A report on a book discussion held at the India International Centre on May 24, 2016, with Indu Agnihotri, CWDS, in the chair and Vidhu Varma (JNU), Kusha Tiwari (Shyam Lal College) and Baran Faoorqi (JMI) in the panel.
Prostitution is about the only job in the world in which you earn the most on your first day. As the days pass, your income declines before you finally burn out within 10–15, or if you are lucky, twenty years. Prostitution consumes your body, destroying it with the abuse, insecurity and poverty that often comes with it. The bouquet of three books under discussion approaches the subject of prostitution from multiple angles. A statement that emerges with tremendous force from these three books could be, ‘Prostitution is a choice where there is no choice.’
Apne Aap Women Worlwide, an organization which works against sex trafficking and endeavours to rescue women from the exploitative institution of prostitution, has Ruchira Gupta as its founder president. Ruchira is a writer, feminist campaigner, and Professor in New York University. She has edited The River of Flesh and Other Stories: The Prostituted Woman in Indian Short Fiction (2014). She has also edited and introduced the Gloria Steinem Reader As If Women Matter. The Essential Gloria Steinem Reader (2014). The third book, Prem Nagar:Town of Love (2013), is by Ann Ch. Ostby.
Prem Nagar is a novel about the Nat women of Forbesganj, Bihar. This is a community in which women are automatically turned into prostitutes to earn a living for the rest of the family as soon as they become (barely) old enough to sustain intercourse. It highlights the predicament, the misery inherent in the act of being a prostitute and also tries to show a way out of the trap of this abusive business of the body through education and social awareness and tact. Though the book is about a certain community, it serves to illustrate very well the argument put forth in the other two books as well.
Heena didn’t bring very much with her when she arrived at Tamanna’s door—a mattress, a blanket so threadbare it was nearly transparent, a tiny metal box containing a comb and a few medications, a packet of tea, a set of extra clothes. These were the wages of thirty long years of service under her brother’s roof, of thousands of men lying in the same bed, year after year. She had let it happen, stared up the ceiling, repeating the same mantra to herself over and over again. Open up, steady breathing, let him finish.
As the case is, it is not just a ‘surrendering of the body’, ‘opening up’ and ‘letting him finish’ that happens every time. It is the killing of the spirit and the complete disregard of the self, not to talk of the violence and abuse to which their bodies are subjected, in exchange for a few pieces of silver. One of the stories in the River of Flesh titled ‘Kalindi’ showcases the life of a woman who models in the nude at a prestigious art school and how the fine distinction of nudity of the human body as something to be observed with the artist’s eye with a view to understanding life forms needs to be understood as opposed to the voyeurist’s lustful, aggresive and violative gaze. The woman lives in a redlight area, and her son, who goes to an English medium school for his studies, gets to play with the children of the women of the surrounding brothels. As such, he soon gets a sense of words like ‘customer’, which to his childish mind suggested meanings like ‘vampire’, someone kids were supposed to steer clear of, for were he (the customer) not to come, they would have to go without roti or vegetables that day. This woman, however, makes her son go hungry the day he asks her what a ‘customer’ is.
But that’s not all. Much after the son has grown up and walked out on his mother, post his coming to know that she models in the nude, the author allows us the following thoughts passing through the woman’s mind: I don’t know if I was wrong to hide things from him but I did certainly strive more than my mother ever did. If a ‘customer’ [quotation marks mine] arrived after we returned from school she would simply say, ‘Deepu, Laali, get under the bed.’ Crouched there, we would finish our homework.
I could see all sorts of marks on my mother’s body. Ash-grey marks from lit cigarettes, purple and blue bruises—they would frighten me very much. I was very angry with my mother. Why couldn’t she wash dishes or take up a job cleaning houses? Why did she allow herself to be trampled upon by men for a few rupees? She had even begun to hope that I would follow suit…. I didnt want to become a prostitute, cheap or expensive. I ran away with a taxi driver. He spoke of undying love…. One day he cast me out, an unborn child [the son who now hates her] in my womb.
The part which agonized me most in the story is about the children crouching under the bed while the mother gets ‘trampled upon’ and bruised black and blue by the ‘customers’. ‘Kalindi’ and twenty other stories, translated from twelve different languages, tell heart-breaking, but stimulating tales of women’s defeats, their losses and their enduring strength and humanness.
Gloria Steinem’s As If Women Matter comes up with many interesting and thoughtprovoking discussions of women’s bodies and the politics around them. It brings to the table the troubled case of pornography versus erotica, as well as the sordid world of blue film-making. The book provides cogent arguments for claiming that the less gender sensitive a nation/state is, the more likely it is to go to war or create desruction of all kinds in the world. The destruction is not just of the women of the species, but also the environment, culture and much that needs to be preserved for the sake of healthy survival on this earth.
It is well brought out that ‘prostitution is really not a choice, but the absence of choice.’ Hence Ruchira’s choice of calling the women ‘prostituted’ rather than prostitutes. If one were to use the term sex-worker, one may get the state telling you that this is a ‘choice’ that you have; while the word ‘prostituted’ suggests that this has been done to the woman, and the reason for her being a prostitute could be of many varieties.
One wonders whether we have normalized the market with regard to prostitution? Is it alright simply beacuse somebody pays for it? Shouldn’t we de-criminalize the women as well as increase the choices they have had or will ever have? No doubt, the perpetrators of this abusive and meagre paying exploitative trade, the brothel owners, pimps and the Johns need the punishment, not the women.
Baran Farooqi is Professor in the Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. Her areas of interest are Shakespearean drama, Women’s Studies and Translation Studies.