As Gangubai Kathiawadi continues to splash its white and pastel splendor across the big screen, Kamathipura finds itself in sudden splotlight once again. Once a colourful place unspiring a curious notoriety across the country for its many vices, it stands muted and forlorn today, its prominence dwindling steadily over time.
Manjima Bhattacharjya takes a look at Mumbai’s famous red light area, and its ‘narrative of decline’ through the testimonies of activists who have worked there over the years .
Bombay’s history is closely linked to its geography. Hugging the Arabian Gulf on the western coast of India, this cluster of seven islands originally inhabited by the Kolis, an aboriginal fishing community, was a strategic location for whoever ruled it: indigenous empires (like the Mauryas), Islamic rulers (like the Mughals) and colonizers (the Portuguese and then the British).
In 1661, Charles II of England received the seven islands as part of the dowry of Catherine of Braganza, daughter of the King of Portugal. He leased them to the East India Company in 1668. By the mid-18th century, thanks to its location, Bombay had become an important hub for maritime trade. The next century saw it developing into a buzzing economy, along with educational institutions and colonial administration being extensively set up in the new ‘Bombay Presidency’ along with new kinds of infrastructure to facilitate its economic rise: the railways (India’s first operational railway line was from Bombay to Thane in 1853), the historic Victoria Terminus station, tramways (the first avatar of Mumbai’s local BEST buses), the stock exchange (the Bombay Stock Exchange, set up in 1875, is the oldest stock exchange in Asia), even the famous system of dabbawalas, allegedly devised to bring the British administrators food cooked in their own homes because they found the local cuisine too strong for their palate.
As the nationalist struggle gathered steam in the early 20th century, Bombay became a strong base for the Indian independence movement, with the first session of the Indian National Congress having been held here in 1885. With its business class, textile mills and organized workers, Bombay was also an excellent catchment area for the independence movement to draw on for its financial and human resources.
After Independence, Bombay Presidency was restructured into Bombay State, drawing smaller kingdoms into its fold. The region was a vibrant space for protest, often the centre of various post-Independence movements: Dalit struggles, anti-price rise movements, and the textile mill workers struggles. With the Maharashtra movement in 1970, Bombay became part of the state of Maharashtra. Bombay was renamed Mumbai in 1995 by the regional Shiv Sena party, which came to power three years after the Hindu-Muslim Bombay Riots took place, in which 900 people were killed, most of them Muslims, and the city was left scarred and communalized.
Mumbai is currently India’s ‘commercial capital’, enjoying various epithets – the ‘city of dreams’, ‘maximum city’, ‘Bombay meri jaan’ (my beloved), ‘the city that never sleeps’, mayanagri or ‘city of illusions’. It is the home of Bollywood and Dharavi (the ‘biggest slum in Asia’) and over 20 million people, a city of possibilities and contradictions as billionaires coexist in dense proximity with the homeless and impoverished, their mansions nuzzling scapes of squalor. Hundreds of people migrate to Mumbai every day. Swelling masses of executives and labourers fill up the local trains that bind the greater city together, a scene Suketu Mehta captured in his book Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found. He writes, ‘And at the moment of contact, they do not know if the hand that is reaching for theirs belongs to a Hindu or Muslim or Christian or Brahmin or untouchable or whether you were born in this city or arrived only this morning or whether you live in Malabar Hill or New York or Jogeshwari; whether you’re from Bombay or Mumbai or New York. All they know is that you’re trying to get to the city of gold, and that’s enough. Come on board, they say. We’ll adjust.’
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Like other sea ports, Bombay’s entanglement with sexual commerce started fairly early and was integral to its development as a colonial seaside port. Sailors and soldiers – the usual suspects’ recreational needs had to be served, so the state was obliged to tolerate prostitution, as it fit into the existing ideas of what constituted rest and recreation for men who were away from their homes and families.
The colonial state set about demarcating a set of lanes in the centre of the city (in between the mills and the docks) where prostitution was tolerated – which became the red light area of Kamathipura.
Kamathipura gets its name from the construction workers from the Kamati community in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, who were settled here in the mid 18th century to construct the causeways that linked the seven islands together. By the 19th century the area was turned into a brothel zone for British troops and sailors. While the 1864 Census records show that other areas had more prostitutes than Kamathipura (such as Girgaum), the next few years saw a decline in prostitution in these other areas as there was a simultaneous ‘consolidation’ of the business in Kamathipura, as strategically arranged by the colonial administrators so that it was easier for them to administer and regulate.
From 1880 to 1920 Kamathipura evolved into a busy red light district, where the most ‘exotic women’ would be available, demarcated and stratified along racial lines, including a separate lane (Safed Gully) for European and South East Asian prostitutes. Scholar Ashwini Tambe (2010) documents Kamathipura’s evolution in vivid detail. As Tambe notes, after the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, women from as far as Poland came to work in its brothels, and by the turn of the century Bombay hosted the largest number of European prostitutes in India. Other Kamathipura landmarks included a building known for mujras opposite Congress House (a hub of the independence movement and the newly formed Congress Party) and a road known for the window bars or ‘cages’ from where women would solicit. Acts of violence permeated everyday life in the area even then, as Tambe’s reading of a 1917 trial of the murder of a prostitute named Akootai from Kamathipura reveals.
This demarcation of a brothel zone was linked to the public health regulatory measures taken by the colonial state, the Indian Contagious Diseases Act of 1868 in particular. It was a strategy to control the spread of syphilis which, according to various sources, had taken the lives of more British troops than combat. Kamathipura struggled over decades with different kinds of regulation, oscillating between tolerance and intolerance like a pendulum, changing moral attitudes, political vanguards and waves of national and local sentiment.
This space saw a changing composition of clients, as well as the women themselves. With increasing industrialization, millworkers came to live in the neighbouring areas, thus profiles of clients shifted from troops to mill workers and dock workers, the area located near pockets of male-intensive worker populations.Women in prostitution themselves came from diverse backgrounds: single women, widows, marginalized, single mothers and so on, driven by a variety of pressures – economic compulsions, low earnings, demographic imbalances, rural displacement, urban migration and ‘female impoverishment’.
By segregating prostitutes into one residential area, the state made it easier to carry out compulsory health checks, although evidence shows that these efforts failed miserably. In fact, Tambe shows how laws almost always operated only at a discursive level and did little to actually regulate prostitution on the ground.
Even this far into the 21st century the shadow of public health remained the dominant narrative of the continued existence of Kamathipura – although now the problem had moved from syphilis to HIV/AIDS. Kamathipura has remained the city’s red light area, gaining notoriety in the 21st century as a nodal point for girls trafficked from around South Asia, as well as an epicenter of the HIV/AIDS pandemic. This led to hordes of anti-trafficking and HIV/AIDS-prevention NGOs setting up base in the area, and undertaking programmes focused on service delivery and welfare. The joke goes that you will find as many health workers and researchers in this area as you will sex workers.
The Kamathipura area – a triangular patch bound by Grant Road on one side, the JJ flyover on the other, and Falkland Road along one boundary – was divided into about 14 lanes, historically stratified along sectarian and linguistic lines (Andhra girls in one lane, Nepali girls in another, and so on). Networks of kin and village members brought in a string of women from the same areas. However, the current influx of different kinds of migrants has changed the demographic composition of the area. Today, Kamathipura is enveloped in a narrative of decline, the details of which we shall go into later. Estimated to have over 100,000 women in prostitution in the 1980s, the numbers dwindled rapidly in the coming decades. The Bombay Municipal Corporation recorded 50,000 prostitutes in 1992, and by 2009, their records showed only 1,600 ‘prostitutes’ in the area. In 2020, there are reported to be 1,000 ‘commercial sex workers’ remaining in Kamathipura. *****
‘What a picture!’ I marvel, gazing at a black and white print of actor and parliamentarian Sunil Dutt holding out his hand benignly, even a little shyly, as hundreds of women in a smiling swarm reach out to him to tie a rakhi on his wrist, which is already thick with ribbons tied to symbolize a fictive kinship with these ‘sisters’ of Kamathipura.
‘What a man,’ comes the pat reply from veteran photographer Sudharak Olwe, who shot the picture. Olwe has been photographing Kamathipura, the home of a few thousand sex workers and women in prostitution, for almost 25 years now. ‘Sunil Dutt was the only politician who would visit the red light area every year on the festival of Raksha Bandhan, and meet the women with such compassion.’
Olwe’s visits to Mumbai’s red light district began very much as the AIDS machinery of international and local NGOs, state AIDS commissions, and local social work reformists started rumbling to life. It was 1988-89, and the first AIDS case in Kamathipura had come out, keenly followed by a global spotlight, but also by local do-gooders wanting to rescue poor girls in prostitution.
Kamathipura was in its hey-day, notorious and colourful, criminal activities at an all-time high. Rumour had it that every night there would be thousands – literally thousands – of girls standing next to each other in rows on either side of the narrow gullies of the area. Olwe didn’t take pictures in the early years. ‘Taking the camera was a risk at the time, even to your life. They could beat you and take the camera. It was easy to get robbed, a rough area if you weren’t in control.’ Only on public occasions, like World AIDS Day, did the community allow a small group of media-persons entry. Olwe followed some of the NGOs working in the area before beginning to establish a rapport with some of the women and men. By 2001 he had been photographing the lives of the women in sex work regularly, with images selected for various international exhibitions. By 2001, Olwe knew he needed to capture Kamathipura on camera, as he realized that ‘things were changing like anything’.
He was right. In the 2000s Kamathipura became a shadow of itself, with a massive migration of girls from the gullies to far flung suburbs like Ghatkopar and Vikhroli. Having come under the gaze of real estate developers, as well as random raids by the state (sometimes simultaneously, hinting at the power the real estate developers exercised over state institutions), articles began to appear in local tabloids about Kamathipura’s sad state, drugged prostitutes providing services for as low as 20 rupees, HIV-related deaths, as well as ‘communal riots and frequent raids’. Little was said about the changing demographics and the flight of former residents ‘to suburban areas and slums and work out of residences, hotels, lodges, bars and massage parlours’.
Why did they leave? A combination of reasons, wagers Olwe and others who tried to analyse the flight. The real estate mafia had slowly been taking over Mumbai, and had their eyes on the prime space that Kamathipura took up. The girls were paid a lump sum by many landlords to vacate, part of a large amount promised to them by builders looking to buy up the small plots in bulk. Then there was the changing face of the business itself, its transformation from its lively, notorious past to reduced footfall from fear of the AIDS epidemic that had begun to define the area. ‘AIDS awareness killed the profession,’ says Olwe. Tired of NGO professionals coming with AIDS related wisdom and trafficking related rescue operations, police who would loot them all the time, and the exploitative pimps, the girls recognized the wisdom of moving out of the now no longer just infamous but also stigmatized area.
Priti Patkar and Preeti Iyer of the anti-trafficking NGO Prerana recall this phase, ‘Out-migration from here has been high since 2005-2006 in particular. Brothels were shut down for a combination of reasons. They were leased out to small enterprises like bag making, cap making and so on, and the number of raids increased making it financially unviable for some managers of the sex trade. Also, action under Section 18 (closure of brothels) increased from around 2002 in Kamathipura and Falkland Road. All this led to a gradual decline in the number of brothels.’ Moreover the high costs of living in the area made staying unsustainable for the women. Patkar and Iyer note, ‘Bed space alone was around 300 rupees per night, that’s 9,000 rupees per month. So the women had almost nothing left to support themselves. Then there was the police crackdown on brothels. As there was strict vigilance on the sale of minors in the brothels, it was difficult for perpetrators (of trafficking) to make it a profitable business. These contributed to changing the overall model of the way things were done.’
According to Bishakha Datta, director of the NGO Point of View and filmmaker who made a documentary on Kolkata’s sex workers called In the Flesh, ‘Brothels have reduced to 25% of what used to be there because of a combination of what is called “AIDS, raids and trades”. HIV put a certain end, then periods of determined and persistent raids. The area has visibly changed with other industries replacing brothels.’
The composition of girls also saw a change. ‘Nepali girls used to be the highest population there,’ says Olwe. ‘Followed by the Kannadigas. There are very few Nepali girls there now.’ The rest of the girls were also migrants – some from smaller towns and rural areas in Maharashtra, and an increasing number from poverty-stricken areas in West Bengal, and perhaps Bangladesh. According to Patkar and Iyer, ‘women from Andhra Pradesh were trafficked and sold in the brothels of Delhi up north, or to Goa, while Nepali ladies were sent to the Middle East’, leaving what was left of the shrinking red light gullies of the area to another conspicuous ethnic group: Bengalis. Iyer says, ‘Now everything is Bengali – the doctors, the fish (river fish instead of sea fish), vegetables. Parmal sells so much! Every second house is making potol bhaja, fried parmal.’
The clientele changed before Olwe’s eyes too. ‘Earlier there were regular people, college boys, trader class and so on with more money. This was replaced by labourers from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.’ Which means, rates had to come down. Olwe spells out the impact, ‘Before, money used to come easily. Now you have to stand longer, further out on the peripheries, there’s no food sometimes. But then a customer comes, or it is Saturday and Sunday and things begin to look up again.’ Datta says that now that every client has a China Mobile and can easily call the woman to wherever he stays, ‘There’s no need for the woman to be at a place where he can go.’
Larger geo-economic shifts have had their own impacts on footfall, the shift of wholesale markets for onions and potatoes to Vashi and Turbe from central Mumbai, for example, says Datta. ‘This sort of prostitution took place in a certain working class milieu. There were patterns with it being around wholesale markets – labourers would drop the maal and then take a break there before going back. But now the labourers are not even going there, so there is no footfall.’
Olwe says, ‘Money is also an important part of Kamathipura, very, very important. If money’s not there and things are down, I don’t know how it happens but somehow the money always ends up coming! Somebody will come and the evening will be colourful. Someone is going to manage biryani and beer that evening, not only for themselves but others around them also. He will bring business of course, but sometimes local boys will also maaro his pocket – they won’t take his wallet, but only the money inside. I asked [the boys] why. They said, if they don’t take the wallet the fellow cannot prove that his wallet has been taken! Who will believe that only his money has been taken? There is a saying – “Baap se beta bura, Kamathipura”.’ [The son is worse than the father, in Kamathipura.]
Olwe’s hard drive is filled with photos of life in Kamathipura, each with a story of its own. Here are photos of the girl who died of AIDS, at whose funeral the other girls jumped into the water at Banganga for a swim. Here they are, posing with posters of film stars in their little rooms. ‘Salman Khan and before that Sunil Shetty,’ says Olwe. ‘The macho men who can protect them.’
Olwe’s pictures reveal to us the ordinariness of daily life in a red light area. They show Kamathipura as, above all, a residential locality.
Here they are, all dancing in the streets with abandon, celebrating New Year’s Eve. Here they are during the festival of colours (Holi), ecstatic faces streaked with indigo paint. Here they are, all decked up during the Yellamma festival on a full moon night in December, a procession of shiny sarees and flowers. Here is a wedding in progress, of an influential broker in the area, an Indo-Nepali wedding (intermarriages between the two communities being an age-old practice here). Here is a picture of a child whose mother died a few years ago. Another, a half-African child, abandoned by both parents but brought up with love by another family and the apple of the lane’s eye. Here are the rows of Congress posters lining one lane, and posters of Telegu films down 11th street, where the Telegu speaking girls lived.
Fragile relations made up the web of social life in the area, shares Olwe. ‘The girls were not capable of trusting anybody – police, pimp, partner who stayed with the girl. Most girls don’t stay alone, have a “protector” living with them – but many times it is these “protectors” (or at least imagined to be by the girls) who harms her, robs her, makes her pregnant and runs away. It’s a place of extremes.’ He shakes his head. ‘Extreme love or extreme hate. Love so extreme that girls can do anything, slash their wrists at the blink of an eye to show love… You see deaths, fights, women selling their own babies, even at this time for 40,000 rupees. Girls get beaten but they beat also. So much violence. Not many people like to see this. That’s the reason also that people don’t go there,’ Olwe opines. ‘It’s too hard. There is too much of misery.’
But, Olwe continues, ‘It is also vibrant and friendly, there is an acceptance for you whoever you are, the accommodation is there whoever you are, when people get money they share it and are nice to you. First two times you go they will not bother with you much, but third time that cold drink will come to you somehow. Someone will arrange for it quietly even though it costs 40-50 rupees in Kamathipura, and not 10 rupees. One person sitting with you will just order 6 teas for everyone all around. So the warmth is there also.’
Kamathipura is conspicuous for the absence of solidarity and collectives of the women in the profession – unlike in similarly sized red light areas, like Sonagachi in Kolkata. According to Olwe, the Dalit writer Namdeo Dhasal did try to start an organization with brothel owners in the 1980s, but it didn’t take off. The bottom line, repeats Olwe, is that there is no trust from one person to another. ‘People do their work and go. Population is floating and not permanent. Nothing is permanent. You make friends with someone today, she dies tomorrow of HIV. Very few have been living there for generations – those who once lived with their mothers or mothers’ mothers have been replaced by floating girls from smaller towns.’
Also having undergone a transformation seems to be the model of each living unit. Datta observes a shift from the unit of a brothel madam and a few single girls sharing a household to nuclear family units, ‘the women, a dependent partner, children, sometimes an aging mother or sibling’. Datta went to homes on three floors of a brothel during a visit with the staff of a cooperative bank started by an NGO and a sex workers’ community-based organization, and found that the residents all belonged to the same family unit. Datta infers that the lack of a madam must mean that they are managing their own business.
According to Datta, the industrial takeover has been extensive. ‘Even the cages on Falkland Road from where girls used to solicit have been taken over to make steel rods (sariyas).’ Olwe, too, notes that, ‘Whole buildings were bought, small businesses were put in place in Kamathipura – you will find small workshops and factory type of rooms in many places. That’s because Kamathipura runs round the clock – it works 24 hours. Rents are low for businesses. So it has become ideal for some kind of businesses.’
Like many other red light areas, Kamathipura is no longer a full-fledged red light area, although prostitution continues in a few lanes and soliciting is done within its informal boundaries. The city’s expansion and its resultant commuter troubles have also caused collateral damage to Kamathipura’s business. Patkar and Iyer find that more and more, ‘women who were earlier living in the brothels of Kamathipura and Falkand Road, now travel here in the evenings and entertain customers in the night, they are not there during the day. This is what we understand – when we go for outreach we don’t see those women. There are some pick up points in this area from where clients take them to nearby lodging.’
Replacing the red light area is a model in which sex work has reconfigured its bearings, spreading itself out into smaller and scattered sex work geographies across the length of the expanding city. Patkar and Iyer feel the 2005 dance bar ban played a role in accelerating this shift, ‘It was the starting point of various things. Since the closure of bars we have not seen those women. Their income has reduced. On the outskirts of Mumbai it continues. [Now] there are other red light areas in Mumbai […] Sex trade from being concentrated in one visible, prominent area, it got dispersed, which was more feasible given the realities of the time. There may not be future growth in [the] red light area.’
This development is in line with a general feeling, around the world, that this is the beginning of the end of red light areas. The mobile phone and the internet have also meant that physical spaces for clients to ‘pick up’ women are now redundant. In the pre-mobile era, ‘floating sex workers’ used to be the term used for seasonal sex workers who would come into the trade in between agricultural cycles, but now, in many ways, all sex workers are ‘floating’, grounded by their cell phones.
Even if the sex workers themselves did not have access to the internet or weren’t able to navigate it well enough to use it for business leveraging, potential clients could still use the internet to access them. Online forums such as World Sex Guide detail the venues for sexual transactions everywhere, sharing details, forming groups to go on ‘group visits’ with, providing feedback and commentary on certain venues, advising on good deals and catches, and warning against bad ones, as well as exchanging numbers.
Olwe feels that most women in Kamathipura do not have access to the internet, although it isn’t like girls don’t know about the internet. Olwe says the girls are scared of pictures being morphed and put online, and reaching their families. But the mobile is, of course, part of life now, mostly used to listen to music or make calls. ‘They watch songs, videos, you see them with headphones. Not so much for business. For business, they are still on that street level.’ Priti Patkar, however, feels that the impact of technology ‘has been too much. We never imagined it. Mothers (of the kids studying in boarding schools or at the NGO’s shelter home) change SIM cards so fast, within 3 weeks they get a new number. Mobile phones are used by their pimps to monitor women and also the customers to contact women now.’
There is an uneasy coexistence with the police, who usually don’t interrupt business unless an incident happens. At times, Nagpada Police Station is filled with local complaints. ‘Even when a girl is “rescued” I have seen that she comes back,’ Olwe says. ‘These raids are very momentary. They are not there for real change – they won’t give the girls a bank account, a job, or place to live or ration card, which is what the girls need. Even the smallest things we don’t do, so putting them on a train and telling them to go is not going to help.’
He voices a commonly held suspicion in the area that many of the raids, like a recent one on Simplex building that rounded up over 400 people and cleaned out every single resident and visitor, were carried out in connivance with real estate sharks. ‘There must be some kind of “masterplan”. It must be a ruse by builders to vacate the whole building easily,’ says Olwe, in the context of the Simplex raid.
One of the brothels Olwe has documented at length is Bacchubhai Wadi – a building known, in the past, for mujra dances. Bacchubhai Wadi was once reputed to house dancers of high stature from Lucknow, with Nawabi patronage and of striking heights – as tall as 6 and a half to 7 feet, according to legend – who were gradually replaced by girls from dancing tribes in Rajasthan. The area by Bachhubhai Wadi has been converted into high rises, wiping out its colourful past. Even the movie theatres in the area, of which there were many, changed before Olwe’s eyes. From being spaces that had seen glamorous soirees and grand moments of celluloid history, bulldozers reduced them to piles of rubble overnight.
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The above is an excerpt from the chapter “Red Light Histories” of the book Intimate City by Manjima Bhattacharya, published in 2021 by Zubaan Books.
The cover art is by The artist is Sukruti Anah Staneley, and her design for this book recently won Publishing Next Industry Awards 2022 in the category ‘Cover of the Year’.