From Bangladesh Colony to Shanthinagar: housing rights, sexuality, and consumption in Keralam

Abstract

As the developmental state attempted to transform the urban slum in Kerala into a model housing colony, narratives of decency, self-restraint, and sexual discipline became crucial for securing housing rights in the transformed space. ‘Bad’ and ‘good’ consumption; ‘bad’ and ‘good’ poor and images of ‘normality’ and the ‘normal home’ as the abode of the ideal citizen and worker were some of the strategies deployed by the residents of the Bangladesh Colony to encounter the quotidian world of moral non-acceptance. This article examines how neoliberal articulation of rights through government projects often have contradictory effects on the lives of differently positioned women. The moral economy of consumption hinders the realization of the neoliberal ideal of the consumer-citizen. Practices considered as ‘excess’ in consumption by female sex workers were perceived as a threat to this slum community lying on the urban margins, resulting in their expulsion. The article integrates theories of urban assemblage and queer temporality to understand how women sex workers resisted such expulsions. These theories converge on the notion of excess/abundance. Abundance of relationships, of political alliances and strategies, of consumption practices—exceeding heteronormative ideals—was deployed by women sex workers to resist their erasure and confinement into any single identity.

Keywords:

• consumption
• housing
• sexuality
• slum
• sex workers
• Kerala

Introduction

The chief minister of Kerala laid the foundation stone for the ‘Shanthinagar Model Village’ in Kozhikode, a city in northern Keralam, in March 2012. In his statement, the chief minister stressed the importance of ‘development’ reaching the previously marginalized sectors of the population. He said that the project is important as it is concerned about the ‘hygienic living of people’ and it would help them ‘become good citizens as expected’.¹ It was a housing programme for the residents of the urban slum, Bangladesh Colony, which was later renamed as Shanthinagar. Until that point, news reports had depicted Bangladesh Colony as Kozhikode’s nightmare—a place from which all the city’s criminal activities supposedly originated. Its residents were characterized as passive, unresponsive, and plagued by alcohol and drug addiction. Some media reports even labelled it a ‘haven for anti-social elements and drug peddlers’ (Joseph 2013). This fear of the urban poor, seen as unruly elements festering at the city’s margins ready to spread and contaminate the social fabric, stems from early 19th-century perceptions of the poor in the context of emerging urban centres. Pathological discourses providing moral and social explanations for poverty and urban inequalities circulated a language of ‘othering’, shaping efforts for urban improvement (Chatterjee 2015; Hall 1997; Matthews 2010; Stone 1989; Tice 1998).

The transformation of the urban slum Bangladesh Colony into Shanthinagar Model Village began in the late 1990s with the initiation of an AIDS-prevention project in the colony. HIV/AIDS-prevention projects in Kerala, starting in 1997, targeted female sex workers as the intervention population (Chathukulam and John 2002; Jayasree 2004; Srinivasan and Sukumar 2006). The non-governmental organization (NGO) overseeing the project established a community-based organization (CBO) named the Vanitha Society, which later joined the all-Kerala alliance of sex workers known as the Sex Workers’ Forum of Kerala (SWFK), advocating for the decriminalization of sex work and the rights of sex workers. The project, identifying unsafe intravenous drug injection as another factor contributing to the spread of AIDS, expanded its focus to include intravenous drug injectors.

However, accusations arose that the project, primarily focused on providing clean syringes, was promoting drug addiction rather than preventing it. In 2004 (One IndiaMalayalam 2004), after the deaths of 14 intravenous drug injectors, popular anger was directed at the project. While three young men from the colony were among the victims, most of the deceased were from other parts of the city. Deaths were due to drug overdose, and according to the project staff, the overdose happened when young men returning from the de-addiction treatment injected doses of the drug that their body was no longer used to due to the prolonged absenteeism while in treatment. All the components that went into the portrayal of slums as the malaise of urbanism was conspicuously present in Bangladesh Colony—drug, sex work, deaths. As many of these imageries were already associated with sex workers, this anger rapidly shifted towards the sex workers living in the colony. AIDS-prevention projects, with their emphasis on sex workers’ role in spreading the disease, unintentionally created a conceptual bridge connecting images of crime and squalor to the presence of sex workers. The political parties played their role in spreading this inflated rhetoric in which petty drug peddling and prostitution played major roles. Sex workers came to be considered as the root cause of the debasement of the colony as a whole and created a climate conducive for the eviction of sex workers from the colony.

Janakeeya Samithi, a people’s committee, was formed consisting of people from Bangladesh Colony, representatives of political parties, and social workers from the city. An ultimatum was issued to sex workers to either vacate the colony or quit sex work. Many women sex workers left the colony and the house of a woman who refused to do so was demolished. In response to the crisis, the government intervened, promising improved houses and infrastructure facilities in the colony. Each family was to get a house worth Rs 5.2 lakh on three cents of land with facilities like safe drinking water and electricity, sewerage treatment plant, drainage channel, a primary health centre, community bio-gas plant, and three anganwadies in the colony. The new name ‘Shanthinagar Colony’ conjured up the images of a peaceful suburban middle-class colony. It was in anticipation of this transformation of the Bangladesh Colony to Shanthinagar that the chief minister made those remarks regarding hygienic living and becoming good citizens.

The predicament that the residents of the Bangladesh Colony in general and especially women doing sex work found themselves in was how to prove that they were developmental subjects worthy of the state’s benevolent gaze, worthy of occupying this transformed colony. The governmental interventions and community responses to such interventions occur within conflicting terrains constituted by marginal existences on the borders of hope/despair, normal/queer, good/bad, cynicism/apprehension, legal/illegal, etc. What happens in everyday practices when the precarious existence within urban slums confronts governance structures that promise housing development schemes and slum transformations? The role that women from the margins, especially the female sex workers whose lives and occupations are invalidated by society and by the government, play in creating urban spaces, solidarities, and movements often remains invisible and unrecognized. The laborious ways in which women doing sex work in Kerala created residential spaces out of thin air in the hostile urban terrain and the ways they negotiated with the communities living around them are left undocumented, making it easier to evict them.

Purely structural analysis of the informal economy, sex work, or the formation of slums will not be sufficient to understand the everyday practices crafted by the women in Bangladesh/Shanthinagar Colony to survive and retain those spaces. Discursive formations and practices in the margins, about consumption, home, and citizenship are some of the points of entry used in this article to understand these ever-shifting and entangled processes through which the women sex workers and the people in the Shanthinagar Colony tackled their precarious living conditions and housing needs.

Life at the margins

Tsing (1994, 279) posits that ‘margins’ denotes ‘analytic placement, revealing both the constraining, oppressive nature of cultural exclusion and the creative potential of rearticulating, enlivening, and rearranging social categories that peripheralized a group’s existence’. Even at the margins, the burden of deprivation is unevenly distributed. In an increasingly neoliberal world, welfare schemes for the urban poor induced constant anxiety about limited resources, shifting the responsibility onto individual applicants. People in the same marginal locations become complicit in displacing each other, allowing the government to maintain a benevolent façade. Scholars have noted how neoliberal articulations of equal rights and inclusive government schemes often rely on normalizations tied to existing power relations, creating new exclusions and marginalizations (Browne et al. 2021; Shah 2015). In Shanthinagar, moral discourses on sexuality and stereotypes about urban slums merged to solidify an image of people denied access to urban spaces. Sexual norms and gendered discourses create notions of ‘normal life’, ‘normal family’, ‘normal work’, fostering possibilities of normality only by excluding certain individuals. This constant ‘othering’ creates and sustains margins within margins.

Lancione (2016) identified four analytical streams that engaged with life at the margins—structural, grounded/relational, postcolonial and vitalist or post-human analytic. In the structural analytic stream, margins are theorized as an outcome of structural processes of dispossession, exclusion, and exploitation (Amin 2013; Lancione 2016). The second stream, relational/grounded analytic, shifts the focus on to the analysis of everyday lives and their dynamics. They move back and forth between the micro and the macro, illustrating the connections that the lived experience of marginalization have with the broader structural dynamics (Datta 2016a). The third stream, postcolonial analytic, discursive formations and the social construction of knowledge around the margins, emphasizes constant questioning and efforts to transform unequal and oppressive power relations characterizing margins (Lancione 2016, 6). A fourth analytic, vitalist or post-human analytic, combines the insights of the relational/grounded and postcolonial approaches. It places humans and non-humans on the same ontological plane, revealing the shared grounds of existence, referred to as urban assemblage (Lancione 2016) or ‘makeshift urbanism’ (Vasudevan 2015, 349). This perspective situates the slum within the complexities of deprivation, inequality, and structural violence while simultaneously reimagining it as a creative and resilient space. It avoids over-romanticizing life within the slums, acknowledging the provisional and precarious possibilities of assembling and developing alternative urbanisms (Jeffrey 2010; Kinder 2017; Simone 2009; Thieme, Lancione, and Rosa 2017; Vasudevan 2015).

The ethnography in the Bangladesh/Shanthinagar Colony helps us understand urban margins not only as spaces where layered experiences of intense deprivation and cultural exclusions exist, but also as places where creative strategies to survive such precarious conditions evolve. These strategies involve a reorienting of the understanding of kinship, family, and labour. However, the ubiquitous discourses of compulsory heterosexuality and dominant discourses of ‘normal’ life result in the continuous devaluation of such alternatives, leading to the momentary and fleeting nature of these alternatives.

Consumption and queer temporality

For people in Bangladesh Colony, life in the slum had never offered permanent possibilities. With the Shanthinagar model housing project, a house in a respectable locality, with all the household paraphernalia that made it similar to any other ‘normal’ household, and which would place them among citizens of the city, had suddenly become a tantalizing possibility. Ahmed (2012, 141) argues that people in Kerala have all become householders (grihsthashramikal) through their consumption habits which have created a homogenous material culture—the householder culture/domesticity. Even the belief in the distinctiveness of each person is subsumed under the overarching homogeneity of this material culture. Becoming grihsthashramikal was never an option for the people living in the Bangladesh Colony until the government housing scheme and the renaming of the colony.

For Zygmunt Bauman (2007), identity is increasingly communicated and conveyed through the consumables we collect and, indeed, through the act of consumption itself. But he cautions that those who are unable to indulge in the act of consumption become the non-consumers, susceptible to being banished from the street to the margins, from the ethical and moral responsibilities of the human community. So, for Bauman, creation of margins is inherent to the processes of consumerist culture of the society.

Seeing consumption and expenditure as a mindless activity of the masses lured by advertisements has been debunked by many anthropologists (Martínez 2010; Miller 1987). Miller examines the crucial and constitutive role ‘objects’ have in human life and shows that material culture participates in the larger processes of development of any possible subject/subjectivity. He shows that subject/object hybridity destabilizes any essentialist understanding of ontology and instead different ontological possibilities are opened up in the relationship between consumption and identity. Martínez (2010) moves outside the economic rationality-based analysis of the expenditure and looks at the ‘inherent pain or pleasure derivable from the act of expenditure’ (611). Martínez uses Bataille’s notion of ‘dignity of the subject’ that is made available through this expenditure and the momentary illusion of wealth that is created through such expenditure.

Another perspective on consumption is viewing it as a ‘common commitment to the present moment’ (Day, Papataxiarchis, and Stewart 1999). In this framework, people from the margins, often perceived as a threat to ‘respectable’ ways of life, engage in consumption as a means to escape deprivation and suffering by ‘living resolutely in the short term’. This approach involves sharing whatever resources they have without expecting future reciprocity (Day, Papataxiarchis, and Stewart 1999, 12). It encapsulates a refusal to relinquish freedom and autonomy, standing in opposition to transcendental values associated with various institutions that organize long-term social reproduction and, simultaneously, produce hierarchical relationships (2).

In a similar vein, Walsh distinguished between consumptions as ‘hot’ and ‘cold’. Hot money is used for consumption habits ‘that leave no enduring traces’ like fashion, which produced ephemeral networks that displayed a personality and their control over outside circumstances (Walsh 2003, 299). Walsh (2003) views such ephemeral consumption as an indication of ‘the active and powerful imaginations of people at risk’ (298). ‘Cold money’ is invested in more lasting consumption which reproduces enduring social networks (302).

In Kerala, Osella and Osella argue that consumption plays a mediatory role between the youthful and mature selves, foreign and local domain. Transience and ephemerality displayed in consumption during the youth are expected to be replaced by mature consumption habits directed towards duration and permanency of householders (Osella and Osella 1999, 990). Dalits and working classes, whose lack of resources restrict them from partaking in more durable and permanent consumption practices, are considered as perpetual adolescents (Osella and Osella 1999, 1020). Ritty Lukose (2005, 508) says that the freedom to consume public spaces is grounded on masculine forms of sociality. The notions of a ‘demure’ femininity relegated women to the public spaces of work and education, what one might call the ‘civic public’ while excluding them from full participation in an expressly ‘political public’ (523).

The concept of queer futurity is also relevant to this discussion. Queer future is not just a utopian vision of the future, but also about making life bearable in the present, emphasizing the aesthetics of the current moment (Ahmed 2010; Jones 2013). Paul Boyce and Rohit K. Dasgupta (2017) have noted that queer perspectives on futurity are rooted in discontent with the present. However, the realization of queer subjects and life worlds in the current moment is deemed impossible, existing beyond the constraints of present time and space, representing an excess (Boyce and Dasgupta 2017, 213).

So queer time and queer future is about the potentiality of a life unscripted by the conventions of family and which is imagined outside of those paradigmatic markers of life experience—birth, marriage, reproduction, and death (Halberstam 2005, 1). Surviving at the margins necessitated building up ‘queer’ relationships, home, family, and lifestyles that defy the individualized notions of progress and possessions; networks of ‘kinships’ which extended beyond the confines of the monogamous heterosexual family. It involves understanding imaginative life schedules and the unusual economic practices adopted by women sex workers. But the lives of women sex workers in Keralam do not always lie outside the normal temporality. It intermeshes with expectations and discourses of heteronormative family life.

Consumption practices have been theorized both as an incorporation into the global capitalist market, facilitating entry into the category of citizen subjects, and also as a way of life that resists being incorporated into the dominant structures of authority. Rather than positioning these arguments in opposition to each other, it is more productive to view consumption practices within the intricate dynamics of citizenship rights and survival for underprivileged women. Lancione (2020) advocates displacing existing epistemologies in understanding urban housing, replacing a priori definitions of resistances and politics with frameworks emerging from housing struggles waged by women, black people, slum dwellers, and homeless individuals under precarious living conditions.

In this article, I trace four different points of engagement employed by women sex workers: first, the possibilities opened up by organizing as sex workers in the context of HIV/AIDS-prevention projects and forming coalitions nationally and internationally; second, negotiations with the state as citizens for housing rights; third, utilizing ‘excessive’ consumption practices as a means of creating family forms and relationship networks that fall outside the definitions of hetero-patriarchal families, representing a queering of family and relationships; and fourth, collaborations with other political organizations and citizen groups that often make demands antithetical to those made by women sex workers.

Methodology

This article is grounded in multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Kerala during various periods: from August 2009 to July 2010, August 2011 to October 2011, and later in 2019. Shanthinagar, an urban slum, was one of the many fieldwork sites. Women sex workers often move to different urban centres within and outside Kerala in search of work and a life free from concealment and to evade various police cases. The mobile identities and networks created by the women sex workers necessitated the adoption of a multi-sited ethnographic approach.

The ethnographic fieldwork also involved 35 in-depth interviews with sex worker activists, residents of Shanthinagar, human rights activists, and NGO workers associated with the sex workers’ movement. Additionally, analysis of movement pamphlets, petitions, genres of agitation, and books written by sex worker activists was taken up. This is also multi-sited in the sense that it explores how different disciplinary sites engage with the question of women’s sexuality. Colonial administration, legal frameworks, poetry, myth, medicine, developmental discourses, public representations, and anxieties surrounding such representations are all considered in understanding how women grapple with their identities and politics.

As a feminist sympathizer supporting SWFK, I was known to my research participants from 2002 onwards. As an activist I was also involved in the production of this ‘field’ which was studied later on by me as a ‘researcher’. This compels me to speak in many voices simultaneously without privileging any one of them. I approached the ‘field’ not as already constituted and familiar to me as an activist, but as a space which is always in flux, where dynamics within the field and disruptions from outside might have changed it (Appadurai 1990; Burawoy 2003).

As a researcher, my focus was on understanding the performance of normality concerning spaces, times, and subjectivities within the context of women sex workers. The ethnography aimed to comprehend how these women navigated spaces that pathologized and criminalized their very existence. I sought to uncover the individual and collective efforts required by female sex workers to establish a semblance of normality. The fieldwork centred on the nuanced everyday life of women engaged in sex work, adopting an ‘ethnography of the particular’ approach that provides a more intricate and layered understanding of their subjectivity (Abu-Lughod 2000; Dewey and Zheng 2013). This approach unveils the interconnections between structure and agency while avoiding the limitations of purely structural analysis. Instead, it explores how subtle and explicit forms of protest and agency unfold within structural factors, sometimes even subverting them (Dewey and Zheng 2013, 5). This necessitated a departure from heteronormative temporality, which pathologizes modes of life not prioritizing longevity, a healthy body, or other markers of a ‘good life’, and embraced the concept of ‘queer temporality’ (Halberstam 2005, 152). The ethnography forming the basis of this article can be characterized as an ‘ethnography of the particular’ informed by queer temporality.

Being recognized as a ‘sex worker’ was desired and spurned at the same time by the activists associated with the SWFK. The recognition is desired as it holds out the promise of a community and the acceptance by society, and also because it is central to a politics based on demand for justice and rights. At the same time, it is spurned not just because of the uncertainties that are exterior to the person, but also due to the dilemma in identifying or limiting oneself as one or the other. Capturing oneself in a process, naming oneself and being identified by others cannot be separated. The dilemmas surrounding negotiating an identity also involve the way in which women negotiated different meanings of good life.

This also reflected the uneasiness in conceptualizing a political project without the certainty of a viable political subject. Sexual subjectivities were not taken as legitimate in the political imaginary of Keralam. Confronting the negative images and becoming a political subject is in itself a huge task. Then the questions whether social and political movements require belief in ‘essential’ unity and what methodology can be adopted in understanding the complexities of such mobile identities and movements arise. When existence itself is vague, imprecise, and indeterminate, being accurate in capturing the complexities of such existence demands establishing equally indeterminate and imprecise linkages and finding unpredictable networks that keep emerging and disappearing.

Does denying the stability of the subject undercut the ground on which political activism is built by denying the existence of a viable political subject? If subjects and subjectivities are fluid and unstable, how can we gather ‘data’ from those fleeting subjects? During the research, the thrust towards the movement shifted to incorporate the how, when, and why of the fictions and the mobile selves. Instead of looking solely into essential identities, the focus was on the friendships, ways of bonding, creative formulations of community living coming into being through combined efforts of different agents so that everyday contestations and creations were given prominence and importance. By the time I revisited Shanthinagar, SWFK was no longer active in Keralam. But the incomplete housing project with its promises and anxieties of evictions was still very much palpable. So the research also became a self-reflexive process of enquiring why the sex workers’ movement, which inaugurated the sexuality politics in Kerala during the HIV/AIDS-prevention projects period, found it impossible to continue with the movement.

The lore of Mitai Suhara

Government has so much land and we have none. If all this land is given to us … then they will have to close the jail. (Thankamma 2011)

I was walking with Thankamma and Ranjini to the women’s prison inside the Central Prison complex in Kannur. The prison complex stretched endlessly and was surrounded by huge compound walls. The long walk from the entrance near the men’s prison to the women’s prison was through an overgrown thicket. The endless stretch of this shady forestland filled Thankamma with indignation occasioning the above outburst.

We visited the prison to secure Pathumma’s temporary release on parole. Pathumma, a neighbour in the Bangladesh/Shanthinagar Colony, had been arrested for drug peddling, though she maintained her innocence, claiming the drugs were planted in her bag. While the case was ongoing, she remained in jail as an undertrial prisoner. Thankamma, Ranjini, and Pathumma have houses in Shanthinagar Colony and all three of them were part of the Vanitha Society. Pathumma urgently sought release to apply for the housing project in the colony, as only those who applied before the deadline could secure homes in the new Shanthinagar. None of them were sure whether merely submitting an application would be enough to secure the houses. As was the usual practice, they would need to rigorously follow up on their applications—meeting local leaders, police officers, and corporation authorities with petitions and bribes. Thankamma, to facilitate Pathumma’s release on bail, had to submit attested copies of the property deed for her small plot of land in the colony as surety. In return for her efforts, she received a small remuneration from Pathumma.

The residents of the colony jokingly referred to ‘Mitai Suhara’ as the first sex worker to settle there, forming part of the origin myths surrounding the community. According to the story, Suhara accepted a ‘mitai’ (a small confectionary worth only 10 paise in those days) as payment for sexual services from her clients. The narrative suggested that Mitai Suhara could be considered the founder of the colony. Subsequently, poorer clients followed suit, and huts began to appear one by one. Over time, other sex workers also came and settled in the colony. Sex work was one of the informal and marginal labour markets available to them, often combined with other informal jobs such as domestic work, home care, small-scale street vending, construction work, and more.

Over the years, Bangladesh Colony emerged as one of the very few spaces within the urban geography of Kozhikode that was available to women situated outside the conventional norms of ‘family’. It provided refuge for single women, widows, those outside socially accepted marriage relations, and those who had left their homes for various reasons. Women independently leaving their families without secure jobs often face challenges finding accommodation in cities of Kerala. Working women’s hostels and other accommodations typically require certificates from employers or family arrangements with hostel authorities, making such facilities inaccessible for women without ‘proper’ jobs and family support. Having a secure place to stay becomes a crucial survival mechanism for these women.

For women engaged in sex work living on the streets, there is a constant risk of being picked up by police or goons—an outcome they vehemently wish to avoid. Debates on the mobility and migration of women involved in sex work often centre around trafficking and sexual exploitation, framing them as vulnerable and in need of protection by either the patriarchal state or the patriarchal family (Sanghera 2005). However, these discussions often overlook the nuanced ways in which sex workers navigate the city’s spatial, caste-based, and economic barriers, creating spaces of relative autonomy and dignity on its margins. Pioneers like Mitai Suhara exemplify the realization of the possibility of entering and living in the city, even if on its outskirts.

Despite its illegal and stigmatized image, accessing Bangladesh Colony was not straightforward for any woman finding herself on the streets. Entry into the colony required extensive networking and assistance from other women, with local pimps, troublemakers, and sometimes even the police guiding women to the area. The colony played a complex role, it rescued the city from the perceived embarrassment of accommodating ‘prostitutes, beggars, and nomads’ within its midst. In this way, the urban space was cleared of marginalized individuals, preventing potential disorder from mingling with the elite neighbourhoods. Bangladesh Colony kept the marginalized people at a reasonable distance, from where they could come to the city and do menial jobs for the city dwellers. Simultaneously, for the residents, the colony provided an affordable location near the city, offering at least one place where they could strive for recognition. However, the same isolation that facilitated the women’s residence in the colony also contributed to the image of both the women and the place as dirty, deviant, and associated with criminality.

Bangladesh Colony/Shanthinagar: a sketch

Shanthinagar lies on the sea coast, three kilometres north of the city of Kozhikode in Kerala. In 2010, the colony consisted of more than 400 families; it was a small stretch of land between the sea and the coastal road running parallel to the sea. It was a vacant area on the outskirts of an old fishing village, which was gradually encroached into over the last 50 years. People started settling there in the late 1970s. They were ‘outsiders’ at a time when the images of Bangladesh refugees pouring into India after the Bangladesh war were still fresh in the minds of the local people. They named it ‘Bangladesh Colony’. Though none of the inhabitants of the colony had anything to do with Bangladesh, the name conjures up images of rootlessness and ‘unruly’ populations migrating from across the borders. That the majority of the people living in the colony were Muslims, lower-caste Hindus, and Christians, and people uprooted from other localities contributed to the efficacy of this curious naming.

Two scheduled caste groups from Tamil Nadu living in the colony—Arunthathiyars and Paraiyars—trace their history to the colonial period, when their ancestors were brought there to do manual scavenging, as no other local community was willing to do this job. As years passed, the cramped quarters of the government-built residential area proved inadequate for all the family members and many relocated to other places in and around Kozhikode. Hailing from a caste previously considered as untouchable, they could not find housing within the city. The vacant land near the sea, out of the city limits, was the only place available. Many of them worked as day labourers—they constituted the major labour force in the private septic-tank-cleaning companies that had sprung up in the city. The experience of the Arunthathiyar caste reveals how spaces within the city are informally organized around the notions of caste and purity and how exclusions based on caste are practised spatially.² The colony remains a spatial experience of caste in the daily life of the urban space of Kozhikode—with which it is connected. In the midst of the colony there was a cluster of around 30 huts of a wandering community of nomads, generally referred to by other residents of the colony as ‘nadodikal’ (nomads). They sold instant cures for impotence or baldness, cheap plastic toys, and ornaments, or told fortunes on the footpaths.

In the beginning, it was a deserted strip of seashore filled with thorny bushes. The image of wild and unruly nature from which they built this place repeatedly appeared in the narrations of many residents of the colony. Now the place has become habitable. Residents had agitated, negotiated, and bargained with many political parties to get the basic infrastructural facilities, and for rights of land ownership. Women, including sex workers, actively took part in such agitations. In 1998 and 2001, the government distributed title deeds (pattayam) for the land in the colony, that is, two or three cent plots to each family.³ Not all the residents of the colony received land and the expectation of further land distribution was constantly kept alive.

The Dalits, other backward caste Hindus, and working-class Christians and Muslims ending up in an urban slum is not surprising in Kerala. Based on the ethnography conducted in two villages in central and northern Kerala, Gough (1965) had pointed out that the landless families in both these villages belonged to the lowest caste groups and economically backward Muslims. The movements for land rights by the Dalits and Adivasis—especially the Chengara agitation⁴ led by Dalits from 2007 onwards and the Muthanaga struggle⁵ under the Adivasi leadership in 2003—verify Gough’s findings and bring into focus the acute landlessness of these communities. These struggles show that the Kerala Land Reforms Act of 1963 for ending inequality in land distribution and the acclaimed Kerala Model development have bypassed socially disadvantaged castes like the Dalits and Adivasis in the state (Rammohan 2008, 14). The land reforms bypassed this dilemma by creating around one lakh housing colonies for Dalits and Adivasis with one or two cents of land and a house. In 2013, there were 26,198 Dalit colonies in Kerala and about 60% of the Dalit population in Kerala were living in such colonies (Anees 2020). This has led to the ghettoization, segregation, and further exclusion of these groups while ensuring that the landlessness and abject living conditions remained intact (Anees 2020; Sreerekha 2012).

Eviction of sex workers

Despite enduring extreme privations and the associated humiliations of colony life, Bangladesh Colony residents countered such challenges by constructing alternative narratives. They portrayed the colony as a haven without incidents of communal riots, often emphasizing harmonious coexistence among people from different castes and communities. Every other conversation was interspersed with observations like, ‘we are a model for the rest of Kerala, people from different castes and communities live here together very harmoniously’. Residents proudly pointed to inter-caste and inter-religious marriages in the colony, asserting their openness to diversity, transcending caste and religious differences. The perception of the colony as a ‘dirty’ place could be linked to these unconventional practices and transgressions. As Shanthinagar Colony attempted to attain respectability, many residents of the colony started resenting such marriage practices. Those resentments, predictably, turned against women, especially those who did sex work. They became more and more articulate in the context of the emergence of Janakeeya Samithi.

The Janakeeya Samithi asserted that the negative perceptions of criminality and disorder associated with the colony were adversely impacting the social standing of its residents. They aimed to alter this image, as it affected marriage prospects, property values, and employment opportunities, jeopardizing the future of the younger generation once the address of the Bangladesh Colony was revealed. The Samithi highlighted increased drug use among the youth, accusing sex workers of being involved in drug distribution. Madhya Nirodhana Samithi (Alcohol Prohibition Committee), comprising social activists from Kozhikode, conducted a study and submitted a petition to the government to intervene in the issue and make a respectable place out of the colony (Raveendran and Chinnamma 2009), which strengthened the demands of Janakeeya Samithi. In response, the SWFK protested, expressing concerns that eviction would force them back to a precarious existence on the streets. They accused Janakeeya Samithi members of collusion with the powerful drug mafia, suggesting that the focus on small traders allowed major drug dealers to escape scrutiny. Sex workers suspected ulterior motives, alleging a plot by real estate agents aiming to purchase land at a nominal price. In response, the sex workers submitted a petition to the Kozhikode Corporation authorities and initiated a court case against the proposed eviction.

The Government, Janakeeya Samithi, and Madhya Nirodhana Samithi advocated for rehabilitating sex workers into more ‘respectable’ professions, with the condition that if they ceased sex work, they could remain in the colony. An alternative offered was piece-rate work, making cleaning mops from waste cotton obtained from cotton mills. While sex workers earned up to 500 rupees daily, mop-making provided less than 100 rupees a day, insufficient for their daily needs. Despite the meagre income, the primary motivation was retaining the hard-won space, especially with impending housing schemes. Consequently, many sex workers reluctantly accepted rehabilitation offers.

Responses from the government and society mainly comprised underpaid jobs and philanthropic rehabilitation efforts. Jameela (2007, 86), the then President of SWFK, succinctly captures this in her autobiography. During monsoons, when jobs were scarce and the climate harsh, Janakeeya Samithi opened a community kitchen in the colony, distributing rice gruel to residents. Accusations of women taking more than their fair share led to conflicts between women and volunteers. Facing such indignities, many women found it unbearable, prompting some to return to sex work, while others chose to leave the colony.

The Janakeeya Samithi was not a body consisting solely of people outside the colony intent upon evacuating sex workers. It included residents of the colony and even family members of sex workers were in the samithi. So, the whole process was not one of antagonism between opposing groups. It was an ambiguous ground where different strategies were resorted to for survival, for gaining respectability, and for gaining housing rights. These are also the processes by which people within the slum distinguished themselves from others within the slum (Kolling 2016), marking themselves as the better or worthier beneficiaries. It also reveals how the development discourses and interventions by the post-liberalization state fluctuate between welfarist principles of distribution of goods and services and neoliberal values of self-sufficiency of the agents (McLaughlin 2022).

AIDS-prevention projects unintentionally created circumstances that led to the evacuation of the women doing sex work from their place of residence. Sex workers embraced AIDS-prevention projects and negotiated with the state to claim citizenship and possibilities of being recognized as workers. Despite repeated attempts by different sex workers’ organizations, a trade union status was never granted by the state. Other trade unions never accepted sex workers in their ranks as that would entail a radical reimagination about solidarity and labour to ‘accommodate issues of identity, stigma, sexuality, gender, patriarchy, and caste’ (Vijayakumar, Chacko, and Panchanadeswaran 2017, 90). But the projects resulted in attracting the attention of the media, the government, and other social and political actors to the presence of sex workers in the colony. This gaze from outside resolved the problems faced by women sex workers with the verdict that they are to be removed or rescued from the colony and rehabilitated into ‘proper’ occupations. An ideology of punishment and benevolence converged in its resolution. The hetero patriarchal and casteist norms regarding labour, family forms, and political protest underlined the efforts by the government and the civil society engagement with demands made by sex workers and the residents of Bangladesh Colony. Browne et al. (2021) have pointed out how ‘such normalisations are therefore inherently exclusionary, and supposedly inclusive legislation can reiterate existing power relations through the creation of new and stigmatised others’ (35).

Development discourses and Kerala

In Kerala, the reform movements of the early 20th century floated the idea of a liberal society of equal individuals. These individuals were to be identified by their ‘inherent, internal’ qualities and not by what they inherited (Devika 2005, 462). Very crucial to this notion of the individual was the distinction between romantic love (premam), often ideologized as a social necessity, and bodily lust (kamam). Premam came to be eulogized as ‘the force emanating from full-fledged individuals that ensured the stability of the modern family’ (Devika 2007, 214). The ‘feminine’ that emerged through the debates of Kerala modernity ensured women’s entry into public space through an extension of feminine qualities like love, tolerance, patience, kindness, and adherence to monogamous ideals and restraints (Devika 2009).

Such intense scrutiny of gender re-emerged later under the overarching framework of ‘development’. Kerala holds an ambiguous status as the land of the ‘gender paradox’ (Erwer 2003). Indicators like high life expectancy, low infant mortality, and high literacy rate in Kerala are equivalent to those of the industrialized countries. Women played a crucial role in the construction and de-glorification of the Kerala model. As per the UNDP’s gender development index, Kerala is far above the Indian average in female education; the health indicators are also very high for women (Dreze and Sen 1995). However, other researchers, who contested this claim, showed that successful development interventions should be appraised in relation to patriarchy. They argued that the conventional dimensions of well-being, like education and health, ought to be combined with other factors like property rights, political participation, crime against women, mental health, work relations, etc. in which women in Kerala are not performing well (Mukhopadhyay 2007, 4). When compared to other Indian states, Kerala is at the bottom on direct measures of autonomy including household decision-making, mobility, and access to money and low work participation rate of women (Kodoth and Eapen 2005). Anna Lindberg (2005) talks about the process of ‘housewifization’ in Kerala, the ideology of defining women as dependent housewives and the house as the normative space and housewife the normative role of women even when they may be holding a job outside the house.

The discourses on paradox and gender have been used in creating notions of utopia and dystopia about Kerala (Sreekumar 2007). Kerala is a utopia as it incarnates the almost impossible combination of a beautiful evergreen Arcadia and a rationally ordered socio-urban society. The highly educated modern working women are the keepers of the utopia. Women who are victims of sexual harassment and gendered violence are seen as wrecking this utopia leading to dystopia. Women from the marginal locations rarely get the relative security of victimhood and are often cast as malignant sexual provocateurs and their inability to contain the dangers around them is seen as the root cause of all the troubles that they land themselves in.

An intersectional analysis would alert us to how Dalit working-class women are constantly under threat of being dubbed ‘bad’. Failing to be identified as a ‘decent’ woman is a constant dread not just for the woman concerned, but for the whole social network in which she is embedded. In addition, the Indian law regarding trafficking, the Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act (ITPA), has clauses that could penalize anybody living on the earnings of ‘prostituted women’. This means that the family of a sex worker is always under the radar of the police. Moreover, sex workers are perceived as divorced from kinship ties, and hence as potential threats to the solidity of the ‘family’, the survival of which also depends upon successful marital alliances. If it became known in the neighbourhood that someone from a particular family was doing sex work, it would considerably diminish the chances of all other family members negotiating successful marital alliances, creating obstacles to the future prosperity of the family. It was within such a complex terrain of active engagements of negotiations, acceptance, and concealment that the life of each sex worker was lived.

The incessant struggles to secure dignity within the colony reveal the epistemological ambiguity, if not impossibility, of arriving at a univocal meaning of ‘home’ from the location of women doing sex work. Within the colony, the households of women doing sex work included their children, partners/lovers/husbands, occasional relatives, and female friends. The fictive kinship that they developed in the living spaces offered care, protection, and emotional support for a lot of people—especially women—who were not part of the care/welfare measures provided either by the ‘family’ or the state. In critical situations such as police arrests, harassment by clients, or encounters with troublemakers, the networks and relationships established by sex workers became vital. Mutual care during pregnancy and childbirth was a common practice among them. Older sex workers, no longer earning, often stayed with and supported younger counterparts. Many of them extended their care to young women who found themselves on the streets, irrespective of their involvement in sex work. This process led to the reconstitution of the ‘family’, incorporating individuals facing social ostracism and exclusion. bell hooks, in her critique of feminist theories regarding home as a site of women’s exploitation, argues that the home serves as a space where dignity, denied in the public sphere, is restored, particularly for black people. She says that ‘home and public are not the polar ends of a dichotomy with home restricting the political expressions and initiations of the women’ (hooks 1990, 47). Home becomes part of the care networks built by the women on which their very survival depended. The very notion of home is thus infused with multiple meanings. Home as a depoliticized site might undervalue the political significance it acquires in the lives of underprivileged women.

The picture given above doesn’t imply that Bangladesh Colony was a utopia of female care and camaraderie. Post-delivery, a sex worker’s return to the field often led to increased demand and higher income from clients. However, the depleted resources during pregnancy, delivery, and childcare prompted a focus on maximizing earnings. Supporting a young, pregnant sex worker and helping care for the baby entailed calculations involving the sharing of earnings when she resumed sex work. The dynamics of these networks and relationships were constantly in flux.

Clients relocated, lovers drifted apart, friendships ended, children were sent to Children’s Homes, women transitioned in and out of sex work for alternative employment, left the neighbourhood, faced police interventions and imprisonment, or left the city entirely. Despite their transient nature, these ephemeral relationships remained crucial for women, providing support when relocating to a new place. However, the transient nature of their families clashed with prevailing notions in Kerala regarding the stability of family relationships. This contrasted with the expectations of modern women, who were perceived as capable of providing stability to their marriages and families.

While the homes built by the sex workers reflected nascent attempts to build a community and networks that allowed a semblance of dignified existence within the exclusionary urban spaces, an epistemological impossibility in recognizing the ‘homes’ and ‘families’ created by sex workers as ‘home’ and the ‘family’ emerged in the colony. This refusal of recognition arose partially from the ‘everydayness of compulsory heterosexuality’ that imposes sanctions based on legitimate and illegitimate ways of living, strictures on ideal couples, monogamous family structure, and norms of parenting (Ahmed 2006). It also emerged because the façade of such ideal families was necessary for the residents of Bangladesh Colony to build up the image of respectable, but poor and marginalized urban dwellers, the good poor image, which would earn them the houses in the new model colony.

Chanthi panam chinthi pokum: between saving and spending

In the colony, I heard the proverb, ‘chanthi panam chinthi pokum’ (a rough translation could be ‘cunt money gets scattered’), which implied that the money earned through sexual labour does not actually serve any purpose or have any productive use. Even when the money earned by sexual labour sustained quite a lot of people—especially women, old people, and children—this proverb was frequently heard. Chinthal (scattering) acted as a word of caution against sexual transgressions as the preservation of the ‘well-being’ of the family is often linked with such caution.

Sex workers were seen as the opposite of a modern developmental subject—as women outside the control of a husband or a monogamous family; a woman whose sensibilities do not include an ‘interiority’ that enables her to have proper control over her senses/body; a woman whose notion of parenting is not proper; a woman who has multiple sexual partners and receives monetary benefits and contagious diseases for the sexual favours she offers. Within such discourses, the importance given to containing the scattering—chinthal—becomes crucial in valuing women as good or bad.

Jose, the man who alerted me to the proverb about chinthal, was describing it in the context of the futile attempts by the poor people in the colony to rise above their living conditions. He used to be a hired goon, a muscle man, who was hired by local merchants and money lenders to collect money from defaulting creditors. He later converted to Pentecostal Christianity and gave up drinking and stopped working in the extortion business. He was the secretary of Janakeeya Samithi in the colony.

Have you seen any chair in any of the houses of this colony? All of us sit on the dirt floors. None of us wants to rise above our present levels … The floor is enough for us. I started a chair chitti (lottery) a few years back. Each family can deposit a few rupees each month and the ones who win the lottery will get a chair. Only very few participated and the lottery failed.

Jose was trying to distinguish between useful and wasteful expenditures. He also said that instead of cooking meals in their own houses, sex workers and their family members had food brought in from the hotels, bought expensive clothes, and went to movies and fairs—all ‘unnecessary’ expenses. Jose also connected this apathy of the people in the colony with the presence of sex workers in the colony. Sex workers have money and they spend it without saving any for the future, without any attempt to rise above their current situation. This has a contagious effect on other inhabitants of the colony. The chair in Jose’s house and the ‘hotel food’ ordered by the sex workers pointed to differing aspirations, different patterns of consumption. The chair represented middle-class aspirations, whereas the ‘hotel food’ was an indicator of the lack of such aspirations. So, chinthal or scattering was about striking a fine balance between the wasteful expenditure, consumption, and the necessary expenditure. The trope of a consuming family was used to distinguish between the legality and illegality of people living in the colony.

But for the women sex workers, this larger spending was called for by the larger networks of care and protection that they cultivated. This ‘economy of care’ became invisible in the language of unnecessary expenditure. Such expenditures created a social network that ensured women sex workers’ survival on the streets as well as a dignified space in the colony. It created bulwarks against violence in their private and public life. Excesses in expenditure were an effort to resist the stamp of illegality surrounding them by a proliferation of relationship networks.

However, when expenditures deviated from the moral norms of the monogamous nuclear family, they were framed as problematic, like the illegal presence of the slum, like the illegality of their occupation, their life and their relations also became illegal. The invisibility and perceived illegality of sex work and the care networks built by sex workers rendered them easily dismissible by the community and state. Street sex work’s transient nature lacked value compared to the stability of home and labour endorsed by society and the state.

Sex workers in the colony existed in a liminal space between collective and individual consumption and labour. Sex work, considered as easy money, contradicted the notion of hardworking poor people. The colony aimed to transform itself into a moral space, deflecting implied criticisms of laziness and dubious occupational practices onto the sex workers. Hard labour was deemed crucial for future prosperity, yet many within the colony struggled to provide evidence of such exertion, however hard they might be toiling. Sex work, operating beyond the regulatory controls of labour, workplace disciplines, unions, or the state, failed to convince Kerala society of its ‘worker’ status. Shanthinagar sought to emulate the factory model as a panoptical institution producing a disciplined workforce (Bauman 2005, 18), projecting itself as a regulatory space ensuring the systematic reproduction of the heterosexual patriarchal family—a cornerstone for the reproduction of ideal ‘laborers’.

Bauman (2005, 29) stresses the ephemeral and transitory qualities of identities and consumer goods which can be endlessly replaced by other goods or identities. For sex workers their identity as sex worker overshadows all their other identities, making it nearly impossible to ignore it. They are delegated forever to be the ‘underclass’. In Bauman’s theorization, consumption becomes the villain precisely becomes it replaces the family values of mutual care and the social solidarity. In Shanthinagar, the sex workers’ lives show how the hetero patriarchal family pushes out women who do not conform to its ideals. Such exclusions and betrayals by the family are overcome and new solidarities are forged through the consumption practices.

Martínez cautions that the notions of respectability are woven into social scientific enquiries of expenditure. The normalization of expenditure is ensured if it is also tied to ‘deferred gratification, the accumulation and conservation of one’s pool of material wealth, enhancement of the domestic environment, and indulgence in leisure pursuits that do not create scandal’ (Martínez 2010, 615). All other expenditures are designated as indecent. There is a linear notion of development that instructs each household to limit its expenditure and conserve it or invest it for the future of its members. Owning a house in the future, the education of children—in fact, all the markers of a decent person. Any excess that is indulged in at present is seen as a potential threat to future prosperity. The inability to plan for the future makes the person a culprit, a threat not just to their personal future, but a potential threat to the community and to the nation itself (Halberstam 2005). Being unobtrusive, scandal-less are the ways in which decency is assumed to be in your daily life practices. Which also meant that your expenditure and consumption must be kept within your limits. Expenditure that exceeds your social location defies these cultural limits. Such lack of parsimony in personal life was projected as a threat to the survival of the colony. The excesses indulged in by the sex workers in the colony was seen as resulting in the actual death of people.

The intertwining of consumption and decency holds significant implications for the colony residents, as the transition from Bangladesh Colony to Shanthinagar brought both peril and opportunities. Excess in expenditure and consumption that is not confined within the moral contours of the monogamous nuclear family put a stamp of indecency and illegality on the slum and everyone inhabiting that space, resulting in the erasure of possibilities to access the available space. For Jose, the equation, ‘Jose plus a household with furniture’, equalled a new ontological possibility, transforming from a gangster to a potential ‘respectable’ suburban dweller. He sought to distance himself from the negative image associated with spending on drugs and sex, aiming for ‘scandal-free’ expenditure to elevate his status. Jose also knew that spending money on drugs and sex was seen as a bad expenditure. He wanted to distance himself from that image through ‘scandal-free’ expenditure that would raise him above the ‘ground level’. Jose wanted to be accepted by the government by highlighting his respectability.

Both sex workers and Jose embraced the idea of transformation. Sex workers sought legitimacy and worker identity through organization, aiming to alter their current existence. Jose, on the other hand, pursued respectability through religious affiliation, political alignment, and a modified stance on consumption. He disapproved of the perceived indecency in the colony’s marriage practices, attributing it to the presence of sex workers. This sentiment aligned with a growing acceptance of such notions of indecency among the colony’s residents. ‘You see that community of nadodikal (nomads) living in the colony? They are very careful and very strict. Their women are not allowed to get married to whichever person they like. They would even kill them if that happens.’ Jose’s yearning for the control of the female sexuality within the community reflects his angst at the exclusion experienced by the slum dwellers and his anxieties about the housing projects.

Jose’s anxiety reflects Bauman’s point about how the inability to consume relegates non-consumers to the margins, ascribes them with the identities of ‘criminal’ and ‘unruly’, and excludes them forever from welfare schemes. Both sex workers and Jose try to overcome this dilemma by gaining the ability to be consumers. But unlike Bauman’s conceptualization, it is not the inability to consume alone that is pushing the slum dwellers to the margins, but the absence of ‘respectable’ consumption, scandal-free consumption sanctioned by the desires of the heteronormative middle-class family. Contrary to Bauman, women sex workers through acts of consumption and expenditure created social networks and a community around them. This was integral to their efforts of survival and acquiring a life of dignity and companionship. It was an ethics of care which went against the established social order that led to their eviction.

The transition from Bangladesh Colony to Shanthinagar held the possibility of transformation from criminals to citizens. But it also created a sense of panic. As people who had already experienced being uprooted more than once, they feared that this might lead to yet another eviction. The discourses of immorality and marking the colony as an immoral space might make it easier for the government to uproot them once again. They knew that even slight variations in everyday cultural practices surrounding family and sexual norms gets amplified signifying a difference indicating moral degeneration (Chatterjee 2015, 94). By evicting sex workers, they hoped to bring houses in the colony closer to the image of a ‘normal’ family.

Sanjay Srivastava (2007) has commented on how in the post-independence India, a masculinist ideal foregrounding an ethic of non-consumption aiding nation-building through savings was valorized. Whereas in a neoliberal economy, the desiring self becomes a tool of individualized management. The moral economy of consumption differentiates between the moral and amoral woman, while the moral woman is distinguished by their ability to exercise control over consumption and harmonize it with domesticity. Normalizing consumption is never possible to women doing sex work because their families, their class, caste, and labour lack the respectability to be part of the ideal domestic environment.

The words chinthal (scattering) and chanthi (cunt) are related to another word in Malayalam, chantha/marketplace. The chantha is a space where containment of scattering is difficult. It is the place where ‘chantha pennungal’ (market women), who are lower-caste, working-class women and who are supposed to lack the interiority that contains the chinthal in contrast to the ‘ideal feminine’. Chantha or the market is the place for economic exchange or a space of consumerism that threatens the frugality of the housewife and opens up the domestic, enticing women with temptations. Left-wing criticisms that emerged in Kerala against the mobilizations of sex workers focused on the notion of dissipation brought in by ideology of the market and imperialism against Third World resistance. The market was portrayed as encapsulating the ‘demonic’ force of capitalist ideologies that jeopardize the solidarity of the working class in Kerala. For instance, left-wing ideologue, M. N. Vijayan, considered sex as a tool for depoliticization as it induces people who are used to ‘resist with closed fists, to beg with open arms’. He wrote that capitalism dangled the myth of unbridled sexual pleasure and ideated human agency as in pursuit of those pleasures which, when backed up by capitalistic funding, becomes a potent means of controlling and suppressing all resistance in the Third World (Vijayan 2005, 7–11). Such a perception of the sex workers’ mobilizations offers limited opportunities for chronicling the agency of the women at the margins, their resistances, and the ways in which they traverse the urban space.

The implementation of urban housing schemes in Kerala had often blurred the boundaries between officially devised mechanisms to ensure participatory governance and preexisting structures of power and patronage. These boundaries are the spaces where potentially contrasting ideas of ‘proper’ gender roles are revealed and contested, with ambivalent outcomes for women (Williams, Devika, and Aandahl 2015). A focus on the intimate spaces of the home reveals the complexities of relating to the ‘state’ and the ‘law’ in registers of hope, cynicism, apprehension and moral appeals for inclusion into wider society (Datta 2016b).

As we can see chanthi, chantha, and chinthal became connected and were pitted against languages that included rights, resistance, production, and consumption. Sex was aligned with consumption and dissipation that led to poverty and submission. So, the proverb chanthi panam chinthi pokum illustrates how intersection of sexuality, class, and caste becomes central to the struggles over urban spaces in an expanding and modernizing city. A weeding out of the poor people, demarcating between those who can be rehabilitated into the proper, socially acceptable labour and are capable of accepting the regulatory institutions of the society, and at the same time overcoming the constraints of poverty happened during the housing project. Despite the visibility gained through political mobilization, sex workers found their self-identification as ‘sex workers’ turned against them. They were labelled as incapable of socially productive consumption, resulting in their exclusion from participation in the idealized modernity and development of the colony, city, and state.

Abundance/excess

The life of women sex workers in the colony can be connected to Lancione’s theory of how people living in the urban margins struggle to make a life in the city and how their struggles are integral to (re)shaping urban practices (Lancione 2016). Abundance/excess is how women resist being vanquished. There is an abundance of strategies employed by women sex workers to hold on to the urban space. Such abundance in political practices, abundance in consumption practices, and abundance in relationships, points to new ways of being in the world. When consumption of public space as political subjects is denied, multiple daily living practices are used to mark their presence. Acts that were both intimate and public were foregrounded and used to tease out a new language of politics and to question ‘norms and notions’ governing the political acts. That is precisely the radical potential of such acts. They are not pre-scripted and do not belong to any existing categories making it difficult to be recognized as resistance by the state and civil society. Judith Halberstam imagines queerness as detached from sexual identity and its radical potential springs out of its practice as a way of life. Queer time does not belong to the future-oriented developmental logic (Halberstam 2005; Oswin 2014). In fact every act by women sex workers is seen as antithetical to the concepts of progress and reproductions of social divisions. A family that does not resemble the ‘normal’ families in Kerala, a social space of care economy that includes potentially dangerous and repudiated others including sex workers, clients, pimps, homeless people, drug addicts to name just a few, a movement that is repudiated by other political parties. Teleological narratives of progress and social reproduction which govern every living moment of people in Kerala are suspended at least momentarily in such practices.

Conclusion: ‘neither citizens nor workers’

By the end of 2012, 200 houses were built in Shanthinagar and assigned to recipients, causing confusion and uncertainty in the colony. Rumours spread, suggesting fears of land appropriation by the government under the Coastal Regulation Zone law and potential real estate speculation. The extreme insecurity about the land was palpable in those rumours. In 2019, many hadn’t received houses or title deeds, and those who did lacked clarity on property legality. Before the construction of the houses, the title deeds were kept as surety by the government department. When and how they were going to get them back was not known to many of them. The sense of foreboding that at any moment their houses would be taken away was still lingering. Children of sex workers in Janakeeya Samithi were promised homes if their mothers abandoned sex work and withdrew the court case against house demolition. This led to the withdrawing of the court case filed by the Vanitha Samithi. The desire for home, for a safe place for regaining dignity and care, got overlaid by the narratives of decency, self-restraint, and sexual discipline. The governance system and communitarian politics strategically deployed emotional blackmail, sympathy, and moral values, creating barriers to their housing rights and their right to access urban spaces.

The rejection of sex workers’ demands for welfare and their categorization as criminals or subjects under surveillance hindered their ability to be recognized as citizens, workers, or welfare claimants. To establish themselves as deserving of such claims, they had to navigate normative attitudes towards female sexuality, class, and caste. Discourses within the colony reflected the entanglement of emerging political subjectivities with these normative attitudes.

The interpretation of excess consumption as a threat to oneself and the community revealed the challenges sex workers faced in asserting their political subjectivity. Self-regulation of consumption became a marker of worthy householders and, by extension, worthy political subjects or citizens. The survival strategies of sex workers, including their consumption practices and excess expenditure, which helped them navigate the urban environment, were seen as detrimental to the overall survival of the colony. Consumption rides the fine line between decency and indecency, between legality and illegality. Even perfectly innocuous substances like food or clothing became indecent ‘consumption’. It was labelled as indecent because it lacked the solidity of the heteronormative family to anchor it. It exceeded the boundaries of what is considered as a ‘normal’ family in Kerala, spilling over into larger networks, making the boundaries of family porous. This hints at an existing angst about the subversive potential of the sexuality of women and of people in the lower rungs of caste hierarchy if left unsupervised.

Sex workers’ struggle for political visibility and finding their voice entangled them in the dangers attached with that visibility/attention. It also made their survival difficult within the precarious and fragile contexts of quotidian violence and moral nonacceptance. This alerts us to the contradictory effects that emancipatory politics and government projects have on the lives of the differently positioned women. The enabling and constraining potentials of urban marginalization and the clear and clean demarcations between recipients/agents, home/public, etc. are untenable while analysing happenings at the micro-level. Being at the margins in many ways enables, as well as restricts, those who are waiting outside the urban sanctum of development. The ways in which spaces and provisional identities are occupied from time to time reveal the ever-shifting dynamics of marginalization as a process. The shifting relationships meant that the women in the colony were juggling, changing, and adapting to varied roles while negotiating with the society and the state—roles as sex workers, activists, mothers, citizens, victims, friends, community leaders, and so on.

Contradictory potentials of oppression and emancipation dangled by social structures and systems to people living at the margins make it crucial to formulate multiple ways of engaging with such structural and systemic oppression. Neither family, nor capitalist market, nor political organizations, nor the development state apparatuses completely encapsulates all the possibilities of overcoming their daily life of drudgery and precariousness. But these are the available avenues of making life better within the sociocultural and economic boundaries of the city. Gaining status as a worker through the organization of sex workers which were connected to much larger networks of sex workers’ groups nationally and globally was one such attempt. Claiming housing rights, indulging in excess consumption practices, experimenting with new family forms and relationship networks, negotiating with political rights were all equally creative attempts. Queer temporality and urban assemblages in that sense is also about an excess, an abundance, multiplicity of engagements by the urban poor.

Partly as a consequence of, or as a prerequisite of, such ever-changing modes of inhabitation, the self-fashioning among the sex workers in the Bangladesh Colony underwent constant modifications. This malleability allows flexibility in negotiating the everyday urban predicaments but it also points to the limits experienced by women in marginal spaces in self-fashioning. Socially desirable identities of the citizen and the worker were snatched away as soon as they came within their grasp. In this way, both the being and its circumstances (self and home) happen to be passing occurrences. The very description of sex workers used in this article should be taken as a relatively stable occurrence without essentializing or solidifying it.

The nascent attempts at civic politics revolve around the image of social ideals that remain ideals precisely because of their unattainability to those living at the margins. The inability to achieve these ideals was conveniently attributed to those who were even more marginalized and marked as illegal or deviant. The rhetoric of rehabilitation camouflaged the fact that legal rights and welfare provisions given by the state enforced self-regulatory behavioural practices and hegemonic codes of conduct on women occupying marginal locations. Though theoreticians have effectively shown how the claims for equal citizenship are contingent on the ability to project oneself as the neoliberal ideal of the consumer-citizen, the ethnography from Shanthinagar Colony shows how the moral economy of consumption negates even that possibility to the women doing sex work. Aspiring for legitimacy and recognition in the present as citizen subjects via neoliberal discourse on rights and justice was not possible for them. Such processes eroded the survival basis of women sex workers and possibilities of forming wider networks were destroyed thereby making their lives more precarious. As Nalini Jameela remarked in a webinar, ‘the sex workers in Kerala ended up as neither citizens nor workers’.

Acknowledgements

This paper draws from my doctoral work and I wish to acknowledge the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Bergen, Norway for their support. I am extremely indebted to Dr Vigdis Broch-Due, my doctoral supervisor. My deep thanks to all the referees of this paper for their truly insightful comments. Sincere thanks also go to the residents of Shanthinagar and activists of SWFK for assisting and participating in the fieldwork.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Reshma Bharadwaj

Reshma Bharadwaj is at the Department of Social Work, Sree Sankaracharya University of Sanskrit, PO Kalady, Ernakulam 683574, Kerala, India. Email: [email protected]

Notes

1 For the complete news on the event and Chief Minister’s speech, see Rajesh (2011).

2 Kalluthan Kadavu slum in Kozhikode is another area where the manual scavengers were rehabilitated by the government.

3 Cent is a common measure of land and 1 cent is equal to 435.56 square feet.

4 In 2007, landless Dalit and Adivasi families occupied the rubber plantation leased by the government to Harrisons Malayalam Company. They formed the organization Sadhu Jana Vimochana Samyukta Vedi and demanded the government to provide five acres of cultivable land and 50,000 rupees as the initial investment towards farming. After two years of agitation, the government declared the ‘Chengara package’ promising land to 1495 landless families belonging to Dalit and Adivasi communities. But as most of the allotted land was not suitable for human habitation and for farming, people declined the package and continued the agitation.

5 Landless Adivasi families under the leadership of Adivasi Gothra Maha Sabha started agitating in front of the government secretariat in Thiruvananthapuram in 2001 demanding land. They pointed out that the starvation deaths in the Adivasi areas in Keralam were a direct outcome of the land alienation faced by them. Though the government declared willingness to give land to all landless Adivasis in the state, it remained just a promise and in 2003 they entered and occupied land lying adjacent to the reserved forest in Muthanga in Wyanad district. This led to the confrontation between the agitators and police, with police firing upon the agitators.