Winds of change are blowing through Kolkata’s Sonagachi, among Asia’s largest red-light areas that is home to an estimated 16,000 sex workers. A colonial construct, Sonagachi is one of many red-light districts the British corralled the ladies of the night in, to keep their men safe.
Having lost their own future to years of exploitation, the sex workers are now actively shaping that of their children, educating them so that they can get a decent job in Kolkata or elsewhere. This is a major development. For many years, children of sex workers led marginal lives, like their mothers.
A large number of sex workers in Sonagachi say this is the new image they want to portray, an image that is the opposite of their reputation. Expectedly, the children are happy to step out of their shadowy lives into mainstream society.
Every year 800-1,500 young women come to Sonagachi, hoping to scratch out an existence. They stream in from Bengal, Jharkhand, Nepal, Bangladesh, and more.
In Bengali, Sonagachi means Tree of Gold. Once the area was a den of dacoits, who would rob travellers of clothes and gold ornaments purchased from small shops lined along the busy Chitpur Road.
One of these dacoits, Sanaullah, was instrumental in giving the neighbourhood its name. He once told his mother that he had become a gazi (soldier). When he died, the mother named her son Sona Gazi and built a mosque in his memory. The mosque collapsed due to disrepair but gave the neighbourhood a variant of its name.
“We are witnessing a new empowerment in Sonagachi. We are constantly trying to reduce the stigma attached to these women. The Supreme Court recently said that it is not mandatory for a woman to mention her husband’s name in any document. They have gained more prestige over the years. They are forward-looking. Not all of them, but a significant number of them,” says Dr Pratim Ray of the Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee, among the the more prominent non-government organisations (NGOs) working out of Sonagachi.
On May 19, 2022, the apex court directed that sex work be recognised as a profession. The court said sex workers, like any other professional, were entitled to dignity and Constitutional rights. What the court implied was simple: sex work must be seen as any other kind of work.
“We have suffered two devastating years of the pandemic. We raised around Rs 3 crore to help the women and their children during this period. It’s been tough. Happy to see that some of the women are emerging out of this despair and shaping the lives of their children,” Dr Ray told MoneyControl.
Across this eastern Indian metropolis and its neighbouring districts, there are an estimated 3,00,000 sex workers. Some work as private escorts, spa workers, masseuses, etc. Local newspapers, mainly vernacular ones, carry advertisements for their services.
The stigma surrounding sex work has meant women faced multiple barriers to accessing facilities meant for the masses. "Sex workers have experienced greater levels of loneliness, stress, anxiety, and depression since the start of the pandemic. But thanks to the positive attitude of many of these women, and with a little help from Durbar, Sonagachi is different now," says Dr. Ray. "However, though they have many rights today, it is still a long journey,” he adds.
Kumkum, 45, has sent her son to the Oriental Seminary School in north Kolkata. She is proud that her son studies in a school where Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore had once enrolled as a student.
“I have named him Ashok, after the great emperor. He wants to be a poet. He has a collection of over 200 short poems,” says Kumkum. She services three to four clients a day, some of them online. Like other professions, sex work in Sonagachi has also moved partly online since the pandemic.
Her son is proud of his mother. He knows she was pushed into the profession by none other than his father.
Kumkum says life had been especially tough during the pandemic. “But I ensured that my son had a smartphone for his online classes. He is my hope. If I had not helped him, Sonagachi’s darkness would have swallowed him. Who knows, he would have ended up a pimp,” she adds.
Neela, a relatively new entrant in Sonagachi, says she operates primarily through Twitter, Facebook, and WhatsApp. Her daughter, Kalpana, is 10 years old. Neela wants Kalpana to be an Odissi dancer.
Hailing from a village bordering Bangladesh, Neela says she was trafficked into the profession by her maternal uncle. She has been in Sonagachi for almost a decade. “I was in love with a cab driver and we decided to have a child in my very first year in Sonagachi. Then one day he dumped me and moved to Delhi. I learnt he was already married with three children. I had to sell sex again because I had no money. This is life,” said Neela.
Neela says she will move out of Sonagachi in a few years and relocate to the southern parts of Kolkata. “I have some steady clients who would be happy to come wherever I go. And unlike the person who deserted me, my current lot of clients are very supportive of me and my daughter. They want my daughter to shape up as a top dancer and an arts graduate,” says Neela, supremely confident.
And then there is Anita, who has been here for almost a decade. She works in Sonagachi’s Usha Cooperative Bank, run by sex workers. A unique initiative, the bank was founded by the Durbar Trust. Once, it had over Rs 25 crore in deposits, now it has about Rs 16 crore, as people withdrew a lot of their savings during the pandemic.
Anita says her son works for a top tea company in the Dooars in north Bengal, bordering Bhutan. “He is Uttam (named after the late Bengali superstar), and he’s an officer in a plantation which supplies tea to markets in north and west India.”
Uttam is dating a final year BA student from north Kolkata’s Scottish Church college, and will be getting married next year. The girl’s parents, who are in the retail trade, are aware of his mother’s profession.
“My son alternates between his workplace and this place (Sonagachi) through the year. His fiancée has come here to meet me and seek my blessings. No one has a problem with this relationship, except some who still hate us, our profession. I wish to tell them I am here not by choice,” says Anita.
Sonagachi’s colonial-era buildings are bursting at the seams and are in an acute state of disrepair, compelling young sex workers to move to neighbourhoods across Kolkata. Some ply their trade out of guest houses and small hotels on the fringes of Sonagachi. The girls are confident that their clients will follow them anywhere.
Change is visible in other aspects too. Once clients travelled in hand-pulled rickshaws and gave monthly retainers to their flavour of the season. Now they pay through Gpay, PayTM, and sometimes even credit cards, accepted by a handful of mom-and-pop stores in Sonagachi. Further, besides clients, Sonagachi is also frequented by filmmakers, photographers, and scriptwriters working on projects related to the place or the profession.
Pompa, a sex worker, says that she and her daughter Annapurna (named after the Hindu goddess of food) want to build a home for the retired sex workers of Sonagachi. The mother-daughter duo know it is a huge task but they have already started work on the project. A website will be up soon.
“It is a huge task,” says Pompa, who has been in Sonagachi for a little over a decade and a half. Her daughter is a fine arts student at a private college in Kolkata. The retirement home project is important for Pompa and her daughter, because nearly 60-70 percent of the women have nowhere to go after a lifetime spent working in the brothels.
Worldwide, top professionals help raise funds for such causes, but it cannot be expected in India, says Pompa, as sex workers are a highly stigmatised lot here. “It has remained the same even after Gangubai Kathiawadi (a recent blockbuster featuring film star Alia Bhatt, about a young girl duped and sold to a brothel),” Pompa said.
“No one will help, my daughter hopes to do some cloud funding,” adds Pompa. She says she is proud of her daughter and happy that she is doing something extraordinary.
Pompa says sex workers all over India are in a worse condition than ever before. More and more girls are joining the profession, and seniors in the trade do not have any way of making ends meet once they stop working.
She adds that clients take advantage of their desperate situation. Sex workers cannot pick and choose, and are often forced to go with dangerous clients (read, criminal elements). Worse, the mental health of many sex workers has suffered considerably, with many contemplating suicide.
“The women of Sonagachi are growing bolder, they are trying to build connections with the society at large, but it's still a tough life, very tough,” says Dr Ray.
The sun has set, it’s time for work. Girls and women line up, pimps and middlemen get busy, clients slowly fill the by-lanes, delivery boys zip around, and shopkeepers do brisk business.
(Names of the sex workers have been changed in this story. The women interviewed refused to be photographed.)
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