Daughters of the Red Light: Coming of Age in Mumbai's Brothels (Kindle Single)
Shanoor Seervai
Language: English
Pages: 44
ISBN: B0141DKB96
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
When Shanoor Seervai first visits Mumbai's red-light district as a young volunteer, she is shaken by the violence and despair that women there endure every day. Years later, now a newspaper reporter, she returns to gain a deeper understanding of the lives of sex workers.
Daughters of the Red Light is a searing look at the poverty, injustice and stigma that keep entire families from escaping India's notorious sex industry. Seervai takes readers to Mumbai’s grittiest alleyways to discover the stories of these women and girls. As she unravels the brutal web entangling them, she finds an unexpected reason for hope.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Shanoor Seervai is an Indian writer and journalist. Her work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Daily Beast, Guernica Magazine, The Caravan and The Indian Express. Born and raised in Mumbai, she now lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she is pursuing an advanced degree in public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.
EARLY PRAISE FOR DAUGHTERS OF THE RED LIGHT
"This is a meaningful and important piece of writing that contributes in a significant way toward understanding the lives of sex workers and their families and how we might help alleviate their marginalization and suffering. Shanoor Seervai's book shows you the humanity of the mothers and children in the red light district, as she takes you on her journey of discovery into their world and her place in the world at large. It gave me new insight into the lives of the sex workers and their children, and how the tireless work of some offers real hope—the greatest gift of all."
— Geeta Anand, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of The Cure
"Most writing about India's underbelly treats people as passive victims. It is far too easy to find stories of misery in Indian cities and hold them up as one-dimensional examples of the country's uneven progress. Shanoor Seervai does not do cutouts. She dives into the world of Mumbai's sex workers, introducing us to real women with families and dreams we recognize. She brings the reader along for her journey, which is journalistic as well as personal, as she navigates the gender norms and class divides of urban India with sharp observations and true empathy. I've been visiting Mumbai all my life and feel I understand it better having read this heartfelt work."
— Shashank Bengali, South Asia bureau chief, Los Angeles Times
"A thought-provoking headlong dive into a little known culture."
— Sonia Faleiro, Award-winning author of Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World of Bombay’s Dance Bars.
"With this honest and insightful memoir, Shanoor Seervai peels back a tattered curtain to reveal the complex and brutal world of Mumbai’s commercial sex trade. Through her eyes, we begin to really see the women — and children — behind the makeup. Through her journey we are challenged to consider our common humanity; and our own, personal response to the injustices that land (and keep) millions of the world’s most vulnerable children in the hell we call the 'Red Light.'"
— Laura Entwistle, Founder and CEO of EmancipAction, an international non-profit organization working to end child sex trafficking around the world
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Conversations, but I get the sense that she prefers not to talk about herself. I choose not to pry — not only to respect her privacy but also to avoid giving her an excuse to stop speaking to me. After I’ve known her for many months and feel confident she will be straight with me, I persuade her to chat about her past. Robin’s father grew up in acute poverty, selling snacks by the railway tracks in central India. But he was “brilliant,” she says, and took a difficult exam to secure a place.
Out. She enrolled in the military after high school because it won her a full scholarship to a university in Illinois. After her first stint on active duty and before she went to Budapest for a gender-studies Master’s degree, Robin had some time off. She came to India to volunteer with sex workers through various anti-trafficking and rehabilitation NGOs. Witnessing how these organizations perpetuate victimhood, Robin decided she would start a shelter home that did things differently after she.
Many ways, Shweta is just a typical teenager — curious about the world, experimenting with a million new things, struggling to figure out who she wants to be. And that’s what Robin has ensured. After atypical childhoods, she’s giving the girls the opportunity to be teenagers. Their lives are complicated, but don’t all teenagers have complicated lives? Dismantling prejudice is the place to start. If Kranti’s neighbors in Kandivali had looked at the girls not as the daughters of sex workers but.
Satisfy a long-pending desire to paint with oils and matriculated in a program that guides students through the cathedrals of Italy before retreating to artists’ studios on a Greek island. The misalignment between my twin callings of social responsibility and creativity was profound, taxing. And my infinite privilege became clearer than ever before, inducing a queasy concoction of shrugging gratitude spiked with heaps of guilt. At first, I hadn’t given much thought to how I would transition.
Freelance articles for U.S. publications and only pursue stories that interested me. At the top of my agenda were sex workers and their children. So it was that I returned to Kamathipura — older, wiser, a little more tempered — to find a way to tell the haunting tales that had consumed my thoughts since I’d first set foot inside this red-light enclave that, in a very classist society, is seen as the lowest demimonde. ***** I am seated cross-legged on a brothel floor on a hot April afternoon.