Sisters under their skins

My Mirror column:

Last week’s release Love Sonia, Tabrez Noorani’s cinematic exposé of India’s role in the international sex trade, makes for an interesting juxtaposition to Tikli and Laxmi Bomb.

The two women at the heart of Tikli and Laxmi Bomb, which I wrote about last week, differ in age, background, language, priorities — but are united by a common fate and an understanding of what they’re up against. It is after Putul and Laxmi begin to trust each other that they can forge a larger sisterhood of sex workers. Writer-director Aditya Kripalani’s programmatic zeal can feel cinematically clunky, but his core political premise is irreproachable: the world is run by men and women can only resist if they come together.

Kripalani’s film wants us to recognise sex work as a form of labour, currently carried out under drastically unfair and unsafe working conditions. His dream is a sex workers’ revolution: a krantikari sisterhood that offers both a safety net and entrepreneurial improvements.

At first sight, Tabrez Noorani’s Love Sonia, released last Friday, seems to share Kripalani’s themes: sex work and sisterhood. But it approaches prostitution from the opposite end. Rather than adult women who are making a choice (albeit in straitened circumstances), Love Sonia is concerned with the trafficking of children and young women into the national and international sex trade. In another contrast to Tikli and Laxmi Bomb, the sisters in Love Sonia are biological ones — and the film is about their wrenching separation rather than their coming together. In a plot that underlines Noorani’s focus on unfreedom, an indebted farmer somewhere in the Mumbai hinterland sells Preeti, the fairer of his teenaged daughters, into the flesh trade. The other daughter, Sonia (an affecting Mrunal Thakur), tries desperately to trace her. When that fails, she follows Preeti to Mumbai, but ends up a prisoner in a brothel herself.

The brothels of Mumbai have long been the site of both tragedy and villainy in Hindi cinema, and the Love Sonia version is just as depressing as what we’ve seen before. The claustrophobic small rooms, the blue painted doors, the flimsy partitions, the very young faces with painted red lips all evoke Mary Ellen Marks’ Falkland Road images from the 1970s. But with Sonia’s first cowering view of it, as she slinks past half-naked bodies heaving in dank rooms, Noorani turns this world into something almost biblically sinful, a latter-day Sodom and Gomorrah. This vision of the brothel is underscored when one of its long-time inhabitants, the slightly unstable Rashmi (Freida Pinto), tells Sonia her family would have done her “kriya-karam” (her last rites) long ago. “Ab toh bas iss narak ka maja le le (Now you may as well enjoy the pleasures of this hell),” Rashmi says.

Hell has its gatekeepers. In an update of sorts on Sadashiv Amrapurkar’s legendary Maharani in Mahesh Bhatt’s 1991 Sadak, we have Manoj Bajpayee as the brothel owner Faisal, a terrifying presence who swings between quiet cajoling and violent, abusive rage. There is a pattern to Noorani’s male characters. Whether it is the girls’ father (Adil Hussain) at the family level, the village level patriarch Dada Thakur (Anupam Kher in a nicely underplayed but supremely creepy performance), or Faisal as the self-appointed father-figure of the brothel, each of these men claims to be shielding women from what lies beyond. “Baahar yeh jo jaanwar type ki duniya hai, kaun bacha raha hai tujhe usse (Who do you think is saving you from the beasts that make up the world outside)?” Faisal once yells at Sonia. But in fact these men are themselves the source of danger, their protectiveness a mere front for exploitation.

But let us return to sisterhood — and the pressures upon it. What lights up Sonia’s journey is her love for the sister she’s always taken care of. But we also see the dark shadow cast by competition. The widely accepted idea that Preeti is prettier affects Sonia’s belief in her own attractiveness. In one harrowing scene, the spectre of jealousy becomes a wall between the sisters.

Even more complicated are the teenaged Sonia’s relationships with older women in the brothel. The madam Madhuri (Richa Chaddha in a fine performance) and Rashmi both try to win Sonia’s trust, even as they collude with Faisal to break her spirit. But the strings they try to pull also reveal their own status as puppets. Sex is the only bribe they can offer; their seductiveness is a weapon of the weak. Noorani’s is a tragic vision of how women operate in a world so totally governed by men.

The saddest comment Love Sonia makes on the sisterhood theme, though, is when it shows us how women judge each other by the standards men have set. When Rashmi tries to position herself as a surrogate sister, a stand-in for the absent Preeti, Sonia is appalled that her innocent sibling might be equated with a woman she clearly sees as ‘fallen’. “Tumhare jaise bilkul nahi hai woh,” she cries. The madonna and the whore are tragically real stereotypes — even among sex workers.

Some might argue that Noorani ends on a more hopeful note than that. Indeed, some broken bonds between women are revived, and some transformative new ones forged. And yet, it is hard not to read the tragic ends of specific female characters in terms of that disturbingly familiar Hindi movie trope: the fallen woman might atone for her sins, but she would never escape her fate.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 23 Sep 2018.

Bought on and Sold on Mutton Street

My Mirror column last Sunday:

Our columnist takes a historical detour through the antique pleasures of Pila House.

Last Monday I went to Mutton Street. I had spent a week in Mumbai, setting up 'work' meetings that were really an excuse to wander the city as a happy, giddy tourist of the Delhi variety. But one item on my Bombay agenda remained - a trip to Chor Bazaar: several streets' worth of dusty antiques. 

But at Mumbai Central, cab drivers seemed mystified by my desire to go to Chor Bazaar. Then, gently but firmly, one deposited me on a road lined with hardware shops, saying this was Chor Bazaar and I better find this Mutton Street myself.

I did. Having burrowed into uncarry-able and unaffordable mountains of old things, I settled not unhappily on two 1970s print advertisements. The genuinely non-sleazy shop man took me to an ATM on his scooter, past an old theatre showing a Mithun film with brilliant hand-painted poster. Only on my way out did I realise what I had walked down was called Patthe Bapurao Marg. That was when it finally clicked. I'd been walking on Falkland Road.

From dates.sites, (a must-have compendium for film nerds and Mumbai fans, published by the Cinema City project), I knew that Patthe Bapurao was born a Brahmin, named Shridhar Krishnaji Kulkarni, underwent caste conversion in order to work in tamasha and married a Mahar dancer called Pawala. Among the other impressive acts to his name is a visit to Ambedkar in 1927, when, “flanked by two women dancers dressed in finery”, Bapurao offered to contribute the proceedings of eight Tamasha shows to the Mahar Satyagraha Fund, a campaign for the entry of Dalits into temples. Ambedkar rejected the offer on moral grounds.

Bapurao died in poverty in 1941. In 1950, the Marathi director/actor Raja Nene made a highly successful biopic. As one of the central arteries of what was for many years Mumbai's entertainment district, Pila House, it seems only fitting that Falkland Road was renamed Patthe Bapurao Marg. 

Here's the entry in dates.sites: “Pila House-hybridisation of Play House-a cluster of theatres staging Parsi theatre plays and Tamasha performances - bordered on the east by red light area of Kamathipura (named after the Telugu-speaking community of masons), and on the west by migrant courtesans and other entertainment artists at Congress House (named after the office of the Congress Party nearby-is at its peak at the turn of the century.”

While the theatres – the 'play houses' set up in the 1800s - gave the area its name, Falkland Road's association with an even older form of entertainment dates back to the 1700s. That was when brothels first emerged in the area, catering to soldiers.

In an essay called 'F**kland Road' (in another Project Cinema City volume), Bishakha Datta makes the connection explicit. She cites the background note of a (proposed) Union of Entertainment Workers of India that refers to the Arthashastra placing courtesans and sex workers alongside actors, dancers, musicians and bards. The note continues: “It is common knowledge that... sex...work is a form of intimate entertaining communication, involving some very subtle and complex combinations of gesture, language, play and relaxation.”

This is, of course, true - though the argument might find few takers in the hypocritical modern world, where even bar dancers are refused their rights as workers.

But even if the cinema-sex equivalence is unlikely to fly with most people, Pila House has plied generations of (mostly) male, (mostly) migrant clients with both. Built before cinema existed, the 'play houses' are some of the last theatres still projecting film prints. They have specialisations, too: Nishat shows Bhojpuri blockbusters, New Roshan devotes itself to Mithun, Silver to sex films.

There was a time when the brothels of Kamathipura not only lived next to cinema, but in Bombay's cinematic imaginary. Realistic depiction was never the point. Even Gulzar's Mausam, or Sudhir Mishra's Chameli can only be called 'good efforts'. But the girls in the cages of Falkland Road were a legendary sight – when I interviewed her a couple of years ago, Deepti Naval described, with alternate shudders of excitement and distaste, her trip in the 80s to see them. Naval ended up spending half the night in a Nepali sex worker's room, and the experience inspired a performance years later.

Naval got me thinking: has any mainstream Hindi film ever let a girl from a “good family” meet a prostitute? Well, very recently. But of course Kangana Ranaut must travel all the way to Amsterdam to hang with an Indian sex worker, and make the startling discovery that she's not an alien. 

Ironically, just before Queen, Ranaut played a Kamathipura sex worker called Rajjo in a bizarrely retro film called Rajjo, where the token 'contemporary' event is the brothel torn down by an evil consortium of politicians and builders to build a mall. Small industries have indeed replaced most Kamathipura brothels, with owners cutting their losses and leaving as the buildings they rented become prized real estate.

Whether Kareena was a convincing sex worker or not, at least Reema Kagti shot Talaash in Kamathipura. Rajjo chose to spend 5 crores 'recreating' Pila House on a four-acre-plot in Borivali.

Perhaps the last two films about Kamathipura -- one acts as if the place is already gone, and the other is a ghost movie. No Rani could ever show up to meet a Rajjo. In Falkland Road, there may soon be no more sex workers to meet. Not even the ghosts of them.