For generations, one Indian village has seen widespread prostitution, with women passing on the trade to their children. Nat Purwa, a small village in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, is about a two-hour drive from the provincial capital, Lucknow. In the mornings dozens of young children wearing tattered clothes trot along its dusty streets. It is hard not to notice their big, round, undernourished bellies.
The children disappear into the fields, chasing away stray cattle. Like most other villages around here, Nat Purwa suffers from abject poverty. But one element makes the village stand out from others in the area: Here, prostitution is a hereditary occupation, passed on from one generation of women to the next.
When Chandralekha turned 15, she joined the trade like the rest of the village girls. What difference does it make if you become one? Wrinkles criss-cross the year-old's face as she recounts her past. With the first man, then the second, fourth, fifth, sixth. Thousands of men come to one woman. I'd say a woman starts feeling bad since the beginning, but there's a weakness. There's a hungry stomach to feed and there is resignation.
Chandralekha gave up prostitution owing to intolerable abuse. Chandralekha and thousands of other women from Nat Purwa belong to the Nat community. The Nats have led a marginalised existence for decades. The Nats were one of the tribes targeted by this law. They got beaten up, arrested, locked up and brutalisation continued.
This dried up their traditional source of livelihood, and women had no choice. They ended up in prostitution - what [else] will they do? Kishwar said that, more than six decades after independence, the legal framework in India still views the marginalised community through a colonial prism. Prostitution has emerged as a strategy of survival among several such communities. Agrawal says all these communities are inter-linked: "They share a distinct past.
