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Christine Janumala
Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee
Kolkata, West Bengal, India

Even amidst many colorful personalities in Sonagachi, Mita stands out. The first time I saw her, she was wearing a gorgeous green silk sari with stacks of bangles encircling her slim wrists. She struck me with her confidence and fashionability. We spoke briefly about her life after being rescued by the SRBs.

Today, for my independent interview with her, she is wearing a bright pink kameez tunic and jeans. She lacks the traditional Indian trifecta of adornment: two golden earrings and jeweled nose stud. Instead, she has a sandstone ring and a pearl ring. The nails on her left hand are long, very long, and patterned pink. The nails on her right hand, in common Bengali fashion, are trimmed short for mealtime efficiency. Even though she is by all appearances dressed-down, her petite figure’s gestures and grace still distinguish her. Her story reaffirms this dignity, providing a context from which her singular charm seems almost inevitable.

Mita, 24, is a singer. Even her laugh is musical as she recounts her desperate desire for fame when she was young. She spent all her time after school at music classes, invoking first the amusement and then the irritation of her family as her dream persisted into adolescence. One day, a family friend told her she could come to Kolkata to continue learning music and so she went. She would work as a maid to pay for her classes. She would live by the talent she loved.

At 16, after years of working as a maid or nanny and singing in her free time, she arrived in Sonagachi to look for work. Unaware that this was a red-light area, she was invited to join “the line” (to enter sex work). Upon arrival, she was brought before Durbar’s Self-Regulatory Board (SRB) members, who described the region and explained what working “the line” entailed.

Mita and the board members openly discussed the risks and dangers of the area, as well as the extensive support that the Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee offers. Finally, after three days in a safety home, Mita was asked whether she wanted to return to her family or work in an alternative position (because she was a minor, she would not be allowed to join sex work). After working as a receptionist, then a member of the cultural wing, she now serves as a board member on the very SRBs that rescued her many years ago.

Mita’s refinement comes from many years of singing lessons but her strength is hidden somewhere deeper. My interviews have concerned the counseling services available to women here, and when I ask Mita who she talks to in times of trouble, she answers with a laugh. “No one,” my translator relays with his own smile. “She says she doesn’t need to talk to anyone.” After a little probing, Mita explains that when she was little, before she ran away to follow her singing dreams, she used to talk with her stepmother. “After so many negative reactions,” she says, “I stopped talking. I sang instead.”

Paradigm Shifts and a Lesson in Expectations
My initial expectation as I planned my research was that the support services here would be desperately lacking. The SRBs offer extensive vocational counseling, in the perhaps odd form of helping a woman decide whether or not prostitution is the best fit for her. Considering the abuse that colors many sex-workers’ pasts and the under-addressed issue of child sexual abuse here (see Bitter Chocolate for an exploration of child sexual abuse in India), I assumed trauma counseling would be a great need in this community.

However, if there is a lack of such support, the women themselves don’t feel that way, as Mita and others have expressed. Rather, their community of peer educators, of fellow sex workers, of retired workers, of matronly malkins (madams), of sympathetic babus (regular clients) have been consistently rated as “safe,” “comfortable,” and “understanding.” Of course, this refers only to their perceptions of the community members they choose to speak to, rather than the community at-large. Still, even strong Mita claims that her stoicism regarding her past isn’t due to a lack of ready listeners.

Rather, she takes pride in her strength and determination. Once again, I find myself awe-inspired but this time it is accompanied by a good dose of empathy and surprise. Sonagachi has continued to contradict my expectation of sadness and despair. More importantly, the people I’ve met here have done me the service of complicating my perceptions of mental health, the application of rights, and beauty. Mita exemplifies how a striking personality or a particularly arresting face offer stories and surprise to the sympathetic listener. India has been a constant river of experience and often it’s hard to stop the current to really explore the depths. The challenge is always rewarding, and in the best of circumstances, enlightening.

Christine Janumala
Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee
Kolkata, West Bengal, India

As I sit in Kolkata’s Au Bon Pain writing to a soundtrack of airy café music, a man walks by the window led by his capuchin monkey. At first I mistook her for a tawny street cat, but the monkey’s face is startlingly animate, tender, motherly, and her baby clings to her underbelly with the same soft stare of a street child.

The first time I saw the traveling troupe, it was through a window in a Vodaphone store after nearly three hours of standing in line trying to get an international SIM card. (The wait would extend another three hours the next day.) Seeing a man walk a monkey while I was sitting surrounded by the latest touchscreens has become the visual mascot for what I love about the city. It’s not just the City of Joy; it’s a city of joyful, in-your-face, laugh-out-loud paradoxes. It’s an ashram of absurdity and a meditation on flexibility. It may be a tough pill at times, but with the density of sweet shops in West Bengal, there’s always a spoonful of sugar nearby.

The man and his monkeys usually perform their little drum skit outside of one of the area’s most expensive hotels here on Park Street. Businessmen crowd around, smoking sleek cigarettes and dropping coins into the monkey’s palm. Drive west to the river and the city’s slums rise like funeral ash from the swollen banks of the Hooghly. Drive east to Kolkata’s luxury Quest Mall and find 6 floors of brands from Gucci, Armani, Prada, Michael Kors, Swarovski. India has always held a place of surreality in my heart, as both my homeland and a land of strangers, but rarely does a city thrust this surreality as sharply into focus as Kolkata can.

My journey here thus far has taken a road as long and winding as any of these curving city streets. My first lesson in flexibility came after I had already been named a Gallatin Global Fellow. My original placement in Berlin fell through and I found myself in Kolkata instead. I had not expected to come back to India. I was born in South India, in a city called Chennai, but had been raised in California since I was 3. I had returned twice, once when I was 9 and again when I was 12, to visit my family in the south.

Kolkata, on the other hand, is a city so culturally, linguistically, and geographically distant from my family’s region that it is just as foreign to them as it is to me. Yet after nearly a month here, I can’t imagine a place that could have taught me more about trafficking (my area of interest here) as well as progressivism, paradoxes, and myself.

My first days in India, before I began my 9-week internship placement, I volunteered with Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity. I washed street children and was attacked with baby powder in return. I spoon fed a girl as old as me who had cerebral palsy. The community of international volunteers, many of whom also stay at the Baptist Missionary Society Guesthouse with me, is a rotational family of Mexicans, Americans, Canadians, Spaniards, Russians, Italians, Koreans, Finns—all of whom have been great viewing partners for the World Cup.

My internship itself began three days after I arrived. Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee is a collective of 65,000 sex-workers across West Bengal advocating for the decriminalization of prostitution. Explaining this project to locals and other international volunteers has been a demanding verbal dance.

“Are you trying to get them out of the brothels?”  — No, they consider them their homes.

“Do you try to get them to do other work?”  — No, they consider this their work.

“So, what does Durbar actually do?”

Durbar, as I’ve learned firsthand, does quite a lot. They offer vocational programs for women leaving sex work, educational services for children of sex-workers, a self-sustained lending cooperative, two boarding homes, a cultural activity troupe, HIV/AIDS testing and prevention services, an LGBTQ community, and my arena of focus: self-regulating boards to combat trafficking.

The organization is located in Kolkata’s red-light area, known as Sonagachi, home to 11,000 of India’s 3 million or so sex-workers. The 2005 Oscar-winning documentary, Born into Brothels: Calcutta’s Red Light Kids , propelled Sonagachi’s many residents and frequenters into international focus. However, despite the film’s international acclaim, it has faced stark criticism for its unilateral treatment of prostitution as being synonymous with child endangerment and neglect. Sonagachi has a robust history of advocacy and activism through Durbar and other internationally respected community-based organizations in the region, yet such local groups were never mentioned in the film.

The Sonagachi I see is not the Sonagachi of the film. It is just too simple to decry Sonagachi’s poverty and sexual trade without addressing the roots of these conditions—roots which, like the base of a banyan tree, are twisted and deep. These roots reach to bitter wells of misogyny, caste hierarchies, patriarchal fixation, and sexual repression. Yet despite these apparently oppressive beginnings, the people here are strong. Whether transgendered, HIV-positive, sex-workers, or children of sex-workers, none of them offer an apology in their eyes or ask for pity. They stand as proud members of a committee and a community they themselves have built and envisioned.

The infrastructure and network that Durbar offers its members—a society of social cast-outs—is more efficient than many of Kolkata’s competing non-profits and underfunded governmental agencies. Durbar’s Self Regulatory Boards (SRBs) illustrate this well. They are unusual in the anti-trafficking community. Much as Born into Brothels depicts the children of Sonagachi as desperately in need of rescue and rehabilitation, most contemporary trafficking perspectives offer the same semi-infantilizing approach.

The DMSC refers to this as “patriarchal legislation,” which attacks trafficking through efforts like tightened border control, tougher anti-prostitution laws, and severe sentencing. However, this often diminishes the capacity for a trafficking victim to become anything other than a victim of trafficking in the government’s eye, and this reduces her ability to seek redress from exploiters and represent herself and her will.

In my conversations with the residents of Sonagachi, many women have described their trafficking experience with a nonchalance that is almost startling. For most, their trafficker was a lover or a close friend. Their experiences are very varied, but their willingness and strength in discussing these experiences is indicative of a solidarity they all share.

Durbar has offered them a voice beyond victimhood, where their retelling is not merely a rekindling of trauma but an opportunity to reflect on what civil and political society needs to know and understand about trafficking from an individual rights perspective. For example, there is the young woman pursuing a vocal music career after intervention through the SRB system. There is also the SRB board member who was both a victim of trafficking and later a willing sex worker. These women’s experiences indicate that trafficking cannot be summarily treated by blanket legislation or tightened migration laws. Rather, as Durbar proudly proclaims, “only rights can right the wrong.”

Before I left, one of my biggest questions was how to prepare for the sadness here, but so far I’ve found little. The women laugh easily; it is as common a sound here as that of bangles clinking on their arms. They joke and tease the men—doctors and client alike—in stark contrast to the down-turned glances often sported by most women outside the community. My research has put me in conversation with many survivors, some of whom have continued sex-work and some of whom chose not to. I deeply believe that Kolkata’s singular message to me has been of empowerment despite (or perhaps through) patience and paradox. The women here are unafraid to question the mental shackles of many of those trying to “rescue” them.

When I am asked what I am learning here, I struggle to put it into words. How can I begin to explain I am learning cheerfulness from trafficking survivors? Political progressivism from retired prostitutes? That the words of those targeted for rescue, for rehabilitation, have been pivotal in rescuing me from my own narrow expectations? Often all I can say is that I am learning why this is called the City of Joy.