(Slums near Howrah Station)

Drive west to the river and the city’s slums rise like funeral ash from the swollen banks of the Hooghly. Drive east to Kolkata’s luxury Quest Mall and find 6 floors of brands from Gucci, Armani, Prada, Michael Kors, Swarovski. India has always held a place of surreality in my heart, as both my homeland and a land of strangers, but rarely does a city thrust this surreality as sharply in focus as Kolkata can.

My journey here thus far has taken a road as long and winding as any of these curving city streets. My first lesson in flexibility came when my original placement in Berlin fell through after I had already been named a Gallatin Global Fellow. Instead, I found myself in Kolkata. I never expected to come back to India. I was born in Chennai, a city in South India, but had been raised in California since I was 3. I had returned twice when I was young to visit my family in the south. Kolkata, on the other hand, is a city so culturally, linguistically, and geographically distant from my family’s region that it is just as foreign to them as it is to me. Yet after nearly a month here, I can’t imagine a place that could have taught me more about trafficking (my area of interest here) as well as progressivism, paradoxes, and myself.

Before I began my 9 week internship placement, I spent my first days in India volunteering with Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity. I’ve washed street children and been attacked with baby powder in return. I’ve spoon fed a girl with cerebral palsy as old as me. The community of international volunteers, many of whom also stay at the Baptist Missionary Society Guesthouse with me, is a rotational family of Mexicans, Americans, Canadians, Spaniards, Russians, Italians, Koreans, Finns—all of whom have been great viewing partners for the World Cup.

My internship itself began three days after I arrived. Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee (DMSC) is a collective of 65,000 sex-workers across West Bengal advocating for the decriminalization of prostitution. Explaining this project to locals and other international volunteers has been a demanding verbal dance.

“Are you trying to get them out of the brothels?” No, these are their homes. “Do you try to get them to do other work?” No, this is their work.

“So,” I’m inevitably asked, “what does Durbar actually do?”

(Sign for the original HIV/AIDS Sonagachi Project Ambulance)

Durbar, as I’ve learned firsthand, does quite a lot. Founded in 1995 following a successful HIV/AIDS intervention project, the DMSC includes vocational programs for women leaving sex work, educational services for children of sex-workers, a self-sustained lending cooperative, two boarding homes, a cultural activity troupe, HIV/AIDS testing and prevention services, an LGBTQ community, and—my arena of focus—self-regulating boards to combat trafficking. It is located in the red-light area of Kolkata known as Sonagachi, home to 11,000 of India’s 3 million or so sex-workers. The 2005 Oscar-winning documentary Born into Brothels: Calcutta’s Red Light Kids propelled Sonagachi’s many residents and frequenters into international focus. However, despite the film’s international acclaim, it has faced stark criticism for its unilateral treatment of prostitution as synonymous with child endangerment and neglect. Sonagachi has a robust history of advocacy and activism by Durbar and other internationally-respected community-based organizations in the region, yet such local groups are never mentioned in the film.

The Sonagachi I see is not the Sonagachi of the films. It is just too simple to decry Sonagachi’s poverty and sexual trade without addressing the roots of these conditions; roots which, like the gnarled base of a banyan tree, are twisted and deep. These roots reach to bitter wells of misogyny, caste hierarchies, patriarchal fixation, sexual repression. Yet despite these apparently oppressive beginnings, the people here are strong. Be they transgendered, HIV+, sex-worker, child of sex-worker; none of them offer apology in their eyes nor ask for pity. They stand as proud members of a committee and a community they themselves have built and envisioned. For a society of social cast-outs, the infrastructure and network that Durbar offers its members is more efficient than many of Kolkata’s competing non-profits and underfunded governmental agencies.

Durbar’s Self Regulatory Boards (SRBs) illustrate this efficiency well. They are unusual in the anti-trafficking community. Much as the film depicts the children of Sonagachi as desperately in need of rescue and rehabilitation, most contemporary trafficking perspectives offer the same semi-infantilizing approach. The DMSC refers to this as ‘patriarchal legislation’ which attacks trafficking through efforts like tightened border control, tougher anti-prostitution laws, and severe sentencing. However, this often diminishes the capacity for a trafficking victim to become anything other than a victim of trafficking in the government’s eye; this reduces her ability to seek redress from exploiters and to represent herself and her will.

In my conversations with the residents of Sonagachi, many women have described their trafficking experience with a nonchalance that is almost startling. For most women, their trafficker was a lover or a close friend. Their experiences are very varied, but their willingness and strength in discussing these experiences is indicative of a solidarity they all share. Durbar has offered them a voice beyond victimhood, where their retelling is not merely a rekindling of trauma, but an opportunity to reflect on what civil and political society needs to know and understand about trafficking from an individual rights perspective. From the young woman pursuing a vocal music career after SRB intervention to the SRB board member who was both a victim of trafficking and later a willing sex worker, these women’s experiences cannot be summarily treated by anti-trafficking blanket legislation or tightened migration laws. Rather, as Durbar proudly proclaims:

“Only rights can stop the wrong.”