Eventually she fought back. ““A few other girls stood by me,’’ she says. ““We picked up kitchen knives.’’ The hoodlums laid siege to the house with rocks and bottles. Customers couldn’t go in, and the girls couldn’t leave. ““We went without food for days,’’ says Biswas. ““We didn’t give up. One day we managed to catch hold of their gang leader and beat him up until he begged for mercy.’’ After that, the tough guys kept their distance from Biswas and her friends.
It was one of the opening skirmishes in a full-fledged revolution. Since that incident, more than a decade ago, Biswas and thousands of women like her have begun reclaiming their lives and their dignity, both individually and collectively. Pimps and street-corner thugs have learned to speak respectfully to Sonagachi’s 5,000 or so women, commonly addressing them as didi (older sister). Government officials and the local media now routinely use the neutral term ““sex workers’’ in place of ruder words.
Four years ago the women of Sonagachi created Calcutta’s first cooperative of sex workers. The group’s immediate aim is to protect members’ rights–an effort that someday could ease the burdens that have kept many women trapped in the profession and in poverty. Even now the members are making and selling handicrafts in stalls run by the cooperative at local fairs. As sex workers the women earn between $1.50 and $20 a day. Nowadays many of them keep 50 percent or more for themselves. Before the sex workers organized, the madams routinely took half their earnings, and the pimps took half of the remainder. ““We now have branches in almost all the towns and cities in the state,’’ says Sadhana Mukherjee, one of Biswas’s friends and fellow members. ““There are more than 30,000 sex workers in our organization, and the number is growing. Today we sit across the table from public officials and discuss our health and welfare.’’ They have plenty to discuss: for one thing, prostitution is still against the law in India, although the country has an estimated 200,000 sex workers.
Mainstream feminists speak admiringly of the Sonagachi movement, but the two groups pursue separate agendas. In fact many activist sex workers credit much of their success to a male. Seven years ago the World Health Organization, needing solid numbers on the spread of AIDS in Sonagachi, sought help from the state-run All-India Institute of Hygiene and Public Health in Calcutta. The institute assigned the study to Dr. Smarajit Jana. The soft-spoken epidemiologist finished his report in three months–and decided to stay in the district. He could not shake the violence, the squalor and the exploitation he had seen. But what haunted him most was the sense of loss. ““Almost all these women wanted to be mothers,’’ he says. ““Many of them had turned infertile because of repeated abortions and various sexually transmitted diseases. When I told them they could never be mothers, many of them broke down and cried for hours.''
Jana began his Sonagachi Project as a medical clinic occupying a single rented room. Now funded by the British government, it has expanded to 12 clinics and education centers employing 200 sex workers, both active and retired, as teachers, nurses’ aides and social workers. No one knows exactly how many thousands of lives the project has saved. When Jana began his work in the district in 1992, only 3 percent of the women said their customers wore condoms. Now the figure is above 90 percent. That’s one reason the incidence of HIV among Sonagachi’s sex workers has been kept down to roughly 5 percent–compared, for example, with the brothels of Mumbai (Bombay), where the rate exceeds 45 percent.
A sense of mission animates the women who wear the project’s trademark green smock over their saris. They are now constructing a four-story women’s center for themselves. It will house a modern health clinic, a child-care facility and classrooms where sex workers can learn other work such as tailoring.
On a cool morning, Biswas is out distributing condoms in the company of two friends: Sadhana Mukherjee, 39, and Gita De, 25. Mukherjee says she arrived in Sonagachi as a teenager, too scared and ashamed to go home after being raped. De’s family married her off at 12. She says the man deserted her and their baby daughter two years later. Eventually De left the baby with her mother and landed in Sonagachi–with the help of a woman who sold her to a madam for $20.
All three women are building new lives. Mukherjee has visited San Francisco, Manila and Bangkok, helping spread the word about AIDS prevention and sex workers’ rights. De has joined a local theater group. Biswas has learned to read and write and is now teaching those skills. The women remember in disbelief what their lives used to be like. ““It seemed like an unending nightmare,’’ says Biswas. ““It also seems as if it was many, many years ago.’’ Not enough yet, of course. But getting there.
