Born unto Brothels-Toward a Legal Ethnography of Sex Work in an Indian Red-Light Area

Prabha Kotiswaran

The global sex panic around sex work and trafficking has fostered prostitution law reform worldwide.
While the normative status of sex work remains deeply contested, abolitionists and sex work advocates
alike display an unwavering faith in the power of criminal law; for abolitionists, strictly enforced criminal
laws can eliminate sex markets, whereas for sex work advocates, decriminalization can empower sex
workers. I problematize both narratives by delineating the political economy and legal ethnography of
Sonagachi, one of India's largest red-light areas. I show how within Sonagachi there exist highly
internally differentiated groups of stakeholders, including sex workers, who, variously endowed by a
plural rule networkconsisting of formal legal rules, informal social norms, and market structures-
routinely enter into bargains in the shadow of the criminal law whose outcomes cannot be determined a
priori. I highlight the complex relationship between criminal law and sex markets by analyzing the
distributional effects of criminalizing customers on Sonagachi's sex industry.

INTRODUCTION

On Friday the women plan to participate in a procession wearing black and white masks.... The sex
workers will also tie their hands in chains made of paper, a symbol of their bondage. After reaching
Sonagachi early on Friday, they will make a bonfire and bum their chains and masks. (Times of India
2004)

Dr. Prabha Kotiswaran is lecturer in law at the School of Oriental and African Studies, the University of
London. Her e-mail address is pk5@soas.ac.uk. She is grateful to Jane Fair Bestor, Janet Halley, and
Martha Minow. Special thanks go to Duncan Kennedy; his input on Section III of the article in particular
was invaluable. She thanks the anonymous referees of the article for their excellent suggestions, and is
indebted to the Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee, a Kolkata-based sex-worker organization whose
activism fostered many epistemic breaks in her writing about sex work. Thanks finally to Chi Hang Yu for
his able research assistance.

© 2008 American Bar Foundation.

580 LAW & SOCIAL INQUIRY

Sonagachi, as we know from Zana Briski's Oscar-winning documentary Born into Brothels,' is the largest
and most prominent red-light area in the Indian state of West Bengal. Sex workers' suggestion of
throwing off the shackles of "sex slavery" upon entering Sonagachi would seem jarring to modem
sensibilities. After all, in the early twenty-first century, we are in the throes of a global sex panic (Weitzer
2006) around sex work and trafficking that has occupied the energies of nation states, international
agencies, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and feminist researchers and activists alike. This sex
panic has even entered our popular consciousness through dramatized series such as Lifetime
Television's Human Trafficking. Moreover, the fractious and polarized debates over the moral status of
sex work accompanying this sex panic find expression in a plethora of legal and regulatory