Laura Agustín

A scholar of medieval Japan, Janet Goodwin, reveals how sexual mores changed from liberal and accepting to disapproving a thousand years ago. The above picture depicts sexual entertainers in a small boat - nomadic sex workers - soliciting passengers in a larger boat. Note how positive perceptions changed to negative, and how the disapproving attitude towards prostitution was accompanied by negativity towards women in general.

Changing Times for Japanese Sex Workers

Ayub Khattak, 13 January 2006, UCLA International Institute

In medieval Japan, sexual entertainers and their customers enjoyed great freedoms until a growing orthodoxy stifled their trade, Janet Goodwin tells a UCLA audience.        An early Heian period painting shows three women in a boat rowing alongside a larger boat carrying male passengers, some dressed richly and some ascetically—aristocrats and monks. The kimono-clad women were asobi, or sexual entertainers, singing their siren song to lure the aristocrats to some temporary pleasure shack.

With the monks in the rear . . . the large boat was probably on its return from some chartered pilgrimage to a sacred site. The asobi knew well the sea lanes for pilgrims who were ready to unburden themselves of their journey’s abstinence. . . weaker pilgrims might have looked for the asobi even on the way to sacred sites.

. . . once liberal perceptions towards sexuality would give way to a conservative sexual orthodoxy in both the Heian (794–1185) and the Kamakura periods (1185–1333) Entertainments provided by the asobi were not exclusively sexual. The women’s high-priced services included folk songs, sometimes lyrically composed of Buddhist sutras, and traditional dances, Goodwin said.

Goodwin drew on such sources as courtier and courtesan diaries, records of judicial cases involving the asobi, and divorce settlements to argue that the Japanese embraced a very liberal attitude towards sex in the early Heian period. Men were polygamous, women serially monogamous, widows sexually active, and divorce common. Prostitution was merely risqué, not shameful, according to Goodwin.

But as time went on, Goodwin said, people began to look on the asobi with distrusting eyes. Celibate monks, their chastity perhaps threatened, began to decry the women as a wicked bunch out to distract and corrupt Buddhist men. . . . Beyond temptations and conflicts, social considerations began to prompt change, Goodwin argued. With the emergence of the shogunate during the Heian period, greater emphasis was placed on a strict patrilinear system. Penalties for adultery grew more strict, in part to prevent feuds among legitimate as well as illegitimate offspring. Women who seduced high-level aristocrats came to be known as keisei, or “castle topplers,” after one lady was sent by one lord specifically to enslave a rival through seduction, finally coaxing him into giving up his holdings.

Meanwhile, the asobi were gaining a reputation as a public nuisance because of their itinerancy. Although some settled in “pleasure districts,” they were largely nomadic, drifting about in search of work. “They live in animal-hair tents and drift from place to place in pursuit of food and water, just like the northern barbarians,” wrote a twelfth-century observer, Ôe Masafusa, in a sharp departure from the tone he had adopted in an earlier description of the asobi. (”Their voices halt the clouds floating through the valleys, and their tones drift with the wind blowing over the water. Passers-by cannot help but forget their families,” Ôe had written.)

Gradually, and as the asobi came under harsh scrutiny from a ministry set up to regulate prostitution, the stigma attached to sexual entertainment prevented many aristocrats from indulging in it. The sexual orthodoxy that reigned in the asobi had broader consequences for the liberties of Japanese women, Goodwin said. Divorce was increasingly frowned upon, and widows were expected to remain unattached and to pray for their dead husbands, perhaps entering a nunnery. Attitudes changed not merely towards physical acts, Goodwin suggested, but towards gender roles, affecting especially the lives of women.

If you’re in New York, try to come to tonight’s event at 66th Street and York Avenue - a lot of fantastic people will be in attendance.

I’m giving a talk at a good evening hour on 10 March, on the East Side in the 60s, and welcome anyone interested to come along. The lecture is part of the Pugwash series of conferences ‘examining the relationship between science and society, to ensure that research benefits humanity.’ This is a good opportunity to consider what social-justice advocates and social scientists consider to be evidence of a problem and what it means when proofs conflict. So many trafficking conversations consist of ideological battles that I don’t wonder most people feel confused about what’s going on.

Trafficking, migration and the sex industry: Framing the questions, providing the proofs

Lecture by Laura Agustín, author of Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry

Rockefeller University
Weiss Building Room 305
York avenue at 66th Street
New York NY 10065
Enter the campus at 66th Street

Wednesday 10 March 2010

645 pm (refreshments) - 9 pm
Lecture begins 7 pm, Questions 8 pm

Subway: Lexington Avenue Local #6 to 68th Street/Lexington Avenue Station; walk east
Buses: M31 (York Avenue/57th St crosstown) and M66 (68th St crosstown

Contact: pugwash [at] rockefeller.edu

Laura Agustín studies cultural, sexual and postcolonial issues linking commercial sex, migration, informal economies and feminist theory. Her research amongst migrants and social helpers challenges several contemporary myths: that selling sex is completely different from any other kind of work; that migrants who sell sex are always passive victims; and that the multitude of people out to save them are without self-interest. Agustín argues that the label ‘trafficked’ does not describe migrants’ lives and that a Rescue Industry disempowers them. Frequently, says Agustín, migrants prefer to work in the sex industry to their other options, and, despite being treated like a marginalised group, they form part of a dynamic global economy.

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.Pleasure Island

The purest form of Afghan afeem (opium) was available only at Bachchuseth ki Wadi on Foras Road, a place famous for its kothewalis and mujras. Free-flowing liquor, the aroma of kebabs, the scent of mogra gajras and the resonance of ghungroos, musical instruments and melodious voices made it the most famous entertainment zone in Mumbai. In the 1970s and early ’80s Bachchu Wadi was the haunt of Mumbai’s underworld, with such kingpins as Haji Mastan, Karim Lala, and Dawood Ibrahim frequenting it. The kothewalis, trained in Hindustani music, were much sought after. “The place would come alive after sunset, and there was music and laughter till the wee hours of the morning,” reminisces Abdul Rauf Sheikh, a pan-stall owner. But after R R Patil became home minister in 2003, policemen started forcibly shutting down the kothasat 12.30 am. Sheikh says that girls from Bihar, Orissa and Uttar Pradesh now rent out their rooms while they themselves work in beer bars in the city and suburbs. Shah Bano, a one-time singer and dancer at one of the kothasin Bachchu Wadi, now lives in Mira Road, dropping by once a week to meet her children who still live there. The children, however, have shunned the kothatradition and do odd jobs for a living.

Salim Balwa, director, D B Realty, is all set to change the face of Bachchu Wadi and Kamathipura in turn. Bachchu Wadi is to be his first redevelopment project in the area. The wadi has 280 tenants - of these 100 are kothewaliswho regularly hold mujraswhile the other 180 are normal households. For Balwa, the major stumbling block was that the two groups did not want to live in the same building. “So , over the course of several meetings it was decided that the 100 tenants who hold mujras would be given a separate building with a separate entrance and lift. And the rest would be in a different building. Once my door is closed, how does it matter who does what?”