By Sujoy Dhar
KOLKATA, India, Sep 5 2002 (IPS)

Come Durga Puja, the raucous Indian festival in October dedicated to the ten-armed goddess Durga, and sex workers in this bustling eastern metropolis are in demand not just for the satisfaction of lust but also the dust on their doorsteps.

By age-old custom, the numerous, gaudily painted, clay images of Durga — specially made for the festival and worshipped by devotees before being consigned to the Ganges or other rivers — are never sanctified unless the clay is mixed with dust from the doorsteps of prostitutes.

This season, however, sex workers across West Bengal state, estimated tonumber 60,000, are demanding a price for the dust — their dignity. The ritual, they say, serves to “segregate them from mainstream society and is demeaning”.

All the cajoling of priests and idol makers who insist that the ritual in fact accords respect to prostitutes in that the soil at their feet is being venerated is not making any impression on modern-day sex workers.

“The priests say that when men come to us for sex they leave their virtues at our doorstep and return with the sin. How come you equate sex with a prostitute as sin and that between a man and his wife as virtue? ” asks Sapna Gayen, president of the Durbar Mahila Samanaya Committee (DMSC), the apex forum for sex workers in West Bengal.

“We are in just another profession and consider our work as services,” Sapna, whose name means dream, said, dismissing the patronising, religious claptrap.

“I don’t think we are absorbing the sins of the society when men release their sperm in our bodies. Neither do we think we are offering some virtue. Instead we consider this practice as a symbol of showing indignity to us,” added Sapna. “Why are we being singled out for favours in a religious festival?”

This year, the DMSC has decided that it would not voluntarily part with the precious, ‘merit-laden’ dust at the Durga Puja. “If they take it without our knowledge that is different,” Sapna says.

Officials like Mrinal Kanti Datta, programme director of an anti-HIV/AIDS project in Songachi, reckoned to be Asia’s largest red-light district, are inclined to see the ritual as another piece of social anachronism that must go.

“If practices like ‘sati’ (burning a widow on her husband’s funeral pyre) and human sacrifice can be banned, why not this demeaning practice,” Datta argues.

“They are isolating the sex workers from society in the name of religion,” he adds.

But the priests, clay sculptors and community leaders are disappointed at the new uncooperative attitude of the sex workers.”They are creating an unnecessary fuss over a small matter,” says community festival organiser Dipak Ghosh.

“I think the prostitutes are shown honour by this practice. They are equated with the goddess. There is nothing demeaning,” says a well-known expert in Hindu rituals, Ramapriya Bhattacharjee

“This is not the way to earn dignity which is being denied them by society with or without this ritual,” Ghosh adds.

“We are still waiting for the soil of their doorstep before putting the final paint on the images,” says idol maker Jatin Pal, anxious that his yet buff-coloured idol of Durga with a weapon in each of her 10 hands are ready in time for the festival next month.

Durga Puja is by far West Bengal’s most important festival and a time of accelerated economic activity, with government employees and those working in the private sector expecting large bonuses for the new clothes and expensive festivities.

But the sex workers are adamant. “We won’t allow this to go on anymore. We have requested the idol makers and priests and also asked the shops selling the soil to do away with the practice,” Sapna says.

As part of their campaign, all the 250-odd brothel-based sex districts in the state have refused to grant dust from their doorstep this year.

Used to discrimination, atrocities and indignity for centuries, the sex workers in West Bengal are now vocal on various issues, thanks to their transformation as activists following the AIDS prevention and awareness campaigns.

Far removed from their status as faceless women caught in the vortex of prostitution in disease-prone, dilapidated sex quarters, many of them are now community leaders giving direction to a movement of their sisters in the Asia-Pacific, demanding dignity and recognition of their profession.

“We want the same rights as labourers as we see ourselves us as workers who work with our bodies. These protests against social discrimination are milestones in that movement,” says Putul Singh, a member of DMSC.

At a sex workers’ convention on Mar. 3 last year, the DMSC and other groups declared their intention to observe the day as International Day of Sex Workers and geared up for a long battle for their rights, including the legalisation of prostitution.

Ever since the launch of the HIV/STD Intervention Programme in the red-light district of Sonagachi here in April 1992, oppressed sex workers have begun to assert themselves as complete persons with emotional and material needs and become activists and health workers fighting AIDS.

By July 1995 they had set up the DMSC which has been demanding the legalisation of prostitution, workers’ rights and social dignity.

“They work with their bodies and hence they want workers’ rights,” says Mrinal, who is himself a son of a sex worker.

“If the mainstream society terms prostitution as harmful and denies rights to sex workers, it would be sheer hypocrisy as the labourers engaged in making ‘bidis’ ( cheap hand-rolled cigarettes) or country liquor are also manufacturing something that is harmful to the people’s health and yet recognised as workers with trade union rights,” he argues.

Smarajit Jana, former director of the HIV/AIDS programme and the man behind the social awakening of sex workers in Kolkata, says prostitution should be seen as a profession since sex workers fulfill a social need.

“Under the patriarchal system there is always a need for sexual services outside the family and hence prostitution will always be there. If sex workers are armed with trade union rights, they can articulate their problems and avail of government schemes for themselves and their children,” Jana said.

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