Abstract
The book, edited by Ruchira Gupta, brings forth writings by some of India’s canonical figures on women in prostitution, including writers such as Kamala Das, Baburao Bagul, Sadat Hasan Manto, Ismat Chughtai, Premchand and Amrita Pritam. The book is a collection of 21 stories, including 19 translations from Bengali, Marathi, Konkani, Urdu, Kannada, Hindi, Assamese, Malayalam, Tamil, Odia and Punjabi. The chapters bring to view the lives of ‘prostituted women’ from a wide range of historical and contemporary contexts, including undivided British India, India’s partition and the independent developing India, and their conditions through these ruptures of time. Although the stories are set in different historical time periods, geographical locations and cultural settings, they allow the reader to understand the lives of women in prostitution across the time frame in a very lucid way.
In the ‘Introduction’, Gupta uses the term ‘prostituted woman’ rather than ‘sex worker’ in the book. She argues that the term ‘sex worker’ fails to capture the complexities of the lives of women in prostitution, and the term rather normalizes prostitution by categorizing it as work. Gupta argues against viewing ‘sex as work’ in the Indian context, highlighting the existence of brutal violence and force involved in bringing women into prostitution. Nevertheless, while Gupta wishes to create a monolithic and homogeneous narrative of violence, abuse and force from every woman protagonist’s life, yet the collection of stories betrays this attempt of the editor, encouraging the readers to engage with each character, their social locations and their life circumstances in a nuanced manner.
Each story uniquely maps how intersectional matrices of gender, caste hierarchy and poverty play out in the lives of the characters. The ‘prostituted women’ in this anthology largely come from lower rungs of the caste hierarchy. Heeng Kochuri by Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay narrates the bond of affection between a lower caste ‘prostituted woman’, Kusum, and a gluttonous Brahmin boy who loves to eat the heeng (asafoetida) flavored kachuris (fried Indian snack), which she purchases for him. Kusum struggles to explain to him why she maintains the strict codes of inter-caste dining which forbid her from giving him water or cooked food, lest he gets polluted by her. When they meet after 30 years, she still remembers him as the Brahmin boy and gets heeng kachuris for him, maintaining the codes of inter-caste dining.
The anthology also captures the complexities of sexuality and motherhood in sex work. Many sex workers in India have challenged the stigma attached to them with the identity of being a ‘mother’. In Manisha Kulshreshtha’s Kalindi, the son and mother are protagonists, both dealing with the dilemma of how to approach the subject of the mother’s occupation. In Baburao Bagul’s Woman of the Street, protagonist Girija attempts to suppress her motherly concern for her sick son while soliciting for a customer, and puts on a seductive appearance out of fear that the customer might abandon her and thus ruin her chances of earning money to visit her son.
Gupta argues that each story brings forth the absence of choices in the lives of the protagonists and characters in the stories. Yet, readers will understand that the debate about choice and agency in sex work is as complex as each of the characters and protagonists of the stories and much more complicated than Gupta contends it to be. For instance, in Premchand’s The Murder of Honour, the protagonist Zubeida, seeks revenge on her husband who humiliatingly abuses her for his new found mistress. One morning Zubeida walks out of her house after being beaten up by her husband and his mistress, and three days later her husband sees her sitting atop a ‘whorehouse’. Next morning she hears the news of the mistress being killed by her husband who shoots himself too.
While Gupta argues that all women in sex work are forced into prostitution, the anthology speaks otherwise. We come across various women characters whose entry routes into sex work are diverse; while some characters are deceived and sold into sexual commerce, some characters enter sex work on their own amidst certain conditions in their lives. Therefore an uncomplicated blanket assumption that all women are forced into sex work neither does justice to the collection of stories nor to the reality existing in the world. The book would have benefitted from a more engaging dialogue on the idea of ‘agency’ which has shaped the pro-sex work and anti-sex work discourses in India. The anthology is a literary addition to the current literature on sex work in the Indian context. The editor has done a commendable job of selecting each story and compiling an anthology which will be an insightful read for students of gender studies, sexuality studies and literature.