Sex, drugs, and Bangladeshi rock and roll

Last night I went out to dinner with the woman with whom I briefly shared my flat and several of the people she’s been hanging out with in the city. We went to China White, which is far and away the best of all the posh-y restaurants I’ve ever been to in Kolkata. Generally restaurants with entrees in the 100-200 Rupee range have little to offer over less expensive establishments aside from exhaustingly attentive wait staffs and quart-size bowls of Thousand Island dressing with single prawns floating on top, but the food here was phenomenal and allowed me to indulge my recent yet robust love affair with pork. We dined with a couple from Chicago named Daniella and Gabe who had just returned from a week or so in Himachal Pradesh and Kashmir, where I’ve never traveled. Apparently I haven’t spent enough time with hippies-in-the-know to be aware that Manali, a town in HP, is a major tourist destination in the Northwest Himalayas (especially popular among Israeli backpackers?)—I’d never heard of it before. This is what I get for ignorantly buying the Fodor’s travel guide to India three years ago, a book that advises travelers to eat at Kolkata restaurants such as Kewpies and stay at the Taj Bengal and the Oberoi Grand, whose hotel bars are your best bet for finding quality scotch and a French businessman looking for a good time.

Apparently Manali is a magical place where weed grows just like a weed, emerging through cracks in the sidewalk and covering the nearby hills, a place where if you come across a day laborer absentmindedly making finger hash on his way home he’ll take you back to the one-room house that he shares with two other guys on the side of the mountain and smoke you out and feed you apples. I have a bunch of friends who’ve traveled around Mussoorie and Dharamshala, how is this the first time I’ve heard about this place? Dalai Lama my ass.

Also joining us was a Bengali man named Shantinu who I’d guess was in his forties and sported a goatee and a ponytail. He was quite vague when I asked him how he knew the couple from Chicago (“Well you see a friend of mine… asked a friend of theirs… for her number.”) and also about his line of work, which seemed to involve every type of media imaginable. He was planning to head off this morning to make a documentary about some famous Baul singer, which sounded cool. Laura, my erstwhile flat-mate, was telling this man that she’ll be in Bangladesh for a week starting today, and after asking where exactly she was headed asked her if “she liked to meet nice people.” “Yes, I like to meet nice people” she replied, and Shantinu offered to hook her up with some of his friends in Dhaka. One of these friends is some kind of rock star and the other he described as “a man about town.” These are the kind of people I need to be friends with. The dinner conversation revolved mostly around body piercings, groping, and how I looked exactly like Gabe’s first girlfriend who was also named Becky but who had a strong affinity for horses that I do not share.

For another month Gabe will be working for Durbar, the NGO attached to the totally badass commercial sex workers (CSWs) union that came from the Sonagachi project, which I find wholly awesome. I’ve been interested in the Sonagachi project for a couple of years now—it’s this completely groundbreaking “public health intervention”, the success of which hinged on very cleverly negotiating with power brokers in the red-light district of Kolkata to allow sex workers to organize. Since the project began in 1992 condom use among CSWs increased from 3 percent to 90 percent. Public health professionals and academics have attempted to recreate the project in Guatemala and South Africa (citing the impossibility of convincing sex consumers in these cultural milieus to use condoms as reasons for failure, which is total crap) but these attempts have suffered a complete misreading of Sonagachi as a social capital-building project in the Robert Putnam (of Bowling Alone) or de Tocquevillean sense. This communitarian view sees strengthening the social relationships and networks that facilitate actions within social structures as the key to community well-being. The Sonagachi project was not just about improving socialization and social support among sex workers through network strengthening—while such endeavors are great and shiny and happy, increasing CSWs’ capacity to act (agency, whatever) within social structures will not be achieved by improving their social network and relationships to other groups in the community, because the arena in which sex work exists is often one of extreme stigma and social inequality and it is unlikely that networking with other more advantaged groups will serve any other function than reinforcing that inequality.

In a speech published in the International Journal of Health Services in 2002, Vicente Navarro critiques Putnam’s appropriation of American labor movements into his discussion of social capital, pointing out that the solidarity of the labor movement has historically had a much different purpose than Putnam proposes. Putnam places such movements within a competitive, capitalist framework (the more social capital we have, the better competitors we are), whereas Navarro reminds us that the objective of the labor movement was not to increase the social productivity of such groups but to transcend capitalism itself. The class struggle from which labor movements emerge is not a competitive struggle, but rather one of social and economic survival. Similarly, Sonagachi has not sought to improve CSWs’ capacity for competition but for equality in safe sex negotiation.

While this is all of course arguable, I think the biggest lesson Sonagachi had to teach the public health community, a lesson which has been largely ignored, is that its success has not been only in the solidarity of CSWs as a labor group but in the project’s acknowledgement and employment of historical power dynamics that surround Kolkata’s CSWs to what advantage it could muster. Rather than promoting communitarianism within the red light district “community”, the project has navigated the complex power relations that once inhibited CSWs’ ability to negotiate safe sex with clients, engaging other interest groups and achieving a nuanced adaptation and ultimately effective challenge to existing power structures, at least in this particular sphere of influence these structures have on the lives of CSWs, sexual health.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to talking to someone who has practical experience with the organization. In the meantime I should probably go read about mangroves or something.