Gentrification always tries to make street life more orderly, less messy, more suited to middle-class tastes. Recently I published stories about city ordinances in Spain and Italy that name specific activities to be banned in public places: bathing in fountains, eating sandwiches, selling sex. This story about Mumbai describes how a traditional red-light (and slum) area is replaced during gentrification, with interesting attention to shifting social alliances and ideas about the sex industry.
Red light district swaps sin for skyscrapers
Clara Lewis, Times of India, 28 November 2009
Till about four years ago, garishly painted women in glittering attire were a common sight on Cursetji Shuklaji Street, a busy road in Mumbai’s notorious red light district, Kamathipura. Once known as Safed Gully (White Lane) on account of the European prostitutes that it housed during the British Raj, Shuklaji Street was the place where, for years on end, one could find sex workers plying their trade. These days however, they’re out there not to solicit but to await the private taxis that ferry them to dance bars in the suburbs.
From 50,000 sex workers in 1992 (a statistic recorded by the BMC as part of its AIDS documentation ) to a mere 1,600 today, Kamathipura and the adjoining Foras Road are a mere shadow of their former selves. The street-facing brothels have given way to little shops vending CDs and mobile phones; there’s also a clutch of video parlours where boisterous youngsters throng to catch the latest Telugu blockbuster.
Gentrification is slowly descending on Kamathipura , like it has on many of Mumbai’s distinctive boroughs. The one-storey, ground-hugging structures are making way for dizzy skyscrapers – two, of 35 storeys, have come up on Shuklaji Street, while another two, 47 storeys each, are nearing completion. Salim Balwa, director of DB Realty, the company that’s busy making over the area, is planning several more projects here. “The space crunch in Mumbai has meant that you go looking for land where no development has happened,” he says. All the towers overlook Kamathipura.
Balwa, who’s developed 10 lakh square feet in the area and is in the process of acquiring another 3.5 lakh, is sure that he’s on to a good thing. “All said and done, the place is centrally located, and it is better than living in far-off Mira Road,” he says. The present residents, most of whom live in houses that are about 100 sq ft in size, will get 300 sq ft after redevelopment, says Balwa. And, of course, there will be a more-than-neat profit for him.
It was the twin factors of AIDS and the Maharashtra government’s redevelopment policy that played a major role in getting sex workers to move out of the oldest profession in the world and subsequently out of Kamathipura. The AIDS scare led to the first serious government intervention in the area’s prostitution dens: Dr Jairaj Thanekar, Chief Executive Health Officer, BMC, who worked in Kamathipura for 15 years to implement the AIDS intervention programme, says the corporation played a key role in reducing the number of prostitutes . “From organising raids on the Yellappa markets down south – the main source of girls for Kamathipura – to raiding the brothels, we made it difficult for prostitution to function,” he says. “From 1999 onwards, the number of sex workers started dwindling.”
When the BMC intervened, the rate of transmission of HIV was a shocking four per cent. By then a large number of sex workers had died. “Brothel owners, faced with sex workers who kept falling ill, moved them out to other brothels in Mulund, Bhandup and Ghatkopar, but procuring new girls was also becoming difficult,” says Thanekar. This and other factors – a reluctance among landlords, newly aware of AIDS, to lease out their premises to prostitution, spiralling rents, police raids, and the emergence of a new generation of financiers who got into more lucrative ventures – hastened the downward spiral of prostitution in Kamathipura.
The reconstruction wave of dilapidated buildings completed the process. “Several people were bought out by the builders,” says a brothel owner. “Gangubai Chawl on 11th Kamathipura Lane was among the first to be torn down and reconstructed into a six-storey building by a private developer. Normal households moved in.” The stigma attached to Kamathipura began to dwindle somewhat, and the newly reconstructed prostitution dens began to be put to other uses – for the last four years, businessmen have been renting out the infamous rooms to small manufacturing units. Mohammed Israr, a 22-year-old native of Bihar, who assembles travel bags for a local manufacturer, has rented 600 sq feet in a one-storey structure in Kamathipura. He pays a stiff monthly rent of Rs 12,000 for the space, but says that it’s worth the money, given the central location.
Abdul Sattar, a local pan-beedi stall owner on Lane 13, has been in the business for the last 15 years. “Earlier, sex workers’ clients frequented my stall,” he says. “There were a lot of goons and hangers-on around. Now, proper businessmen come here. It’s a welcome change, as people working in the vicinity are no longer looked down upon. There was a time when we were ashamed to tell our relatives that we lived and worked in Kamathipura . But not any more.” Adds Sadiq Ismail, who owns a consumer goods shop on 12th Kamathipura Lane, “I live in a house above my shop with my wife, three sons and a daughter. There is nothing shameful about living here any more.”
Street named desire
Kamathipura is Mumbai’s oldest and Asia’s largest red light district. It got its name from the Kamathis (workers) of Andhra Pradesh. They worked as labourers on construction sites. The neighbourhood also had Chinese residents who worked as dockhands and ran restaurants. Kamathipura was formerly Lal Bazaar, an area set aside by the British for their troops’ sexual pleasures. By the end of the 19th century, Lal Bazaar was known as a “tolerated area” as prostitution was illegal. At the time, Bombay and to a lesser extent Calcutta were the most important cities in an expanding prostitution network. Cursetji Shuklaji Street in Kamathipura was called Safed Gully as it was home to European prostitutes. The brothels here were classified into first, second and third class. In 1916, the British set up the Venereal Disease Clinic, the first of its kind in Bombay. The BMC took over the clinic in 1925. Read the rest of this entry »
