Molli Desi is one of the small number of Devadasi (sacred prostitutes of India) still remaining; she and Rani Desi, a Nagarvadhu (high priestess) now live in London and are active on Twitter, which is how I got to know them. A few years ago Molli was trapped in one of the rescue industry’s many “rescue centers”, but eventually escaped; I asked if she would share the story on my blog and she graciously consented to do so.
I wish to give special thanks to the Nagarvadhu for helping me with this article, which is a translation from an account written in my mother language. In this short a space I cannot tell the whole truth about all rescue projects, but I think I can expose how structurally and institutionally dangerous most rescue centres are in much of South Asia. Furthermore, I will suggest that many donors from the West deliberately ignore these risks to detained women and girls so as to pursue their self-serving agendas. I do not use the terms women and girls lightly; women and girls are often conflated by the NGOs, so that women of 23+ or married women of 16 will be referred to as girls; female identity in India is far more complex than any simple consideration of age.
It seems so strange to me that organisations that condemn the excesses of closed brothels will in turn exercise the same powers over those they claim to rescue; of course most girls are not rescued from closed brothels, but rather are taken from domestic labour or other sex work environments such as bars, clubs or rooms. After “rescue” they are detained in facilities (sometimes called orphanages, shelter homes or rehab centres) where sexual and other abuse is commonplace; these detention centres are supposed to be inspected by the Government, but there is very little accountability so they foster and encourage a culture of impunity among the organisations that run them. I wish to share my story because I think it very important that people understand the motivations and practices of these organizations; my experience is not unusual, and was a direct consequence the power that “rescuers” exercise over detained women and girls. I have changed names and some details so as to protect myself and others.
I do not know my date of birth; I do know I was taken from the arms of a dying woman who told the people around her my name just before she died. One man claimed to be my uncle and wanted to take me away, but one Devadasi lady knew he was really a miscreant and refused to let him take me. Eventually I was taken to a nice orphanage, and while I was growing up there I was told that my mother and father were migrant workers who had been killed in a bus crash, so no one could trace my real extended family. In India this made me a social outcast, but my time in the orphanage was a happy one. I had many “sisters”, was successful at school and had a talent for classical dance and singing; however, I was also aware that was socially suspect and that I would not be considered suitable for marriage by most “respectable” families because I was an orphan.
In India, marriage is the institution in which patriarchal power is reproduced, and its implementation and policing is delegated to older women; married women in particular support marriage, as it is the means by which they exercise male-delegated power over their son’s wives. It was common practice for the sons of respectable families to target orphan teen girls when they went to college and to have affairs with these girls with promises of marriage. Once the boy graduated, his family would arrange a marriage to a respectable girl and the orphan girl would be disowned. Such young women would then only be able to make a marriage to a low-caste man, and then only with a promise of dowry; if the dowry was considered insufficient the husband and his family might even torture the wife, and sometimes kill her. Orphan girls fully understand that we need to find alternatives to marriage if we want to escape such subjugation. Some girls focus on getting skills or higher education; others develop dancing or even gymnastics. Others do sex work rather than marry or take dangerous work in a garment factory or domestic service. However, in India an unmarried woman is not considered fully human, so anyone who refuses to marry is considered a dangerous rebel.
As I got older, I began to spend time with a small group of girls and young women who sold sex in various residential hotels; I was attracted to them because they worked as a group and lived a freer life, coming and going as they pleased. Two of my good friends from the orphanage worked with these women, and when we were not at school and they were not working we would arrange outings and gatherings. Because they worked as a group they could negotiate with the owners of the residential hotels for better rooms to meet their clients and for less cost. If any residential hotel owner caused a serious problem or assaulted any member of the group, they would set fire to his rubbish bins or his car and send a note to say next time they would burn the hotel. They had money that could use for clothes and telephones but mostly they saved their money in the bank for when they would rent their own apartment. If men eve teased them in the street they would shout back and even throw stones at them, whereas most girls would run away. I admired their self-assurance, but I did not do sex work myself at this time because I did not feel confident enough.
One evening before Ramadan I was visiting my two girl-friends at a residential hotel where they working when suddenly there was a commotion from the lobby. One friend looked out of the door and then closed and quickly locked the door; she told us the police were in the hotel. We were all terrified because the police will often rape women and take their money. The police went from door to door shouting for everyone to come out; we could hear the screams of the women and girls. I hid one of our phones and most of the money in a condom inside my vagina; it was very painful but I knew we would lose it all if I didn’t. We then went outside into the hall, where two policemen shouted at us to come into the reception area; eventually there were about twelve women and girls surrounded by more than twenty police and NGO workers (only two of them were women). A police sergeant made us line up and he took everyone’s phone and money, except for what I had hidden; if he asked a question and didn’t like the answer he got, he would hit the woman in the face. After a few minutes the police inspector left, and the NGO workers said all young women and girls would have to go with them for safe custody; only women who could prove they were over 20 or had a magistrate permission certificate to be a prostitute could stay. Eventually the NGO workers took me, my two friends and another young woman; we were chosen because we were the smallest and the police said they knew the other women were well known prostitutes who were definitely over 18. The police then took the women who were allowed to stay, and in exchange for sex they could have their telephones back.
We told the NGO workers that I was not a prostitute, but was only visiting my friends; also, a police officer said that I did not look like a prostitute because I was wearing blue jeans and not Salwaar Kameez like the others. However, the NGO workers said I was at risk of being trafficked by my friends, so I must go to “safe custody”. There were five NGO workers; they took photographs of us (it’s not unknown for TV journalists to be invited to watch these “rescues”) and then took us outside to their minibus. I tried to run away in the street, but one NGO woman grabbed my long hair and slammed me into the side of the minibus. A crowd gathered as I was fighting back and during the chaos the other young woman managed to run away, but the NGO woman was much bigger than me so eventually my friends and I were pushed into the minibus. All the way to detention the woman hit me and called me very bad names.
In tomorrow’s conclusion, Molli describes the rescue center and tells how she eventually escaped.
A particularly distasteful Hindglish euphemism that covers everything from unwanted sexualised speech to gang rape. Typically it refers to actions by a group of men towards a lone woman in a public place.
I reckon the smritis are at least partly to blame for the laid back attitude so many in India have towards the sexual humiliation of women.
In the Mahabharata the polyandrous wife of the Pandava brothers is kidnapped and publicly stripped in order to punish her and her husbands. But no matter how much sari her assailants pull from her body it never unravels lower than her waist. Many commentators have interpreted this as meaning that no matter how much you abuse an Indian woman you cannot denigrated Indian womanhood and I think many see this as an indication that ‘eve teasing’ of individual women is of little consequence in the scheme of things. If it was good enough for Draupadi …
In the Ramayana after Sita is rescued from the demonic Ravanna there is a public perception that she is ‘fallen’ following her long period of forced cohabitation with her abductor. Rama goes along with demands that she should be thrown onto a pyre, after which she emerges from the flames unscathed. This is interpreted to mean that a woman who is pure and without sin cannot really be harmed, which again can be thought of as a kind of licence by ‘eve teasers’.
I was unfamiliar with the term myself, and so in my editing assumed it was a typo for “ever teased”. But when Molli checked my checking, she corrected my error and suggested I read the link (which I had not yet).
This woman knows what real hardship is like and what it’s like to be considered something less than human. I wish more Americans could experience this kind of thing first hand – it would do wonders to eliminate the “Driskill Mountain” syndrome of people who always whine about poverty in America.
One of the things that surprised me the most during my first trip to India was how lightly extreme poverty to the point of starvation sat upon so many people.
Bombay (not yet Mumbai) was the first place I ever visited outside Australia and I was travelling through slums within minutes of landing. The streets outside my hotel in Shahid Bhagat Singh Drive was full of people sleeping rough in the monsoon season with all of their sodden possessions in small bags under their heads (a few years later I’d be sleeping rough on the streets of Calcutta, but that’s another story and my experience doesn’t compare with those who live that way indefinitely).
By and large the destitute people I interacted with seemed happier with their day to day lives than most of my middle class friends in Australia. I think it’s because one thing India (especially Mumbai) is very rich in is people and even the poorest beggars have more meaningful social interactions than your average Sydney suburbanite.
There are quite a few in India who choose extreme poverty (e.g. sadhus, bhikkhus) and unlike here begging is not seen as a denigrating occupation. People in India know what a begging bowl is for and don’t expect you to debase yourself to get it filled.
Sigh – reflexive blaming of men for the dreadful way women treat one another. You’d think women had no moral agency at all. If the implementation and policing of marriage is done by older women, doesn’t it seem just a teensy bit possible that we are talking about matriarchial power?
I’m sure most people would agree that Indian culture is pretty patriarchal. Someone’s being “reflexive” here, but it isn’t your hostess or her guest blogger.
Only as a very broad generalisation. There is, as with most things, more variation within India than you find in just about any other society.
Patriarchy is much weaker in the south than the cow belt states of the north with matrilinearism the rule rather than the exception among higher castes in Kerala (that includes high caste Christians, Muslims and Jews – all religions in India have castes). Matriarchy isn’t inevitable with matrilinearism but they often go together on the Malabar coast, especially among the Nair caste in the south. Feminism in Kerala got about a century’s start on the West and we are yet to catch up in many ways, though there is also a substantial patriarchal backlash against Keralan feminism both in and outside Kerala. The former princely state of Mysore, now a district of Karnataka, also has smatterings of matriarchy among the Kshatriyas though I think it’s the exception rather than the rule. Probably a bit of osmosis from the old Travancore aristocracy.
There are pockets of purely matriarchal and/or polyandrous communities in the north eastern Himalayan states too, though most are in long term decline as previously isolated groups are mainstreamed. The Khasi in Meghalaya are still strongly matriarchal. I think there’s still a couple of matriarchal Adivasi tribes in the Eastern Ghats as well.
The educated urban elite have also left many of the old ways behind and are generally no more patriarchal than their western counterparts.
Let’s not forget that India elected a woman as leader before the vast majority of Western countries did, even if, like Britain and Sri Lanka, they chose a nasty, authoritarian one.
Most high-level female politicians are authoritarians, and the first female chief executive of a country nearly always is. I’m not surprised feminists choose to ignore that fact, but I am surprised that everyone keeps pretending that these women are exceptions when it’s perfectly obvious why they could never be in any pluralistic republic.
Ours wasn’t particularly authoritarian.
Just incompetent.
If you lot end up with Hillary you’d better be ready for the designer jackboots though.
Throughout Martha Nussbaum’s Women and Human Development, there are excellent discussions of the situation of women of various religions in Kerala, for those who are curious. Some of their rules may be matriarchal (or matrilineal), but the major takeaway is that benefits of the system generally accrue to men, not women. Whether such a system should be called patriarchy or not is, I suppose, up for debate, but much of Keralan politics and social practice seems to be oriented toward benefiting men.
The two main political parties in Kerala, Congress and the Communist Party of India (Marxist), are certainly set up for and by men. The BJP even more so. But they’re all non-Keralan blow ins. Even though women have made great contributions to Keralan politics – especially in the CPI(M) – they are largely excluded from both official positions of power and official party histories.
Certainly the traditional monarchies of Travancore and Cochin greatly benefited women and the social indicators for upper caste women (education level, health, sex ratio, etc) in Kerala are both better than for women in the rest of India and better in comparison to Keralan men than exists in other states.
At the family and household level women definitely dominate in both Nair and Kshatriya Hindu families and among high caste South Indian Christians (around Kottayam at least, the Christian city I’m most familiar with). I’m told many Muslim families are the same, though I didn’t encounter any woman dominated Muslim households myself.
There has been a lot of talk in India about the high level of reported sexual assault in Kerala, with speculation that it’s part of a patriarchal backlash against Keralan women. I’m inclined to think it’s just a greater preparedness of Keralan women to report.
I’m not sure how Nussbaum would argue than inheriting property down the female line benefits men nor how expecting the bridegroom to become part of the bride’s household rather than visa versa would do so (in the rest of India, the wife often suffers abuse from the in-laws) but in my personal experience – as opposed to my reading of Western feminist interpretations – Keralan women do very well indeed by Indian standards and pretty well by Western standards too, even if some of the rhetoric of a Malabar feminist Utopia is overblown.
Hmmm….since the media likes to go on these rescue missions, any chance of crowdfunding an expose on what happens at these places? This website has documented many groups like this around the world as well as prostitutes that are jailed without charges “for their own good”. I figure a documentary would be a great way to fight back against who feel entitled to make your business their business.
“Crowdfund” me – I’ll do it! 😛
I was two seconds away from booking a flight to Ukraine to record some of the revolution there – but then I saw a YouTube of high def recorded video of the demonstrations taken with … a DRONE and figured no I way I could offer any better photo-documentation than that.
So, by-jilly – we’ll need a DRONE to do this right!
Oh my god. So important these stories are told. My heart goes out to Molli and thank you Molli for telling your experience to all of us. Who want to help. Blessings. May great things come to you. x Love from California redwoods.
Brilliant by Molli Desi, I’m on tenterhooks like one of those 2-part Starsky and Hutch episodes waiting for the next instalment.
I like the notes of ‘street sleeping’ cabrogal too! – India seems to be a remarkable coalition of cultures, certainly not a conventional country.
I’m Molli’s Twitter friend, and I’m glad that she is guest blogging here so that I can learn more about her and her experiences.
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