Kolkata prostitutes sell beads, stage play, seek identity

Raising funds at an exhibition stall here, 30-year-old Jennifer from Australia and 50-year-old Nirmala Ghosh from India make an odd pair. Th...

Raising funds at an exhibition stall here, 30-year-old Jennifer from Australia and 50-year-old Nirmala Ghosh from India make an odd pair. The women communicate through signs, as they hardly understand a word of what the other says. But they have a common cause, that people should recognise the rights of sex workers.

‘‘Treat us like human beings is what we are trying to say,’’ says Ghosh, who is part of an eight-member delegation from Sonagachi redlight area in Kolkata. All the members in the team belong to Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee (DMSC), an NGO set up in 1995 by sex workers of the area.

‘‘A group of sex workers from Sonagachi had set up the DMSC. The purpose was to forge a positive identity for themselves as prostitutes and mark out a space to act on their behalf,’’ says Ghosh.

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Her organisation is selling little items made of beads at the AIDS Conference here to raise funds for AIDS-prevention programmes back home. ‘‘We cannot always depend on government funds. We have to do things for ourselves as well,’’ Ghosh says.

Her group feels that the conference, with its 65,000-odd crowd, will definitely teach them to formulate better programmes to check the spread of the disease. Though Sonagachi has an STD intervantion programme and the volunteers of the Kolkata Network of Positive People are working there, the problem, according to Ghosh, are the ‘‘customers’’.

‘‘The customers there don’t want to wear condoms. They just refuse. So, awareness programmes need to be for them as well,’’ she says. ‘‘The DMSC, however, asks its members to insist on condoms because the disease is so scary,’’ she adds.

The group members performed a one-act play on the problems faced by them. The NGO, they say, has provided the women of Sonagachi a platform to represent themselves in conferences like this one.

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In the past three years, the NGO has taken Ghosh to Nepal, as well as Bangladesh. ‘‘There are some people who have gone as far as America,’’ Ghosh says, pointing to her companion, Seema. Travelling to different parts of the world has made them more aware about their rights, she adds.

‘‘Things are different abroad. In India, the term ‘prostitute’ is rarely used to refer to an occupational group of people who earn their livelihood by providing sexual services. Rather, it is used to desribe women, who pose a threat to public health, sexual morality, social stability and civic order,’’ Ghosh says.

‘‘In places like Thailand and Australia, there is no such problem. But we become victims of the tout-police nexus, as the government is not willing to accept our rights,’’ says Seema. DMSC, according to them, has done a lot in this regard. ‘‘We have formed groups to check trafficking of minor girls and also made representations to political leaders,’’ she says, but adds that ‘‘how much of that will work needs to be seen’’.