“Perhaps I am that woman”: A review of Tales of the Night Fairies

Ram and Sita myth

Ghosh begins the film with a radio dedication on Valentine’s Day coupled with images of embracing heterosexual couples enjoying tea and each other. The film moves from this sequence of commercialized intimacy to a street theater performance by Komol Gandhar, the theatrical arm of the Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee (DMSC—http://www.durbar.org/), a collective of 65,000 sex workers in West Bengal, India, organized to fight for “decriminalization of adult sex work, social recognition and the right to form a trade union.” Komol Gandhar as the director explains it is “E-flat, a soft note on a sharp scale is a line from a poem by Bengali poet, Rabindranath Tagore.” And as elder stateswoman Mondol interprets it komol means gentle, gaan means song, and dhar means sharp edge, “like a chainsaw that cuts back and forth.” In explaining what they hope to eradicate, Mondol elucidates, “we will sever inhibitions from the minds of the people and bring glory to the name Komol Gandhar.” The performance strategy to bring awareness and visibility to sex workers and their rights as citizens and workers receives censure from members of the audience, particularly one irate man referencing the Hindu story of national morality, “Ram and Sita.” He claims, “Your movement is unjustified. Indian culture does not allow this.” Mala Singh engages him in a dialogue (of sorts) by asking, “what culture and traditions?” The young passer-by responds, accusatory digit indignantly in the air, “When people cast aspersions on Sita, Ram sent her for a trial by fire. These were the ideals of those days. Look at the degeneration today. Now sex workers claim that their work is as legitimate as any other work. This is wrong.”

Ram and Sita are staples in Indian, specifically Hindu, cultural production. The myth is used as justification for maintaining codes of modesty, respectability, and invisibility for “transgressive” women. Yet the myth has also played a central role in Deepa Mehta’s 1996 feature film, “Fire,” which upended the tale of female chastity and obedience in a story of sisters-in-law becoming lovers. Ghosh, too, reframes this oft-invoked tale showing the “disobedience” of sex workers challenging internalizations of this myth. The story of Ram and Sita incorporates jealousy, rejection, and redemption. Ram is banished to the forest by his jealous stepmother, who wants her son to inherit the throne; his faithful wife Sita follows him into exile. However, she is kidnapped by Ravana, the evil king of Lanka, and is not freed until Ram rescues her. Upon her release, Ram requires that Sita prove her chastity to assuage his mind after her long years of captivity. She demonstrates her fidelity by undergoing a trial by fire. She is returned unharmed by the God of Fire. Ram is crowned king with Sita as his queen. But before they can fully enjoy their bliss, a local washerman refuses to accept his wife who spent one night away from home, justifying it by saying, “he was not like the king who took his wife back after she had spent years in another man’s house.” Although the Gods vouched for Sita’s honor and she is by then pregnant with her husband’s child, gossip continues and he banishes her to the forest. Support of the Gods is not enough, and Ram bows to public innuendo.

Patricia Mohammed (1998) argues that Ram and Sita are the models of ideal masculine and feminine behavior in India and its diaspora. In fact, “This obsession with female chastity which condemns a woman even on the basis of unfounded gossip permeates the whole concept of Hindu marriage and religion. It is the wife’s chastity which protects her husband[’s] honor” (p. 395). In Night Fairies, it is the honor of the worker rather than the husband or client that is at stake. As Singh shakes her head during her encounter with the angry young man, she makes it clear that unlike Sita, she and other members of the DMSC are not beholden to a myth that denounces their value as citizens and as workers.

“Ram and Sita” cement notions of a woman’s appropriate behavior and her idealized role as mother and mate. The myth has set the standard of the endlessly sacrificing woman who would burn rather than dishonor her husband and family. In the context of sex work, it limits female autonomy and delegitimizes and stigmatizes sexual labor. These discourses embedded in morality regulate sexual expression, citizenship rights, and access to resources because they reiterate that sex work is a sign of national ruination and degeneracy (Kempadoo, 2005/2012: xv–xvi). Trying to confirm that association, some “good women” from Delhi, who felt that “prostitution is a violence against women,” attempted to stop the first ever Sex Worker Millennium Carnival (March 2001), an event that aimed to show the community that they too can “laugh and play.” This attempt by the “good women” became an extraordinary organizing event for the workers. Not only did they manage to keep the permits and hold the carnival, but they also used the opportunity to circulate a petition in support of future carnivals. These DMSC members hold their own against criminals, state officials, and “good” women.

The Ramayana’s enduring story is a bridge between tradition, culture, and the storytelling possibilities of both Tales of the Night Fairies and Komol Gandhar. Because narratives constitute the ways we construct and make sense of the world, they have enormous power. As such, the narratives we retell through tradition and custom or the ones we may reinvent or rehearse provide a framework with which we can consider what is possible. Stories help us imagine possibilities before they can be realized. In telling this story, Ghosh meditates on “the gaze” and Calcutta as a city of gazing and gazers. The film recalibrates this gazing—sex workers need to be gazed at to attract clients, and the director gazes at film posters, while people gaze at her. Ghosh recounts one woman loudly wondering if she is a boy. Although there are coy references to her own sexuality, Ghosh never discusses it. By the end of the film, she mentions that she did not have to courage to tell her own story. Nonetheless, there is a connection between the social power of narrative and “the gaze” that the film employs with visual elements that produce a social affect—the narrow city walkways; the filming on rooftops, which gives a sense of openness and power; references to music from beloved Indian cinema; the tilt of the camera; and filming through iron bars. These filmic effects quietly illuminate as the voices, which shape the film’s ethical core, take over.

While documentary films can be ponderous social justice interventions, Night Fairies is, like its protagonists, feisty and diffuses the victimology of many sex worker narratives. “I Am That Woman” is one drama performed by Komol Gandhar that features a generic poor woman, representative of several historical eras, subject to male desire whose work is the mainstay of her family. Her sexual labor protects and provides for her family. This “twist” in the drama highlights the reality and cultural place of women in the society:

And you, all of you have done me many favours in literature, in poetry in rituals. You have worshipped me as Mother. Celebrated me as nature. Then having painted my lips, you left me on the streets as the “fallen” woman. Yes, I am that woman.

Sexual labor

Throughout the film, Ghosh comments on the movies she grew up with and their explorations of love. At one point, she and Mukherjee sing the famous ballad from the 1970s movie of the same name Amar Prem (Immortal Love). She confesses that as a teenager, she and her friends spent many hours imagining what it would be like to “traffic” in sensuality by running a hotel called “Prostitutes Paradise.” Although the lives of these workers may not be paradise, their complex stories are infused with pleasures and the difficult negotiations of sexuality, labor, and citizenship.

Although not using the term sexual economy, Mala Singh deftly characterizes it,

My mother did sex work. She slept with my father to feed and clothe her children. I do exactly the same work but take money in exchange. With that money, I also feed and clothe my children. So how is the sex worker different than the housewife?

Her provocative question complements those by feminists who make transparent the sexual economies in which women everywhere circulate. The hetero-normative marketplace in which sex is exchanged for other resources and in which women’s sexual activities are not private, but publicly monitored, impacts their sexual currency, which is dependent on their perceived chastity and other variables such as competition, variety, and supply. Understanding such sexual economies should govern engagement with this text because it exposes a way to discuss sexual intimacy in economic terms.

At stake in the film and the broader global context is the ideology of labor—who decides if and what rights workers have—workers, the state, religious communities, “good” people, the client, or employer? As Uma Mondol argues, “People who produce things using their labour are called labourers. … We produce happiness in the hearts of people.” This “pleasure principle,” or the commodification of sexual satisfaction and happiness reclassifies and clarifies the debate because selling pleasure through film, theater, and other forms is big business. In a 2007 article, the DMSC argued,

Now is the time for a vigorous mass movement demanding the Right to Leisure/Pleasure/Play/Entertainment for all the people and, for safeguarding and enhancing the social, legal, labour and human rights of all the entertainment workers of our country and of the whole world. (quoted in Augustín, 2008: 83)

Mondol argues that the pleasure these workers produce has value and should be recognized as dignified work. DMSC works to intervene in the behaviors of those in stigmatized and discredited professions as well as re-conceptualizing the discourse on sex work from the margins to mainstream public policy discussions.

As Ghosh admits in a voice-over,

Nitai was never meant to be in my film because I set out to tell stories of women sex workers. But he always showed up, inevitably on the margins of my frame. Sabeena, [the camera person,] said I could no longer ignore him, so he walked into my film.

Nitai’s tale helps the reconceptualization process by bringing together several important themes in Ghosh’s narrative: the in-between space of sex work and sex workers, the notion of a workplace, and storytelling through performance. As Nitai says,

Our situation is different from the women because we have no fixed place of work. We work at the railway station or inside a cinema hall … sometimes in hotels, sometimes in different spaces. Our work has to be clandestine … so that no one knows.

Here, the physical space of labor—streets, doorways, unfixed places—bespeaks of organizing for dignified workplaces. Nitai is treated in the same way the other workers are, and other than his analysis about his space of work, not much is made of his status as male, until he makes it a key point of consideration:

Some of us have joined this life out of choice, others out of compulsion. Most of us are here because of poverty. Our situation is most vulnerable [because] we are neither here nor there. I have long hair and long nails. I am feminine in my behavior. Who will offer us jobs?

Nitai’s gender performance and sexual expression put him beyond normative sexuality; he is in between Ram and Sita’s story. However, his emphasis on poverty closely aligns him with the other sex workers, since these women are the disproportionate number of poor, undocumented, and migrant laborers who may engage in sexual labor (Kempadoo, 2005/2012: x). The range of reasons for pursuing sex work is often lost to larger political and economic narratives that conflate it with slavery and criminality (Democracy Now, 2012).

Agency, action, and storytelling

The discourse on human trafficking while normally about illegally moving bodies across international borders for forced labor—sexual or otherwise—here is about internal migrations. As Jacqueline Bhabha (2012) observes, the three principal elements of human trafficking are as follows: movement, recruiting, transporting, and/or harboring of a person; exploitation; and “some element of lack of freedom or coercion.” Bhabha emphasizes that trafficking is a “continuum of situations that go from relatively free to relatively forced migration” (Solomon, 2012). Kempadoo (2005/2012) argues that three privileged narratives emerge in human trafficking discourse: abolition (tied to anti-prostitution policies), criminal justice (fighting transnational crimes and connected through various treaties and United Nations (UN) protocols), and transnational feminist (emphasizes connections among all poor migrant women) (pp. xi–xviii). These narratives overlap and highlight the complexities embedded in discussing sexual labor.

As demonstrated in the film, these women and man exercise their capacity to intervene in the lives of other sex workers through peer education and an HIV/AIDS hotline. In addition to empowering each other, these protagonists highlight their interventions in the larger social order—from the debate over sex work that opens the film to advocating for the sex workers carnival. Fighting violence (bomb threats, police raids, brutal pimps, and madams), health risks, and the prevailing idea that “whores can’t be raped,” the six characters in Ghosh’s film make concrete that it is their lives and dignity that are at stake. These workers effectively convey that work should not be stigmatized and credit the egalitarian DMSC process as the reason they have voice. Their ability to make personal, political, and economic interventions achieve varying degrees of success.

Mala Singh’s hatred for the police began when she was 9 years old and a drunken policeman brutalized her. Her opportunity to “thrash” the police came when they staged a raid and beat up sex workers. The victimized women called Singh, and she took them to the hospital and filled out the necessary paperwork. The next day, armed with their documentation, Singh and the women filed a complaint. The police wanted it withdrawn to save the accused officers’ reputation ! The women refused. That day, Singh was able to negotiate and receive in writing assurances that the police would no longer conduct unannounced raids, harass clientele, nor enter Sonagachi until 9:00 a.m. Singh contends that retaliating with “pen and paper is better than muscle power. We have been abused by ‘the tyranny of paper,’ but not anymore.”

In her valuable book on sex work in the Caribbean, Kamala Kempadoo (2004) defines two aspects of agency—resistance and rebellion. The primary distinction she makes between the two is the notion of visibility, which “seeks to dislodge the prevailing system … [and which establish] alternative forms of knowledge and counter-discourses” (pp. 192, 197). Through personal stories, this film does precisely this—it highlights that these workers are not victims even if their original entrance into “the line” may have been coerced. Instead, they speak of their triumphs: fieldwork to garner peer support for forming a union, speaking internationally, and controlling their resources. Their stories highlight a range of subjectivities, experiences, and interests, which cannot reduce them to their work alone. As Singh notes, “It is from recognizing that we should live like human beings and not under the weight of shame like our predecessors that our struggle began.” The stories of Komol Gandhar and the DMSC move forward as those highlighted in the film continue to reconceptualize the place of sex worker citizens in Indian society. These stories remain necessary and continue to transform Indian society as the efforts by these activists have halved new HIV infection rates in the last 10 years. As recently as Summer 2012, the United States denied visas to HIV-positive sex workers barring them from attending the international HIV/AIDS conference. Once again, Calcutta sex workers rallied by providing an alternative space for these workers to collaborate and celebrate during a 6-day “Freedom Festival,” which emphasized “the right to move, work, have access to healthcare, participate, organise, be free of violence and discrimination” (Mail & Guardian, 2012).