Born Into Brothels

I just saw (most of) Born Into Brothels. I have immigration stuff to do, so I really must not get carried away with the potentially gargantuan commentary that is churning in my head. However, I will say that overall, I appreciated the film for giving subjectivity to the children. I did go back and read some of the criticisms that had been flying around, and some of them actually pissed me off. I think sometimes activists let identity politics get in the way of humanitarian work. So what if she was a white woman appearing to try to "save" brown children? Yes, there are many areas of portrayal in which she needs to be sensitive, and her conclusions are certainly questionable, but I also saw that she was treating these children like human beings, and trying to do something positive for them. It is one thing to evaluate and critique the means by which the task is undertaken, but why complain at the fact that someone with privilege is trying to exercise it positively? It seems like some of the criticisms were implying that people of the "west" should just butt out altogether, but that's a situation where under revolutionary ivory-tower supervision, you're damned if you do, and damned if you don't (isn't it we who otherwise criticize Eurocentrism in discussions of human rights?). When it comes to identity politics vs. social service, I also think there was some whit of cred to the theorizing of one dead white men named Maslow. In the larger scheme of things, social and economic justice clearly must be strived for rather than "saving" people, but short-term needs also must be pragmatically accounted for.

That is NOT to say there are not other people, including locals, who have their interests at heart also, and it's a problem that she skipped over any discussion of them. And it's certainly not to say she did a good job of representing the sex workers themselves. They have very little involvement in the film other than being shown as abusive, alcoholic monsters. Hence, supposedly the need to remove these children from their homes and send them to boarding school. I really don't have enough information to say what is too paternalistic and what is really in the children's best interest (It's easy for me to argue that the children should stay in the community, but would I ever send any child I know to live there? What if a sex worker's child wants something different than the parents? Whose decision should be given more deference? Who knows.), but I am glad that something was created that could raise these questions and invite dialogue on a population that is quite hidden from many parts of the world.

I thought this was a pretty fair commentary. I shall paste the most pertinent sections:

Frontline's investigation into some of the claims made by Briski has shown that key elements of the Born Into Brothels story are questionable on points of fact. Whereas Briski suggests that the children received little or no education before her efforts to have them admitted to boarding schools, Frontline found that all of them were going to school when the documentary was made. While the children involved in Briski's project were delighted with the creative opportunities and the sense of purpose she had given them, it was clear she was far from being a solitary saint among the wretched of Kolkata. Several non-governmental organisations provided a welter of services that had significantly ameliorated the horrific conditions of organised sex trade in Kolkata, in comparison with other major urban centres in South Asia.

Frontline's investigation adds to a small but growing feeling of disquiet provoked by the film. Partha Banerjee, a New York resident closely associated with the making of the film, has, for example, pointed to the exploitative character of the enterprise and asserted that the children it represented were worse off after the documentary was made. It is hard to know what the children themselves would make of the film. Briski has said that the film will not be screened in India, a decision she claimed was meant to protect the privacy of her subjects. She was quoted by the news portal rediff.com as saying this was because "she had promised to protect the identities of the prostitutes from police and politicians" - a specious claim, since those allegedly dangerous police and politicians would have no trouble purchasing the DVD version, due shortly for release, or, indeed, in watching it at film festivals in India, where it will be screened. Sonagachi, though, is not Briski's cause - and that is just the beginning of the problems posed by Born Into Brothels.

...

Watching it, audiences might never realise that there is another Sonagachi: one where sex workers have organised for their rights, won battles against police harassment, registered significant gains against Human Immunodeficiency Virus, and where there is a vibrant movement for the legalization of the profession. Kolkata is home, for example, to the Sonagachi Acquired Immune Defeciency Syndrome Project, one of the largest and most successful community-run intervention projects in the world. Set up with government assistance, the Sonagachi Project was spearheaded by Smarajit Jana, an epidemiologist who trained several sex workers to act as `peer-educators'. Soon, noted Paroma Basu in a 2002 article, "hundreds of women were refusing unprotected sex, even if their clients offered to pay more". While in 1992 a government survey showed a mere 2.7 per cent of 450 sex workers were using condoms, that figure had gone up to 69.3 per cent within two years. Only 9 per cent of Sonagachi's sex workers were HIV-positive in 2002, compared with upwards of 70 per cent in Mumbai - and that too in 1997.

By design or otherwise, Briski and Kauffman censor out the well-known story of the Sonagachi sex workers' efforts to gain democratic rights, notably the legalisation of their profession - and of their growing success in securing rights. In 1995, sex-workers in Sonagachi set up the Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee, a trade union that now has over 60,000 members across West Bengal. The Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee has fought not only for decriminalisation, but also for the right to negotiate wages and working conditions. It has had considerable success in mitigating the rampant harassment of sex workers; Kolkata, where Briski so heroically overcame the police and organised crime to make her documentary, is one of the safest centres for sex workers in India.

...

Briski's variation on the theme of oriental despotism fits her audience's political prejudices. Other commentators in the United States who have researched the subject, however, came to very different conclusions about the West Bengal government's integrity. Noting that both Kerala and West Bengal had low numbers of AIDS cases among sex workers, Raney Aronson, the producer of a 2004 television documentary, said that while "whether this has to do directly with a communist-led government is the big question, I think it might".

PERHAPS the most disturbing aspect of the film is its advocacy of removal: the contention, as Briski and Kauffman put it, is that as long as the children remain in Sonagachi, "these kids have little possibility of escaping their mother's fate or for creating another type of life". It is here that Briski's silence on the struggle of Sonagachi sex workers to transform their own lives is of particular significance: it is, in her view, of no consequence. Avijit's journey to Holland for his photography award represents, in Briski's argument, one kind of redemption; boarding schools another kind. Out of their mothers' homes, out of their rotting tenements, out of Sonagachi, out of Kolkata, and out of India, the argument goes, the children of the brothels may find freedom and fulfilment. The notion resonates powerfully with received middle-class wisdom on class, caste and criminality.

...

South Asia has its own forms of removal, sadly uncontested - one reason, perhaps, why much of the Indian media have greeted Born Into Brothels with either nationalistic and parochial ire or with undisguised reverence. Adivasi children are shunted into Hindu missionary-run schools, for example, or poor Muslim children into madrassas where they may be remade in the image of their benefactors. It is important to note that Briski is not dealing with a special group of children who need to be removed from their homes; her students are representative of all the children in the community. Any criticism directed at such charity meets, always, with the predictable response that the children are at least fed and clothed - an indisputable virtue that, nonetheless, diminishes not a whit from the real need for economic reform and wider educational access in their own communities. If Briski wanted evidence that the children of Sonagachi could beat the odds and give meaning to their lives, all she had to do was turn to Mrinal Kanti Dutta: the son of a sex worker, Dutta was a key figure in the mobilisation of the Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee. Others have made lives for themselves elsewhere: but there is space for none of this in Briski's missionary enterprise.

Pardon my shameful ignorance, but how exactly does sex work and the gendered economic conditions compelling it coincide with Communism in the first place, if it's truly Communist? I will have to look into this...

And there was the edited version of what I was going to say.

Update: I'm not done yet, with watching the movie in the first place, or giving my thoughts on it. One thing that I might just do as a separate post is the possibility of economic empowerment through art and photography, and/or the power of spreading such art with access unrestricted by copyright.

Also wanted to briefly address the imperialistic angle, since that is one disturbing inference that could be drawn in this case because the filmmaker happens to be white American. However, I don't think this particular "saving" mentality necessarily carries racial or imperialistic connotations. There are plenty of conflicts between South Asian sex workers and South Asian middle-class social workers, for example. (What to say of an effort like this? It seems well-intentioned, but is against legalization and founded on the premise that most women involved in sex work are "victims of circumstance" -- do the sex workers necessarily view it that way and all want to be "rehabilitated" though? What if some sex workers want to continue working and apply harm reduction? What if they want to apply this so they can have their daughters enter the work? Hard questions.) I'm sure the average middle class South Asian in South Asia would come to the same conclusions about wanting to remove the children. And right here in the US, there are plenty of family law cases where certain types of parents are deemed unfit, usually due to economic deprivation. I think the rift is one of class. Clearly, class is tied to race in the US, and caste in India, and clearly, on a global scale, class is tied to country. Which I guess is what makes it imperialistic, even though the motivation was probably more to save the poor and the abused -- per middle-class, including brown middle-class standards -- than save the brown, but who knows?

OK, then again, as I read more, I become less sympathetic to the film and its motivations.

In the end, the film seems more about Briski’s journey and less about the hard reality of prostitution and the effects of her interference in young lives. It tugs at the heart but leaves the head relatively untouched.Intentionally or not, Briski is the noble soul in the film, faced with the mountain of Indian bureaucracy, teaching the children photography, trying to move them to good schools, getting them tested for aids and taking them to the zoo. The film’s self-congratulatory tone thickens as it progresses through ‘Zana Aunty’s’ triumphs and travails, making us wonder who the real subject is.

And the subjectivity of the kids is the whole reason I was liking it. Blah.

Among the questions Partha Banerjee asks:

Did the producers and directors ever get permission from the sex workers to show their kids and lives to the world (including Calcutta and India) and aren’t their identities now widely exposed because of the new fame and glory and global distribution of news (for example, see big papers Anandabazar and Telegraph, Calcutta, March 1, where they’ve published names and schools of these kids)

It's kind of sad that this question was just a passing thought in my mind, but I didn't dwell on it. Americans are so anal about privacy, especially children's privacy, and want parental consent for every damn thing. Why would it not matter what the parents thought in this case? Because they are just ignorant poor brown female sex workers in a third world country? Ick.

On the other hand, while there are many valid concerns about the movie, I want to make sure that our pride and sense of ownership over our cultural representations don't get in the way of addressing and bringing exposure to important social issues, especially those confronting the most marginalized of the marginalized.

And then I'm also annoyed at why there is still little discussion in any of these critiques of why there is prostitution in the first place. People cast all responsibility on economic injustice across countries and among the genders, and ultimately on western imperialism, but isn't that just too bloody convenient? What is really driving the demand side of the market? Who are the clients, and why are they treated as incidental to the trade -- are they just mindless victims to a western imperialist patriarchy? Or are we so idiotic as to take for granted that men have a biological need to fuck, and hence the reason for the existence of rampant female prostitution shouldn't be questioned? Is it not questioned so that we don't vilify lower-income men? For, while certainly there are high-class and middle-class assholes who go to brothels, many of these men are also piss-poor. The higher-end men probably go to higher-end places than these -- the bullshit "gentlemen's clubs." Most of those men are turds, but many of the women working in such places could conceivably have other options and actually be choosing to do the work too, so matters are a little more complex. On the other hand, most of the workers in brothels are probably not people with many other options, or so society widely believes, including men who go to them. Am I supposed to sympathize with such men because of economic injustice even when they apparently have money to spend on things other than their families, and then they spread diseases to their wives? Because I really don't.

In conclusion, I have no conclusion.