Amar-Prem, Chameli, Chandni bar, Chori Chori chupke chupke, Chingari, Devdas, Julie, Mandi, Pakeezah, Umrao Jaan
Do you know what is common among all these movies?
They all revolve around the theme of prostitution and the way it is seen in our society. And Bollywood, especially, influences the perception of the people towards sex-workers. Bollywood has certain norms set for portraying prostitutes or Dhandewaalis as they are called many a times.
I have been attending a Film festival organized by PSBT ( Public Service Broadcast Trust) at Indian Habitat Centre. One of the short films (Zinda Laash) that I saw today revolved around the theme of portrayal of sex workers in Bollywood. The film wasn’t that good but it got me into serious thinking.
Being a part of the society highly influenced by the cinema, I had never really cared about how prostitutes or their lives were being portrayed. I always took it for granted. Bollywood’s term for women working in the sex industry, dhandewalis, technically means women in business, but it has come to have a derogatory meaning. The norms Zinda Laash identifies for representing prostitutes, sex workers and call girls are classically melodramatic. They are shown wearing quintessential tacky clothes, chewing a paan, smoking, swearing loudly in public and surrounded by shady characters. They are never shown as humans. They are shown as entities, as objects, whose value is over once used.
The behavior towards them is insensitive and that of disgust. They are considered impure and different from rest of the women in the society. They are not considered as marriage material nor as mothers and this taboo is supposed to stay with them all their life. It is always shown that a prostitute becomes a living corpse in hell and it is almost next to possible for her to escape her identity.
Why do we follow such a concept? Aren’t sex-workers human beings? Don’t they too yearn for love and family? Don’t they think of living with respect in a society?
Of course they do, but we tend to stereotype them in such a way that they get engulfed with that image and try as they might, they are not able to ward off that kind of an image.
It’s high time we, who proudly call ourselves as intellectual breeds, start thinking about these things with a wider and broader perspective and try and communicate a different side of sex-workers that would help remove or alter the prejudiced attitude of the society against them. Bollywood or films for that matter are the best medium to change this perception.
Also one should never forget that they may be selling their body to earn money but their soul remains intact unlike many of us!!!
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