Students' Responses to the Gender and Human Rights course held at Open Space in May 2005

“Tales of the Night Fairies” directed by Shohini Ghosh, was screened during the recent Gender, Sexualities and Human Rights course held at Open Space.

- Review by Suparna Bhattacharya

In the ‘play within the play' mode, Tales of the Night Fairies raises a pertinent question – who are these ‘fallen women', whose very shadows must be shunned in the daytime, but whose bodies can be used at night? Director Shohini Ghosh leads the viewer into Sonagachhi with her own childhood sense of wonder and unanswered questions about these ‘inner cities of hushed whispers'. The 300 year old settlement of ‘line' houses in Sonagachhi stands distinct from the other residences which bear a sign stating ‘These houses belong to decent people'.

Tales of the Night Fairies speaks through the buoyant voices of Uma, Deepti, Shikha, Sadhana, Mala and Nitai, all commercial sex-workers in Sonagachhi. The film tries to document the change from a time when prostitutes had no rights, nor awareness of them, to a time when they seek to be recognized and accepted as workers, no different from any other class of manual labour, rendering services for a price. This was a process set into motion more by their own efforts and mobilization rather than by intervention from outside. The Durbar Mahila Samanvaya Committee ( DMSC ) is a forum that represents commercial sex-workers and pushes issues like decriminalization of adult sex-workers, social recognition and dignity, and the right to form trade unions. This gives them a fair chance to alleviate conditions of work and health within the profession. The sex-workers pointedly ask why they are forced to live in inhuman conditions, are allowed no choice or agency, and reiterate that they don't want to be ‘rehabilitated' into a world which has anyway closed itself to them.

DMSC also provides a social-support system for the sex-workers, where they help each other learn to deal with clients, negotiate condom use, organize health check-ups and even deal with police excesses. Music, dance and drama are harmonized by the group called Komal Gandhar in the attempt to reach out to people. Not that reaching out is an easy task – more so in a prevalent mindset which glorifies Sita's mythic trial by fire and wonders what the world has come to, when sex-workers set out to demand rights.

More recently, DMSC had to go through a trial by fire of a different kind, in a bid to organize the Sexworkers' Millennium Carnival in 2001. Until the eleventh hour, the government authorities and women's groups tried to stop the proceedings, but in vain. The Carnival is a heartwarming part of the film, with the obvious intention of showing that sexworkers are as ‘normal' a part of society as all others. The irony in the attempt to deny them the simplest of pleasures, to keep them from public view, cannot be missed.

In the film-maker's own words, Nitai wasn't meant to be in this film about female sex-workers, but he was always there – in the margins of the frame. In time, he walked into the film. Nitai's position is a little different – he is a male sex-worker and is forced to work clandestinely to stay beyond the reach of legal provisions informed by positions of ‘moral' authority. He is equally active in his role as peer-educator in DMSC though, and mesmerizes with his performance in Komal Gandhar .

“Tales of the Night Fairies” is actually the name of the dance-drama staged by Komal Gandhar , about these female sex-workers caught in the dichotomy between social rejection and the representation of themselves as seductive night fairies, albeit from the moralistic standpoint. They have, in effect, always been the ‘Other' who enable ‘decent' society to sequester itself and its women, and create its own identity in opposition to this ‘Other'.

What comes up on more than one occasion is that sex-workers confide in, and can only be understood by other sex-workers. The film-maker's position, as a non-sex worker, appears problematic in such a case, as in all such representation. The director, however well-meaning, certainly cannot be considered free from mediation, cannot escape the charge of holding a perspective.