat?’ she asks me. ‘No, so what is the point?’ she says firmly.
Prostitution in India is in the peculiar position of being tolerated, despite not being entirely legal. The laws are nebulous—they do not abolish the trade nor do they legalize the profession, making the lives of women like Vimla difficult. The current legislation controls and regulates the trade in a way that conforms to the low social position of sex work rather than making the lives of sex workers better by giving them rights. The first national law dealing with sex work, the Suppression of Immoral Trafficking Act (SITA), came into being in 1956. The name immediately became controversial because in Hindu mythology, Sita is the pure wife of Lord Ram who is kidnapped by the demon king Ravana. Like the Indian Penal Code developed by the British, SITA did not prohibit prostitution outright, but it did prohibit the commercial activities of the flesh trade like pimping and trafficking. One of the biggest drawbacks of SITA was that it covered only women, not children, men or transsexuals.
SITA was revamped in 1986 when the Immoral Traffic Prevention Act, or PITA, came into being. PITA (this time legislators changed the name so as to not offend people) worked off the framework of SITA but was more comprehensive, and included male workers, hijras and children. Like the previous law, PITA too maintains an ambiguous position towards sex work. It is not illegal, but a ‘prostitute’, defined as someone who is involved in sex work, is liable to be criminalized and the acts and conditions accompanying sex work are illegal. The law does not make prostitution illegal, but makes it illegal to practice sex work within a 200-meter radius of public places such as schools, temples, hospitals, nursing homes, or hotels. The law does not take a position on sex being exchanged for money, which is stated to be a ‘private’ affair but like SITA it does criminalize soliciting sex. It also makes it illegal for sex workers to live with their children (or other dependents) in a place where sex work is performed, making it difficult for a sex worker to find a house to rent. All these conditions make sex workers like Vimla dependent on other agents: pimps like Mohsin and madams. It also gives power to agents such as the police, leading to further exploitation of sex workers.
There is no easy answer when it comes to legislation regarding prostitution. Legalizing prostitution provides some benefits, but there are those who protest that it undermines so-called moral standards. Morality, though, cannot be legislated and immorality cannot be destroyed by legislation alone. Banning prostitution, arguably the oldest profession in the world, seems impractical and it is unrealistic to think that commerce and sex will cease to be intertwined. And trying to forcibly separate the two has often had unforeseen consequences. For example, many believe that the suppression of prostitution in Argentina in 1937 led to such an incredible spread of venereal disease, sexual perversion and crime that it was legitimized once again in 1954.
Organization of sex workers is a crucial dimension of the political economy of the market for sex work, and the unionization of sex workers could offer a partial solution to some of the legal problems that they currently face. In the red-light area of Sonagachi in Kolkata, sex workers have united under the NGO Durbar Mahila Samanwaya which has been able to increase the bargaining power of sex workers significantly by stopping trafficking and getting rid of pimps, middlemen, madams and policemen. A micro-finance organization, USHA, has helped prostitutes shake off their financial dependence on madams and pimps. Though the model has been successful in Kolkata, the brothels of GB Road in New Delhi have not been able to unionize despite two NGOs being present in the area.
Vimla tells me that she doesn’t care about organization, because she doesn’t feel like it will help her.
What does she care about then?
She tells me that she cares about only herself and her daughter. She also cares about her marriage.
‘There is a lack of good men and husbands,’ she says glaring at Mohsin, who looks genuinely embarrassed.
‘So if you were married, what would you do?’
‘I would stay at home.’ She adds, ‘Obviously.’
Mohsin, who has been silent this entire time, grins at her and squeezes her breast. She yelps and slaps his hand.
There is no love lost between the ex-lovers. She reaches for his scrotum through his jeans and firmly squeezes and punches. He squeals and runs away.
Vimla has to leave now; she is meeting her new boyfriend, a man Mohsin only refers to as ‘madarchod’. I buy Vimla a Thums-up and some fluorescent pink cotton candy. Mohsin helps me find a cab, opens the door for me, telling me that he worries about my wandering around Delhi like this. There is something ironic about a pimp worrying about my safety. I tell him I’ll be okay and watch as he and Vimla drive away into the dusty, violet night on his motorcycle. She has her arms wrapped marsupial-like around him, her diaphanous dupatta unfurling behind them. The pimp and the prostitute, they zoom away, they could really be any couple in the world.
♦
According to a study by sociologists K. K. Mukherjee and Sutapa Mukherjee, in which they interviewed nearly 10,000 sex workers spread across thirty-one states and union territories, the number of prostitutes grew from 3 million to 5 million across the country over the course of their three-year study (from 2003-2006).77 Their study states that earlier most sex workers were from scheduled castes, scheduled tribes and backward classes, and that poverty drove them to become sex workers. But today this is changing, as roughly 60 per cent of the commercial sex workers are in this ‘low-end’ category while 40 per cent of sex workers are from the upper classes operating as call girls, bar girls and high-class prostitutes. Whereas prostitutes like Vimla operating on the street and brothels earn between 2,000 to 24,000 per month, the ‘new’ Indian prostitute makes around 40,000 to 800,000 per month. These numbers don’t mean that the low-end category is decreasing, only that one class of sex worker is increasing at a galloping pace to keep up with the growing sexual demands of an affluent demographic. There are several reasons why prostitution is increasing right across the spectrum—migration and urbanization, economic destitution, the erosion of traditional values, declining job opportunities for uneducated and unskilled youth, and a desire to earn easy and fast money.
A pan-India survey done by the Centre for Advocacy on Stigma and Marginalisation (CASAM)78 in 2011 revealed that over 80 per cent of the women surveyed entered into the profession of their own volition as opposed to being forced or born into it. While poor family backgrounds and the need to look for incomes and livelihoods at an early age is what makes women enter the informal labour market, the possibility of earning higher incomes is what makes sex work today a more economically rewarding optio
n.
♦
Ads for ‘massage parlours’ in the classified sections of newspapers are ubiquitous in any daily newspaper in any part of the country. These large ads in bold colours take up prime advertising space in the newspapers. They usually go like this:
Hotel Guest Only, Royal Class Body Massage by Young, Educated, Decent Female Staff. J___ O___ 9871430390
Another:
PRIYA Royal Escort. Luxury Call Only. Relaxable massage by Young, Educated, Decent Female Staff. Home/Hotel 24 Hrs
A third:
Hotel Guest only. Body massage By Edu Decent Staff M/F H/H. 24 Hrs Service. All Credit Cards Acp. S_____ S_____ 9811068373.
I wondered if it would be as easy as calling up these telephone numbers to get access to sex workers. There was only one way to find out. I began by looking through the massage parlour ads and calling all the numbers in the newspaper, and asking for Jesika, Sophia, Priya and Nancy. Most of the women who picked up hung up on me, saying I had reached the wrong number. Maybe they smelled a rat when they heard a female voice on the phone. The sixth number that I tried, for ‘Nita Escort Service’, hit pay dirt. A man answered the phone, speaking in heavily accented English punctuated with Hindi words.
Me: Hello, is this, uh, Nita?
Man: Haan, haan, what do you want?
Me: I am looking for a massage service.
Man: Man or a woman? (He sounded suspicious.)
Me: Uh, woman. Home service please. (It seemed like they offered gigolos too.)