Immorality, Hurt or Choice: How Indian Feminists Engage With Prostitution

Abstract

This article examines key trends within Indian feminist analysis on prostitution, and is based on primary fieldwork around feminist organizations in India and on research conducted on prostitution in the states of Maharashtra, Delhi, West Bengal and Orissa. The article argues that there are at least three ways in which Indian feminists have addressed the issue of prostitution – as silence, as hurt and violence and as potential choice and liberation. I suggest that all these perspectives are limited in that they do not necessarily take in the wide range of experiences encountered by women in prostitution, and may well feed into mainstream patriarchal views on prostitution. The first trope looks at the ways in which ‘mainstream’ Indian feminists did not raise issues of sexuality, thereby relegating questions of prostitute rights to the margins. The second approach is based on radical feminist critiques of prostitution as violence and hurt, and legitimizes itself by drawing on the articulations of those sex workers and activists who draw on the experiences of hurt, anguish, violence and coercion that form a part of their lives. Finally, I look at prostitute rights organizations that seek to create an alternative to these analyses.

Keywords:

• choice
• feminism
• India
• liberation
• prostitution
• sexuality
• sex work
• silence
• violence

Notes

1. In the USA, there was some degree of co-operation between prostitute rights groups and feminists in the 1970s. In 1973, COYOTE – ‘Cast out your tired old ethics’– emerged in San Francisco from WHO – ‘whores, housewives and others’. In the 1980s, the AIDS virus killed the connection between the prostitute rights groups and women's organizations. Mainstream feminists now castigated prostitution as a form of patriarchal abuse against women. The image of the liberated whore was replaced by that of the oppressed prostitute who would be rescued by feminists.

2. By mainstream feminisms, I refer to women's organizations and feminist organizations in India that have focused on issues of violence against women in the 1980s and 1990s. These include women's wings of left-wing political parties like the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and self-defined autonomous women's organizations such as the Forum Against Oppression of Women, Bombay.

3. Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee (DMSC) and Veshya Aids Mukabla Parishad, Sanghli (VAMPS) are NGOs that work with sex workers in Kolkata and Sanghli respectively. DMSC works on varied issues connected with sex workers' legal, economic and sexual rights, and has created a Sex Workers Manifesto that articulates the rights of sex workers to practise their trade. VAMPS also works on issues of sexual and legal rights, and similarly articulates the rights of sex workers to practise their trade.

4. There were and continue to be several strands in the women's movement in India. Women activists from left parties may not call themselves feminists, but have taken stands that are feminist and have worked with self-consciously feminist groups in the country on several campaigns.

5. Interview with Sandhya Gokhale, Member, Forum Against Oppression of Women, Bombay.

6. Interview with Salima, 24 January 1999.

7. According to MacKinnon (1993: 149):

• Women who are compromised, cajoled, pressured, tricked, blackmailed, or outright forced into sex … often respond to the unspeakable humiliation … by claiming their sexuality as their own. Faced with no alternative, the strategy to acquire self-respect and pride is: I chose it.

8. There are differences between the legal and social constructions of childhood in India. Therefore while the age of marriage had been legally fixed at 18 for women and 21 for men, socially childhood is seen as over for girls once they attain puberty. Therefore, many marriages are arranged for girls before they are 18.

9. Based on field work in Calcutta, August 1999 and May–June 2000.

10. Interview with Shekhar Chatterjee, who worked with CINI and now works for a sponsorship programme run by Sahay in 400 villages in West Bengal, 1 September 2001.

11. International Committee for Prostitutes' Rights, World Charter for Prostitutes' Rights, Amsterdam 1985. The charter states that:

• There should be no law which implies systematic zoning of prostitution. Prostitutes should have the freedom to choose their place of work and residence. It is essential that prostitutes can provide their services under the conditions that are absolutely determined by themselves and no one else (Peterson 1989: 40).

12. Of course, women in prostitution in India (if they are Indian citizens) have a technical right to vote; however, in reality, their names are rarely entered in voters' lists, a concrete example of stigma and discrimination.

13. Interview with Khairati Ram Bhola, Bhartiya Patita Udhar Samiti, 29 August 1998, New Delhi.

14. Excerpts from interviews with sex workers:

• The man gets free labour in the house from his wife. He also gets a dowry, and children to carry his name.

  We can refuse to sleep with a man if we don't want to, a wife can't.

15. Interview with Khairati Ram Bhola, President, Bhartiya Patita Udhar Samiti, 29 August 1998. Bhartiya Patita Udhar Samiti is a Delhi-based NGO that works towards legalizing prostitution.

16. Interview with Police Inspector V. G. Wagh, Nagpada Police Station, 5 November 1995.

17. Interviews with sex workers in Calcutta in September 1998.

18. Interview with Rekha Lamba, sex worker from Calcutta, 14 July 2001.

19. For instance, blacks calling themselves ‘niggers’ and lesbians ‘dykes’ or gay men ‘fags’ as a political assertion. There is an interesting analysis of one woman's assertion as a sex worker in Sheila Marie Thomas (1998).

20. This paragraph is based on personal communication with Meena Seshu, Veshya Aids Mukabla Parishad and Sanghli, January 1999.

21. Interview with Shekhar Chatterjee, 1 September 2001.