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Iris Murdoch once said, quote, Love is the extremely difficult realization that something
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other than oneself is real.
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I won't pontificate on love here, but I like the phrasing of something other than oneself
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If you've heard recent episodes of the show, you might have heard me musing about our tendency
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to treat all other people like minor characters in a play or props in a scene in which we
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are the star and everyone else is there just to fulfill this function or that role.
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I think about this more and more these days, how reflexive it is to behave like the center
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And while this is something I grapple with at an individual level, where I try to be
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mindful of treating people as actual people.
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This is also something that plays out between groups.
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And indeed, if you look at how men have treated women through the ages, you'll find that
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a lot of it is based on function.
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Women have been forced into different roles and stereotypes, and anything outside of that
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has been treated as surplus to requirement.
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And at one level, the roles women have been pushed into may seem to fall between the extremes
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of those cliches of the whore and the Madonna.
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A book called Intimate City, written by my guest today, shows that in some ways, those
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extremes are not opposites, but even the same thing.
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For example, both sex workers and housewives are assumed to have given their consent away
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once they choose those roles.
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Marital rape is still not considered a crime in India, and lawyers have argued in court
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that the rape of a sex worker cannot be a big deal because, well, they're used to sex
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In a different context, my guest spoke about how at different points in time, quote, life
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outside marriage or prostitution has been impossible for women, stop quote.
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You'll have to listen to this full conversation to hear the full argument.
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But for now, I'll share a third commonality between a sex worker and a housewife, as they
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have typically existed, that they are both instrumental to the needs of the men in their
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Their autonomy, their personal needs and desires, their interior lives don't matter.
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That's all that matters.
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And I think you'll agree with me that to reduce human beings to this is a terrible crime.
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And we do it in many contexts other than this.
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Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics, and behavioral
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Please welcome your host, Amit Barma.
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Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen.
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My guest today is a sociologist, Manjima Bhattacharya, author of a book called Intimate City, which
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I loved and recommend to all of you.
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Intimate City is about the changing face of sex work across the world and in India.
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It looks at how globalization and technology have transformed sex work.
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And I found many things here in common with the way the creator economy has evolved.
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The book also takes a close look at the way in which feminism has evolved in how it looks
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At first, appalled by the objectification and the presumed lack of consent, but later
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accepting that all sex work does not arise out of trafficking and sometimes women exercise
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their agency in choosing sex work over other available ways to make a living.
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At first, I thought this episode would be mainly about this book and perhaps touch on
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Manjima's previous book, Maniquin, which looked at the women who worked in India's
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But as we got talking, I got more and more fascinated by Manjima's journey into feminism,
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activism, sociology, and just by the way her thinking evolved with all the work and the
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So the first half of this episode is about her journey as a feminist.
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And then we talk about the changing face of sex work.
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There are many sharp insights in this conversation.
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And while listening to the edit, I found myself forced to stop and process some of them.
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I think you'll enjoy it as well.
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But before we get there, let's take a quick commercial break.
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But before we get there, let's take a quick commercial break.
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reading. At the end of every day, I understood the world a little better than I did before.
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So if you want to build your reading habit, head on over to CTQ Compounds and check out their daily
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reader. New batches start every month. They also have a great program called Future Stack,
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which helps you stay up to date with ideas, skills, and mental models that will help you
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stay relevant in the future. Future Stack batches start every Saturday. What's more,
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you get a discount of a whopping 2,500 rupees, 2,500 if you use the discount code Unseen.
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So head on over to CTQ Compounds at CTQCompounds.com and use the code Unseen. Uplevel yourself.
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Manjima, welcome to the scene in the Unseen. Thank you, Amit.
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So, you know, before we start, and I've completely been fascinated by the sort of
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work you've done and both your books, Maniquel and Intimate City, particularly Intimate City,
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because in so many ways, the changes that are reflected in that book are changes,
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I think, taking place not just in that industry or not just regarding sexual relations, but
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pretty much all around us in many different ways. But before we get to kind of talking about that,
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I'm keen on knowing more about you. Like, where did you grow up? What was your childhood like?
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This is one of those very difficult questions to answer, as always, and I'm glad you have
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a long interview lined up for it. I grew up in the Middle East, in Kuwait. I was born in a place
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called Digboi in Assam, and it's a really interesting name because they say, the legend goes that
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a British person said Digboi and they dug and they found oil. And so, you know, it was one of those
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oil townships that I was born in. And from there, in the 80s, in 80, actually, there was a flight of
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many engineers when the conflict started in Assam, actually, that a lot of people moved to the
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Middle East because the oil industry there was booming at the time. So, my father was part of
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that flight. And so, I grew up, through the 80s, I lived in Kuwait. And until the first Gulf War,
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1990, which is when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. So, till then, I grew up in Kuwait, a life of
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a quiet life, a very, an expat life, one would say, very conscious of being South Asian. So,
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the South Asian community was really close. I think it was very unusual. I mean, there is
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the universal experience of the NRI, which you see in Jhumpa Lahiri's novels and so on. So, that
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emotional thread was very much there in our lives of being away from home and so on.
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But it was also very distinct because the Gulf is a very different place.
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There is no, a lot of people talk about being from small towns versus being from big cities.
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But in the Middle East or in Kuwait, at least, it wasn't like that. There was no small town and
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there was no big city. There was only one big city, Kuwait city, which is the capital. Otherwise,
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there were small townships, like there were housing societies in a sense, you know,
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localities where you stayed. So, you never felt, you know, there was neither the small town nor
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was there a big city. So, your community was, for us, it was the Bengalis. The Bengalis create a
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cultural society wherever they go. So, the Bengali cultural society was basically, I would say,
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the community that we were part of. And then there was school and it was very, if I were to
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put a color to it, it was a very sandy, sort of a yellow, dusty brown, serene sort of a landscape.
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And then there's the blue of the sea. And it was very, very quiet, almost as quiet as this room,
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even quieter than this room that we're sitting in. And I mean, the only, only the hum of the ACA.
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So, it was a very quiet life and one with a rhythm of its own going to school. And I went
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to an English school and we had, you know, it was sort of you went to play in the desert kind of area.
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We had small sheds where libraries were there. I was chief librarian at age nine or something.
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Yeah, it was quite idyllic in its own way, but very specific to a certain group of people who
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lived in Kuwait in the eighties. I'm sure people who live in Kuwait now would not have the same
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experience. I think the South Asian identity was also very important. Bollywood was a big influence.
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That's how we connected to India. That's how I learned Hindi. I mean, you know, we had in our
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building, there was a culture of video cassette borrowing. So, and there was also a culture of
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really stretching your, you know, whatever you paid. So, if one family hired a video cassette for a
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week, everybody in the building had to watch that because, you know, that's the only way that we
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would be in solidarity with one another. But it was also actually fun. So, that one video would
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traverse every single flat in that building. And so in that, so I've watched all kinds of rubbish
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through the eighties. But it was, it had a function of connecting us to each other and also to connect
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us to back home. The second phase, I would say I was Delhi actually, which is where I went after
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the first Gulf War, then after the invasion. And that was then exciting, you know, you're in your
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teens. This is Delhi, which is Delhi in the nineties, very, this is post-globalization. India,
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you have channels, TV channels of all kinds, and, you know, the really changing landscape.
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But still something about, you know, Delhi doesn't change also still, even in that time.
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So then finished school there. I finished college. I went to, you know, I did my post-grad there,
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etc. And then moved to Bombay in the mid 2000s, 2007. And since then, I've been living here.
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In the middle one, for one year, I lived in Geneva.
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Which is, which was a brief foray into really working with an international organization called
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WILF. It was one of the first women's organizations in the world. 1916, it was started after the first
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world war to sort of make sure women have a seat at the peace negotiations. And it was a,
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it was a really good experience. It was a year in, in WILF's office in Geneva, and where a lot of
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the work was really being at the United Nations office and monitoring all kinds of gender related
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issues. So, have I gone off your question completely because I...
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No, this is lovely. These are the kind of sort of, you've given me many things to double click on,
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and it's kind of lovely for that reason. And I think it's important that you, you know,
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kind of lovely for that reason. And one of them that strikes me is, is that you described these
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specific things about Kuwait, like it was so silent and, you know, the colors sandy and sandy
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slash brown and the sea was blue and all that. And I remembered this scene from, a scene from a film
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I saw in my childhood, Steven Spielberg's Empire of the Sun, where, and I've completely forgotten
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the plot, I've forgotten everything about it. But I remember there's a scene where there's this
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kid at a dining table, I think it's a kid, and the house is being emptied because they're moving away
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and everything is silent, right? There's complete silent on the screen. And then suddenly it becomes
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more silent. And it becomes more silent because I've taken the clock down. So the tick tick which
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you had normalized of the clock, that's gone. And that's when you realize that the clock was there,
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even though it was there earlier, but that's when you notice it. And I'm thinking that these
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these impressions, that therefore that you have of Kuwait, that it was so silent and this was a
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color, are these things that you thought about in retrospect? Because at the time, I'm guessing
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would not have had a frame of reference to compare it with, like the hustle bustle of
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Bombay or, you know, the sounds of Delhi and, you know, those reference points wouldn't have been
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there. And so is this something that you've kind of done looking back? And is that looking back
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something that, you know, you do once in a while, like in the sense that I often think about how
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non-self aware I was at that time. So whatever awareness I have of myself as a person in that
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time, as a boy, almost like you're looking through a prism and you're looking at someone else, right,
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is that awareness was not there in that boy then. It's kind of looking back that you're aware of
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what was going on. So, you know, so when has it come through looking back and when you look back
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at yourself in Kuwait and the texture of your days and what are you doing and all of that,
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what do you feel? It's an interesting question. I'm not sure it's entirely in retrospect.
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I think even at that time, you know, we would come on holiday to India maybe once in two years and
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it was really, it's one of the most obvious sort of experiences, right? Also, I feel
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it's interesting you mentioned the clock because, I mean, I have had to make my dad take off the
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clock in a bedroom when I once went to stay over at their place because the ticking of a clock
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sounds really loud to me. So it was both, I would say. You know, we realized it while growing up
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that this was silent and it was, now I realize it was a luxury, you know, in the context of
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living in Bombay, particularly. So part of it is when you think back and it may be these are the
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things that, you know, these are the cherries on top that you're actually remembering. So you're
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not remembering the other kinds of cacophony or problems that may have been there, but, you know,
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that's the pleasant taste that you want to carry with you that you're actually, you know,
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emulsifying, in a sense, in your mind.
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Well, like the other strand I also want to explore in this is that whole thing of video
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cassettes being passed around. If one family has a video cassette, everyone watches it in a week.
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And that's so, you know, familiar because it was like that for everyone here as well. Obviously,
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there's a scarcity of things, a scarcity of entertainment. You can't, there's no smartphone
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that you can whip out and watch what you want. So, you know, if like Doordarshan would show one
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foreign film a week at 10 p.m. at night or whatever. So, you know, there's this people like to say that
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in which Annie gives it those ones, Pradeep Kishan film, which Arundhati Roy wrote, it aired only
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once on Doordarshan. But the fact is, everybody from my generation saw it that one time that it aired,
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right? Because that was the only thing that you had to look forward to. And now when I look back
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on that, it's interesting. And I don't know if I can put a finger on it. But here's the thing,
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we are obviously shaped by all these influences when we are children. It's the people around us,
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the little communities they might be part of, or we might be part of and so on. And the films we
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watch, the books we read, and so on and so forth. And in those days, a lot of that reading was
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indiscriminate. You read whatever you could get your hands on and so on and so forth, ditto with
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films. And a lot of it was also cliched, because you'd have the same set of reading kind of go
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around. All kids would read Enid Blyton and Hardy Boys, and then, you know, get a little older and
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read another set of books, Woodhouse and so on. Similarly with, you know, with music, you know,
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you would go to college and it would be the same rites of ritual, the same 70s classic rock, and
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all of that would kind of happen. So in that sense, there is this common layer that binds all of us
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in a manner of speaking. And today, since you're a mother with two growing kids also, you would
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have seen them grow up as well. And today, one, I think that that common layer isn't necessarily
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there, because across fields, across cinema music, the mainstream has dissipated, there are so many
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niches and so on, so that common layer isn't there. And also, I wonder whether serendipity then plays
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a greater role in how they are formed. Like, you know, looking back, I can see two things about
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myself. And one thing is that I have changed enormously to the extent that I was just a
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completely different person then. But there is something that was essential to the way that I
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was formed, which could be the kind of music I like or the kind of reading I like, which has sort
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of stayed the same and which was, in a sense, almost shaped by accident, as it were. So what
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are sort of your thoughts on this as someone looking back at yourself and also looking at
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your kids today where the whole world is sort of, in a sense, open to them? It's not just one video
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cassette circulating through society. I mean, it's interesting you say that, because
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in Kuwait, Kuwait also had two channels, right? There was KTV1 and there was KTV2. So, and
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there also you waited to watch English films. There used to be a show hosted by, called Scenic
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Club, which was hosted by an Egyptian critic called Farouk Abdul Aziz.
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And so Thursday night, and my parents would allow me to stay up and watch that. They were not
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interested themselves. But that was one thing I was allowed to stay up and watch. These world
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films that used to come on Thursday night and used to be presented by Farouk Abdul Aziz. And so I
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used to wait, I used to listen to his old analysis in Arabic of the film and then sort of watch the
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film. And one of those films that I saw, I feel in retrospect, really shaped me. And I don't
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remember what the film was, but it was a young woman who decides to become a nun, goes to, I
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think, a Latin American country. And she's driven to actually serve people. And she's driven to
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serve people. And she's driven to resist violence. And she's very young. She becomes a nun, goes there
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and then gets murdered by people while she's in the process of helping them.
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And for some reason that film, and really the sincerity of the protagonist, stayed with me.
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And really, if I think back, it really made me channel a lot of my energy and my later decisions,
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I feel, were guided some way through the emotion that I experienced while watching that film.
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And so similarly, when you talk about cultural journeys, it's a lot of things, Amit. I feel like
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we do read similar stuff, et cetera, et cetera. But there are many factors that facilitate that.
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Quaid did not have many bookshelves. And you were always dependent on a parent to take you to a
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library, et cetera. So it was my luck that my father would, he never said no. If I said,
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okay, he would come back from office and I would say, I need to go to the library. He would go back
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and it was a long drive back, et cetera, and take me patiently, go to the library, wait with me and
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bring things back. So there are those kind of nurturing of interests, and when you talk about
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my children, I realize how important facilitating is, having a facilitated journey. And I think
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it's also what you pick up. In today's day and age, for example, you're saying there are so many
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various streams you could sort of go down. It's not the same big, thick channel that everybody
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is swimming in. But I realize now more and more that actually they're very, very individual choices.
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So my son is very different from my daughter. There was a period where everybody read Harry
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Potter. But now it's not like that anymore. And you're right in that. But there still are,
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there still are those who will pick up Harry Potter. There are also many forms that I feel
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we were not, we read the Enid Blythens and I'm a very conventional reader. I grew up reading
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Nancy Drew's and she was, I would say my first big influence in terms of feminism was probably Nancy
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Drew. She was this independent girl going about doing everything on her own with a very supportive
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father and doing detective work and driving around. It was like a dream to be Nancy Drew.
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So there was one sort of form that we found. Now I find that there are so many different,
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even games or gaming, I would say, is actually a way to explore, to have a cultural journey
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of your own. And I think those options perhaps we didn't have. Now you're right, my kids do have
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them and many children have them. But I would hesitate to say that it's very, very different.
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There are still, there's still a values framework. When you think in terms of a framework,
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there's still a certain set of values that each of these are constructed on. So there will be some
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element of racism, there will be some sexism. They're embedded into all of these kinds of
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narratives, even YA stories and so on. But there is, but kids are able to now see those things
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in a better way, which is like the debates on Enid Blyton and the Gollywogs, for example.
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In our time, we never thought twice about it in that sense. Now kids are talking about it.
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They talk about representation in very serious ways. And I see that especially in my daughter's
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case where she's 16. And so there is so much conversation on representation, on expression,
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on gender identity, sexual identity. Not so much for my son yet, but definitely for her.
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So there's a lens which is now different also, which we have to account for, which wasn't there
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in our time. Again, I feel I've gone off topic. No, you can't possibly go off topic as long as
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you're talking about yourself. So, you know, I did an episode with Mrinal Pandey where she told
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me about this period of time in her childhood when she realized that her mother is not only cooking
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meals for her husband every day, but is actually stressing out over them, trying really hard to
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make food that he likes. And she, I think Mrinalji must have been 15 or 16 at the time. And she
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completely lost it. And she told her mother that how can you do this, you know, why are you wasting
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so much mental energy and emotion and all this over what a man is eating. And I was really struck
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by that because at the time that this would have happened perhaps in the 1960s, I was wondering
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that all of this is purely instinctive on her part. The frames came later. And as she pointed
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out also, as the reading expanded, the frames came later through which you begin to understand
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all of these and see these hidden structures, as you called it. And you mentioned that, you know,
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in your daughter's case, of course, because we are open to the world and everything is so global,
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and we are influenced to thought from everywhere, that these frames are there so she can see that.
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In your case, how did that awareness kind of come about? I mean, there is, I would imagine at one
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level, there is that instinctive thing that no, this is unfair. And then at another level, over
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a period of time, one builds a frame where you then look at it and say that no, this is unfair
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because and then you kind of go further. And obviously, when you're educated, you might be
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learning those in a formal way. But otherwise, what was that period of formation like? Like in
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my case, I remember and you know, the show is called the scene in the unseen. This is a classic
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case of the scene in the unseen that, you know, most men don't realize that there is an invisible
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layer that, you know, an invisible layer of awareness that women carry with them and everything
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they do, I can go for a walk at midnight, and there's no issue. But women have to think twice,
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you get into a lift, you look, you look around at all the other people who are there. And it took
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me well into adulthood to even realize that there was this extra layer, right. But women obviously
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figured it out earlier. And I guess the options then would be that you normalize it, that this
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is the way things are, or you get pissed off, and you start thinking deeper about it. So what was
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that process for you of finding the feminist in yourself and shaping the feminist in yourself?
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I would say, really, the experience of violence is the most obvious, even in a household where
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one doesn't face discrimination, you know, I didn't realize that gender discrimination was not really
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part of my, I didn't realize it until I was in college, in a sense, you know. And I'm sure
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that's the case for many people of my generation, class, caste, etc., because you're going to school,
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you're not deprived of anything, you don't face that kind of discrimination at home, in terms of
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food, etc. But I think the experience of violence, so sexual violence, harassment, I realized very
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early on that, okay, this is something that's wrong, you instinctively realize, you know,
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that this is wrong, that I have to fight against it, that I have to, you know, either hit back or
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elbow jab or whatever it is. But I cannot tell my parents, you know, because I don't want them to
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because I don't want them to stop me from going out on my cycle, etc. So I have to hide it,
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it has to be a secret. But I also can't let it get me down, you know, that's also there. So I have to,
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whatever, resolve it in my head, and I have to keep doing what I'm doing. So I think for me,
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that was the, that's the unseen that, that I experienced, but I kept unseen from everyone
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around me. And it's a recurring thing that, that, you know, would keep happening at different ages,
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at six, at eight, at whatever, 12, you know, and then in buses in Delhi, I mean, so actually
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sexual harassment is the primary experience that makes you really realize that something is amiss,
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and very rotten, something is rotten. But the real sense of, that something is a little,
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is even more off, structurally off, I think happened when I was doing my, I did my graduation
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in economics at the Sriram College of Commerce in Delhi University. And there was a professor there,
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Professor Bose, Professor AJC Bose, and he used to have this famous thing called the Bose Notes,
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you know, which you used to buy in the cyclostyle shop. And he used to have these notes for
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developmental economics, but in between, he used to have lyrics of Pink Floyd songs or Springsteen
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songs and so on. And he was like a bit of a dude, you know, legend at that time. But he, he told me,
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when I asked him once, it was, and BA in economics was very classical at the time. I don't know if it
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still is. And I asked him, I said, you know, this is all about men. What about the work and labor
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that my mom does, my grandmom does? Nothing is showing up in all these, in the last three years
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that we've been studying economics, you know. It's just been abstract and about the world, the male
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world, you know. And he told me that, you know, there is a women's movement out there. Why don't
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you go and find it? You know, and they'll give you the answer to this question. And that was the first
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time I, then I went looking. He asked me to go and visit Brinda Bose, who was a professor at
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Hindu college then. So I went to her. She told me, you know, Kali for Women, the publisher,
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they have a diary that they bring out every year. And at the back of that, there's a list of women's
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organizations. So why don't you go in? And I went to the people tree, which used to be this shop
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next to Regal in Delhi. And they used to have the Kali for Women diary. So I bought the diary for
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that year. And then I looked at the back and my best friend, Anvita and I, we went, I said, let's
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go and visit these places. So one by one, we went to visit them. And I think the third organization
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I went to, which was Jagori, which is a feminist group in Delhi. I went there and said, you know,
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I want to work here. And Abha, who was running that place at the time, she said, okay, come from
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tomorrow. So I said, okay, fine. It was a really hot day in April in Delhi. And she said, yeah,
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come from tomorrow. So then I started working in Jagori. This was my third year in college.
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And I'm still with Jagori, in a sense, I'm on their board now. But so that started me on
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a line of questioning that I hadn't asked before. And I realized that, okay, so, you know, this whole
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question of women's, why is it, why is housework women's work? I hadn't thought about it. I thought
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it was some accident of fate that, you know, my mom was just doing that. It was so naive,
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you know, really. And it showed me like how privileged we are and the blinkers we wear,
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really, you know, in the world we live in. So anyway, that was sort of my, how I found the
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women's movement. And today, in today's day, I mean, that's, and even now I'm, you know,
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I had not yet found feminism, even when I joined Jagori. I think as part of Jagori, then I went to
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a workshop where I was given the task of doing the English report. And it was a workshop with rural
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women in UP of the Mahila Samakhya program. Mahila Samakhya was a adult literacy, women's literacy
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program that the government had started. And it was being sort of, it was taken up with a lot of
#
enthusiasm by lots of feminist groups who were working with the state for the first time, in a
#
sense, you know, otherwise they had mostly worked sort of against the state or demanding that they
#
make laws and so on and so forth. So they were providing the perspective building to this
#
generation of, you know, adult women who were learning to read and write and creating collectives
#
and so on. It was a women's empowerment program. So in that, I think that was the training in which
#
I'd gone just to write the report that I realized it was a gender training. And that was where I was
#
introduced formally to the idea of feminism and feminism. And it was like a third eye open for me,
#
you know, it all, everything fell into place, how gender roles and the idea of what was expected
#
from women and men, how different it was and how it was actually not the same across the world,
#
which meant it was fluid. I mean, it was, it was socially constructed. And that got me really
#
thinking about these kinds of things and explained to me a lot of my own experiences of violence
#
and explained to me why the context of say my mom or my grandmom and my aunts and so on,
#
and the world around me, I could just could understand everything clearly, you know,
#
after that. And I think there was one moment in that, in particular, that I'd like to say,
#
and that was a, we took all the participants went to watch a show of, of Mrityudand, which was a
#
film by Prakash Chah. And in that, there's a scene in which Shabana Azmi plays the role of the,
#
of one of the sort of protagonists and she, she gets pregnant and the younger sister-in-law asks
#
her, whose baby is it? And she says, and it was such a powerful statement. And the next day,
#
people couldn't stop talking about that particular moment where we, you know, just the understanding
#
that this child could be mine. It doesn't, it's not, you don't have to name the father. It's not the
#
father's really, our bodies are our own, our wombs are our own. So that it was such a radical idea.
#
So I think moments like that, you know, built one on top of the other stacked up to really
#
to really create for me an understanding of feminism that became a lens through which then
#
I actually then proceeded with my activism as well as my academic work and so on. And yeah.
#
Yeah. And again, sort of the accidents of life that, you know, Professor Bose happened to be
#
your economics teacher and had you asked some other economics teacher, you might not have been
#
told go and you know, maybe some other chain of events gets you there, but not this. So,
#
you know, like before this, what is it that you wanted to do? Like what was your image of yourself
#
that these are the things I will do in the world? Like many of us in our generation,
#
whatever we studied was kind of by accident, you just drift into something and inertia and you kind
#
of go along and it has no relevance with what you end up doing. So were you also drifting or
#
were there specific things you wanted to do? And then when this sort of light bulb moment happens
#
and this third eye opens as it were, do you, you know, how did that change things and how did that
#
shape the direction that you sort of went in after that? I'll have to go a little bit further
#
back to answer that because my daughter asked me recently, what did you want to be when you were
#
young? And then it got me thinking and I realized that, you know, until the Gulf War,
#
I did have dreams. I didn't think that, you know, I wanted to be a surgeon, which is, I mean,
#
you know, these are not really, I suppose, our own dreams, but you hear, you think that you'll
#
do something, you'll save people or whatever, but so I wanted to be a surgeon. And I realized
#
that actually since the invasion and the way life changed overnight, I stopped having dreams
#
for myself. I stopped thinking that, okay, when I grew up, I want to be this, I want to be this,
#
I want to be that. And I actually hadn't realized it until she asked me that, yes, I mean, until
#
then I had wanted to be a doctor, but then since then I never thought I want to be this, I want to
#
be that. I drifted. I went by what I thought interested me at the moment. And I think I had
#
the maybe luxury of doing that because maybe there you have gender, you know, a gender role sort of
#
here where nobody's telling you to be an engineer or doctor, maybe that's not the case for many boys
#
of that time or, you know, socioeconomic class. So I didn't know much about sociology, but after
#
then, once I'd finished my graduation, I realized that actually the questions I was asking fitted
#
much more into the stream of sociology. And so then I thought, okay, let me try to do sociology. And
#
then I just loved, I loved the subject and I loved sociology. I never thought that I would be in one
#
doesn't dream and I grew up and be a sociologist or something like that. Not a very glamorous
#
occupation, but I also feel you don't have to be one thing in a lifetime. You know, I really find
#
that. I mean, and now I am a writer. So one can say that, yes, I always knew that writing was
#
something I would always do. But yeah, I mean, you know, it's that dream that, you know, the Marx has
#
this thing, right? You want to go fishing in the morning, you want to do your writing in the
#
afternoon or whatever. There are three things that he says that, you know, you can do many things
#
in a day. And in your life, I feel as you, as you age and as you discover yourself more and more and
#
more, you realize what you want to do. So I feel like you should have one career in a decade,
#
like every decade you should change your career. I work in the development sector. So that is, that's
#
an important thing that I carry with me. But alongside, I do several things. So I have multiple
#
actually interests and therefore careers in a sense.
#
What was it about leaving Kuwait that made you stop having dreams? Or is it maybe you can't put
#
your finger on why or looking back, do you think, you know, because the way you kind of, it almost
#
seems like a defining moment that something happened and you just stopped thinking, why?
#
This is in retrospect completely. One didn't, one went along with the flow at that time.
#
It was because, you know, I never saw my, the house that we left when, I mean, we left just the
#
night of the invasion and that was by accident because we didn't, we were coming on holiday. And
#
so we were never able to go back to that house. When my father was able to go back, you know,
#
you one heard that there was, you know, so it's, it's very visual actually what he found when he
#
went back. We used to have a green carpet. It used to be wall to wall carpeting all the houses.
#
And after the invasion, when the oil wells were all burning, right, you would have seen those
#
images of that time, fantastic images of just black skies and just blazing fires from the oil
#
wells. And what happened was that crude condensed, these were air conditioned homes. So when the crude
#
went inside the flats, they would condense and they would sink into the carpets. So actually when
#
you step into the carpet, you squelch. So you're going into like little lakes of crude oil,
#
essentially, you know, and you have black stained walls. And so this is the kind of
#
image I heard from my father when he did go back after the war was over. But essentially,
#
I never went back to that house. I never went back to that school. I never went back to that
#
life. And many years later, only when Facebook came around, did one reconnect with, you know,
#
my classmates from around the world over there. So it was like, I think it demonstrated that
#
things can change completely. You cannot, you can make all the plans you want in the world,
#
but I mean, who knows what will happen. So subconsciously, I think that's the message.
#
That's the big headline, you know, like neon mounted that, you know, that was like blinking
#
in my head. And so, you know, that's the reason, I think, why one stopped having very fixed plans.
#
I'm also interested by something you said a while back about showing that film,
#
where the Shabana Azmi character says, ki yeh mera beta hai, yeh mera bacha hai,
#
and how the women reacted to that. And, and it just strikes me as a light bulb moment.
#
Like what I sometimes, like the phrase I use while talking about ideas is that sometimes in life,
#
people have a light bulb moment and it goes off and you can't turn it back off. It's always on.
#
Right. And this is such a good example of that. What was it like that? Because, you know, I would
#
assume that at that event, then what you've done is you facilitated a light bulb moment for so many
#
people. And I presume over your, over the time you worked in that field, you know, there have been
#
those light bulb moments and so on and so forth. So what are those like? Because each of those must
#
be so mind blowing to witness someone's third eye going on, as it were, to go back to the description
#
that you used. So what was that like? And was there something to hope for in that, in the sense that
#
in general, I am a pessimistic person when I look around me, because we can see that, you know,
#
I am a pessimistic person when I look around me, because we can see what is happening around us.
#
You know, we can, we haven't made all that much progress, if at all, in so many areas like gender,
#
caste, and the religious othering, of course, is now particularly out of back. But in all of these
#
areas, we haven't made that much progress. So there is at one level, this sort of deep sinking
#
feeling that, hey, this is who we are and we're never going to get out of this mess. But at the
#
same time, what you're describing is that it is possible to light up these light bulb moments to
#
happen to make people see the world differently, especially to make women see the world differently.
#
You know, I had a guest on the show a while back, Shruti Kapila, who was talking about
#
how tragic it is that women in India don't form a vote bank, because if they did,
#
then, you know, they could set so many things right. And almost as a counter to that a few weeks
#
ago, I had the journalist Rukmini Ayes on the show. And she pointed out that there is no such
#
thing as a woman vote bank, because like all of us women contain multitudes, right. So you've got
#
your own priorities, just as your family does. And it's not that all women everywhere will work
#
as one. I know this is a bit ramly, but I'm intrigued by that, that the fact is that there
#
can be light bulb moments, that they are light bulbs, as it were. So, you know, these same women
#
whom you see react like this, do they then go back to their lives and they just live lives of
#
quiet desperation, as Tharo would put it, or is social change actually happening on the margins
#
at a glacial incremental pace, but it's real? I have now been part of the women's movement for
#
25 years. So I can tell you that change is happening. You know, I feel in the everyday,
#
it's very hard to see. So this is the thing about change, right? It is incremental. It's not linear,
#
it goes back and forth. And it's in I mean, some things that we think are what we might not define
#
as success may actually be defined by others as success. And I can give you some examples of that.
#
But before that, I'll say that, you know, these, they result in, see, everything is a bargain,
#
right? There's this scholar called Denise Candiotti, and she has a term called bargaining
#
with patriarchy. And how actually across the world in different cultures, we have different
#
kinds of patriarchy, where some things are valued more than others. So in the case of India, Middle
#
East, etc., there is very classic patriarchy where shame and honor, for example, is the most
#
important framework, right? So it's inexplicable why a family would murder their daughter, right?
#
For it's just, it doesn't make sense. But in their context of classic patriarchy, where
#
shame and honor are the most valued social currency, it, you have to understand it in
#
that context, really understand. Now, everything that women's wins have always been through small,
#
small bargains with patriarchy. So okay, I'll, I will, you know, I'll, it's like I will go to
#
school, but I will wear a certain kind of clothing, or I will, you know, do all the housework, then I
#
will go out for paid work. You know, everything is actually small bargains with patriarchy through
#
which you make come, move ahead. For us, we do see change happening over generations, right? We know
#
that our mother's lives, my grandmother's life, my mother's life, my life, my daughter's life,
#
my life, my daughter's life, very, very different. And they are, that's the visible change. So over
#
generations, you see change happening. In my work, not for us, we see it in generations,
#
but in some places. So for example, in places in rural India, even a small change will be very
#
conspicuous and very big. So a young girl talking to a young boy, you know, it will be seen as
#
something very huge. It might lead to a dangerous situation and so on. So it depends from context
#
to context. So I am so hopeful because I never, when I joined the feminist movement, people didn't
#
know what feminism was. It's unthinkable that today, a 21 year old as I was then doesn't know
#
what feminism is, right? Now everybody knows what feminism is. Feminism is so mainstreamed, even
#
though it's sometimes I feel it's oversimplified and it's fashionable, et cetera. So in a sense,
#
I mean, even I've dropped, I've stopped calling myself feminist researcher and writer because it
#
doesn't make sense anymore. Everybody's posturing and all of that. And actually when I say feminist
#
researcher and writer, it's because I'm a scholar of feminism, you know, so it's not exactly the same
#
thing. But the point is that now nobody has to buy the Kali diary and go hunting for a women's
#
organization and work in institutional feminism to experience, to be a feminist, to practice
#
activism because of the internet. They can do it. You know, they don't have to be in a women's group
#
to be an activist. So it's a completely different scenario. The quality of conversation Amit has
#
changed. So I used to work on violence against women when I joined Jagori. Even today, the issues
#
that say a Jagori or any other women's organization works on might be the same, but the quality of
#
conversation has changed. For example, the conversation on victim blaming, on claiming
#
public spaces, on the right to be out and about, on the right to mobility, to wear what women want
#
to wear. These kinds of conversations have now become mainstream, which wasn't the case 20 years
#
back. Just thinking aloud, like I often transplant this saying about futurists and science fiction
#
writers to the creative economy. And I talk about how creators often overestimate the short term
#
and underestimate the long term. And it seems to me that maybe that is what social workers should
#
be wary of as well, of overestimating the short term and imagining that they'll see dramatic changes
#
and of underestimating the long term and giving up hope because they don't see anything happening
#
immediately. And what you seem to be describing is that, yeah, you know, if you're zoomed into
#
the present moment, it may seem that nothing is changing or it's too slow and you might be
#
frustrated and why should I bargain with patriarchy and blah, blah, blah. But if you zoom out,
#
then you see that, yeah, you know, our lives are different from our mothers and their mothers and
#
so on and so forth. And that's really interesting. And, you know, just speaking of sort of shifting
#
ways of thinking. In your book, Maniquin, you speak about the influence of the Mathura case
#
from 1979 on the women's movement, which again seems like a light bulb moment. And for my listeners,
#
what really happened there was this this girl was raped by these two cops and they got acquitted
#
because the argument of the acquittal was that she was habituated to sex and therefore it was
#
kind of OK. And you speak about how that created a Philip in a sense for the feminist movement and,
#
you know, set a chain of events and people could kind of organize about that. And there's a passage
#
from your book, Intimate City, which also I'll read out where towards the end, when you speak
#
about interviews with sex workers, you write quote, we see from the interviews that once someone
#
consents to enter the occupation of escorting, further consent is not deemed necessary. There
#
is a sense that wives and sex workers don't have a right to consent because they have already
#
offered lifelong consent simply through participating in their respective institutions.
#
Mugda's experience of rape is akin to marital rape. In this sense, escorting is a lot like
#
housewifery in its vulnerabilities and the emotional labor involved. And this really struck me because
#
you speak about how, you know, even sex workers complain about the binaries of the whore and
#
Madonna that that kind of and the false binaries, of course, that exist. But here you actually see
#
an example of where whether you're from this extreme or that extreme and quote unquote around
#
extremes, of course, consent is simply not given importance. I mean, you look at the current debates
#
around marital rape, you kind of feel that at some conceptual levels, there is still a glacial
#
pace of at least the way that the law operates in society at large operates, even if the discourse
#
has changed, that many more people can talk about consent and sort of voice all of this. And this
#
was, in fact, one of the most striking passages from your book for me, because it's quite a
#
revelation to realize that whether you're a sex worker or housewife, the Madonna or the whore,
#
you still are not supposed to have consent in this country, which is just crazy, which,
#
you know, and I completely understand that your big picture view is that you take a zoom back and
#
things have gotten better and it's incremental and it's glacial. But all this stuff is still there.
#
Yeah, I think consent is a little complicated. And I know it's one of the principles. I was
#
telling you, I watched your show with Kavitha yesterday and with Kavitha Krishnan, which is a
#
documentary. The video thing, yeah. And I, you know, I know consent is one of the principles that I
#
understood you sort of really honor. I feel in, and you're right. I mean, the point I was trying
#
to make in the passage that you read out is that actually for sex workers and for, in this case,
#
for escorts and for wives, while most clients find consent to be a very important value,
#
they have explicitly stated in all the interviews I did that they would not want to actually be
#
with someone who has been coerced. And so consent and consent on the internet is actually
#
verbalized, you know, which is not so clearly done in the everyday. So, but, you know, their
#
understanding was that once a woman has consented to being an escort, then further consent is not
#
required. So, you know, within that, then anything can, you know, she's open to anything. That's
#
their assumption that no further thing is required. If she's consented to be in the vocation,
#
that's enough. And so I make a parallel that it's the same for many housewives in a sense,
#
because once you have agreed to be a wife, then your marital duties, which is how the,
#
you know, which is a commonly used term in law, actually, you are expected to fulfill your marital
#
duties. There's no further consent required in that. And that is one of the blocks or obstacles to
#
conceiving of marital rape in the eyes of the law. So, this is, that's the context in which that,
#
that quote is sort of talked about. But I want to complicate this idea of consent and agency a
#
little bit, because I don't know if you'll remember, there was this video that went viral, you know,
#
people trying to explain consent. And there's this cup of tea, like if someone, you know, there's
#
basically tea. And if you're, if you say no to tea, to having that cup of tea, then nobody can
#
force you to have that cup of tea. So, this was a video that went viral, trying to explain this idea
#
of consent. So, if you haven't consented to drinking that tea, you can't, you shouldn't be,
#
you shouldn't have to have that tea. And I, when I watched it, I was like, you know, this is not
#
true in India, because consent is much more complicated than that, right? You have tea
#
for various reasons. I cannot imagine going to do my field work in rural India and not having tea
#
in some, even though I'm not much of a tea drinker, and I'm very specific about my tea.
#
But it means that I am not practicing casteism. It means that I am comfortable in a rural location.
#
It communicates so many things. You can't, I mean, can you imagine going to some, my aunt's house or
#
someone and refusing to have tea or a mitai or, you know, lunch or dinner or whatever, you know,
#
you can't do it. So, even if I don't want to do it, one has to do it for the various
#
meanings that are there in that, surrounding it. And so, I feel sometimes we get stuck in
#
this idea of consent as being very black and white, but it isn't. And yeah.
#
You know, it also reminded me of, and this is something Rukmini pointed to me too in the
#
episode I did with her, where we were discussing, actually, where we were discussing sex workers and
#
why sex workers throughout Southeast Asia are wary of Indians, because Indians, apparently,
#
are especially brutal and so on. And she pointed me to this book by Srinath Perur called, if it's
#
Monday, it must be Madurai, which is a travelogue. And he goes to Thailand with a bunch of tourists.
#
He's basically going on these tourist trips to different places and seeing what happens. So,
#
is it Thailand or is it one of the ex-Soviet republic countries? But wherever he goes to
#
this place, people go for sex tourism and he describes the people who are with him and how
#
they are treating sex workers. And there's one particular scene where, you know, to the effect
#
of that, once the sex worker has consented to come with you, you can do whatever, you know.
#
And this notion of women sort of as a property of men requiring the permission of men,
#
which is much worse than even this, because at least before agreeing to this, a sex worker is
#
her own person, but is enshrined in our laws. I mean, even if the adultery law went, for example,
#
you know, 497, which was the adultery law, spoke about how if a person has sex with the wife of
#
another man, quote, without the consent or connivance of that man, as if she is a man's
#
property, then he is guilty. And one law that is still there is 498, which is enticing or taking
#
away or detaining with criminal intent a married woman, where again, you know, if somebody entices
#
away a woman who he knows to be the wife of another man, now, quote, from that man or from
#
that man or from any other person having the care of her on behalf of that man, and blah, blah, blah.
#
So it's not treating the woman as someone with agencies, treating her as sort of the property
#
of a man. And this is enshrined in our laws. And luckily, I think what is happening is I agree with
#
you on the broader point that social change is happening, even if it's low, because I remember
#
that if, for example, 377 was struck down in 1988, it wouldn't have gone quietly, and it wouldn't
#
have been greeted with such public celebration as it was when the law against homosexuality went.
#
And some of these laws are still there, and hopefully they will go in time. But given your
#
circles, there is, to some extent, I guess, a little bit of selection bias, because you would
#
be moving around with other feminists and activists and people who are involved in the field. But when
#
you sort of look around, are there moments where you pause? Are there moments through these years,
#
in fact, where you've said, is there any point to this? And I am perhaps sounding a bit bleaker than
#
I should be, but I'm looking around at what is happening on other margins in our society,
#
and wondering if in certain other areas we're actually slipping backwards.
#
You know, for example, women's participation in the workforce has gone down drastically over
#
the last 15 years. I've had a bunch of episodes on this, most recently with Shriyana Bhattacharya.
#
So, I mean, I'm not even pushing back against what you're saying, because I agree with it.
#
I think if you zoom in, you can see that, you know, we do tend to overestimate the short term,
#
and a lot of progress is possible. But, you know, are there moments where you've doubted this?
#
What's that journey sort of been like? Every day. Every day one wonders, you know,
#
what this world is coming to, what this country is coming to. Should one move to Canada?
#
You know, all these questions. Why Canada? I mean, anywhere, but you know, why not Canada?
#
Yes, I think, so it's not, when I said that, yes, change is happening, it's certainly in a certain
#
field. There's also regressive changes happening, say, in another field. So, like, in the case of,
#
definitely in the situation of Muslim communities in the country, it's unimaginable what they must
#
be going through right now. So, it is, things have become in terms of free speech and expression,
#
what we are facing. It's really, and really, impoverishment and economic precarity,
#
which is the context of countries around the world, I feel, but especially India. There is a
#
certain return to poverty, which we can see, which may not be reported in our, you know,
#
but we see it around us every day. Young boys just digging sides of roads as, you know, that's their
#
future, or I have seen a return to street sex work, like last eight years in the area where I live.
#
One didn't really see soliciting happening, but now one sees it's back and it's there in many other
#
parts of the world as well now. So, definitely the situation and women's workforce participation,
#
I mean, we can talk about that separately, because I think Mannequin was very connected to that.
#
I think there are very much such moments, but there's also resistance to it, right? There's also,
#
I mean, we've had the CIA protests, we've had the farmers protests, we've had student protests,
#
we have the emergence of a range of feminism. So, like you said, there are multitudes,
#
even of feminisms, right? There's, you know, Dalit feminism, Muslim feminism,
#
there is, these are emerging as very strong conceptual frameworks with their own histories,
#
their own origin stories and their own, I hesitate to say cadre, but you know what I mean, like
#
a strong network of people who are actually taking that agenda forward. So, the struggles
#
are continuing and then there's hope in that, you know, that's the hope that we'll keep fighting,
#
we'll keep resisting and, you know, there'll be more and more people joining that sort of stream
#
of resistance. And it's unfortunate that we could be spending our time really discovering new things,
#
thinking new things, like just doing amazing things, you know, and that's the hope.
#
Like just doing amazing things and instead we're having to protect these gains that we have made
#
that we are now going back on. Yeah, I think that, so that's one part of the answer. The
#
other part is actually being wary of moves that appear progressive, but are actually regressive.
#
So, for example, laws like, and you spoke of laws, laws like the one against triple talaq
#
that was created, that seemed to be, that was promoted as being or projected as being something
#
for Muslim women, but actually what it does is demonize Muslim men or say raising the age at
#
marriage, which nobody's stopping anyone from marrying at 21, but this actually increases that
#
18 to 21, the vulnerable age where young people's sexuality is criminalized. And you know that our
#
laws criminalize and, you know, parents are constantly using different kinds of laws to
#
prevent daughters from marrying of their own choice or having inter-caste relations and so on.
#
So that increases that, the captivity of actually girls in between 18 and 21.
#
So, you know, these kinds of legislation that profess to be progressive and actually nobody
#
will say no, right? Nobody will say that, no, I don't think that 21 is the right age to marry.
#
I don't even think 21 is the right age to marry, but who gets affected by a law like that?
#
Actually, it is poor people who are marginalized groups for whom getting their girls married at
#
18 is a way of survival. It has its own logic. And it is a way for many young girls to actually
#
escape violent homes and to try and, you know, have an adult life, because for us, we don't have an,
#
either you're married or you're a child and then you're married. I mean, there's no in-between
#
sort of phase, which is allowed to majority of women, you know, to live an independent life.
#
There's no imagination. Like you said, you know, the adultery law and so on.
#
So many laws are framed around wifehood, right? So everything is the family is like the the family
#
unit. It's like the fulcrum around which many of our laws operate. So where is the, where do we
#
see single women? It is, it's really, there's no imagination of women outside either marriage or
#
prostitution. These are the two institutions within which people can imagine. Even the state
#
can imagine women. And that mean that is changing now because there are more single women, but they
#
are marginalized also. They don't have access to so many kinds of women. They don't have access
#
to so many kinds of, you know, citizenship rights. Really, it's hard to find a house.
#
It's hard. It's so difficult to do so many things as a single woman in this country.
#
So there are multiple issues working here that make progress very difficult.
#
So I agree with you there, but my hope is really that there are also people who are
#
resisting constantly. So I have a complicated question, but before that, a quick observation
#
that as far as the economy is concerned, I think one reason that people refuse to acknowledge or
#
leave unseen what is happening to the economy is that so much of the damage has happened in the
#
unorganized sector, especially demonetization onwards. There is absolutely no reckoning of
#
that. Earlier, we used to kind of try and figure out what's happening in the informal sector,
#
you know, with proxies and so on and so forth. But I think the damage after demon and the botched
#
implementation of GST already was sending us on a downward trajectory, which of course,
#
COVID contributed to. And I'm really glad you brought up that question of laws, and I'll
#
cite a couple of other sort of similar laws with unintended consequences, including one from your
#
book, and then I'll segue to this sort of larger question I want to ask. And, you know, as far as
#
you know, as far as similar laws are concerned, I remember when I was editing Prakriti, the policy
#
magazine, three or four years ago, I'd carried a piece where an economist, I think she'd written
#
about how it actually hurt women in terms of getting jobs after the maternity law was passed,
#
the maternity leave law was passed, because the incentives for employers now change drastically.
#
So you have the classic example of a law with good intentions and, you know, bad outcomes. And,
#
you know, similarly, I had once, you know, written a piece on child labor, where everyone can agree,
#
and I think I'd written this in 2007, but it was still hold true. It's a universal thing that
#
everybody would agree that child labor is terrible, and you need to eliminate it. But how do you do
#
it? You can't just pass a law and hope it goes away. And I cited this Oxfam study, where they
#
spoke about how international outrage forced factories to lay off 30,000 child workers,
#
and they followed these 30,000 child workers, many of them starved to death,
#
many became prostitutes. Similarly, a 1995 UNICEF study described how a boycott of carpets made in
#
Nepal using child labor, right? And you'd imagine that such a boycott is a good thing, you're
#
fighting child labor, but it led to between 5000 to 7000 Nepali girls turning to prostitution,
#
because a better option was now denied to them. And similarly, in your book, you talk about the
#
ban on dance bars, where you write to court you the ban allegedly left over 75,000 women without
#
a job overnight, and 2500 establishments in the lurch. And later you add, you know, by the time
#
it was going through the courts, you add, quote, bar dancers entered penury and were displaced,
#
many moving to smaller towns, some pushed underground into sex work,
#
reports occasionally came out of former bar girls taking their own lives, top court.
#
And in all of these cases, you have people identifying what is what appears to be a great
#
social problem, you have them with the best of intentions, framing laws to fight it. And then
#
you have these unintended consequences, which hurt those who are supposed to help the most.
#
And my larger question here is this, that I think that when it comes to social movements and to
#
activism, there is a danger that some of that activism becomes activism for the sake of activism,
#
in the sense that when I look around me, you are right that it's a wonderful thing that many more
#
people, including men, are more aware of what feminism is and can identify it. But equally,
#
you have a lot of posturing, including a lot of shrill posturing happening.
#
On the one hand, which would be social media, which is not necessarily going in productive
#
directions. And on the other hand, you know, you have activism, which is kind of going in
#
these directions, where you have funding, you need to show you're doing something with it,
#
oh, you've passed a law, you need to show a win, so to say, and you do that. And you may not always
#
be aware of ground realities. Like, you know, Kavita Krishnan had done a four hour episode with
#
me where she spoke eloquently on aspects of this, how, you know, so many feminists, you know,
#
don't have that lived experience of working on the ground with victims and people who have actually
#
gone through all of these, but they forge ahead anyway in search of these sort of wins and so on
#
and so forth. So now when you look at the movement, and you've been part of the movement for such a
#
long time and been part of the grassroots and covered so many different aspects of it,
#
what is your sense of this, especially in the last, say, 10 years, where social media now allows
#
anyone to become an active, to become a quote unquote activist with very little effort,
#
you can suddenly go on and, you know, signal the greatest virtue by just typing a few words out on
#
Twitter, you don't actually have to go out in the world and do anything and make people's life
#
better. So is this something that you've seen? Is it hard to reconcile? Do you look around,
#
for example, at your fellow travellers? And obviously, many of those fellow travellers would
#
be like you who just want to make a change, who know that they're playing a long game, it's a long
#
haul, so on and so forth. But it may not be that way for everyone. Alongside that, I'd add the
#
problem of the NGO-ization of social movements. So there is also that, there's also the funding,
#
you know, politics at play here, which is that, you know, there is funding, it's become a sector
#
like anything else. Social change is a sector now, as much as activism or a desire for change,
#
in that sense. Yeah, I feel that despite I agree that there is a lot of posturing,
#
not I don't think that's there in institutional feminism, I think institutional feminism is
#
beset by other problems related to the NGO-ization of the sector. But in terms of woke feminism,
#
you know, that kind of a very superficial engagement with issues, I do agree. But I feel
#
that this is a journey that each individual goes through, honestly. And I've never, I've always
#
felt people find their own feminism, and they find it at a moment in time that is relevant to them.
#
And it has to have, it has to make sense for them, right? There, it has to ultimately change
#
something in their life, for it to have meaning. That's why I take the term feminist quite lightly
#
now. One knows that it's not actually very deep understanding of a certain kind of scholarship
#
around feminism that we're really looking at, or thinking around feminism. So I do see, I understand
#
what you're saying, but I feel some of these debates that emerge. So even if it is, for example,
#
the question of the crowdfunded, the LOSHA, the list of sexual harassment in academia,
#
the LOSHA that... The first MeToo, basically, in India. Correct, correct. That, I'm forgetting
#
her name now, but the young woman who had Raya Sarkar, it was the name of the young woman who had
#
sort of brought, started that crowdfunded list. And so, you know, there will be many people who
#
will sort of go along with it, but it pointed to a real fault line in the movement, which is the
#
question of caste identity and really what the whole thing that, you know, Raya Sarkar herself
#
being a young Dalit feminist was really the list, in the list, most of them were upper caste male
#
academics who were accused. And, you know, there was a letter written by older feminists,
#
challenging the mode of, you know, the way that it was just a public list without due process.
#
And younger feminists then wrote sort of rebuttal against that saying that,
#
look what due process has got us, it's brought us absolutely nothing. And so that led to,
#
what was a vicious sort of a moment. And, but it pointed for me at many fault lines that we'd been
#
ignoring, which is really the question of an intergenerational dialogue, because I don't find
#
that actually they were saying very different things. It's just this one group had a faith in
#
due process, one group did not have a faith in due process, but it was caste in caste identity.
#
And so it assumed a different shape and form. And the problem I feel is that we move too quickly
#
from one eruption to the next. And there's not enough time or space or dialogue, actually,
#
a constructive, empathetic and compassionate dialogue between groups to arrive at a more
#
complete, you won't resolve it, right? You won't resolve something that is so deep and fundamental,
#
like caste identity and the experience of being oppressed or being the oppressor or
#
blind privilege and so on. You will not resolve it, but you will shift something through that,
#
through dialogue, if you give it some space. What I find disturbing is that we quickly,
#
this finishes and then we have question of cis women versus trans women. I mean, there'll be a
#
new debate that will emerge and people will move so quickly from one to the other without actually
#
having worked through the important things that came up in the first issue to begin with.
#
Three things I'll kind of want to double click here on. And one is that you pointed out that
#
people make their own journey, which is of course true. You know, we all make mistakes in our youth.
#
Sometimes you're impatient. Sometimes you're impetuous. Sometimes we flit from idea to idea,
#
approach to approach. We find out what works. But what people in our generation have done
#
is that a lot of this has not been in public. A lot of this has been in private where we have
#
space to grow without having to take a position in public and without being scrutinized all the time.
#
My worry today is that when a young 20 year old something spends two years taking particular
#
positions, taking hardened lines, castigating others for not being pure enough and so on and so
#
forth, they themselves then get cast in that mold as it were. And what they are at a particular
#
point in time, they almost become that forever because they've taken those public positions and
#
they double down on it and they rationalize whatever holes they might be. Whereas in an
#
earlier generation, you blunder from this end to that end and you kind of, you know, you find your
#
way around. The other thing is that this added element of caste is really interesting to me
#
because you brought it up also during when you were talking about these bands on dance bars,
#
where you talk about how there is this movement from seasoned feminists who are objecting to the
#
band. And they're saying that, look, all of these people involved are there of their own volition.
#
They've consented to be there as it were. You are probably dispatching them to worse fates,
#
which as you know, the excerpt I read out from your book shows did happen and therefore they are
#
against the ban. But then suddenly you have from the side, Dalit feminists coming up and saying
#
that, no, no, the ban is good because understand that there are these structures and invariably,
#
and as you've pointed out throughout your book, there is a strong element of caste here as well.
#
And invariably, many of these sex workers are, you know, from the lower rungs over there. And
#
you have to take that into account. And there, I think like my fundamental sympathy still lies
#
with those who are opposing the ban because it's a question of sort of means not ends,
#
that by taking away people's consent, you can't possibly solve the problem. That whereas I agree
#
with the Dalit feminists about the structural issues, the issue becomes one of means of how
#
do you address them? Is this the way to address them? Will this have unintended consequences
#
which take these already unprivileged people to an even worse place as we know happened?
#
You know, but that's a different matter. It doesn't matter where one is on that. But does
#
that then make the task kind of harder where there are people coming up with entirely justified anger
#
across all of these margins saying that, hey, you've ignored Dalits all this time or you ignore
#
trans people all the time. And you can see where the anger is coming from. And obviously they have
#
a point. But then the question becomes of how do you fight this beast that you are fighting?
#
And you have people within the mainstream feminist movement, institutional feminists, perhaps like
#
from the taking a trace from you who have been fighting this for decades. They know the pace of
#
change. They know what works and what doesn't work. They know that, you know, unintended
#
consequences exist for everything. And there are others in a hurry because the world is changing
#
so fast. How does one sort of reconciled that think about this? Is there scope for dialogue?
#
Just, you know, if an outsider was to see those battles that are happening within the feminist
#
camp at the time of Losha, for example, it would just seem really toxic at one level, the anger and
#
the sort of the infighting that is going on where basically you're on the same page.
#
Yeah, I think there was a sociologist Geeta Chatta called it a feminist civil war.
#
In, you know, in that phase and the first question you asked, you know, about getting typecast in a
#
sense, right? You'll always be the if you've said something ignorant, not just that you'll be
#
typecast, but you will become that person. You'll solidify yourself. You'll stop growing.
#
Because once you've taken that strong position on Twitter, once you and your gang have canceled
#
somebody also from your gang for not being pure enough, right, then by solid, by taking such hard
#
public stands, you almost commit yourself to becoming that person. And you're less fluid in
#
a sense, while otherwise you would have continued to grow, go in different directions, and so on and
#
I don't I actually don't agree with that. I think that, you know, we do that when we write also,
#
right? So if I look at some of something I would have written 15 years back, I have a different
#
position, say from from what I would have now and Mannequin, my book on, which is on women in the
#
modeling industry is an example of that. Because when I before I started doing my research on the
#
fashion and modeling industry, I was one of the women who was against beauty pageants, and I would
#
protest and etc, etc. And by the and when I came out the other side, I had a different understanding
#
and view on objectification, commit commodification of women. So even when you're writing something or
#
you know, you commit to something and then you can you change, right? I mean, that's the journey
#
of, of anything, any person who's thinking and studying and or just living through two times.
#
So I feel that the, you know, there is the danger I feel is that this leads to silence, right?
#
Those who do have good points to make, and arguments to make, don't say anything because they
#
don't want to be hounded. Because that's what it feels like at the end of the day, right?
#
It on Twitter and so on, it feels, it's, it's, you feel wounded by the kind of animosity and the
#
amplified sort of hatred that comes against you. And I think we're still working our way through
#
this, we don't know what, what will happen, you know, whether we will be able to be resilient,
#
resilient towards this and become the person who, you know, and stop being identified as the person
#
who once said that about that or something like that, you know. JK Rowling, I don't know if she
#
will ever be able to, to go back to that, the standing that she had because of her comments,
#
because she's now identified as what they call a TERF or a trans exclusionary feminist, radical
#
feminist. So I hope we are, I hope this is a phase and I hope we are able to actually see that people
#
change, people learn, people grow. I mean, you know, we don't know so many things. And that's
#
what I would say even for people who have been in this business of change for so long, there's so
#
much they don't know and they realize it every single day, you know, every single, and I think
#
it was in your episode, for example, with Rukmini that you had done on, where she talks about
#
how these laws are being used against young people who are eloping. And it's not just that. I mean,
#
many groups in the movement also have been doing studies and finding that even work like, you know,
#
the child marriage law, for example, is used in exactly the same way. It's actually used by parents
#
to bring back girls who've eloped or against, you know, against such
#
choice marriages, you know, as we say. So, I mean, every, I mean, there's learning happening
#
everywhere. Nobody knows enough, honestly. I feel the question of, you know, Dalit sex work and the
#
Dalit feminists. So this was, again, this is a light bulb moment, when this realization that actually
#
Dalit feminists, and for me, it was a moment at, it was the National Autonomous Women's Movement
#
Conference that this happened, and I've documented it in one of the books, and there are several
#
books actually that have documented that moment, which is a walkout by Dalit feminists when some of
#
the bar dancers were part of the conference, and they came in one of the evening shows, they came
#
and they performed on stage, and that, and one of the sex workers' rights movements, sort of leaders
#
went and offered, sort of did a, you know, like you do in Shaadis, you know, that Aarti kind of thing,
#
and it just really started, it pissed off a lot of people, and it made it, already there was
#
discomfort in the air because of the existing tension in the women's movement. But that Aarti
#
kind of thing is a Brahmanical thing, right, doing the Aarti? No, it's with the money, it's like the...
#
Oh, okay, so it's not got that connotation, the ritualistic connotation. No, no, no, it's an appreciation
#
and, you know, yeah, it's like a blessing. Yeah, and, but it just visibleized the act of
#
money, giving money for dancing, basically, right, so it made, it was like in your face,
#
and that triggered, already there were debates, etc. happening, right, because there is,
#
there are two, there are divisions within the movement, those who feel that sex work is labor
#
versus those who feel that it is actually violence against women. But this was like a very simplistic
#
kind of understanding, that was a legacy from the Western feminist sex wars, and, you know,
#
it had its own manifestation in the Indian context, but this was a new element, Dalit feminists saying
#
that, look, this is caste-based labor. Women in sex work are predominantly Dalits, and they are
#
there because they are Dalits, and because it is like manual scavenging or any other caste-based
#
occupation. Would you be pro manual scavenging? No, right? So then why are you pro bar dancing as
#
livelihoods, or sex work as livelihoods? Because this is caste-based labor. So this position was
#
sort of a, I think it brought many feminists to a standstill, because they hadn't seen it through
#
that lens. And this is true for many things, you know, now we see it through the lens of
#
caste that we have not really looked at before, for example, violence against girls.
#
There are so many cases of violence of girls in rural India, especially, that now we see as
#
caste-based violence, not only as gender-based violence. So they are acts which are, you know,
#
targeted at a certain caste. So it is, these are changing lenses, but the dialogue that is possible,
#
I mean, honestly, it's a dialogue that I think can only be addressed by sex workers themselves
#
speaking about their choices, right? I cannot speak for them. Nobody else can speak for
#
Dalit sex workers, who can talk about very matter, and I've heard them say in the most
#
beautiful ways, matter of factly, how many of them arrive through coercion, through
#
caste-based exploitation and so on. And many of them don't. Many of them arrive there through
#
their own volition, their own journeys. It's only understandable in the context of their own lives,
#
in their life stories. So it is, I think, only through hearing voices of women themselves,
#
can we ever be convinced about things as emotional and as deep-rooted, like child labor,
#
or like sex work. It's impossible otherwise, because we have such fixed ideas of what is
#
right and what's wrong around these things. Unless one hears it from them, the people themselves,
#
we're not going to be convinced. In fact, one of the things that makes Intimate City such a rich
#
book is also that you have so many of these voices speaking in the book. And at one point,
#
in fact, you write on this subject, rather than comparing sex work with manual scavenging or
#
other forms of caste-based exploitation, sex workers themselves often articulate a closer
#
connection to domestic labor, placing sex work on the continuum of work that housewives do,
#
stop code. And we'll, of course, dive deep into this later. But first, I want to kind of double
#
click on that phrase that you mentioned about NGO-ization. And in your chapter on Kamathipura
#
also, you give different reasons for the decline of Kamathipura. Of course, one is just real estate
#
pressures and all of that. Then there is a fear of AIDS and so on. Then there is a clientele
#
changing to a sort of a lower class of client, which has less money to pay for that. But you
#
also sort of talk about the NGO-ization of Kamathipura there, for example, and you write,
#
quote, this led to hordes of anti-trafficking and HIV-AIDS prevention NGOs setting a base in the
#
area and undertaking programs 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 find sex workers. Stop
#
code. Taking that as an aside and just driving deeper into your point of NGO-ization. What did
#
you mean by that and what is the problem there? I have obviously no familiarity with NGOs in this
#
space, but the little familiarity I do see with NGOs in other spaces, my biggest sort of criticism
#
is that when they begin, their incentives are that there's a problem in the real world, a social
#
problem, and they want to solve it. But over time, funding becomes a main imperative and therefore
#
the incentives are designed around the funding. They have to get the next round of funding,
#
they have to get the next round of funding, which therefore implies two things. And I'm talking
#
about this in other fields, what I'm familiar with, not your field at all. And the fact that
#
funding is a main imperative takes them in two directions. One, they have to paint the problem
#
as worse than it actually is. And two, they have to show that they are making a difference of some
#
sort or the other. Is that something that would carry through to the sort of NGOs that you've
#
encountered in the field? And whether yes or no, elaborate on NGO-ization because that's such an
#
interesting phrase. Yeah. Well, it refers to the broader context in which social work happens.
#
Earlier it used to be voluntary, but you can't expect people to give their time without paying
#
them also. So it's sort of a shift from voluntary social work to professionalized services. So it's
#
a large shift and it has various elements to it. Funding is only one of the elements.
#
We know that NGOs, through the pandemic, filled in the gaps where the government could not
#
sort of do anything or did not do anything. And it's true for all fields. I cannot imagine if
#
there were no NGOs in many of the places I visit, what people would do, honestly. There is such
#
infrastructural neglect. Even if young people are not going to schools or colleges, they are being
#
through programs, they're learning life skills, they're having opportunities to play sports,
#
they're doing all kinds of things that they would not otherwise. So this is in addition to a lot of
#
the NGOs that I have seen do a lot of perspective building. So really bringing people together to
#
bring people together to make sense of their lives, to really improve the quality of people's
#
lives. There are all kinds of NGOs, of course. There are those that are very service delivery
#
oriented, to facilitating access to your entitlements, helping you get your Aadhaar
#
cards and so on, or NREGA cards. There are those that really enable people to join the panchayat,
#
women to join the panchayat. So there are very specific fields. I feel
#
that we would be bereft without the kinds of contributions that NGOs do. However, they are
#
quite demonized. And the history of that really comes from a long time back, from the Congress
#
period actually, where there was a suspicion of foreign funding really supporting anti-government
#
activities and so on. So that strain has continued. I feel that the NGO-ization also means that
#
we have social work schools, we have women's studies centers now, we have all kinds of
#
interdisciplinary centers that train people to work in the development sector.
#
So it is an acknowledgement of the lack of development, actually. That is what the
#
NGO-ization is a response to, the entrenched lack of development, which we have seen in our country
#
and around the world. And the fact that you need expertise to really handle this challenge,
#
the massiveness of this challenge, which is why you have developmental professionals now,
#
who are parts of NGOs. Maybe they should not be called NGOs. Maybe they should be called
#
the social sector. And now increasingly there are models of social enterprise, for example.
#
There are models in which there are for-profit companies who are doing social change-oriented
#
work. So there are shifts happening there as well. I feel that this idea of having to have funding,
#
well, what else? If you're a nonprofit, where will you get the funds from? It's a vicious cycle,
#
right? How will you pay your staff? Why should staff work for such low salaries? And they are
#
really low. I don't know how people survive on these salaries. And funding organizations often
#
don't pay for it. It's not sustainable because funding cycles are in small, small sort of
#
two-year, three-year, whatever, sometimes yearly. So you cannot have long-term employment.
#
So in a sense, there is an, and you spoke about the informal sector, but what I was thinking about
#
is that the informalization of every sector has happened. It is not just the informal sector,
#
the corporate sector. There are jobs which are not permanent jobs anymore. We don't have the idea of
#
permanent. Everything is a temp job, honestly. Everything is contract-based. So there is an
#
informalization across the board, whether it's the corporate sector, whether it's the NGO sector.
#
So there is an informalization that exists in the sector. But these are problems, I feel,
#
which are not only in the NGO sector. They are really across the board. And even if we look at
#
the gig economy and the kind of low pay that exists, the gig economy has emerged actually because
#
of this informalization of the corporate sector and so on. So there is a broader, I mean, economists
#
must be looking at this. I don't know, but the NGOization is something that I agree that
#
NGOs struggle with because it's pushed them to a corner where, yes, they have to support the
#
staff that they have. They cannot withdraw from programs or interventions they have started on
#
the ground. Because that's often the only thing that exists in rural areas, in the areas and
#
communities they work in. They are the ones people turn to for whatever violence, disenfranchisement
#
that they face. So, I mean, it seems like unless they work together to really push for state
#
accountability, to have systems that work better, there are many systems that work. There are many
#
systems that are pushed to work and it differs from state to state, district to district. I mean,
#
if the collector is good and so on, it's the same old story, right? Many changes happen in districts
#
quickly. But until those systemic changes happen, we're not going to resolve, in a sense, this
#
problem. The issue is also that the state and NGOs are often, at the local level, they work together
#
closely actually, because the state actually can't do without NGOs in most places. But at the macro
#
level, there is this bit of a standoff and so it's actually very nuanced and different at different
#
levels. Yeah, I mean, I didn't mean to imply for a moment that NGOs are a bad thing. I mean, as you
#
would have heard in my episode with Kavita, which just released yesterday, which is why you
#
mentioned it. I'm for anything that civil society does that involves voluntary action. It could be
#
through the mechanism of free markets, it could be through NGOs. The fact is the state most often
#
is going to let us down. So, you know, whatever civil society does is great and NGOs are one way.
#
My sort of mention of the imperatives of funding and the incentives that they lead to was not to
#
imply something malign, but to point to something tragic, that therefore you get imprisoned by
#
those imperatives and they can divert you from whatever your core direction is. Like what would
#
happen, for example, in a marketplace, in a free marketplace where there is no cronyism,
#
is that a company can only make a profit by fulfilling the need of whoever its customers
#
are. Therefore, it is making people in society better off and that's the only way to make money.
#
And therefore, there I see the incentives are completely aligned. In the social sector,
#
it's complicated because it doesn't work like that. And so, this is not something I have an
#
answer to, but this is something that I sense and with NGOs that I'm familiar with in other
#
fields and I won't take names. I see this as a problem that they get into this area of ticking
#
boxes, that once they become big, like any big company does, they'll have these departments,
#
they'll do separate things. Each department will take boxes, they'll do this much on social media,
#
they'll have an Instagram page, they'll do this outreach and so on and so forth. But in the end,
#
no one's really passionate anymore about what the core cause is. That's been forgotten. The founders
#
have probably gone somewhere else and I kind of see that happening. But otherwise, I totally agree
#
with you. We would be bereft without them. We would be bereft if people in civil society didn't
#
help each other. That's what we do. Yeah. I mean, I think what you're referring to is actually
#
bureaucracy. And it's a way of working that we know. So, our NGOs are also just learning from
#
people around us. So, the institutions and organizations that we create are not those
#
fun organizations. I mean, there was a time when there were collectives, they were small,
#
many of them, you're right. When an organization grows to a certain size,
#
it becomes a beast of its own. And this is the issue with startups as well, I would say.
#
So, this is an institutional problem, I feel. This is what happens when you create an institution
#
and you have to keep on running it, running it, running it. And I feel like the problem is that
#
our template is that of a bureaucratic template with different departments, this, that and the
#
other. I wonder if we completely scrapped it all to the ground and we just gave it to a bunch of
#
young people and said, here, you do what you want with it. This is the heart. This was the vision
#
that we had. And you do what you want with it. You can have your own vision, which is why,
#
I mean, this question of diversity in hiring, why I feel it's so important. It is important to have
#
Dalits, Muslims, trans people, young people, people with disabilities, all kinds of groups
#
represented in an organization because they bring different visions and they bring different
#
energies, of course. But something holds us back. And I hear you on that, you know, that it becomes
#
something like a stone around your neck, that we are not able to move away from old ways of building
#
institutions and tending to them. And, you know, so that's the, I agree with you on that.
#
You know, and I agree with you on the diversity bit in the sense that I keep citing these studies
#
I first learned about them from Philip Tetlock's book, Super Forecasting. We showed that for any
#
firm, the single biggest factor in good decision making is not intelligence, however you measure
#
it, or education or whatever. It is diversity. The more diverse a group you have, the better
#
decisions you'll get. And that's actually commonsensical. And I remember another study
#
a while back. I don't remember where I saw this, but if I find it, I'll link it in the show notes.
#
We showed that companies that are less diverse actually do worse in the US. This was a
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purely in a US context. They just perform worse in the marketplace, which you would expect from
#
the previous study, because hey, after all, you're taking worse decisions. So I think diversity is
#
something that can come about, that should come about from companies themselves in a voluntary
#
way in their own self-interest. And, you know, leaving sort of that aside, you know, before we
#
start talking about your book, which we'll do after the break, I want to kind of go back on the
#
biographical journey that, you know, you've sort of your third eye has opened, or you've had your
#
light bulb moments, and you've decided this is what I want to do. At this point in time, in the
#
mid 90s, who are your models? Who are you looking at? Like, I can imagine it being easy for you to
#
find intellectual models today, great books to read, which show you the way forward, and so on
#
and so forth. You can go on YouTube and watch a bazaar discussions between people who have
#
achieved a lot in these fields. In the mid 90s, you don't really have all that. And I would assume
#
that some influences would perhaps be local ones, people you see in action, who you find inspiring.
#
So both in terms of intellectual frameworks, which could be books, which could be whatever,
#
and in terms of people who you look at and say that I want to live a life like that, I want to
#
do things like that, that's the kind of person I want to be. So who were your models in that sense?
#
And it's almost ironic I'm asking a question about models, given that your first book was Mannequins,
#
So in the 90s, I mean, I would really say books, honestly, there was still old feminist classics,
#
because I was encountering feminism for the first time. And that time I was, I mean, everybody in
#
the movement used to smoke. So, you know, the smokers area was near the racks of the library,
#
the library, basically, which was in the outdoors area. And so, you know, smoking breaks would be
#
like going up and down the book rack and really sort of really getting a sense of this ocean of
#
literature, you know, feminist classics, which were around me. And so really reading those kinds
#
of books, I would say Betty Friedan, Betty Friedan's book, especially her essay, The Problem with No
#
Name, where she talks about housewifery in America, and how women would go to sleep at night after
#
doing the day of, you know, taking their kids to school and, you know, preparing their husband's
#
meals and lying in bed at night and thinking, is this it? Is this the end of the dream? And,
#
you know, the way she put it was really, it was remarkable the way that she had written it also.
#
So I think books were very significant, especially feminist classics. I think, around me, I had
#
feminist greats at that time, Kamala Basin very much, you know, was a part of, she was one of the
#
founders of Jaguri. There were many others, Abha Bhaiya, there were many who I would say influenced
#
my journey. But other than that, I think it was actually honestly, a sense of just community,
#
friendships that you had. And, you know, you saw everybody struggling. I mean, you met people who
#
had run away from home, who had tried to create their own lives. I did casework, where I
#
learned that I'm not cut out for casework. So I'm one of my first
#
tasks was actually to help, you know, dowry victims in Safdarjungh Burns Ward, Safdarjungh
#
Hospital Burns Ward to actually file their police complaints. And in another situation, I was,
#
I would go every Tuesday to Dakshinpuri, which was an urban slum. And there used to be a single
#
women's group there. And they used to have their meetings on Tuesday nights, where women would
#
come together to talk about their problems, and they would resolve cases that had come to them and
#
so on. So I would spend the night in Dakshinpuri at my colleague's house. And so those kinds of
#
everyday experiences, I would say, was really the, creates that emotional, very strong emotional
#
tapestry, you know, on which you then start sort of exploring things and you start experiencing
#
what other people are experiencing, you know, some empathy, wires of empathy sort of open up,
#
and you're able to connect to other people through that. So I think that, and I think just the
#
practice of research, honestly. So for me, that became a very alive wire to connect to other
#
people's lives, to other conceptual frameworks. And it became sort of a feed, feeding system for me
#
to grow. And yeah, I'm trying to think if there were any other people who would be able to
#
grow. And yeah, I'm trying to think if there were any other people. But no, I don't think I've been
#
a very role model oriented person, much more drawn to ideas and conceptual frameworks than
#
anything else. And are there any more light bulb moments for yourself that you can
#
remember, something that you believe then, which you suddenly stop believing, because
#
something went off in your head? Yeah, I mean, as you were saying, light bulb moment, I actually
#
remembered that experience. And this is one of my first experiences with sex workers. It was a
#
training in Khandala with the sex workers group. And they were an anti-trafficking group, actually.
#
And it was a group of sex workers from there. And I'd gone again, not I was not the main trainer,
#
I was just the assistant, I was going to write the report, etc, etc. And Abha was the main trainer.
#
And there you have an exercise, you know, where you, it's a common exercise in feminist trainings,
#
where you, which is called the pleasure and pain exercise. Basically, you have this massive, you
#
stick two sheets of chart paper together, and one of the women will lay down on it, and we'll draw
#
her silhouette, we'll draw around her, someone will draw and leads to a lot of giggling, because
#
you know, she's getting tickled and all of that. And then once her map is sort of drawn on the
#
sheet, she'll get up and everybody will be given two pens. And it's one, so if it's blue and red,
#
blue will be points of pain. And red, you mark points of pleasure on that body map.
#
So everybody will think about it. And then they'll mark, okay, this is a point of pleasure on my
#
body. This is a point of pain on my body. And the intention is actually to use this exercise in an
#
entry point to talk about health, to talk about really the body awareness of the body, and so on,
#
and open up, you know, that sort of conversation. And when we did this exercise over there with the
#
sex workers, I don't know what I had imagined. I had imagined that maybe they will know much more
#
about their bodies. But the responses were exactly the same as any other rural women, you know.
#
Then I realized that they know as little about their body and health, sexual health, and so on,
#
as anyone else. And so for me, that was a light bulb moment about my own
#
presumptions, as well as the fact that, hey, hold on, stop looking at them as sex workers.
#
These are single women, they are poor women, they are single mothers,
#
many of them are Dalit women. You have to see them, you know, beyond this identity that you've
#
come in with as sex workers. And of course, there's the realization that they're not
#
the prejudices we carry with us, you know. It was a stupid assumption to think that they would know
#
more about their body than any other women. Yeah, and there's another, on the same themes,
#
this profound passage from your book, again, which points to one of those possible light bulb
#
moments for others, where you write, you know, the words, you know, the words of a woman,
#
where you write, quote, take, for example, this comment by a well-known porn star in
#
Wendy Chapkis's book, Life Sex Acts, which significantly shifted my own view of sex work.
#
And now the quote begins, work is work. You have good days and bad days,
#
but my worst day at work is still better than the best day selling shoes at guineas,
#
stop quote, and which is again, so sort of thought provoking in different ways.
#
And we'll come back to that and to the book after a quick commercial break.
#
Long before I was a podcaster, I was a writer. In fact, chances are that many of you first heard
#
of me because of my blog, India Uncut, which was active between 2003 and 2009 and became somewhat
#
popular at the time. I love the freedom the form gave me, and I feel I was shaped by it in many
#
ways. I exercise my writing muscle every day and was forced to think about many different things
#
because I wrote about many different things. Well, that phase in my life ended for various
#
reasons. And now it is time to revive it. Only now I'm doing it through a newsletter. I have
#
started the India Uncut newsletter at indiancut.substract.com, where I will write regularly
#
about whatever catches my fancy. I'll write about some of the themes I cover in this podcast
#
and about much else. So please do head on over to indiancut.substract.com and subscribe. It is
#
free. Once you sign up, each new installment that I write will land up on your account.
#
Each new installment that I write will land up in your email inbox. You don't need to go anywhere.
#
So subscribe now for free. The India Uncut newsletter at indiancut.substract.com. Thank you.
#
Welcome back to The Scene in the Unseen. I'm chatting with Manjima Bhattacharya,
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and we've kind of gone through a significant chunk of your personal journey. But before we
#
talk about your book, Intimate City, which I want to talk about at some length because I loved it so
#
much, and it's got so much in it that it's sort of provoking. I want to continue with the personal
#
journey a bit, to take you to your first book, Maniquin. How did that sort of come about? Take
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me through then, I imagine it's in the mid-90s, the second half of the 90s, that you got into
#
activism and feminism and so on and so forth. So what was that journey like from reaching a
#
point where you said that, okay, one, I will write a book, and two, I will write a book about this?
#
That book came out of my PhD. So it was actually the PhD that I did on...
#
So the intention for the PhD was really to look at globalization, women, and work.
#
Because by now, I'd been working with Jayaguri. I would go to college in the mornings. I was doing
#
my MA in sociology at JNU, and then I would go to work in the afternoons at Jayaguri. So that was
#
sort of the rhythm of life. I think in that period, I was working a lot on migration and trafficking
#
at that time, which was really trying to understand whether... Really trying to understand
#
how trafficking was defined. When women were moving of their own volition, and they were
#
entering into very unsafe migrations that ultimately ended up being trafficking, in a sense,
#
into various kinds of labor, sex work, domestic work, factory work, and so on, different kinds of
#
labor. So my interest in women and labor was increasing, and I wanted to study that. I wanted
#
to actually study what kinds of work women were doing in post-globalization India.
#
For example, there were a lot of women who were coming to work in export processing zones.
#
There was a huge chunk of young women coming to work in factories in export processing zones.
#
There were young women coming from, say, Jharkhand, et cetera, to work as... Live in domestic help
#
in Delhi. So there were flows that were happening, and there were a lot of young women who were
#
participating in beauty patrons and who were becoming models. So I think I wanted to look at
#
these various kind of flows that were happening. My committee at JNU said it was too much,
#
so I had to choose one. I chose women in the modeling industry, finally, as the area I wanted
#
to study, because there was nothing on it. It was actually completely barren in that sense,
#
academically. And there was also an interesting moment, because there was the anti-beauty pageant
#
rallies, et cetera, that had taken place. 1996, when I had joined, was when the Miss World beauty
#
pageant in Bangalore had seen all these protests. And even though there were three different kinds
#
of streams of protest, there was the left protesting against globalization primarily, which was...
#
I mean, like they protested Kentucky Fried Chicken, they were protesting the Miss World
#
pageant. Then you had the right wing, they were protesting degradation of Indian culture,
#
breakdown of Indian culture, that kind of thing. And then the third stream was actually feminists
#
who were objecting to the commodification of women, and they were objecting. So their slogan was,
#
So their issue was that what are the priorities of the government? Why is the state government
#
supporting this and putting money into this, whereas they should be focusing on other things?
#
And the concern that the middle class did not have a sense of, looking good was not a priority,
#
et cetera, and that this would change that. This would open up India as a market for beauty,
#
and Indian women would be targets of that market, which all did happen. But these three different
#
nuanced positions was all brushed. It was all made into one broad protest, which was against...
#
Actually, it was framed as a protest against the bikini round. And the bikini round was moved to
#
the seashells and things continued sort of thing. But for the women's movement, it was an important
#
turning point because it made them really reflect on this idea of beauty and so on.
#
And so I think I joined the movement exactly as you said, at that time, when in the shadow
#
of this kind of tension, where there were the women inside who were participating in the pageant,
#
and there were the women outside who were protesting the pageant. And I was with organizations
#
who had been protesting outside. So for me also, it was a question in my mind,
#
why would women participate in something that is not in their interest, in a sense.
#
So that was my research question. And when you're doing research, you have to... I mean,
#
it is hard to actually arrive at a good research question. And for me, this was the one that made
#
sense for me. So with this research question, I sort of entered the PhD. So that was the PhD.
#
The book came at another point in time, actually, when I had moved from Delhi to here, to Bombay.
#
And I had always wanted to write a book. I'd been recommended even by the examiners that this
#
should be a book, et cetera. But then I finally got this amazing grant from the New India
#
Foundation. It was a fellowship that sort of gives you a salary for a year to sit and write a book.
#
This was 2009. Now I'm talking about 2009, 10, something like that. And that's when I realized,
#
okay, I can actually take time. I took a small office and I shared it with someone, with another
#
colleague who was a consultant. And that's when I actually started writing the book. And I just had
#
my second child then. And so I really needed a space where I could go and write. And I realized
#
when I thought, okay, one year, that's good enough. I already have a written PhD. But then when I
#
started, I realized that, okay, I cannot use a single word from the PhD. I have to rewrite
#
everything from scratch. When you're writing a PhD, you're writing for people who know more than
#
you about a subject. When you're writing for the lay person, you're writing for someone who knows
#
nothing about that issue, actually. You have to assume. It was a completely different... It took
#
me six months to realize that actually what I had was unusable. I'd have to start again. And that's
#
when I started writing in a different way, using a different sort of craft in a sense. And by then,
#
I had learned a little bit how to write for a lay audience. Because when I moved to Bombay, I came
#
here without... If you don't know Marathi, it's very difficult to work at the community level.
#
So I was doing consultancies, et cetera. But one of the things I was doing was writing. And I was
#
writing, I was lucky that Nonita Kalra at Elle, who was the editor of Elle at that time, Sathya
#
Saran, who was then doing a magazine called Me for DNA, and Nina Martiris, who was with the Sunday
#
Times, Times of India. They gave me work. They gave me opportunities to write pieces that were
#
based in research, but for a lay audience. So then I was developing a practice of writing for a lay
#
audience. So thanks to that, I had started a journey. And so then that book took a long time.
#
I mean, Manikin took a long time to write because I wasn't only doing that. I was doing so many
#
things. I was raising kids, I was finding work, all those kinds of things. So that year of
#
fellowship was very important. But then there are other sort of practical life coming in the way
#
kind of situations also, which meant that it only was published in 2018, which is like nine years
#
later. And two of those were with, when it was sort of with another publishing house and just
#
sort of lay there. It didn't really move, which is when I withdrew it from there. But
#
there are other things that happened that made the book really come alive. For example,
#
Motivation by Jerry Pinto, who I met through my friend and colleague Bishaka Dutta, who insisted
#
that I write a thousand words a week, I think, and send it to him. Whether he read it or not,
#
I don't know. But every week I was supposed to send him a thousand words. And that made me,
#
that pushed me to actually develop a practice of writing and trot out that first draft,
#
which is the most, it's the hardest thing to have that first draft. Then you can keep shaping it
#
and crafting it. And that's the bit I love. But that horrible first draft was really thanks to
#
Jerry's insistence. So anyway, these are the sort of nitty gritties, but that's how that particular
#
book came about. And I think those nine years were important because initially I started out
#
writing a book about women working in the modeling industry. By the end of it, it was a book about
#
fashion and feminism. So the aboutness of that book changed as I kept thinking about it and
#
sort of pukowing it like a very long dumb biryani kind of thing. It just got, it changed in flavor.
#
And I'm so glad it did. And it was also one of those moments, I think I went to the loo and I
#
sat down and I was like, it just came to me after all those years that, oh my God, my book is about
#
me and as most books are, but it's really about me and my journey in fashion and feminism.
#
And it is about my changed thinking about these things.
#
Bunch of places I want to dive in here. And it's interesting you said that the first
#
draft was the hardest and one of the blurbs on your book I noticed was by Sonia Follero,
#
a good friend of mine. And you know her as well, I'm guessing. So she'd written Beautiful Thing,
#
which was on the bar dancers of Mumbai. And I remember that she wrote some four or five
#
drafts of that and I saw all of them and they were all completely different from each other.
#
So it's not like she's done one draft and she's moved paras around and cut things here and there.
#
She just wrote every draft from scratch. Your main characters changed. They were completely
#
different. It was just an insane kind of work ethic, which I can't quite imagine.
#
And that's sort of my next question to you. Like many years back, a writer called Mason
#
Curry came out with a book called Daily Rituals and got a tremendous amount of flack because
#
what he covered in it was the habits of artists and writers, but all of them were male. And the
#
criticism correctly was that, listen, there's a different kind of privilege at play here because
#
many men are able to shut themselves in a room for four hours in a day and say, don't disturb me
#
and do their thing. But women don't really work like that. And then Curry, to his credit,
#
came out with another book called Daily Rituals Women at Work. What was it like for you? Because
#
you've got a couple of kids, you've got guessing your consultancy or daytime gig, whatever it is,
#
plus you're writing articles for all of these people. And you're trying to write this book a
#
thousand words a week at a time and got Del Cherry Pinto for motivating you to do this.
#
How were your processes like? How would you manage to kind of get that mind space where
#
you can sit down and actually get some writing done? Both my husband and I, our writing happened
#
at the dining table primarily. I mean, that's just the way it was. It's a luxury to imagine
#
that one can go away somewhere and write, et cetera, et cetera. I will say that it happened
#
only because of the kindness of family, friends, help, and so on. So the reality is that even when
#
I went for a writing workshop as late as 2016, my in-laws came and spent two weeks with my kids
#
so I could go. Even when I was doing my PhD, my mother came and stayed for two months to sort of
#
look after my daughter while I would go to Teen Murthy in the day and work on my PhD. So finding
#
a space has always been very hard and which is why the grant from New India Foundation was so
#
important and that office was so important even just for that one year. So it's extremely
#
challenging and it's not just male writers. I think male anthropologists and sociologists,
#
this idea that people can go away for a year and nobody will need them. They can go off to a village
#
and do their research and come back with this genius piece of work. It's so gendered, right?
#
Because I can't imagine being away from home for more than a certain period of time
#
with no doorbells to answer, etc. So it has been very hard and it has been at the cost of
#
many things. A very untidy house, not really caring. At some point you have to drop the ball
#
on many things. You can't be a super woman. I also realize it's important to
#
really be honest with everyone that this is important to me. I want to do this. Everybody
#
understands and appreciates that. I think I have clear channels of communication with everyone,
#
including my partner, Saurabh, who is completely a full participant in house care. I wonder how it
#
is for those who have to do everything without the sharing that is possible or needs to happen
#
for real work to emerge. I don't know if these books would have been better off if I had gone
#
away somewhere. I did do a workshop for two weeks where I went to Chamonix, where I was
#
telling you about that. For two weeks I did this writing workshop and I had never gone for a
#
workshop before, but I gave myself permission. I said, I can do it. I don't have to feel guilty
#
about it. I can do it. I can go away for two weeks and really try and understand craft differently,
#
because as academics we are not really taught craft. We have expertise in a subject, but not
#
the craft of writing per se, which is much more intuitive. I can do it intuitively, but I would
#
like to know more about the craft. It was my first experience. It was a wonderful workshop
#
where I was with other MFA writers. It was in the American tradition of giving very constructive,
#
compassionate feedback to each other's chapter, but it was a luxury and I don't think I can
#
keep doing it. I've done it once. I don't know when I would be able to do it again, but
#
the thing is that it was very important because I learned from fiction writers how to craft a scene,
#
for example. I understood from reading their work, how they were approaching their work,
#
how dialogue is just written on separate lines. Such a simple thing, but it's something that
#
as a reader, you don't really notice it sometimes, or how you build a character,
#
or what each sentence, the rhythm of each sentence, how each sentence sounds.
#
Those kinds of things I really realized were important. And so when I went back with this
#
fresh eye, I was able to really apply it in a new way to my work. But here also, I feel like I gave
#
myself permission to go out and do this, and it was a big leap for me. I came back thinking
#
that, oh, how wonderful it would be to have this kind of an opportunity to create what I had called
#
the XOXO, Hugs and Kisses, kind of a workshop for women to write in. And I shopped it around,
#
I sent it around to a few publishers, but it didn't pick up at that time. But I mean, I would
#
love, I think it's a great opportunity to, if publishers could actually create these kinds of
#
spaces for women to come together and read and write. I did try one more time when I was writing
#
Intimate City to go away and write somewhere. But that was a hillary, I mean, it was a big flop,
#
I would say. I went to Karjat. I thought, let me take a few days and I will go away from everyone,
#
and I will go and write, okay? I went. There was nobody there, I was the only person staying in
#
that place. There was one woman who would teach me how to do clay work, pottery work, etc. And
#
the rest of the time I would have on my own. It was really spooky. And I just could not get even
#
one word down, you know? And then it just got worse and worse. And then I wonder, I think the
#
second day or third day, I woke up in the morning and I looked outside my window and I hadn't put
#
my glasses on yet in the morning, but I could tell that there was a dog outside my door.
#
And I could tell just by looking at it, that it was not alive. It was like a sack of fur
#
that was just laying there. And I was so spooked. And I had never seen something like that before.
#
And I realized that my God, there is some, even without my glasses, I could make out that there
#
is no life force in that. And I was very, very shaken by that experience. And I thought, okay,
#
this is not happening. So I cut it short and I went back home. But what that did do is that
#
I read massively in those few days. I couldn't put a word down, but I finished a book and I made
#
a clay crocodile, which I called Sultan, and I brought that home. And I mean, it was one of
#
those really strange experiences which showed me what life force looks like. And I don't know why
#
that dog came outside my door and passed away. I can't say it gave me some major aha thing,
#
but it really made me experience something called life force. And that I came back with a sense of
#
appreciating something supernatural. And I'm not a believer, per se, but I felt that I witnessed
#
something or had a moment there. I'm reading a book called Thin Places, which is about those
#
moments in life when there's a very thin membrane between one world and another, in that sense.
#
And for me, that was like a thin place, where I felt like some osmosis was happening at that
#
moment. It sounds odd to say, but that was the other time that I tried to find an alone time
#
to write. And I went back and I realized that a room of your own is good enough. You don't need
#
to go away. A room of your own is a dream for many of us, especially in Bombay. But writing in the
#
busyness of everyday life, I think it seeps into your work and it has its
#
power and impact also. But yes, I would like there to be spaces where I get to think. I mean,
#
it's such a luxury. I would love to be a thinking, you know, like a writer that just writes someday.
#
You know, I just think that these five minutes where you spoke about that time and
#
Garjit are going to be among my favorite five minutes of the show ever. And you should really,
#
I mean, it would make for such a lovely novella, you know, just the feeling of things without
#
spelling anything out too much, just this notion of this membrane between. And what's Sultan up to
#
these days? Sultan has unfortunately lost a limb in onerous gusting that has been done by.
#
But I shouldn't have asked that question. This part of the charm is kind of gone. But this was
#
just such a lovely story and there's kind of so much there. You spoke about, you know, having to
#
consciously train yourself to come out of an academic way of thinking and about taking
#
influences from fiction of how to build narrative, how to get into character, how to write dialogue
#
and all of that. Tell me a little bit about this. Tell me a little bit of, you know, that journey
#
in finding the voice of the book, like I'm imagining that the voice of the book would be very,
#
very different from the voice of the PhD thesis. Right. So what was that sort of journey like?
#
And do you, did you feel during that journey that you are also thinking in different slash
#
better ways about the subject itself? Like there is such a close connection between writing and
#
thinking in that sense, that just the act of writing, even if you're not, even if you're just
#
daily journaling and you're not writing about anything in particular, I mean, this is something
#
Amitav Kumar spoke about in his episode with me at length, that if you just write every day,
#
you are adding something to yourself with that little bit of reflection that happens. And you
#
become a different person. And in your case, you're writing about the subject you mentioned
#
before that you would once have looked at beauty pageants and the people that you are writing to.
#
And the people who participated in them in a particular way. And by the end of the book,
#
you looked at them in a completely different way. And these are perhaps two different journeys.
#
One is a journey of your writing voice and how that evolved and how that changed you perhaps.
#
And the other is sort of a journey of how you think about the content itself. So
#
tell me a little bit about these two and are they related in any way? Might not be the case,
#
but tell me a little bit about these two. Cheryl Street, who is, you know, she was
#
one of the mentors on the workshop. And I remember she said that the voice of a book, I mean,
#
your voice is the most on paper is the most relaxed expression of yourself.
#
And I love that term. And the thing in academia is that you're expected to keep yourself
#
away from your academic work, right? Because it's supposed to bias your work in some way,
#
right? It'll expose your biases and you're supposed to be objective. So you try and keep
#
yourself completely away from the text. But I mean, I think what was different in Mannequin
#
was that I put myself in the book, you know, and that's a radical departure from academia in
#
general, right? When I put myself in the book, the story changed. That's when the story became
#
about fashion and feminism, because it became about the conflict between me and the women
#
who were supposedly on the opposite sort of side. So this voice, I think really comes with allowing
#
yourself into your work. And I feel that is, that's a strength that I feel I'm building,
#
whether it was through Mannequin and through Intimate City as well. The act of writing,
#
for me, is very important to building theory. It is through the act of writing and rewriting
#
that I arrive at theory. As a sociologist, actually, it's important for me to arrive at
#
theory. Actually, that is the difference between a sociologist and an anthropologist who is
#
very into detail and a thick description, elements of which, of course, are there.
#
But the sociologist is expected to have grand theory. Now, I'm not saying it's necessarily
#
grand theory, but it is a trend. We are trained to search for that theory at the end of the day.
#
So, for example, for Mannequin, I realized as I was writing and rewriting all the stories of
#
the women models, that actually what I had witnessed or what I was seeing was a new set
#
of women were entering the workforce in this period, just like they had, say, post-partition,
#
a post-partition Bengal when a lot of women entered the workforce. I don't know if you've
#
seen Mahanagar by Satyajit Ray. And so that sort of shows it was a period when middle-class women
#
entered the workforce. And so there was a similar moment, actually, that was happening in that 90s
#
and 2000s when young women were joining the modeling industry, which is they were the first
#
generation of their time to start working in the workflow, to migrate to another city.
#
To live independently on their own, to find financial independence. So that was, for me,
#
that was the big pattern that I felt was being revealed to me. And it was only through the act
#
of writing that I find that I get closer and closer and closer to really the bones of what I'm really
#
saying or thinking. So it's not the same process for every academic or sociologist or whatever,
#
but for me, that's how I do arrive at. I arrive at myself and I arrive at theory through the act of writing.
#
One of the great EIL moments I had on the show was when I was recording an episode with Chinmay
#
Thumbey on his great book, India Moving, where he pointed out that the largest source of internal
#
migration in India is women getting married. Because women get married and they move to move
#
with their husband wherever the husband is, and that's the largest source of internal migration
#
in the country, where you would imagine in your mind's eye if you think of internal migration,
#
it's like migrants from UP, Bihar, moving to Delhi or Bombay and so on and so forth.
#
And what you're talking about here is also seems like a seismic shift in the sense that it is women
#
migrating, but it is not for marriage, it is not following a husband. It is for job prospects.
#
It's an incredibly empowering act. Like I did an episode with Shrena Bhattacharya on just these
#
subjects and she was speaking about how one of the possible reasons, she gave a number of reasons
#
for the decline of women in the workforce, is that many of the booming industries are things
#
like construction and all of that, where typically you have male laborers. Women won't migrate to
#
work at a construction site alone unless they're going with a husband. And it seems that industries
#
like these new industries, like the modeling industry, are an industry where women will come
#
from one city to another on their own to look for opportunities there. And therefore, it is almost
#
a very opposite of what the earlier feminist criticism would have been, where the earlier
#
criticism would have been that women are being objectified and blah, blah, blah. But actually,
#
women are really being empowered in a sense by these new sort of opportunities that they have
#
got. So, was this sort of the kind of journey that you made as well? And what was this sort of
#
process like? What was it like talking to these young women and kind of were there light bulb
#
moments in there as well for you? Yeah, absolutely. For the first point, this idea that marriage is
#
the most prominent migration stream. Actually, this line of thinking in India, in India, in India,
#
this line of thinking invisibilizes a lot of the migration that has also happened for work,
#
especially cross-border migration. I mean, you have domestic workers from all over the world,
#
sort of crisscrossing, going here, there, everywhere. There have been women migrating for
#
work for decades. Even when women migrate with marriage, they migrate for work because they
#
migrate and then they go work. They are also migrant labor on construction sites or wherever
#
they go, right? A lot of the time, it is jury labor that's happening. So, a couple is contracted,
#
but for wages of one person, and a couple gets contracted. And this is a common way of actually
#
contracting labor. So, I mean, the absolutely migration for work that women have been doing
#
has been present, it has been invisibilized, and it has not only been for marriage. In my work,
#
I'm talking about specifically women in the modeling industry, but I found that there are
#
things that I learned that illuminated realities about women's working lives in general, right?
#
So, for example, one of the things, and there are three things that I, and I've said it before,
#
three things that I realized were common to women's working lives, which is, and I'll say
#
the three of them and then I'll explain them, the invisibility of their labor, the conditionality
#
of their work, and the cost. What I mean is that, like women models, they assume to be not really
#
doing work. It's just wearing clothes and sashing down. I'm like, where's the labor in that, right?
#
So, let's check. But there is work, as I've shown in my book. Modeling is a form of labor,
#
it is a form of informal work, it is gendered labor, but it is assumed to be not really work
#
or just women's work. Similarly, what women do is always considered, is always invisibilized,
#
whether it is work in the home, when it's paid work, it's more complicated, right? Because it's
#
visible, but women try to stay invisible because you don't want to, the premise of middle-class
#
respectability is seclusion of women. Yeah. So, women who do need to go out and work,
#
they're the ones who go out and work. That's the understanding that we have in society, right?
#
Not because it is empowering, or it's transformative, or you want to do it,
#
or it's fulfilling, et cetera. Even when you are in paid work, many women try to minimize that,
#
even if they earn more than men, more than their husbands. They try, and because there is a sense
#
that it's going to create an imbalance, it will threaten their relationships. We don't have an
#
imagination of a good relationship where women are earning more than men, or they are visibly
#
in the public eye. I mean, even we have films like Abhiman, and there are ample cultural
#
references where this is a source of tension. So, it's best to, it is either invisibilized,
#
or you try and manage the visibility. You don't want to be too visible. The second thing,
#
the conditionality. So, models would be told, okay, you can work by their parents. They would,
#
okay, but you can't wear a bikini. You can't do this kind of work. You can work until you get
#
married. You can do modeling until you get married off, et cetera, et cetera. Similarly,
#
women generally in paid work, they have conditions. Finish housework, and then go to work. Come home,
#
make sure all care work is done, right? So, you can work if you don't travel too much,
#
go on, you can't go on tours, you can't come home too late. Everything is under this,
#
within this framework of conditions. The third is the cost. In the case of models, it's stigma.
#
In the case of others, it can be, I mean, you know, the relationships, as we were talking about,
#
stigma is always there. You leave the house, the possibility of stigma is always there. So,
#
there is definitely a cost to being part of the paid labor workforce. And I feel that these three
#
define the experiences of women in paid work. And perhaps that's the reason also for such low
#
female workforce participation. It is the other, I mean, I realized, for example, that when I did
#
a comparison between a woman who came from say an upper class house and a young girl who came from
#
a more lower middle class family, and both of them were working with the same modeling agency,
#
the woman who came from the upper class household, she faced like a lowering of her status when she
#
joined the modeling industry. And she won, she said, you know, do I have to just for 10,000 bucks,
#
I have to do all this. So, it's like, you know, there is, it's not a fulfilling experience
#
because of these reasons. On the other hand, it is also a transformative experience, you know,
#
for those who are in paid work and so on. So, it's not difficult to understand why there is reduced
#
female workforce participation, in a sense, even because, I mean, there's no effort to actually
#
create the conditions for which women can be, can imagine their lives as free to be ambitious.
#
You know, or really dream and want to do, want to be anything they want to be. There's so many hurdles
#
in front of them. I mean, earlier, when you were talking about your own process of finding the
#
space and the time to write, the phrase you used two or three times is I gave myself permission.
#
And is it then the case that, you know, the way you said it, it's as if it is unusual, it is a big
#
step, it is a big leap, I gave myself permission. Is it then a ubiquitous problem that women have
#
given themselves permission enough? Yes, I think so. I think even the best of us
#
operate with very deeply ingrained ideas of duty and, you know, a sense of responsibility
#
towards our roles. And I think parenting is one of those parenting, caregiving, those kinds of
#
ones are very deeply ingrained. So it is about giving yourself permission. It's also, I mean,
#
it's not just in this scenario, but even giving yourself permission to tell the truth, right?
#
Giving yourself permission to write personal things, to write about the violence you've
#
experienced, to talk about problems in your relationships, to write about
#
parents, to write about your children, which must be even more complicated. So as writers also,
#
we have to give ourselves, that's why memoirs are so interesting, because how do you arrive at a
#
place where you're actually able to open the doors and really let yourself bleed on the page
#
in that sense, you know, which is why I admire Natasha Badwar so much, you know, because she's
#
able to actually, you know, open paths of herself to people, which is why I feel that
#
people also respond to her in a certain way. She's tremendous, yeah. So that's, so there are
#
different levels of permission and we arrive again, we get there differently at our own pace,
#
you know, and it's like being able to, like I was saying, talking about violence that we've
#
experienced, and I feel like many women have arrived at that place of talking about violence
#
or the Me Too, for example, that took so long to happen, really. But even for men, their
#
experiences of violence, their experiences of bullying, something, they have not, we have not
#
arrived there, I feel. And that's where I feel, for example, in this case of this young man in
#
the cricket, you know, there was recently that case of bullying and being hung from the 15th floor by
#
one of the IPL league teams many years back. But that kind of revelation, I think, should open up
#
a conversation on experiences of bullying and the kind of violence that we have not heard about,
#
and we should. Yeah, and you know, as a cricket journalist, I can tell you that that kind of
#
bullying was actually much more common back in the day within the team. I think Irfan Pathan,
#
for example, got bullied very badly like that. I won't take the names of the people who did it,
#
there's no point to it now. But what happened to Yusvinder Chahal, for example, is, you know,
#
even before this, there was an incident where during a party, these people just for fun,
#
they tied him up with a rope and they put a thing on his mouth and then they forgot. And he was like
#
there all night and discovered by the cleaner the next day. And my, you know, default thought here
#
would be that those people should, their career should be over. Whoever did this, just on the spot
#
over, right? There's not even something you want to discuss, you want to, but it doesn't happen.
#
No, I mean, and going back to that thing of giving yourself permission, you know, I think that can be
#
a light bulb moment for someone listening to this to realize that you can give yourself permission,
#
not just in the sense of the word permission that you're holding back from things because
#
you don't have permission, but also from the point of view of agency that you can give yourself
#
permission, you know, and I think perhaps some of us who are more fortunate, take it for granted
#
that we are able to give ourselves permission, but that it's a conceptual leap that anyone can
#
make at some level. We hold ourselves back too much. Let's now sort of come to intimate city,
#
that you've done Maniquin and you've, I think, looked at the people within that book, not just
#
as, you know, subjects to whom you are applying a particular large sociological theory, but
#
as actual real people you've spoken to, you've captured their voices, you've told their stories,
#
and you've arrived at this very different understanding of them as people with free will
#
and agency, and they're doing what they're doing, and a much better understanding of that.
#
How did then that next step to intimate city sort of come about? Like you mentioned that when you
#
were coming up with a plan for a PhD thesis, you know, the scope of your original proposal included
#
what is an intimate city that you also look at. So was it always on the cards that after Maniquin
#
this is like a natural progression, or is it something that? No, not at all, actually. This
#
was a completely different moment, and it was connected. So, you know, I'm not in academia
#
per se, so I have, you know, I have a regular job, etc, etc. I work in the development sector.
#
So there is, I think I was at a time and place where an opportunity arose to apply for this
#
postdoctoral fellowship at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences for something called the Urban
#
Aspirations Project. And I think I had just been, it had just been in my mind this question of
#
where were the voices of middle-class women and sex work? You know, where were the voices of
#
middle-class women or middle-class men as clients? And what was the internet doing? You know, I had
#
just finished a study called Erotix, which was a multi-country study, and we, myself and Maya Indira
#
Ganesh, my colleague and friend, we had done the bit on India. And we looked at how young women
#
in Mumbai were using the internet to explore their sexual rights, to express themselves,
#
and to find information on sexual health, and to really, you know, have relationships and so on.
#
And this was in 2000, around then, 9, 10, you know, that was the time period. So I was interested in
#
the internet and sexuality rights. I had already been working on sex workers' rights movements.
#
I consider myself an ally to the sex workers' rights movements. So I had been working on this
#
field, but I hadn't, but I had this question, like, what about middle-class women? We talk a lot about
#
choices and consent and the majburi of poor women who are in sex work. But what about middle-class
#
women? What about escorts? What's happening with the internet? So with those questions in mind,
#
I applied for the postdoc fellowship and I got it. And it was, again, a year at TIS. It was in,
#
it got me a room of my own, very far away. I had to travel. TIS is very far from where I stay. So
#
it was a stretch, but, and it gave me access to journals of all kinds. And it gave me an
#
ID, an email ID through which, a tis.edu email ID, through which I could actually work from an
#
institution. Institutions are really important when you're doing work, sex work research,
#
because it gives you a credibility. It gives you a sort of a safety net, actually. You know,
#
you feel safer somehow when you're working within an institutional framework, especially on something
#
like sex work. So it was just an opportunity to answer a question that had been buzzing in my
#
head. And so I took the year to do that, to do the research, to devise this research, to carry it out.
#
And then, you know, as I sort of, when I finished Mannequin, I think I went back to it and I thought
#
that, okay, no, this also needs to be out there. It needs to be in some shape and form. And so then
#
I, my publisher was already very keen on it. Even before Mannequin, they were keen on this book.
#
So, and so then I think I finished it during the pandemic.
#
And had you already arrived at the way one thinks about this? Like one of the things you've
#
described in the book at great length and very eloquently is on the different feminist perspectives
#
on sex work and the battles that have raged around it. Like one perspective obviously is that
#
it's basically coercion. It's a patriarchy. It's, you know, and therefore sex work just by default
#
is wrong. And the other point of view is that, no, it's like any other work. It's like selling
#
shoes, like from that, you know, that earlier quote. And therefore any work that is done with
#
agency, you have to dignify it. You can't, you know, criminalize it or you can't cast moral judgment
#
on it. And these are sort of the different points of views. And there are all kinds of nuances in
#
between and so on and so forth. So what was your journey in terms of thinking about this and how
#
much of that was shaped by the actual interactions you had with, you know, other activists or sex
#
workers themselves? It's completely shaped by my interactions with both sex workers as well as
#
other activists. And it's emerged over time. So there are different positions. The positions
#
have shifted. And as I said, you know, there's nothing more important than actually hearing
#
sex workers themselves talk about the context of their lives. And in intimate city, you know,
#
there are some portions which I would say are more recent. So for example, there are some voices of,
#
you know, sex workers who I've heard on podcasts, for example. And so they're much more recent
#
and you're in, or there are, you know, some voices who are on Twitter. So, you know, one hears
#
of their experiences firsthand from those sources. These are not Indian sex workers
#
who are not on Twitter and on doing podcasts, etc. I wish they were, but there aren't at the moment.
#
And so they are informed by current voices that one hears as well as those accumulated over the
#
years. Yeah, and you also, I'll read out another passage from your book where at one point you
#
write, quote, this is a new landscape for feminists. Here, the question of sexual commerce
#
has moved beyond the old debate of whether it is work or violence. It is a livelihood and form of
#
work and enterprise and business linked to global flows and local realities. It is a real and
#
discursive space that is contested in which labor rights and human rights are sought. Solidarity is
#
built even as violence and oppression is experienced. There is simultaneously a powerful
#
rescue industry out there that dismisses these discursive advances, obsessed with containing
#
the movement of adult women, believing it to be a form of protection for women's own good.
#
Sex work has divided feminists like no other issue in India as much as elsewhere. And there
#
have been many pages devoted to exploring the relationship between feminists and sex workers.
#
This is because sex work gets at the heart of several important feminist areas of debate,
#
agency, choice, consent, and bodily autonomy, stop quote. And are these debates some things
#
that then rage even within the circles that you're part of, even within your fellow activists,
#
where you discuss these things, like within these in groups also, would there be different
#
attitudes to the sex workers themselves? And I'm going to come to the law later because the
#
attitude of the law is a whole different subject here. But, you know, within the movement itself,
#
are these things that have to be sort of negotiated? And in your own case, what was your
#
evolution like, you know, actually encountering sex workers, talking to them? In what ways did
#
that increase your understanding of what's going on there?
#
Definitely, there is a lot, there is debate. I think it's hard to have one position on any issue,
#
but these issues in particular, sex work is a particularly divisive issue, right? And in the
#
initial years, I don't hear this as much anymore, but in the initial years, people would ask even,
#
you know, to each other that, are you saying you would allow your daughter to do sex work,
#
for example, you know, what would you, is that what you're saying, you know, when you say that
#
women can consent or do have a choice and to do sex work? And actually, there's no answer to that,
#
right? Like, how can you, that's, it's a conversation stopper. I feel that, because really would,
#
I mean, it's such a foolish question to ask. It's not like there are, you know, special courses
#
in doing sex work at university, et cetera. Choices are not made in a vacuum, right? As
#
they're determined by caste, class, et cetera. So we would, for example, not be, I mean, where is
#
the choice to be a domestic worker or to do, or to, you know, there is a certain framework within
#
which you make that choice, right? You wouldn't be a car mechanic or a car salesman. I mean, it's
#
not a, they're, they result, they're the outcomes of a certain caste, class, socioeconomic background.
#
And so these kinds of questions I feel are, they just prevent an understanding from evolving of why
#
people do certain things in life. And I've, I find that more and more there, you know, there is
#
one of the questions, for example, when IntimidCity was being released, one of the questions that came
#
to me, and this question has come up in other places as well. People asking me that what would
#
you recommend to someone who wants to do sex work or who wants to be an escort? And I think
#
this question very seriously, because, and I answer with great seriousness, because I really feel that
#
if you want to do escort work, it's an, you know, if you feel that that is something that you
#
want to engage in, you must find a community, even if it is an online community, because that's the
#
way to be safe, to be a solitary worker is very vulnerable, puts you in a very vulnerable spot.
#
So I see it as a serious question of someone who is considering it. And I find that there must be
#
many, many young people who would have done some sort of sexual service provision in the pandemic
#
to make ends meet, et cetera. I feel it is the outcome of precarity, and it's not a career option
#
or a vocation or something like that, but it is a form of a transaction that, you know, just because
#
we don't like it, perhaps, or it doesn't fit into a certain moral framework we have grown up with,
#
that we can remove the possibility of it actually happening, whether it is to our children,
#
whether it is to our family members, or to us, you know, we don't, we cannot really
#
never say never, you know, in that sense. So, I mean, some of these conversations are
#
very rhetorical. They're not rooted in reality. I find this also this idea of
#
the shifts that you were talking about, that's important. So this idea that sex work is work,
#
right, that was very powerful in the 90s. And, you know, I think it's important to think about
#
that. And it is work, it is labor, it does increase people's self-confidence. But so what,
#
right? It's remained at the discursive level. It hasn't resulted in better working conditions,
#
et cetera, et cetera. That is achieved only if the, I mean, it's related to the sector that,
#
actually, if the sector improves the informal sector within which sex work is located,
#
if that is supported in some way, then perhaps rights of sex workers are going to be similar
#
to rights of other workers. Sex workers being organized has been their most important strength.
#
And actually, that is what feminists have appreciated. And that's something I write
#
about. I ask that, is that why feminists are allies of sex workers groups? You know,
#
where is the solitary sex worker? Would we be supporting solitary sex workers? It is really
#
their mobilization and their strength as a movement with a very strong feminist politics
#
that have created this alliance. And they support one another's agendas for the most part.
#
But there's the other shift, I think. Now, okay, sex work is work. Now we are also hearing about
#
sex work as service provision, which is the term that most of the interview is used. We are service
#
providers. Okay, now we understand that now the economy is a service economy. So this understanding
#
of service provision is sort of fits in very nicely with that. And it also, this is the new
#
part that I realized while thinking about it, that actually, escorts perhaps are not
#
the same as sex work as I had understood it all along. Sex work, they escort, you know,
#
these, the people I interviewed kept saying that we are not standing under a lamppost.
#
This is not sex work. You think this is sex work? I don't think so. This is service provision.
#
And I kept thinking, I thought that, okay, no, they're actually just trying to distance
#
themselves from the stigma. But then I realized that, no, actually, there is something a little
#
different in what they're doing. In fact, the difference is that they are part of the gig economy.
#
So escort service provision, that kind of transactional sex, we can say is part of the
#
gig economy, which is different from the informal economy in which traditional sex work is located.
#
Again, the question, so what, right? So what if escort service is part of the gig economy?
#
And that's a question that I struggle with. Yes, it can also lead to a different self-perception.
#
You can call yourself a gig economy worker. You can align yourself with several demands.
#
But can you organize, will you be able to organize, which is so central to collective bargaining?
#
Is it going to draw attention to the precarious lives that people in the gig economy are leading,
#
you know, the precarious wider economic context within which the gig economy has emerged?
#
So these kind of questions do arise for me. And these are the kind of shifts that are happening
#
while I'm writing and while I'm listening to the voices that my interviewees are bringing.
#
The third thing that I really wanted to talk about is this thing you said about
#
trafficking and prostitution, right? What is the shift that really is important for me?
#
And for me, it is really, I mean, initially one saw that trafficking is equal to prostitution.
#
Even in our laws, they are equated and made the same, which means that there is a belief
#
that every single woman in sex work has been trafficked and she needs to be rescued,
#
rehabilitated and sent back home. And there's a saying which goes, save us from the saviors,
#
which is what the sex workers movement says, which is that basically this assumption is false
#
that all of us want to be rescued and taken away, you know, there are many women arrived there
#
because of violence, because of trafficking and trafficking is a reality. There is definitely
#
concern there. All prostitution is not trafficking. All women in sex work have not been trafficked.
#
Women have the ability to consent and be there. These are adult women for the most part. But adult
#
women are not given agency, which was saying, you know, there is this assumption that adult women
#
cannot be trusted on their own. And I saw that in the courts and the kind of judgments that courts
#
gave when there were raids and women, even women who had been brought by families, by husbands and
#
so on, they were, you know, the court mandated that they be returned to those very families,
#
those very husbands, because it's like they don't believe that it is possible for a woman to be
#
outside the family system or the courts. So if a woman vehemently says, you know, I'm not going to
#
go back, then they will put her in a shelter home and they will keep her until she signs, until a
#
guardian comes and sort of releases. And these are adult women. So, I mean, I have seen the harm
#
that this blanket trafficking architecture of laws and this belief that every, this conflation
#
of trafficking and prostitution has done. And so I find it, I find that position to be extremely
#
problematic. This idea that women cannot consent to, to practicing sex work.
#
Yeah, in fact, you know, you write early in your book, quote, the bogie of trafficking has resulted
#
in several hardcore anti-trafficking laws and task forces that have been critiqued as essentially
#
ploys to push back against migration, especially of women and pursue abolitionist motives that in
#
practice infringe on human rights. And you give a demonstration of this in this great chapter where
#
you talk about raids and rescues, often involving savior NGO members, as you put it. And in that,
#
you write, several organizations reported that the police use violence during these raids,
#
arbitrarily detained women found in the raid locations, mistook children of prostitutes for
#
minors in prostitution and took them away and continued the raid, even in the absence of minors
#
or cross border girls. In fact, raids became part of everyday life in the red light area,
#
a terrible occupational hazard, which left many of the girls in police lockups for a day or two
#
in court for another, and then back to work as usual. Once someone came to bail them out or once
#
assigned an undertaking or paid the local police to let them go. And there's a TIL here, which is
#
similar to a TIL Rukmini gave me in my episode with her, where Rukmini pointed out that many of
#
these so-called rape cases that are filed are actually, you know, where the boy has run away
#
with the girl and the family is against it for caste reasons or whatever reasons, and they file
#
a case. And actually it is a family that is a problem. It is not the boy or the girl. And
#
similarly, the TIL that I got from here is that when there are cases of actual violence,
#
when there are cases of actual coercion, putting, you know, throwing women into prostitution,
#
it is not from so-called criminal networks or gangs. It is from the family themselves,
#
from the parents or the husband or whatever. So this whole notion that we rescue a woman and
#
we send her back to the family is compounding the crime in a massive way, doesn't help the women.
#
And what you point out that adult women being forced to stay in shelter homes until a guardian
#
comes and signs, that is equal to abduction, imprisonment, whatever you call it. It is just,
#
you know, it is incredibly horrifying. So that was sort of one of the TILs I got out of this.
#
And just thinking aloud here of morality, you know, when it comes to ethics, there are a number of
#
questions which are known as icky questions, icky thought experiments, which I am sure you must have
#
heard of. For example, here is a thought experiment. There is a man, he is going to eat a chicken. So he
#
kills a chicken and he is going to cut it up and cook it for dinner. But before that, he has sex
#
with the chicken. Is it morally wrong or right? And most people will intuitively say that of course
#
it is wrong. But if you try to rationally explain why it is wrong, if it is okay to kill the chicken,
#
okay to cut it up and eat it, why not do whatever he is doing? There is no answer to that. Another
#
category of icky problem is that let us say that there is a brother and a sister and they are both
#
adults and they do not want to have kids, but they want to have sex with each other. Is it right or
#
wrong? And again, the instinctive response is to say, of course it is wrong. But if you are
#
rationally asked to justify it, you know, it is very difficult to do so. And I think this whole
#
stigmatization of sex work seems to fall in that category that there is this instinctive repulsion
#
to the thought. Maybe it is an instinct that we have evolved to have for whatever reasons. But,
#
you know, rationally, I think it is really impossible to explain why sex work should be
#
wrong. Like, even what you pointed out about escorts saying that, hey, but we are not sex
#
workers. And I think even that is kind of unjustified. They are looking down on sex
#
workers. Why? Why would you need to say that we are not them? There is nothing wrong with them
#
in that sense. So, I am just sorry, I am just thinking aloud. What are your sort of
#
thoughts on the morality of this? Because obviously, the obvious reason for why sex
#
workers are looked down on is because men want to control women's sexuality because it is a threat
#
to them. What are your thoughts on, you know, just our social outlook on this?
#
Yeah, the moral framework is, so it is the same moral framework that says that, you know, women
#
should not wear certain kinds of clothes or, you know, it is the, as you said, the, you know,
#
the aim is to control women's sexuality or find it threatening, et cetera, et cetera. It is on that
#
continuum, this moral framework. And in fact, in Mannequin, I have a device called a stigmometer
#
that I use to, which is like basically put, you know, the nun at one end and the sex worker at
#
the other, and then see the various levels of stigma that are related to actually sexuality.
#
So stigma and sexuality being related completely. I find that in, so this is a narrative, right,
#
that society has. But within that narrative, there are nuances. And within that narrative,
#
there are humanizing of those experiences. So all our films, all our literature,
#
we have the humane sex worker with the heart of gold who sacrifices for the hero or whatever,
#
you know. So we have enough depictions around us to actually humanize and make it possible
#
to have empathy and to accommodate different kinds of moralities, understanding the circumstances
#
and contexts where people are coming from. So in the reality, I mean, so this is the broader
#
narrative. But then when you go into the real stories of people, these hardcore positions are
#
not there, I find, you know. So there is, you know, those who, this gentleman who is a service
#
provider, and he said, you know, when I entered, when I started, I never thought that I would find
#
such nice people. You know, this gentleman in the one of my interview is said to me.
#
And I thought that was such a nice reflection from him that, you know, he was really being
#
honest and, you know, saying that, look, I never thought that there'll be such nice people who will
#
be doing transactional sex. So when it comes to real people, then these narratives don't really
#
apply. And that's our only hope, actually, that one person at a time. And in all the interviews,
#
you'll find that these are the transactions that take place are driven by fantasy, by desire,
#
by an appreciation of, by giving themselves permission to do something that society does
#
not really allow them to do, whether it is they're seeking loneliness, they're seeking friendships,
#
sometimes it's a financial decision, they're seeking money, they're seeking travel companions,
#
you know, it's not always the transactions are not always in cash. There are travels, there are,
#
like, you know, people paying for each other's tickets, there is networks, which in Bombay,
#
for people who come to Bombay, it's very important to have networks, friendships that are sort of
#
no strings attached. And they are a place where you can see, you can discover your sexuality,
#
explore your sexuality and discover yourself, a third domain, you know, which is the personal,
#
which Paramita Vohra actually, she talks about the private, the public, and the personal, which is
#
separate from the private and the public. And if I take that a little further, then, you know, we
#
all have our public personas, we have our private, which is our private selves, but even that private
#
self is performing a social persona, right? So we are in marriages, we have children, we have
#
relationships, we have families, and so on and so forth. And there's a third domain, which is what
#
our fantasies, our desires, what we want for ourselves, you know, and that's the space.
#
That's the third axis, I think, that a lot of my interviewees, I feel, place their seeking or
#
providing sexual services in, you know, trying to fulfill the fantasies and their desires.
#
And this one here, one has heard of in discourses around men who have sex with men,
#
MSM, which is a category, you know, which in HIV AIDS sort of parlance. And here we have men who
#
don't identify as gay. And they have their lives, their social personas as married men,
#
heterosexual men living, you know, regular, straight lives. But they also have sex with men,
#
which is that their personal domain. It doesn't contradict each other, their identity is
#
as MSM does not contradict their identity as householder. You know, so it's a yeah,
#
I think my big headline point is that when it comes to micro individual lives,
#
these narratives don't necessarily work. You know, I love that point. And, you know, one
#
thought that I've that first struck me when I did an episode with Anshul Malhotra, who had
#
written that book on partition, and she's out with a new one now, but I'm referring to the older one,
#
where she had sort of interviewed people who carried objects with them. But as an aside,
#
she spoke about how one of the stories that a person told her, a Hindu who had come from Pakistan,
#
if I remember correctly, perhaps from Baluchistan, was that every day before partition,
#
these people would gather in the village square, and they were all friends, and they were all a
#
community, and they were all good with each other, and so on and so forth. And they were
#
all friends, and they would listen to the radio. And as more and more news came of the impending
#
partition and of the horrors being committed, they began to treat each other sort of differently.
#
And there were two forces playing out, and one is the concrete, that you see these people around
#
you in the flesh and blood, and the other is the power of the abstract idea, in this case,
#
a dangerous toxic one of that particular kind of nationalism. And another illustration Anshul gave
#
of this was, though the formulation is sort of something that I came up with, so she didn't put
#
it in this way, but it was interesting that she was interviewing a couple in Pakistan about their
#
journey that they had made from India, and they were ranting against Hindus, and after a while,
#
one of them realized she's Hindu, and he said, ki, bete aap aise nahi ho, aap theek ho, you know.
#
So in the concrete, it's okay, but in the abstract, it's a problem. And this is something I think
#
about a bit, that a lot of India's problems are because of dangerous abstract notions like
#
nationalism, or tradition, or religious purity, or whatever the case might be, which drive us away
#
from each other. But in the concrete, very often, when we come across the other, we are perfectly
#
happy to be good with them, to be friendly with them, like so often, it's so common to find a
#
Hindu bigot say something like, but I have Muslim friends, and, you know, just illustrating that.
#
So what you spoke about, you know, that these notions might be there, that it is immoral,
#
or it is corrupting our culture, but if you actually, you know, if you concretize it,
#
in a sense, you know, you'd get a different notion of it. If you come across these people
#
in the flesh and realize that here they just, you know, it's no different from someone selling a
#
shoe, as you put it elsewhere. And just thinking aloud, I'm also wondering, you mentioned transactions,
#
and I'm just wondering that if all relationships are transactional in some way or the other,
#
and the problem people have with sex work is that it commits a vulgarity of making this overt,
#
you're revealing to people a part of themselves and a part of human nature that they would rather
#
elide over and gloss over with some kind of covering. So that's, I mean, I'm just thinking
#
aloud. What are your thoughts on that? Yeah, I think that's a good observation.
#
And I think I allude to it when I talk about the comparison with the housewife, the labor
#
that housewives do, and, you know, a lot of attention that's been given to unpaid care work,
#
etc., but not so much to the sexual labor that housewives are expected to perform. And it's
#
an unpopular thing to say, honestly, right? It's not nice to say that lovemaking within marriage
#
can be a chore. You know, you don't want to say that because marriage is also wanted as something
#
that is, it's idealized and it's idolized. And critiquing marriage is dangerous also because it
#
challenges, it shows a mirror to ourselves. I think that's the danger. It's really we're
#
putting a mirror up to ourselves and our relationships, and then we are forced to
#
really think of our relationships in those terms. But it is also, if we think with the
#
scholarship, with the lens of scholarship, then it is an extension of the labor. If we are thinking
#
of paid labor, etc., as household labor being chores, then all kinds of work that can be
#
contracted out, we see it as, it can be labor, right, in terms of scholarship. The girlfriend
#
experience, which is what Elizabeth Bernstein, who's a scholar, what she calls the girlfriend
#
experience, that has revealed more explicitly how scripts of transactional sex are mimicking
#
romantic relationships. That has, I think, brought these ideas out even more. You can buy the
#
girlfriend experience, which means that everything is for sale. I think it's also to do with
#
the broader commodification of everything in the current economic framework. There is a sense that
#
everything has a monetary value attached to it. In that context, it doesn't seem much of a stretch
#
to think of everything in those terms. The harm that it causes to not think of it in these terms
#
is that then it becomes a duty. What we were talking about at the beginning, this idea of
#
marital duties then becomes solidified. It's a duty rather than labor. Also, what do you do
#
with that insight, honestly? How is it going to help our relationships? What's the point of
#
coming up with this point? Is something that I would ask myself, even though I've come up with
#
a point, I'm like, now, what do I do with this? Maybe it will take me some time. I cannot answer
#
you right now, but it will take me some time to really think about it and understand that will
#
this enable people to have more respect, say, for the escort or for the sex worker? Will they be able
#
to associate themselves? Will they be able to then have some empathy? Will it open some bridge
#
between each person and a sex worker when they realize that, okay, this is not so far from my
#
life at all. It's not something that happens in red light areas, in Kamathipura or Sonagachi,
#
but there is a nuance here that is applicable to relations between partners everywhere.
#
That transactional sex happens not just in those areas, but there is something like transactional
#
sex that is happening, and we should start speaking about it so that we really open up
#
the contours, the inequality, that maybe it's an opportunity to actually have more equal
#
conversations, equal relationships, talk about consent, talk about better relations.
#
You know, the part of your book that I was really struck by, and you mentioned fantasies,
#
is this excellent passage where you speak about, in your chapter called The Cruisers,
#
about this guy called Vijay, where you write, quote, Vijay's best experience was when he was
#
asked to play out the fantasy of a woman who responded to his ad around the mythical romantic
#
first night after marriage or the suhagrath in which they dressed up as groom and bride.
#
We went out of town. This is him talking now. We went out of town. She wore a red sari. The
#
bed was decorated like that with flowers and all. I wore a kurta pajama, stop quote. And I found
#
this both charming, interesting, poignant, a whole bunch of things. Even the girlfriend experience
#
is an acting out of that kind of fantasy. In A Separate Place, you've spoken about how escorts
#
advertise themselves and how the two or three lines they'll write about themselves will have
#
both the whore and the Madonna included, you know, both sides of that. And it just struck me that
#
there is actually a deep kind of honesty to this, where both people know exactly what the other
#
wants from them. And that is a deep kind of honesty, perhaps absent in most relationships.
#
Again, I'm not insisting that all relationships are necessarily transactional, but at one level,
#
it might well be the case and is worth thinking about whether only we exist for ourselves and
#
everyone else is a character in a play or a prop in a play, and we are the central character and
#
we are everything. But we are always sort of in denial of this. And in every relationship,
#
therefore, two people are never completely honest with each other about what they may want or what
#
they may expect, except in the most healthy relationships, obviously. And conventional
#
forms of relationships like marriages, for example, get in the way of this kind of honesty,
#
where, you know, you kind of live a life of denial all your life. So in that sense, in a sort of a
#
relationship between an escort or a cruiser and their client or whatever, there is that sense that
#
there is no facade, as it were, that this is the most honest kind of relationship that you can find.
#
And therefore, that is something almost to be admired rather than looked down upon. And again,
#
I'm totally thinking aloud, but just throwing these thoughts out there for you.
#
In the example that you offered, it should be clear that this was a male service provider and
#
the client was a woman. And this is a really new and interesting finding, you know, that there are
#
women who are paying for certain kinds of services. It's also interesting. I also love that example
#
that her fantasy was to have a suhagrath. As a single woman, she wanted to experience a suhagrath,
#
which shows how deeply culturally coded our desires are and how we imagine romance to be in a certain way.
#
So I love that example too. I find that, yeah, it is, it is honest, but it cannot, I mean,
#
it is also secret, you know. So then how do you reconcile, reconcile, reconcile these two things?
#
Yeah. Have you read this book called Everybody Lies? Big data, new data and what the internet
#
can tell us about who we really are by Seth Stephens Revidovitz. So it's a book where this
#
researcher basically got access to a whole bunch of data from Google and several others about what
#
people are searching for. Right. And his premise, and I agree with it completely, and it's a brilliant
#
thought, is that people are most themselves when they think no one is looking. And when you're
#
searching for something on Google, perhaps in an incognito window, you think no one is looking,
#
and therefore you are most yourself. And the searches are very revealing. Like the most bizarre
#
thing about India, for example, is that India and Bangladesh, and in particular India, more than any
#
other country in the world, adult males have this breastfeeding fantasy, which is like completely
#
out of whack and insane. And there are a ton of sort of other insights like this about what people
#
are really like. And, you know, even in the context of fantasies, for example, I was reading what you
#
had written about it, and I recognized that there are certain categories in just what you describe
#
and what the people you speak to chat with you about. There are categories. If you look
#
at erotic fiction, for example, on sites like Late Erotica, or if you look at the categories
#
of porn there, for example, there's the cuckolding fantasy, where, you know, this male escort goes
#
to a couple, and while the husband watches TV, he has sex with the wife, and after that he's
#
worried about whether she really wanted it, and he asks her, was it good for you? And she says,
#
yeah, kind of, but he's happy. So, you know, and this is a whole category of erotic story out there.
#
And, you know, and the other categories of, and I don't know how they would play out in
#
these kind of contexts, but one, in this kind of context, but one huge category out there,
#
which according to Stephens Revider, which is actually, you know, more popular with women than
#
with men, is non-consent, right? And that completely blew me away, because I know the category exists,
#
both in terms of stories and videos and all of that, but the fact that more women would be
#
searching for that category than men also blew me away, and so on and so forth. So, it's just
#
interesting how, you know, in modern times, people can actually play out on their fantasies, first by
#
getting material on it, like in 1990, if you have some random fantasy, you're not going to be,
#
there's no internet, you have absolutely no access, you don't get to explore it, you don't
#
get to go deeper. Here, number one, at one level, you get to go deeper in terms of searching for it,
#
finding stories and videos on it, and realizing with a shock that there are millions of people
#
like you, who might have whatever specific fetish that you do. And at another level,
#
which I discovered, which I read about in your book, is that you can also act out on these fantasies.
#
And it's also very sad at one level, like at another place, you have sex workers talking about,
#
quote unquote, the game of love, where they say that, you know, they keep coming back because
#
they think we love them. And that's also so kind of poignant and tragic at a human level that I
#
just think that there's kind of so much going on here. So, what was it like for you to speak to all
#
of these people and have those TILs in real time in the first person as it, you know, talk about
#
all of this to you? You know, what was that experience like? And what are the other TILs
#
that you have which you, you know, I may not have noticed or may not be in the book?
#
I will paraphrase the gentleman who I had interviewed that I didn't think they'd be such nice people.
#
But yeah, they were all, I think I, you know, the locations where I met many of the men I interviewed
#
was interesting. So, there were some in BKC, and they came in corporate blues, and, you know,
#
there were some in, you know, coffee shops, there were, you know, men who worked in, say, you know,
#
shops, etc., who I would meet at maybe say a McDonald's next to a station, you know, some
#
places like that, young college, just out of college, maybe working boys, there would be,
#
these are the people I met, and there would be those who I had email interviews with.
#
So, there were really a range, a range of men. I wish I had been able to interview more women
#
escorts. It was a really hard experience getting access to women escorts for various reasons,
#
and I think I detailed that in the book. But, you know, the interview that I did do with a very
#
long interview over two days, which was also a really wonderful experience. And it sort of
#
showed me, you know, like she would take a break to have lunch with her mother, I would take a break
#
to have lunch with my kids. And just the whole domestic, domesticity of life was always interwoven
#
with the conversations we were having, which were very explicit, and quite challenging also,
#
you know, whereas, where she would also say things to provoke and challenge me.
#
I would also be a bit disturbed by her casual acceptance that rape happens in our work lives.
#
It's occupational hazard. And, you know, we, the best thing to do is to calm a man down and continue,
#
because nobody is, no policeman is going to believe me if I, if I call them, and it's just going to
#
threaten my life. So, better to actually just handle it and move on. And so, there were a
#
range of, of sort of experiences that I had. I think sex work research is, is already a little
#
difficult, because it's, it's what we call shadow research, right? It's difficult to access
#
both sex workers as well as clients. And the, because of, I mean, for sex workers, it's usually
#
because of what we, what I say are the three axes of their marginalization, which is the
#
illegality of their work, or the perceived illegality of their work, the informality of
#
the labor, which makes it difficult to actually find them, because informal work is always in a
#
flow. And the third is the morality. So, these three axes are sort of, this is the triangle
#
within which you do sex work research. And so, it is hard to do sex work research. There's also
#
other things like, how can you expect people to talk about their lives if you yourself don't open
#
yourself up and make yourself vulnerable also to thinking about these things and to sharing parts
#
of your life also. So, there's always a moment where you ask, do you want to ask me any questions?
#
And they ask you a lot of questions about your life. And there is an exchange that really makes
#
it possible for us to arrive at a place of comfort and an equal level of vulnerability,
#
that both of us have then. So, these are things you learn over time. So, that's not, that you learn,
#
you know, you learn how to handle tensions, how to handle questions, how to make people feel at ease.
#
And you know that really well. You're an interviewer yourself and your interviews are so personal.
#
So, there is a process to arrive there. I think in this case, I had, I built on several years of
#
experience and I was also much older. So, I have done interviews with clients in the past,
#
I have done interviews with clients in my 20s. And at that time, I, you know, the strategy was
#
that go with an older woman. As a younger woman, go with an older woman. And, but this, I mean,
#
so many years later, as an older woman, I felt I could sort of go and do these on my own.
#
There's also often, you know, a sexual tension, right? Because it's like they're, they're,
#
they will think that you, or you imagine that maybe they're looking at you in a sexualized manner,
#
which may be so, but you know, what, where does that not happen, honestly? So, those are little
#
hurdles you get, which are related to doing research on sexuality. And you learn over time.
#
You know, we discussed about how there are feminist debates on it. And, you know, that debate is
#
progressing in different directions. But the law seems to sort of look at prostitution always in
#
the worst possible ways. You know, we've spoken about the bogie of trafficking, as you eloquently
#
put it, and, you know, the result of criminalizing prostitution. And I've, in fact, written before
#
about how we should decriminalize victimless crimes of which sex work certainly is one. And
#
you've written in your book, and I'll read this passage out, Priscilla Pyatt and Deborah Ward's
#
study in Australia looks at violence against sex workers in different locations and the risks they
#
face from a public health perspective. They find that a legal brothel provides the safest
#
environment for sex workers, and that an organized sex industry worker has a positive attitude to
#
their work and workplace and reports consistent condom use. The main risks identified by the
#
study are client violence and client resistance to condom use. For some, the problems associated
#
with homelessness, drug use, and extreme social isolation far outweighed the risks associated
#
with sex work, stop court. And, you know, and in India, especially you've spoken at described at
#
length in this book, how police will typically treat sex workers as court either victims or
#
criminals. So just in terms of, you know, the law always is one step behind society in this sense,
#
right? So even if social attitudes are gradually changing, and I'm not sure they're anywhere close
#
to where they should be. I think those stigmas attached to sex workers are still there. But the
#
law is a step further behind in this particular case. How much of an impediment is that to actually
#
getting things to change on the ground? Like you describe this raid on the Simplex Mansion, for
#
example, where, you know, the cops raided this place, arrested everyone, including alleged
#
customers. And then they went to the police station and they made these alleged customers,
#
many of them stripped to their underwear, which reminded me of this recent incident that happened
#
with journalists, if you read about that a couple of days ago, where these journalists had gone to
#
the police station to protest against an activist arrest and they were all taken and stripped to
#
their underwear and the photo was made viral on social media, which is again, an illustration of
#
how the state treats us as subjects and not citizens. You know, in terms of what the police
#
is like, we're really not even forget 20th century, we're in the 19th century. You know,
#
19th century, we are following the spirit of the first penal code that the British set for us.
#
It's it's just outrageous. So what's kind of your thought on that? Because it is not just society
#
and social attitude towards sex workers. It's a law and this law is often a greater danger to them
#
than the alleged criminal gangs who, you know, might be involved.
#
Yeah, I honestly, I feel a little empathetic towards the police. I mean, I when I,
#
I and Bishaka went to do a little fact finding mission of our own when we read about the Simplex
#
raid in October 2011 or 2012 that took place. And Simplex building is this huge building,
#
it was known as a brothel near Lamington Road and sort of the edge of Kamathipura. And it overnight,
#
400 women were removed from that building. So that building was essentially hollowed.
#
And it was clearly the I mean, there's some real estate, there's some conspiracy there,
#
which led to this decision to raid that building and hollow it out completely.
#
And when we went to actually visit the police and ask about the raid, the inspector talked about how,
#
you know, for three days they were, he didn't sleep for three days. He was working nonstop
#
for three days. He himself did not really know where the order had come from. You know,
#
he was carrying out orders and they were, they came with media and the police came with media.
#
It was, they didn't have enough cars to take the girls. So there would be one batch going and
#
depositing girls in this police station. Then there would be, the car would come back,
#
vans would be sent to carry girls to another police station. So it was like, it was a massive
#
operation, which they were ill-equipped to carry out actually. And they were exhausted by the end
#
of it. And it was, I mean, if you ask them, why did you do it? They say, what's wrong is wrong.
#
You know, that's their classic answer. But, you know, they also did not have much agency
#
in that sense. Yes, that stripping and, you know, stripping them to their underwear, et cetera.
#
I mean, at local level, police have practices, which are, you know, a form of just violence,
#
right? And that's there everywhere. So I feel that that is very much, we have to account for
#
those kinds of practices. Those are dependent on broader police reforms, really trying and
#
understanding what is the role of police in society. You know, is it to do this kind of stuff? Is it,
#
can there be a more productive way of policing? Right? There are those kinds of things we need
#
to have debates about in our country. So it's not only specific to the issue of sex work. What is
#
specific, I think, is this what you'd mentioned, decriminalizing versus legalizing, which is a
#
question that comes up often, you know, should prostitution be legalized? And people ask me that
#
and sex workers themselves feel that they don't want sex work to be legalized because all that
#
means is more surveillance by the state, you know, licenses and this and that. So
#
that's not what they want. But decriminalization is very important because if sex work is
#
decriminalized, then they can, so we have an ambiguous law where soliciting is criminalized.
#
Sex work per se, there's no opinion on it because it is conflated with trafficking.
#
Generally, it's not acknowledged that there are sex workers per se in law. In practice, of course,
#
police know and, you know, I mean, there are arrangements, there are even during the pandemic,
#
we had police stations offering relief to sex workers groups and so on. We saw that in several
#
places. At the ground level, things work in a different way. But decriminalizing sex work
#
clearly would mean that sex workers can approach the police as citizens when they experience
#
violence, extortion and so on. And they have a right to actually demand justice. And it would
#
be the same for, for example, I spoke to you about the question of the escort who said that why,
#
I mean, you know, I can't say anything, I can't do anything if some, if a client rapes me.
#
So it gives her the, at least some leverage to approach a police and say that,
#
look, I'm being violated again. So, so that's the value of decriminalizing. And it's actually a
#
real need, I feel. So decriminalization, I would be completely for. I feel that this idea of
#
citizenship is very important, you know, because then we have to account for sex workers' opinions
#
or their preferences in several other domains. Like for example, what is a safe city? You know,
#
they should be what, what is, what can education for their children look like? I mean, there are
#
so many areas where, you know, their citizenship is being not sort of met, their entitlements are
#
not being met. There's one more thing I wanted to add about the comment you made about searches,
#
you know, and what people search for and whether that's really who they are. I don't think it's
#
as simple as that. And I'm thinking now about, you know, England in the late 90s, 2000s, when there
#
was this whole Hawa about pedophilia, you know, and there was this concern that the internet was
#
corrupting people and, you know, the internet was filled with pedophilics. And there would be men
#
who would get arrested for searching for certain things, right? But that's the thing. If there's,
#
if you're searching for something, it doesn't mean you've done it. So can you go and arrest someone
#
or say that someone is, you know, is a pedophile if they have searched for something or if it is a
#
fantasy, you know, there is a difference between fantasy and reality. And whether it is law,
#
whether it is one another, we have to realize that there is a boundary there, you know.
#
So to fantasize or to think of something, then you'll arrest anything you think of.
#
Then, you know, you can't think of anything, you know, which is illegitimate or, you know,
#
illegal. I absolutely agree. In fact, the sense in which said Davidowitz was talking about all
#
of these searches is more in a descriptive way, not in a prescriptive or prescriptive way. So
#
it's not that if somebody is fantasizing about something, it is okay to therefore do that,
#
or that person is going to go out and do that, or that person even wants to do that. That's not the
#
case at all. It is just that it is, it's just an interesting look at the way someone's mind is
#
working. And it's often more sad. Like, I completely agree that we should only judge people by their
#
actions, because a lot of the impulses we have are things we probably can't control. You can't hold
#
people responsible for their impulses or their thoughts, you can only hold them responsible for
#
what they actually do. So I completely agree there. So the fascinating aspect of your book is that it
#
is more than describing a state of the way things are. Intimate City is describing a way in which
#
a particular world, a particular ecosystem has completely changed in these times, right? And
#
I keep thinking about how other things have changed. Like at the start of the episode,
#
I mentioned that I find many resonances with the way you describe the world of sex work changing.
#
With the way I've seen other things change. For example, you know, one is the fact that the form
#
of so much else was determined by physical restrictions, right? So why was a song on radio
#
three minutes? Because a very first sort of long playing record that came out right at the start
#
of the year could hold that bigger song. Later on, it expanded to holding 40 minutes. That became
#
your album length, right? You know, a newspaper is a particular way because of particular restrictions.
#
How long should an article be? How many articles do you want to fit? Everything is a result of a
#
physical restriction. A printed book, it's not viable for it to be more than a certain amount
#
of words. So it is a certain amount of words. And we had normalized all of these physical
#
restrictions and they have now kind of fallen apart. And that's one way in which I've seen
#
changes in other spaces. The other way is the collapse of the mainstream in the sense that
#
in the media, for example, you had big newspapers and there was a consensus on the truth more or
#
less. And that's where you got all the information from. And that mainstream has fallen apart and
#
people are just getting information plus narratives plus news plus entertainment from all over the
#
place in a dispersed way. The same thing has happened to music, the same thing will happen
#
to cinema. In the creator economy, you see more and more of this, where more and more niches are
#
coming up. And all of this is pretty wonderful. And I was reading your book and thinking about
#
the old structures of sex work. For example, typically red light areas would come up near
#
ports or near colonies where there were soldiers. And that was sort of a physical imperative. And
#
that's where they sort of would be. And where that's changed completely is and it's changed
#
for a number of reasons. One is that cities have kind of gentrified those neighborhoods
#
for a variety of reasons, for zoning reasons, for moral panic reasons, and so on and so forth.
#
And you've described that in your excellent first section where you talk about like the four phases
#
in Antwerp, how they gradually shifted. The shift in Oslo, which was very fascinating,
#
where street sex shifted to massage parlors. And then there were protests against massage parlors
#
because of quote unquote immoral activities. And the sex workers protested back and they called
#
themselves happy hookers to give a different kind of impression. And then eventually the massage
#
parlors went and now it's run out of flats. And you point out in one place how, you know,
#
your conclusion was that cities are not necessarily liberal by default, that liberalism has to be
#
negotiated. And similarly, you know, in your great chapter on Kamathipura, you've spoken about how
#
that gradually declined, how Kamathipura was a center of so much. There were mujras, there were
#
these cages where people would sort of be displayed as it were, and how that demographic changed from
#
sailors to workers. And you've described the decline there. But what has happened in all of
#
these cases is something that's happened in these other areas as well, that the old structure that
#
sex work is in this particular place. It is a particular kind of person who does sex work.
#
It is a particular kind of person who is a client. And all of these have completely changed. Now sex
#
work is dispersed. It's not homogenized in any way. Your profile of the sex worker has changed
#
completely. You have this great chapter early in the book, Who Sells and Who Buys, which shows how
#
it is no longer straightforward. You know, you talk about research from Fortaleza in Brazil,
#
where the phrase that is used there is elegant prostitution on the beach. You talk about the
#
four different types of locations for sex work in Spain. It's all really fascinating. You talk
#
about how it's being professionalized. Like earlier during this conversation, you spoke about people
#
sometimes ask you for advice. And I thought that if you give your book to them, they can just turn
#
to page 2021 and just read about what you've written about escorts and the risk management
#
systems that they have put in place. It's all laid out there. And this is so incredibly fascinating
#
to me that now, you know, almost as the rest of the world, there's a democratization. It's dispersed.
#
It's everything has changed so much. And in many ways, like in the rest of the world, it's empowered
#
people. It's empowered both the people who want to do sex work and people who are clients. And
#
sometimes it's very hard to decide which is which also given the kind of transactions that go on.
#
So tell me a little bit about this and were there aspects of this, which kind of took you by surprise
#
because before I read your book, I had never read about these changes happening in the context of
#
sex work, though it kind of should have been obvious because what is happening with say
#
something like OnlyFans, you know, OnlyFans in a sense, did to pornography what I saw happen to
#
people like me in the creator economy, where the middleman is cut out and the creators are empowered
#
and you know, so on and so forth. It's almost like you're documenting this revolutionary change
#
in this book. It's such a rich world. So I really enjoyed reading of transformations in red light
#
areas around the world. And they're all saying one thing that globalization has changed the sex
#
industry, all with local flavors. And so you know, so in that sense, it's a really rich sort of stew
#
of things that that has come about. And you didn't mention, for example, the role of regulation,
#
actually that a place like San Francisco has seen in a period of great regulation, we saw the rise
#
of street sex work, because it's easier to run away. If you're doing street sex work, rather than
#
be in a brothel and definitely be raided and, you know, taken away, etc. There's also this idea of
#
what is a smart city, what is a world city, what is, you know, it is a site of entertainment,
#
it is where sexual entertainment should be available. And so then there's a rebranding,
#
basically, prostitution is being rebranded as a club good, in a sense, right. So it's integrated
#
with your nightclubs, and your other lap dancing and your other kinds of sexual entertainment that
#
any world city is expected to offer. So it fits into that kind of a imagination of what a world
#
city should be. So that's also another change, which is important. Like I said, everything has
#
got a very local flavor. So it's not in the case of India, only fans, yes, but it's not, again,
#
an Indian, I mean, the situation is that Indian women are not really online. I mean, the digital
#
divide is huge. And those who are online, there are still continued, there are massive threats
#
to really publicly doing sex work, right. So there is, it is not as empowering as it would be for,
#
might be for women in other countries at this moment, even though they're also being threatened
#
with new legislation, like FOSTA, SESTA, there are these new laws in the US that make it basically
#
that criminalize doing sex work online, which has reduced. So lots of sex workers have protested
#
against that and said that, look, now we can't screen people who are writing to us, et cetera.
#
And we were doing, having these online advertisements, et cetera, was important for
#
us. It was a way of increasing our safety, but now we can't do that anymore. And you're absolutely
#
right that those who couldn't access sex work earlier, these technological changes have made
#
possible. So the internet has made it possible. One of my interviewees said that, you know,
#
earlier it was only either high class men, you know, upper class men, the zamidars who had access
#
and the, or it was like laborers. So the middle-class men could never really, you know,
#
for many reasons, including the moral frameworks they were in, they couldn't access sex work.
#
So this is all rooted in this idea that actually there's a natural entitlement that men actually
#
should have to accessing sexual labor. So there is that sort of tinge on these kind of statements,
#
but yes, it is true that there is increased access to sex work. The local flavor that I talk about
#
means that actually in India, we have a mix of the old forms and the new forms of sex work.
#
So we still have the old traditional forms. We have a red light area, which is really reduced
#
from what a hundred thousand sex workers in the eighties and nineties to 1000 sex workers
#
in recent census data. So that's the kind of out flight. And that's the kind of flight that we have
#
seen away from Kamathipura from what you, from, as you said, the different reasons, aids, raids,
#
and trades, trades being the fact that Kamathipura is a 24 seven operational area. And so lots of
#
small industries are now located there. So, but the changes in that, in the physical space of
#
Kamathipura are documented through different sources. And the source that I found most valuable
#
was the photographs that photographer Sudharak Olve has taken, you know, and he gave me access
#
to his hard drive and I spent a day at his place. And he really took me through with stories,
#
you know, of the various photographs he's taken. He's been taking photographs since I think late
#
eighties of Kamathipura. And above all, I think the images that I saw showed to me Kamathipura
#
as a residential locality. It's where people live their lives. It's where births happen,
#
marriages happen, deaths happen, and, you know, heartbreaks happen. There's violence. There's all
#
kinds of very heartbreaking as well as, you know, moments of celebration. I mean, it's a really
#
evocative journey that I experienced looking at those photos. And they made me really think of
#
what are our sources of data that we actually use to document these changes that you're talking
#
about in a place. And there are actually legislation, important cases. These are the
#
cultural sort of sources that one has to look at to understand how the history of sexuality
#
and its regulation in a city.
#
Yeah, and you mentioned sort of Kamathipura and there's this excellent passage where you're
#
quoting Olwe, and I'll read that out, where, you know, he's talking about how everything is
#
impermanent. And he says, quote, 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. So it's a sense of
#
something that is lost and changed. Just as, you know, I had done an episode on Tawaifs with
#
Sabadevan, and you've also mentioned the Tawaifs of Lucknow, how at one point in time, they used to
#
pay more income tax than anybody. You know, there was basically the nobility, and then there were
#
the Tawaifs, and then there was everybody else. And how over time, they were sort of stigmatized,
#
and that's a whole different story. So it's like there's a disappearing world there, and now
#
there's a disappearing world here. And now it's a mobile, floating gig economy, in some ways,
#
professionalized, and very fluid in the sense that, you know, the binaries don't really apply
#
anymore. It's not that you're either a sex worker or you're not. It's just, you know,
#
fluid for so many people and all of that. And I kind of found that really fascinating. The other
#
aspect of the book, you know, in the section four, you talk about, you've read the book,
#
section four, you talk about, you've titled your section Real Meets Virtual, and you speak about,
#
firstly, casual encounter specialists, as you call them, and then cruisers, and then, you know,
#
men who are servicing female clients, basically. And the cruiser's bit was also very interesting.
#
In cruisers, really, where you talk about men who are, you know, servicing female clients, and
#
the tropes that emerged there were so different from what it would be of the male clients. Like,
#
you know, you quote one male sex worker talking about how the only thing the woman wanted was that
#
he'll sit close to her and she'll have a cup of tea with him, and that's all she wanted, which seems
#
just this craving for intimacy. And similarly, you know, you talk about how one common thread,
#
according to these people, is that these women have been neglected, and they just want company.
#
It's not necessarily sex so much. It's just the human touch, in its broader sense. And it's in
#
this chapter where you also kind of spoke about the Suhagrath fantasy, which is also sort of moving
#
in a strange kind of way. And in the next chapter also, where you talk about servicing female
#
clients, you point out that when it comes to male escorts, the supply is much more than the demand,
#
which is interesting. And this seems to point to inherent differences in sex work, that while
#
it might well be that more and more women are expressing themselves and are kind of giving
#
themselves a permission to fulfill a need in this way or live out a fantasy, it is still very much
#
a case of female sex workers and male clients, and otherwise it's kind of outliers. So what's
#
your sort of sense of how all of that is evolving? So the first thing when you talked about how
#
dispersed everyone has become in Kamathipura, and the passage you read out about the impermanence
#
of life there, is actually the root of the fact that there is no organized collective in Kamathipura.
#
And that makes it very difficult to organize and have a strong movement in Kamathipura. And
#
I wonder if there had been a strong collective in Kamathipura, would it have been such a shadow of
#
itself as it is now? I feel there would have been a different kind of resistance towards its takeover
#
and its decline. Regarding this cruisers, so the cruisers are those who, while it's really easy to
#
say that these are clients, these are sex workers, in the case of cruisers, actually sometimes they
#
offer sex work services, sometimes they pay for sex work services, sometimes it's not really sex
#
work per se, it's different kinds of sort of intimacies which are being transacted. And so
#
it's very fluid. There's no clear cut category that one could put these, so which is why they're
#
called sort of the cruisers of the internet highways. And their clients and generally the
#
clients, the female clients that you've talked about, they are very poignant stories. And I wish
#
I had, I mean, these are hard second hand, right? So this is through the male service providers that
#
I heard these stories, I was not able to access the clients themselves. And I think that's the
#
thing about research, right? You have to close your research at a certain point and hope that
#
someone will pick up from there and then take it forward and find those clients and the female sex
#
workers and the male sex workers and really do more interviews with them, really build on that
#
that opening, go through that crack and just widen it, widen it. So there's much more thicker
#
knowledge on it. The thing about female clients that I found interesting was that, you know,
#
the service providers would keep saying that you have to treat them like a princess. You know, you
#
have to treat them, you have to respect them. You have to talk to them, you have to really listen
#
to them. So those kinds of things, which are very gendered in a sense, right? Because it's like
#
it's like saying that, oh, women don't really, they don't really need the sex per se. They want
#
the emotional stuff around it. But then it also seemed to be validated by a lot of the stories
#
that they were saying. Whereas for the men who were, you know, the female escort would talk about
#
how you have to make him feel like he's king. So that's its counterpart. You have to make the
#
man feel like he's king. He's the best lover in the world. He's like amazing. So you just have
#
to feed that ego. But I thought it was interesting, you know, on one hand, they're saying you have to
#
make him feel like a king. You have to treat her like a princess. So the question of
#
more supply than demand when it comes to male escorts. So I came across the male escort service
#
accidentally, actually, because the website that I was looking at, they had put up an ad
#
asking to recruit male escorts. So I had replied saying that I want to do this interview, et cetera,
#
et cetera. So they did. They were nice enough to reply. I never found them again. You know,
#
after that, they had sort of, they said they don't operate online because their female clients would
#
not like to go to a website and find it. This is absolutely different from what the situation is
#
for male clients who want to go to a website, who want to click through, who want to select
#
and who want to, for whom it's very legit. It's like a done thing. It's a normalized globalized
#
practice to go to an escort services agency and, you know, book a service through them.
#
It's very professionalized. It's discreet, et cetera, et cetera. The thing for women clients,
#
the male agency was like, no, we will not have an internet presence at all. It can only be word of
#
mouth because there is a question of safety. There's a question of security. We keep advertising
#
for new escorts because we need to have a turnover because we have to think about privacy and security
#
of our clients and so on. And it was interesting because he said, listen, if you, I mean, you know,
#
you're coming as a researcher, but if you came as a client, we could give you more information.
#
So, I mean, were you tempted? I must say I was not at that time,
#
but also that I couldn't find them again. You know, it was one of those things that, you know,
#
one is in touch for a while and then they clearly they've changed their numbers or their websites
#
or whatever, email IDs, all of that. So then there are the ethics around doing research also,
#
right? You can't just skulk around. You can't do sting operation kind of methods. You have to
#
state on record that there's an ethics committee, of course. And then you have to state on record
#
that you are here, you are doing research. You cannot pay for, I mean, this is something that is
#
debated often. You don't pay your interviewees when you're doing academic research, although you
#
might compensate for travel, et cetera, et cetera. But here, you know, there was an expectation of
#
payment also in some cases. So that also becomes a bit of a hurdle in actually accessing as many
#
interviewees as you'd like. Yeah, the thing with male escort services, I think, is that there's a
#
lot of secrecy around it. And so it's difficult to, so I've done, I've, I did only one agency
#
interview. I wish I'd found more. And that's another area where I feel like young researchers
#
or new researchers should really look at that site too. I feel that the real edgy thing is
#
women as clients. Who is the client? If we are able to really understand women as clients,
#
I feel that we will make some new conceptual headway into really understanding transactional
#
relationships and sex. Like what is it that motivates women to purchase these services?
#
Is it really what yours, you know, the loneliness aspect, which is very present in all the voices
#
that are there in Intimate City? Or is it desire? Is it fantasy? Is it the need to be listened to?
#
Is it just touch? I mean, what is it that is really their motivation if we heard it from them?
#
So that was, I mean, I would be hungry to read those kinds of stories.
#
Yeah, I mean, I'd be equally hungry. And I think many of they don't necessarily have to
#
emerge from researchers. They can also emerge from fiction writers, novelists. I think it's just
#
rich territory. I mean, I was chatting recently with a novelist friend of mine and he said,
#
my God, India is the best country in the world to be a novelist because you're just surrounded by
#
so many stories and so much complexity and all of that. You know, I won't go on about your book
#
anymore because we could talk for another seven hours. I feel a little guilty. I've barely
#
scratched the surface of it, but it's such a rich book and it's got such, such vivid descriptions
#
of this new developing ecosystem that I think everyone should go out and buy it and read it.
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And I will certainly read it again at leisure. A couple of sort of final questions. I see two
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contradictory ways in which you can approach and perhaps be changed by writing a book like this.
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And one approach is that all these people that you're meeting or talking to at some level,
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the danger that a researcher or a nonfiction writer faces is that they become instrumental
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to that person. I have a story to tell. What story can you give me? And you become instrumental in
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that sense. And that's obviously something everyone wants to avoid, though it is part of the game.
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They are instrumental, but you don't want to think of them as just that. And the other aspect is that
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I imagine that after writing a book like this, you must be a different person and you must be
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a different person in the opposite direction, where you have a little more empathy, where there
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is a stronger human connection with every single person you meet, especially those who otherwise
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might have been unseen to you or invisible to you just because you've made all these connections,
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these human connections while writing the book. So what's that process been like for you? Like,
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it can't be easy. You know, at the end of the day, we have this book, and it's a smooth book,
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and it's full of great insights and great stories. But it can't be easy even at sort of an emotional
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level to write a book like this and negotiate these different kinds of connections that you're
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making and so on. Yeah, I think the question of your participants being instrumental,
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you know, and sort of stepping stones to telling a narrative or a story is always
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concerned with researchers, writers, because research is perceived to be extractive.
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And in many ways it is. But it's also, you know, you can really work around that by
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having for yourself a framework within which, you know, you're very transparent and honest with
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your participants about what it is you're seeking, what it is you can offer, because a lot of it,
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a lot of participants will ask you, what can I get out of this? Right. And the truth is that
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actually, I don't have anything to offer, except, I mean, you know, reflective space, or, you know,
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just an opportunity to dialogue. And when I was doing the research, I didn't know I was going to
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write a book. Right. So the book happened later. One of the questions actually that came to me
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at the launch was that, are you going to share the profits from the book with your,
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with the sex workers who you interviewed? And I understand where that question is coming from,
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because it's asking about authorship, it's asking about this very question that it's like extractive
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you're taking their stories, but what are you giving them in return? And the thing is that I
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have been very upfront and transparent about it. Of course, I'm not making any profits, but beyond
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that, that's not the point. The point is that what is authorship and what is co authorship? You know,
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when you interview someone and when you draw on their experiences and your own experiences,
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and weave several experiences together to really think about something and arrive at something,
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there are different, I feel that yes, there are research participants who have contributed to the
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process. There are other situations where there is co authorship, genuine co authorship, you know,
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and one does not put one's name to it. For example, in one has written so many things about violence,
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et cetera, et cetera, but that's the work of many, many minds, you know, which come together
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to create a kind of, to create work, to create new knowledge. And so there is that distinction
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that a writer or a researcher is constantly doing, you know. Feminist participatory process
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feminist participatory process demands that you do that. So I think that is there. It's also true
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that this, like, like we were saying, you know, do you pay your participant research participants?
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Do you not? Why would you not pay for someone's time? But then are they going to say what you
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they think you want to hear? What should be the ideal relationship between a researcher and a
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researcher? Is there anything beyond just equality and opening yourself up and being transparent,
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being honest that is there more that a researcher can do? And I think the research community does
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think about this more and more. But there's the nature of the beast, you know, in a sense.
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So that would be my realization over the last two books, I would say. Am I a different person?
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Certainly. I am a different person after, after Mannequin, I would say more so, perhaps because
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it was it happened at a very impressionable time in life for me. And, you know, it just became much
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more empathetic and able to really see nuance and not feel the need to stick to some part of a debate.
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Really, it liberated me from a lot of archaic feminist thinking and enabled me to really have
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positions of my own, which are very, very based on honest interaction with people who I'd spoken to.
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In this particular, in intimate city, I was changed in the sense that I think I appreciated
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the city much more. I discovered it was a way to discover Mumbai. It was a way to discover
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really an interior life of people and realize that there are interior lives that
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we don't know about. We don't often, we don't talk about, we don't read about.
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And it just makes me feel really excited for all the research that I have yet to do in my life.
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It just gives you a new understanding that there's so much more to learn and know and to ask.
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Wow. Can't wait to read the research that you go on to do and the questions you go on to ask,
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but also please write that novella about that sack of fur as you eloquently described it.
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Finally, to end, give us, me and my listeners, give us some recommendations in terms of books
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you love, films you love, music you love, you know, desert island books and films and music for you.
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I mean, I feel like I've done a disservice to my listeners by not going a little deeper into
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these aspects of you. Like you're a Bharat Natyam dancer, for example, while doing this book,
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you tried to learn the Lavani and all of that. So this, you know, but we'll do a 10 hour episode
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next time perhaps and cover those areas. But for now, you know, what are the books and films
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and music that mean a lot to you? Amit, I am a conventional consumer of books and films.
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I love rom-coms and yeah, I love rom-coms. I wish they would make rom-coms like they used to,
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like a good Notting Hill. I'm just waiting for someone to... Or like Pretty Woman,
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which would help you with your book also. Pretty Woman, yes. But I mean, you know, there were many,
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you know, like... I'm kidding, I'm kidding. I love Pretty Woman also. So I'm very conventional in
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that sense. In terms of books, you know, something I read recently was Arunava Sinha's translated
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version of Mandha Devi's autobiography, An Educated Woman in Prostitution, which I loved,
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which was a translation of a memoir by a Bengali educated woman in prostitution as
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you would have guessed from the title. But it really showed me how, you know, women in prostitution
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have been the only ones who have been financially, a group of women who have been financially
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independent since forever. And like, you know, you said that you talked about how they were the
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highest taxpayers because they were the only group of women who were actually financially
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independent. And that book really revealed to me that things have not changed so much between 18th
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century Bengal and now because life outside either marriage or prostitution is impossible for women.
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It's very challenging. I mean, it's possible, but it really the constraints are huge.
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Such an incredible quote, life outside marriage and prostitution is impossible for women. Sorry,
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carry on. I also want to recommend Factory Girls by Leslie T. Chang, which is an oldish book,
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but it really showed me how young women work in terrible conditions in the factories in China,
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but they love every moment of it because it's giving them freedom in different kinds of ways.
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In terms of films, I'm trying to think of.
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You're a regular Mami buff every year, so you can't pretend you don't watch films.
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That's true. I really miss Mami. I needed to come back before I. Someone make a rom-com quick
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that I can recommend because I can't think of any amazing films I've seen recently.
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Gangubai, Kathiawadi, which I watched. So I know you're not a fan of Sanjay Leela Bhansali,
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but have you seen Gangubai? I highly recommend you watch Gangubai Kathiawadi for its emotional
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tropes. I love emotional films and that really is the good old tradition of Bollywood. I mean,
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that would be a video cassette that would have made the rounds twice over in my building in Kuwait.
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I'm sure it was a really emotional experience. You've been so generous today. You've been so
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generous today with your time that I feel I owe it to you then to also spend however long that film
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isn't watching it. So I will watch it once for you and I will not mention to you what I feel about
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it, but unless I like it in the unlikely event. I think you'll love it. Oh God. She said with a
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mischievous glint in her eyes. In one more film that I think you should watch is, it's an old
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film, a French film called L-E-L-L-E-S, which has Juliette Binoche, an actress I love and admire
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greatly. And it's about, she's a journalist and she goes out to investigate this story about
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students who are doing escorting or providing services on the side and the realization and
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changes that it brings to her life and her relationships. And it's, you know,
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relationships and it's quite fantastic. You should watch that. I can't wait to watch that.
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And I have to tell you that Juliette Binoche was my first teenage crush in a sense of a major
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foreign actress when I saw her and the unbearable lightness of being. Such a great film directed
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by Philip Kaufman and it was co-written by Jean-Claude Carrier, who also co-wrote three of my
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favorite films of all time. I don't know if you've seen them, made by Louis Bunuel. When he was in
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the 70s, between 1970 and 1980, he made these three films before he died. The Phantom of Liberty,
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Discreet Charm of the Bhojwazi and one more, one more whose name I forget now because I'm also
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growing old, but just masterpieces. Have you seen the Discreet Charm of the Savarnas?
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What is that? Oh, it's an amazing film. You have to see it. I don't remember who made it,
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but it's modeled on the Discreet Charm of the Bhojwazi and it's about, you know, what Savarnas
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think Dalits should look like. Wow. It's an amazing film. It's a short film. You should see
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that as well. And I also love Juliette Binoche. She's also, I've had a crush on her forever.
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That makes two of us. And so Juliette Binoche, if you're listening to this, and I know many
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people listen to my podcast, but I'm not sure it goes quite that far. So Manjima, thank you so much.
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You've been so generous with your time and insights today and thank you also for writing
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these wonderful books. And yeah, it's been great. Thank you so much, Amit. It's been amazing.
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Thank you for listening.
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Did you enjoy this episode of The Scene in the Unseen? If so, would you like to support the
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production of the show? You can go over to sceneunseen.in slash support and contribute
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