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Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee Workers

Like any other 16-year-old, Swapna had dreams of a happy married life. A small house of her own, a loving husband who doted on her, children and a square meal everyday. There was nothing more that she craved for in life. Married at the early age of 14, Swapna believed that she had got it all. Fate, however, had other plans for her.

Exactly a year after her marriage, when she was pregnant with her first child, Swapna discovered that her husband was a drug-addict. Pleadings, entreaties, threats - nothing could dissuade her husband to abstain himself. And within months, the once loving man, whom Swapna had believed to be her destiny, was totally transformed.

By this time, he had been sacked from his job on the grounds of inefficiency. Regular intake of drugs had left him too weak to perform any heavy work and the only alternative left for him was to pick up odd jobs that hardly helped him to sustain himself or his family. Moreover, most of the money he earned was spent on drugs.

A 6-month pregnant Swapna had no alternative before her but to take up a part-time job as a maid servant at some houses in the nearby colony. It was in one of these houses where a senior official working with a private company forced himself on her when she was alone with him in the house. The result: she lost her child.

Bitter, disillusioned and a definitely angry, Swapna wanted justice, but did not know whom to turn for help. She reasoned with herself that if she needs to sell her body at the workplace to sustain her job she’d better make selling her body a job for herself.

Six months later Swapna was a regular call girl. Her “madam” or dalal took her to rounds at various flats across the ‘City of joy’ and at the end of the day, she was paid Rs 150. However, that time for Swapna even Rs 150 was a princely sum that helped her to fetch at least two whole meals a day for her husband and herself.

Despite all the hardships and initial moral pangs of adjusting to this new profession, love was still very much a part of Swapna’s life. She believed that this was a passing phase and sooner or later her husband will come out of the clutches of this killer addiction and things will be back to normal once again.

That however, never destined to happen. With every passing day, Swapna’s husband seemed to be engulfed at a rapid rate to the vortex of addiction from where there was no return. Poverty had been a part of her life for quite sometime now, but the new addition was violence. Her husband, who had no qualms about being fed in her money or even using it to buy drugs, however, was adamant about the fact that she sold her body to fend for them. Beatings and abuse by then had become a regular feature in Swapna’s life.

Finally one day when her husband tried to douse her in kerosene and burn her alive, Swapna decided to call it quits. She moved out of her home and took up a house in the infamous locality of Sonagachhi, where she lives till this day.

It was while staying in Sonagachhi, Swapna came face to face with several problems that plagued the sex workers. The first that grabbed her attention was the ill behaviour meted out by the local dadas to the sex workers there. They “touched” anyone whenever they wanted to and even at times forced them selves on these girls. And they were backed by the several “madams” who run the brothels and ate up the lion’s portion of what each of her girls managed to earn.

Swapna was among the first few to raise her voice against these atrocities. The retaliation as expected was immediate and violent. Admitted to hospital with grievous injuries, Swapna, however, was not the one to be scared. She right now heads the sex workers union in Kolkata that admittedly has given a fresh lease of life to many in the sex industry and has been pioneering changes. By getting rid of several abominable practices like “Chukri Pratha” [forced selling of young girls] or Adhiyaar prata [where the prostitute pays half her earnings to the madam at the brothe], her organization ‘DURBAR’, now functions with the primary agenda of getting the sex workers the right of the working class. “We earn by sheer hard work. We do not have sex as a fun but due to needs of the profession. Moreover, our profession, the oldest in the history, is nothing that we are ashamed of and we are in it by choice. Thus we demand to be treated with respect and given a proper workers status,” Swapna says.

“I am there not only behind every sex worker who is in distress, but also with every other woman who is in crisis at any point of time,” she sums up.

About Durbar Mahila Samanyaya Samiti:
Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee is a forum of about 30,000 sex workers of different red light areas of West Bengal. In July, 1995, a group of sex workers from Sonagachi, one of the oldest and largest red light areas of Calcutta, established Mahila Samanwaya Committee to create solidarity and collective strength among a larger community of sex workers, forge a positive identity for ourselves as prostitutes and mark out a space for action on our behalf. The founding members of Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee had come together through their active involvement as field level health workers and peer educators in a STD/HIV Intervention Project which had been running in Sonagachi and adjoining areas since 1992.

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