THE CITY’S RED LIGHTS: MUMBAI’S BOOMTOWN OF MIGRANT LABORERS

       Svati P. Shah

       ISSUE 4.3 (2008)

I walked over to sit with Subha, my main contact at a public labor market, known as a naka, in Mumbai, India. Subha was one of the women who moved freely between the clusters of men and women in the space. She was known by everyone, and had been extremely generous to me with her conversation and time. She would say with pride, “No one will even look at you wrongly, because they know I’m here right behind you. They’re all afraid of me.” When I would ask why they were afraid, she would smile and say simply, “They just are.” After I had been going to the naka for a few weeks, various men began to ask me, “So, has Subha told you yet that she’s a prostitute?”

I had been talking that day with Subha about other areas in the city where women use public spaces, a city street, or the red-light area, to find clients. Almost all of those women said they go looking for construction work from their local manual laborers’ naka in the morning, but they also said, “If we don’t find work there, we come here,” adding, “Pet ki liye karna pad ta hai.” (It has to be done for the stomach.) I asked Subha what she thought about this “pet ki liye” (for the stomach) argument for doing sex work. She replied to me by saying, “Hahn, izzat le kar ghar ka undar bayt satke hai, laykin . . .” (Yes, for honor a person could sit in their house) but . . .” she trailed off, and would not speak about it further.

This article is part of a larger research project that examines the relationship between migration and sex work in India, focusing on the city of Mumbai. In poor migrant communities throughout the city, I talked with women who earned their livelihoods as day-wage laborers in the construction industry, as sex workers, or both. Most of the women were heads of their own households, and were either sole earners for their families or contributed along with their children. No matter how long they had lived in Mumbai, class and caste markers meant that these women and their families had been relegated to a semipermanent migrant status in the city, a status which, in this case, includes living in the vast slums of Sanjay Gandhi National Park at Mumbai’s northern edge. This status of “permanent migrancy” has serious consequences for securing housing, food, access to safe drinking water, and education.

As a researcher I was looking for the untold story, the story that no one else was talking about. I found this in the numbers that India’s National AIDS Control Organization (NACO) reported on the levels of brothel- and non-brothel-based sex work. According to NCO, an estimated 30 percent of prostitution in India is brothel-based. The rest, 70 percent, was non-brothel-based. This was the first reason I chose to focus on migrant women who do sex work, rather than focusing on full-time sex workers who are migrants. Seventy percent is a big untold story.

While Mumbai is iconic for prostitution in many ways—its red-light district is considered to be the largest concentrated red-light area in India, if not Asia—it has no large-scale sex workers’ rights organization. There are, however, several prominent anti-prostitution and anti-trafficking organizations in Mumbai. The reasons for this are still speculative, ranging from the amount of money said to pass through the various rungs of the red-light district’s hierarchy, to the high turnover of women entering and leaving Mumbai’s red-light district. In formulating the research for my project, the absence of a sex worker-led organization in Mumbai was a sign of more untold stories.

Eventually, the research project that emerged was as much about the growth of Mumbai as it was about the migrants, and sex workers, who built it. Understanding nakas was the key to all of this. Nakas formed at street corners and railway stations, and served as key meetings points for migrants, and a source of manual labor for the entire city. Both men and women provided this labor and, inevitably, competed with each other for day-wage jobs. Unlike the construction boom of the mid-1990s, when naka labor was used for large-scale construction work, today migrated communities typically use the nakas to look for short-term “contracts” for manual labor. Trade unionists and migrant workers’ advocates in Mumbai estimate that some 300,000 people look for paid work from one of the dozens of nakas throughout the city each morning, in order to solicit work for that day’s income.

According to construction and NGO workers, and union organizers, the day-wage construction and repair work in Mumbai available from the nakas is usually paid in the range of Rs100 (100 rupees, or around two dollars) per day for women, and Rs125–Rs150 for men. Workers at the Mumbai naka described here reported needing at least Rs2,000 per month, or roughly Rs66 per day. To earn this basic minimum salary, women working as sole earners in their households would need to secure twenty working days in a month; most women reported having eight to ten days of paid construction work per month. Although the provisional reason for the discrepancy between men and women’s pay rates, given by almost everyone involved in the naka, is that “skilled” labor earns higher wages than “unskilled” labor, it is clear that a woman would never be considered a skilled worker, no matter how long she had been working in the industry. Instead, women were almost always identified with begari (helpers) work, a job that includes doing much of the heavy lifting on a construction site.

Some one hundred to 200 people passed through one naka in a northern city suburb each morning. Located on a street corner in front of a pharmacy, the naka was practically part of the street itself. The naka was the community’s daily gathering space, with knots of people listening to someone reading out a newspaper story, drinking tea, and chatting. The naka was also one of the few spaces where members of the poor, Dalit (lower caste) migrant community could gather in large numbers in a public space without fear of having to answer to the police or a passing stranger. To sit around with one’s friends was not seen as wasting time, since it could lead to paid work.

Most nakas are empty and disbanded by eleven in the morning, turning back into street corners, train stations, and roadways, until they become vibrant public labor markets again the next day. By eleven, most workers have either found jobs or gone home. At the suburban naka I mention here, the gendered geography of the space becomes even clearer after the crowd thins, with dozens of men and women sitting in groups next to one another, but generally not mixing too much. While it is not uncommon for women to sit and talk in the men’s space, and vice versa, it is noticeable when this happens because only a few women do this with any ease or entitlement. For the most part, the women sit apart, interacting with each other and the one or two men who enter their section. All of the interactions, regardless of gender, convey the familiar and close-knit feel of this community. The viability of a kind of “double language” to discuss any form of paid sex or sex trade at the naka emerged through conversations like the one I initially described with Subha. I had many conversations in which the solicitation of paid sex was simultaneously affirmed and negated, the negations mediated by the need to protect against the police and against the loss of social standing in a relatively interdependent community.

For some, Subha’s identification as a sex worker was a foregone conclusion, one that she both maintained and denied by her refusal to discuss it further. To be sure, all the women at the construction workers’ naka were not necessarily read as sex workers. However, for women at the naka, having proximity to large groups of men, being unchaperoned by a family member in a public area, and visibly using public space to seek out paid work are all necessary to be hired for a day job by a contractor. These are also signs of transgression of gendered norms of propriety for these communities, and fulfill the current legal definition of solicitation for sex under the Immoral Trafficking Prevention Act’s (ITPA’s) current anti-solicitation clause. (ITPA is the main law that governs sex work in India. The exchange of sex and money is not specifically illegal under the law, but everything around this exchange, e.g. “living off of the earning of a sex worker,” is. The law is currently under scrutiny in a highly controversial debate about how it should be amended.)

The language was more direct when accusations of prostitution were levied at members of caste or tribal communities who were deemed “other” by the dominant Mahar Navbuddho community at this particular naka. When I asked another woman worker whether she thought there was any kind of prostitution happening from the naka, she replied easily, “It’s those tribals, look at them! They are always doing such things. And they only ask for fifty rupees for a whole day’s work! Who else will work for so little?” She carried on in her screed against communities undercutting each other’s wages at the naka, leaving the question of prostitution far behind.

South of this suburban naka, several areas of Mumbai are used as spaces where women solicit clients for sex. One set of side streets next to a major commuter railway station has been targeted by local NGOs for HIV/AIDS outreach. Arriving in the area at around noon, I realized that I had begun to think of it as “the other naka.” The striking difference between the construction workers’ naka and this one was that, while at the construction workers’ naka the women all sat almost huddled together, both to avoid harassment and to make themselves more visible to contractors, women on this side street never congregated, even for a few minutes, without facing harassment from the local police. The only place we could sit and talk was at the local tea shop, where the worst harassment was the stares of the other clientele. I stood next to Uma to invite her to sit for a bit. A man approached her and whispered something in her direction. I heard her say “panas” (“fifty”) before he walked away.

Once at the tea shop, Uma said, laughing ironically, “All we have is majboori, (a compulsion, of necessity) and we say fifty rupees, and maybe they’ll wear a condom, maybe they won’t.”

I said, “You all usually say ‘If we don’t get work on the naka, then we come here for this work.’ Why is that? Do you like [construction] work better than this?”

“Hahn,” (Yes), she replied, as though it were obvious. “That’s mehenat (physical labor).” She raised her arms at right angles on either side of her body, imitating the motion that women do as they lift pans of wet cement and rocks onto their heads at construction sites. “This?” she said, motioning at the street behind her. “What’s this? Sometimes you get a good man, sometimes a bad man, sometimes there’s no work here at all, sometimes they refuse to wear a condom . . .”

She began speaking again about the police, about the one who was transferred to their area some three months before, whose harassment of street-based sex workers at his previous posting was legendary. “Once he chased us down the road with his scooter, nearly ran me over. Another time, we ran so hard, I thought that budhi aurat (old woman) was going to die for sure she was breathing so hard.” She went on to describe a woman whom he had beaten with his nightstick so badly that she couldn’t get out of bed for two days. “Usko puchhna chahiye, humne kra galti kiya hai? Pet ki liye karte hai.”

(“Someone should ask him, what wrong have we done? We’re doing it for the stomach.”) When I asked the chief inspector at the local police station about the beatings and the chasings, he said “Who can tell who is a good woman and who is a bad one? This is a family area. There’s a movie theater on that street that families like to come to. We have to keep the street safe for them.”

Uma’s expressed preference for doing construction work instead of earning money through sex is in keeping with the objective expectations raised by advocates for the abolition of prostitution. Rather than relating a story which complies with the idea of prostitution as inherently violent and a loss of bodily integrity, as per the iconic story of prostitution-as-trafficking, Uma located the main source of violence as police harassment, and the greatest hazard to her own safety in clients who refuse to wear condoms, making mehenat (physical labor) better than paid sex, which is implicitly deemed as something other than hard labor.

Female migrant workers in Mumbai’s day-wage labor markets, like nearly all informal sector workers, move between different kinds of paid work. In addition to selling sex, women sometimes trade sexual services for paid work. Although the legal and public debate on migrants and prostitution has thus far been kept separate, the growing governmental trend toward conflating migration, prostitution, and human trafficking in the bodies of poor female migrants may throw nakas and migrant workers into the debate. As untold stories go, this one, too, must unfold into public view, as the sex workers’ rights movement in India continues to make its mark domestically and internationally.

SVATI P. SHAH is an assistant professor in the department of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She is the author of Street Corner Secrets: Sex, Work and Migration in the City of Mumbai. She has worked with queer, sex worker, feminist, and secularist grassroots organizations in the United States and in India.