[Reader-list] IFS - '07 - 2nd posting - April - Displacement of prostitutes
SUROJIT SEN
surojit369 at yahoo.co.in
Tue Apr 24 10:55:50 IST 2007
Dear Reader,
This is my second posting of my project Displacement of Prostitutes - A tale of two cities in two centuries.
Towards a Towards Text
I had Surojit Sen
Surojit Sen
I had spent my childhood days in the northern part of Calcutta before our family shifted to Chandannagar in Hoogly. In north Calcutta, the house we lived in was a few minutes walk from Sonagachi , the proverbial red light area in Calcutta. Later, our joint family broke up and we moved to another house which was also not very far from Sonagachi, as I grew up in this area , I developed , as a child , a curiosity about Sonagachi which is known as the oldest and biggest brothel in Bengal , if not in India. Gradually, this curiosity turned into an eerie feeling and finally into a sort of sexual wonder.
Sonagachi has been a large part of Chitpur road ( now Rabindra Sarani ) - the oldest throughfare in the city over the last 100 or 150 years. Sonagachi was familiar to me because we had to go to Natunbazar ( to by fish ) and frequently pass through such areas as Garanhata, Masjidbari street, Darjipara, Durgacharan Mitra street, and others - all located in close vicinity to this brothel, we could not avoid Sonagachi even when we would go to see the charak festival at Chhatubabur bazaar every year. As I got familiar to Sonagachi in my early years, I once thought of writing a novel on the prostitutes inhabiting this area. I wished to dub those women as Birds in the neighbouring area. With time, this childish idea wore off, but the curiosity continued to stay on. How was Sonagachi , say, about hundred years ago! Haridaser
Guptokatha ( secret tales of Haridas ), a very sensational book written by Bhubonchandra Mukhopadhyay in 1903 describes Sonagachi as this :
Six months have passed since I settled in Calcutta. By now I have got acquainted with the roads and streets [ in the city ]. One day, on a full moon autumn evening , I was strolling along Chitpur Road. I had not stepped in this area in the afternoon before. I found the same look but one thing struck me as strange. I saw a type of women in the balconies of houses on either side of the road. Dressed in various colours, they put on metal ornaments of different types and dressed their hair in various styles. Some of them were sitting down on stools or their chairs, some standing in the balcony puffing at their silver- made hookahs and some leaning out of veranda, resembling the posture a juggler, with their eyes descending on the road below. Some of these women, I found, had colorful bodices on and some had painted their
faces and some were standing with disheveled hair- locks hanging down loosely. Who are these women? I had heard from gossip that there are many harlots in Calcutta. Those who choose to speak sadhu [ chaste; Sanskritised] Bangla say that harlots or prostitutes are charming public women ( barangana ) bent on capturing the spoilt young men by providing them with carnal pleasure - a sort of entertainment in low taste, once trapped by these women, the young boys - who have gone ashtray and seek entertainment in sensual pleasure only - are done for. I could recall those words standing on Chitpur Road. So, these are public women, I understood, the women who lure young men on to destruction. I got started and shuddered. These women have shaken off all the shyness and sense of dignity, characteristic of a women, and are showing themselves up
right on the road. In form and shape, they look like women; but by nature they are demonic creatures, Calcutta is really filled with filth to the brim, with perfumed clothes and hair cut in a particular fashion, dandies are walking down the road with their eyes raised to balconies above. And the eyes from each balcony are casting lewd looks at them [ to attract their attention ]. Keeping this sight in mind, one city bard interestingly known as pakshi- kabi [ie, bird poet] once said at a gathering : Those eyes are traps set for catching birds; they are flutes to men folk. I thought that the poet was absolutely right.
Such traps abound in Chitpur Road. There is hardly any gentle household in this area. Had there been a few, it would have made a little difference. The pattern of prostitutes settlement in Calcutta is simply contemptible. There is a prostitutes quarter beside a middle class household, by the side a school, close to a school, close to a doctors chamber. In some cases they live in the upper part of a gentlemans house, and on top of all, they even surround the Brahmo Samaj temple. If this be the situation , what would be the fate of this city! Doesnt any body care? ( pp 85 86).
Harishchandra Mukherjee of Hindoo Patriot fame discussed this problem in this paper ( 15 june, 1854 ) and mentioned that there were around 13,000 prostitutes in Calcutta at that time. And Kaliprasanna Singha in his celebrated Hutom Penchar Naksha ( a pithy satire on the 19th Calcutta) observed that the city of Calcutta has become the city of whores. There is hardly any area in the city where you would not find at least ten prostitutes quarters. Their number is rising every year, showing no sign of decline. Nababibi bilas (1822) by Bhabanicharan Bandopadhyay, Apunar much apuni dekho (1863) by Bholanath Mukhopadhyay, Sachitra guljar Nagar ( 1871) by Kedernath Datta and some other satirical pieces written in the 19th Century sketch the same scenario. Going by these sources, we learn that the main red light area in Calcutta in those
days spread along a large stretch of Chitpur Road from Siddheswaritala ( a temple) at Bagbazar to Nakhoda Masjid (the biggest mosque in Calcutta) at Kalutola. In the course of reading these books, I came across one prose piece Bodmaish jobdo ( Wicked Punished ) written by Prankrishna Dutta in 1869. We learn from this text that in 1868, the British Government promulgated the Indian Contagious diseases Act 14, popularly known as choddo ayin ie Act 14 to arrest the spread of syphilis among the soldiers. The Government found this act urgent because after the great Mutiny of 1857, the number of soldiers in Fort William was increased and the government knew it full well that it would be impossible to prevent the soldiers from visiting brothels and contracting venereal diseases as a consequence. According to one account, in 1860, one third
of the British soldiers had contracted syphilis. The 1868 Act, therefore, aimed to free the prostitutes from that contagious disease and thus to make sure that spread of syphilis among the soldiers does not assume endemic proportions.
The act sparked off a stir in Calcutta and led to the publication of scores of plays, skits and satirical sketches on the Act 14. Battala in north Calcutta , the oldest publishing centre in the city, brought out these books. The bhadralok ( elite ) class tended to look down upon the Battala publications as vulgar literature in bad taste. By the elite standards, the language and style of the Battala Literature was vulgar but the social reality reflected in those books provide significant glimpses of social life in 19th Century Calcutta. Prankrishna Datta s text was the first to the 1868 Act. It was followed by thrice satirical sketches on the same subject published in the same year (1869 ). In a caustic style, prankrishna datta depicts the reactions that the said Act brought in wake.
---------------------------------
Check out what you're missing if you're not on Yahoo! Messenger
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070424/1dcf8b2e/attachment.html
More information about the reader-list
mailing list