“I have tried prudent planning long enough. From now on, I’ll be mad.”
Sufi mystic Celaluddin Rumi
Bhaskar poses for Bishakha Datta in a scene from In The Flesh. Bhaskar is a hijra sex worker - considered neither male nor female.
I had worked on more than a dozen documentary films for well-known international television networks before I began making In The Flesh: three lives in prostitution. And on all these documentaries, I had diligently followed the rules – almost to the point where the rules became both a prison and a formula. I wasn’t thinking anymore while making documentaries, just applying Rule No 383 in a half-hearted manner. I was tired of going on shoots that started before the birds started chirping – and ended after the Mumbai locals had gone to bed. And the documentaries became clones of one another after a while…and I wasn’t breaking new cinematic ground…OK, time to cut my losses and run.
Since In The Flesh was my first independent documentary, I was determined to enjoy making it (ideally between breakfast and evening tea). So I decided to follow Rumi’s advice, dump prudent planning and just be mad for a couple of years. Madness, in this case, equaled instinct. Following my instinct. Just following what excited me – and believing that if it excited me, it would all add up.
Two summers back, at a meeting hosted by the organization SANGRAM in the dry heat of Kolhapur, I bumped into Shabana, a 28-year-old woman in prostitution who works the highways looking for truck drivers to have sex with her for a measly Rs 50. Lolling nonchalantly in a low-cut blouse and a red rose tucked into her mane, Shabana challenged every damn stereotype I had about prostitution. I thought of these women as helpless; she was magnificently in control of her circumstances – at least at the superficial level. I thought she would be ashamed of what she did – far from it. “Some people use their brains, like a lawyer,” she said. “We have our bodies, we use those. It is hard-earned money. We give our self-respect to them, wouldn’t you call it hard-earned money?” She was so sure of herself, and her views were so different from what I had expected, that I decided that she must be one of the ‘stars’ in the film.
Meeting Shabana convinced me not to make a film about prostitution – which is anyway a jumbled umbrella of fragmented, competing narratives – but to focus on just three of these lives, three narratives. When you give up width, you often get depth, and that was exactly what I wanted. In Kolkata, the sex worker collective called Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee put me in touch with Uma, a slant-eyed woman in her sixties with a gamy leg and the voice of a bulldozer. Uma had been married off at the age of four to avoid a family legacy in which girls died before the age of 10; since marriage means becoming part of a different family, they thought she would escape the curse. She did. But after her mother-in-law died, her marital family was no longer a haven for her, so she ran away. Into the arms of a distant relative who tricked her into prostitution after assuring her that she was going to work in a plastic factory.
I had always thought that women in prostitution had no lives – all they did was mechanically open and close their legs to clients. Uma totally shattered this myth. She had been a theatre actress in the fifties and sixties – when ‘good women’ didn’t do theatre, so women’s roles were only played by men, or by ‘bad women’. Although she doesn’t have children, she is a grandmother to all the children in the brothel and teaches them to read and write. And for the last 20 years, she has been in a long-term relationship with a man who is an intellectual of sorts, a bhadralok as locals would call him.
From Shabana and Uma to Bhaskar, the third character in In The Flesh, was a short detour via the Sex Workers Mela, which is held in the gigantic Salt Lake Stadium (better known for football) in Kolkata every March. Attended by almost 10,000 people every day, the mela is a rare space – one in which women and men in prostitution can discuss issues, celebrate their lives (yes, there are moments worth celebrating in every life!), and interact with curious onlookers and outsiders. With her blue contact lenses, buffed auburn tresses and passionate convictions, Bhaskar stood out at the mela – and I decided to have her in the film. Although her name is Bhaskar, she is a hijra – and identifies more with the female, rather than male, gender.
The organizations for which Shabana, Bhaskar and Uma work as peer educators in an HIV/AIDS intervention programme readily okayed their inclusion in the film – as long as they were comfortable being on camera. Assuming that they wouldn’t, I suggested to Shabana that she wear a wig and dark glasses through the film – she knocked down the suggestion. All three of them agreed to bare their innards to the camera as long as In The Flesh wasn’t shown on Indian television – they didn’t want some long-lost relative to suddenly discover that they are in prostitution.
The truth is that those in prostitution are such a stigmatized community that this usually becomes a key issue in filming. Women in prostitution get tired of outsiders coming in looking only for sob stories, and they get equally tired of film-makers who only see them as prostitutes, but never as women. Or as human. The outside world feels that all that women in prostitution know about is prostitution. In doing so, we rob them of their humanity. Would we even dare pre-suppose this of others: that a mother knows only of mothering? Or a businesswoman knows only of business? No, we allow every one else to be rounded human beings. But women in prostitution are eternally locked up inside our heads as prostitutes – they can never be anything else.
Since my aim was to show three people in prostitution as people, I spent a lot of time treating them as people while making the film. Camerawoman Ranu Ghosh and I would take a small digital handycam along with us, and spend time with the subjects. The camera was so small that it seemed insignificant, friendly…so subjects dropped their guard and easily went about their daily lives On camera, we talked prostitution. Off camera, we talked everything else, the way we would with anyone else.
For thirty days, we moved in and out of Bhaskar, Uma and Shabana’s house, minding their privacy and respecting their boundaries. The filming became a part of their lives, but it never superseded their lives. When Uma wanted her afternoon nap, she got her afternoon nap – even if we had to cool our heels in a restaurant waiting for her to wake up. When Bhaskar wanted to eat lunch at 1 pm, yes, that’s what he did. The decision to treat them as real human beings, and to treat their needs as equal to ours, is evident to those who have seen the film.
Whenever I screen In The Flesh – which has now been shown in seven cities – I am always asked if I encountered any problems while filming. It is assumed that I must have faced problems, partly because prostitution is seen as a problem – and partly because prostitution, although not itself a criminal act, is connected with crime and violence. My answer is always the same: no. No problems. This is always met with shock and disbelief, but the truth is this: I was filming the three subjects the way I would film three friends. Nothing without consent. Nothing on the sly. No rules broken. Why would I face a problem?
The problems that I did face related to prostitution, but not to making a film. At a critical phase in July 2000, Shabana disappeared. She just vanished, poof, like that! Again, the film took a back seat to reality – the truth is, we were worried about her life, since women have been killed on the Kolhapur-Bangalore highway, where she works. I visited her former madam in Kamathipura and left my card, urging her to let me know if Shabana turned up – atleast so I could know that she was alive. To my great relief, Shabana eventually called, but only four months later. She never really explained what had happened, but it was clear that she had been going through a rough patch – from which she had just fled.
In the summer of 2002, In The Flesh was screened for the first time, with Shabana inaugurating the screening – and Unzipped, the book that accompanies the film. This was the first time in her life that she had stood as an equal before an audience of upper middle-class men and women. They asked, she answered. She talked, they listened. They clapped for her when she finished, the way they would clap for a real movie star. It wasn’t Pretty Woman. It wasn’t Reality Television. It was real. It only lasted an evening, but on that evening, Shabana was seen for who she is – a human being struggling for a space in society.
No more than you. No less than me.
~Bishakha Datta, Director of In The Flesh
This time last summer I traveled to Mumbai, India with a handful of classmates from Seattle University. We were on a study-abroad course studying globalization and mass media. It was the summer after my senior year and the trip dramatically changed my life. (The pictures in this blog posts are ones I took while I was there.)
The three sex workers Bishakha interviews in the film make it unforgettable. She chooses to follow an aging sex worker who stopped selling her body but still lives in a brothel and a young woman in her 20s just beginning. She also tells the story of a hijra – neither male nor female, who crosses gender and sexuality lines in India.
The film is called “The Crimson Mask”:
