Durga Puja: How sex workers at Sonagachi are using their area’s soil as a tool of protest in the RG Kar case

Sonagachi, meaning the “tree of gold”, never had respectable origins. Stories have it that in colonial India, this was where dacoits stored their loot after robbing gold merchants. It then became an enclave of courtesans and entertainers, patronised by both the East India Company officials and its babus. “But its people have more than a heart of gold. It is the only place where identity does not matter. It is the only place where names are completely agnostic, where you cannot be profiled by caste, religion or geography. The only recognition they seek is to be part of the city’s working class,” says Mahasweta Mukherjee, an activist-advocate, who has been assisting the Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee (DMSC), an organisation run by, of and for sex workers. They reclaimed their agency by not only organising Durga puja on their terms but are fighting for dignity of labour, safety at the workplace and gender rights.

The soil of their neighbourhood — which has traditionally been used in the clay mix for the idol makers of Kumartuli (potter’s quarters) as a token ritualism of inclusivity — is now their tool of protest and assertion. As protests over the RG Kar rape spilled over onto the streets of Kolkata, DMSC secretary Bishakha Laskar went on record saying that the soil would not be given to idol makers till such time as the accused are punished and a system that has normalised rape is overhauled beyond just registering an FIR at the police station.

“What many do not know is that we have been refusing this soil ritual for the last seven years to protest against our marginalisation and the rights of all women. There’s no use dignifying us before the puja when we are ostracised despite the Supreme Court ruling two years ago that sex work be recognised as any other profession. We are entitled to dignity and Constitutional rights, labour laws, healthcare and benefits. We are crusading for women’s safety at the workplace, be it ours or the victim’s,” she says.

Laskar and other sex workers decided to do their own puja after years of denial. “Over the years, all puja committees around our neighbourhood have thrived on our donations. Even in the early 2000s, every woman here gave nothing less than Rs 500 to Rs 1,000. Yet we were not allowed to enter pandals or have bhog. People stared at us like we were aliens. Even our children were shooed away for no fault of theirs. Why should they carry the stigma and the burden of choice not of their own making? That’s why in 2013 we decided to do our first puja without donations from residents. Civil society didn’t stand by us. Our pandal was uprooted overnight, our banners were torn down, the permit for loudspeakers was denied to us. So we did the puja inside our quarters,” says Laskar, who was among the first to introduce women priests and drummers for the puja. Now, their cultural showcase is what many look forward to as they always carry a message. This year, it is about climate change.

At a time when liberalism is more rhetoric than action, Laskar and her women have democratised the puja and broken barriers. Everybody is welcome at the Sonagachi puja. “We cook our own bhog and kheer. No passer-by goes hungry as we keep our kitchen open till 10 pm. And we hire delivery boys to send the bhog to every red-light district in the city. Now sex workers in other Bengal towns of Durgapur, Asansol, Bishnupur and Siliguri organise their own pujas. This year, we will be distributing plants, with the help of a nursery, so that residents can make balcony gardens,” says Laskar, who has spearheaded many drives like tying rakhis to the underprivileged and elderly, celebrating Holi and even Sindoor Khela with gusto. “We have one religion called womanhood. It doesn’t matter whether they are single, married or widowed. That segregation is well past its time, just as this issue of soil is. Tell me where would you find it in this concrete beehive of a city?” she asks.

An artist gives finishing touches to a statue of Durga in Kolkata (Express Photo by Partha Paul)

Sanskrit scholar and priest Nandini Bhowmick has challenged the patriarchal chokehold of convention and interpretations. In the early Vedic era, Nature or prakriti was worshipped as the Mother Goddess. Idolatry came with the later Vedic age but even the Smritis retained much of the elements of tree worship. So soil as an earth element was important even in ritualistic practices. There are various types of soil mentioned, from river banks, from the shoreline, from the roadhead, the kind you could scoop up with an elephant tusk, an ox horn, mud from a termite hill, the kind dug up by animals and insects and the mineral-rich clay from gardens. “So it was about the existing ecosystem that the writers of Smritis understood. That context is not relevant now. And in the end, what was the mud a metaphor of? In the absence of soap, people used clay packs before their bathing ritual as it would wash out all impurities and toxins from the skin. Ritualising it for worship ensured people followed a simple hygiene ritual,” says Bhowmick.

Some Vedic scholars saw the different clay mounds as navkanya or the nine manifestations of the goddess. “Among them were the Brahmani (Brahmin girl), nati (dancer/performer), vaishya (sex worker), rajaki (laundry girl), shudra (underprivileged girl) and gopala (milkmaid). You could call them the working girls of their time and it was believed that no puja could be completed without acknowledging their presence in society. In fact, ganikas or courtesans were considered cultural ambassadors of their time, refined women who excelled in arts, studies, music and dance, assigned courtly duties and even allowed to be hostesses and engage in conversations with men. That’s why the priest was mandated to request soil from their home,” says Bhowmick.

Endorsed by royalty, noblemen and merchants, the ganikas were more educated, intellectual, worldly wise and better skilled than married women, who were confined indoors and tied down to patriarchal constructs of idealism as evidenced in the works of Vatsyayana. “Once the empires fell, the ganikas fell from grace and gradually, without patronage, began to be identified only with the sex trade. Their profession was demeaned,” adds Bhowmick.
However, Laskar and the women of Sonagachi are rewriting their roles and challenging stereotypes as a collective. Over the years, proceeds from the stall business of their Durga puja have been used to set up an organisation called Aamra Padatik (We are Travellers). They now have their own cooperative bank and a self-regulatory body that is vigilant about trafficking and abuse of minors, working with the state police on this. “That way we have been able to win common people’s trust and respect and now we take donations, not for the puja, but for our children’s welfare. Staying in safe homes away from their mothers’ place of work, all of them complete their education. Some of them are college toppers and have gone to work in other cities. Meanwhile, sex workers themselves are upskilling themselves, some have turned chefs,” says Laskar.

But what Laskar feels most proud of is raising the all-girls’ soccer team, which now plays mainstream competitive matches and the culture troupe Komol Gandhar, which travels the world, even performing with Dona Ganguly, wife of cricketer Sourav Ganguly. “Thanks to the puja, we have managed to push the envelope in 12 years, what priests call a yug. And even if there has been a 10 per cent change in how people look at us, it is a battle won,” she says.

Meanwhile, Ratan Dolui, who has just completed his master’s degree in social work and is the son of a sex worker himself, practises a skit with a group of children in an old courtyard house. “We just tell our own stories of the world as we see them. I come back home every puja so that seeing us, they too can believe they can change their reality. Many of us carry a stigma that’s hard to shed. But my mother is a doshobhuja (10-armed) herself and has never abandoned me, becoming both my mother and father. I owe it to her and the soil where I was born,” says Ratan, who is determined to prove that they were never the children of a lesser god.