/REPEAT/RIGHTS-INDIA: Sex Workers Find Self-Esteem on Stage

By Sujoy Dhar Reprint | | Print |

Sujoy Dhar

KOLKATA, India, Apr 13 2001 (IPS) - Every evening, Kalyani puts on cheap, garish make-up and waits for her clients in a dingy locality of this eastern Indian port city formerly known as Calcutta.

A round of haggling for price follows after the men arrive and she retires into a tiny room with the highest bidder.

A commercial sex worker in Kolkata’s main red-light district, Kalyani never imagined that she could one day discover self-esteem.

But life suddenly took on a different meaning for this over 30- year-old woman when she was chosen by the city’s most prestigious theatre group to perform on stage.

Kalyani is among some 35 sex workers performing a Bengali language play inspired by Bertolt Brecht’s ‘Good Woman of Setzuan’.

“We never imagined our voices would be heard by respectable people. When I communicate with so many people outside this area where we stay as social outcasts, I feel satisfaction of a different kind,” says Kalyani.

She plays a lead role in the play ‘Bhalo Manush Noi Go Mora’ (We Are Not Good People).

Groomed by noted Bengali theatre personalities like Swatilekha Sengupta and her more famous playwright husband Rudraprasad Sengupta of Nandikar Theatre Group, the sex workers are now staging three plays with themes dealing with their real lives.

“We have a strenuous schedule everyday. We have to go back to our trade during the night and often have to satisfy stubborn clients at odd hours out of compulsion,” says Kalyani.

“So finding time for rehearsal is often difficult. But I still manage and now I perhaps cannot live without the adulation of the audience,” she adds.

She fondly remembers the thunderous applause she got during her last show at a prestigious city auditorium.

She says she keeps thinking about her dialogues even while working in the brothel at nights.

“After the show we need rest. But then its an impossible dream,” says Says Margina Khatun, another sex worker who is part of the theatre group.

Khatun, who lives in the main red-light district of Sonagachi, says the women have little choice. “After all we cannot really earn a living from theatre,” she says.

Sankari Pal who has been a sex worker for many years, says she has taken part in theatre shows in the Indian capital.

“The earnings are small, but the contentment more than makes up for it,” she says.

Pal, who plays the Hindu Goddess Laxmi who descends on earth to seek a good human being, is also an active member of a sex workers’ cultural body.

It was not easy for the organisers to groom the women to take up life on the stage.

“They are not professionals. Neither do we expect from them the skills of seasoned artists. But they are very alive on stage. And the fact that they derive happiness from the performances, makes us happy,” says playwright Rudraprasad Sengupta.

According to Debshankar Halder, who actually trained the women to face the audience, the sex workers were good learners.

Debshankar and Swatilekha Sengupta made several rounds of the city’s brothels two years ago, after they conceived the idea of using the women as artistes.

“What marveled us is their genuineness. Now they can communicate emotions very well. Initially they found it hard to memorise the dialogues and many of them being unlettered, it was more difficult,” says Haldar.

Some 12 shows of Bhalo Manush Noi Go Mora have been staged so far and the public response was “very good,” he says.

“Theatre goers often come to watch the plays by sex workers with a sort of condescending attitude and pity for them. But they were surprised when the girls performed so well,” says Haldar.

The organisers try to ensure that the women also get part of the proceeds of the ticket sales.

The women performed the three plays at an international meeting here in March of some 5,000 sex workers from several countries.

Kolkata’s sex workers have been slowly emerging from their isolation since the launch of an HIV education programme in Sonagachi in April 1992.

Many women in the brothels have become educators and health workers under the programme. In the process, they have discovered self- respect.

The sex workers of the city set up their own organisation called Durbar Mahila Samanayay Committee in July 1995, which now has 40,000 members.

They are now using their collective strength to demand legalisation of their trade and workers’ rights.