Mumbai’s Red-light Zone: Clean-up, or Property Grab?

Ladies of the night, strutting outside ‘cages’, are moving out. Brothels have diminished by half, if not more.Centuries-old eateries serving the best Mughlai cuisine money can buy have shrunk in size and number. Bhatiyaras or chefs cooking biryani on firewood have packed up. And the sound of ghungroos no longer ring in the air. Nautch-girls or mujrawallis, as they were called during the British Raj, are a thing of the past. If at all, a mujra can be sampled on being commissioned a week in advance. “Ho jaayega,” middlemen mumble, bargaining for a hefty pay-up in advance, taking care to ask for specifics.“You want to enjoy old Mughal-e-Azam type of mujra, Umrao Jaan ya thodasa disco?”The Big ‘Clean-Up’ DriveSo like it or not, India’s legendary, history-laden red-light area -- encircling Playhouse in south Mumbai -- has been in the process of a major clean up drive since the last five years. Incidentally, Playhouse is known as ‘Peela House’ ever since it was pronounced that way by those who weren’t conversant with the English language.However, instead of going clean, Playhouse is in state of utter haphazardness, littered with garbage and teeming with job-deprived ragpickers and crack addicts. Homeless migrants cook and sleep under movie posters and tarpaulin sheets. Women and children squat on the roof of derelict structures.Playhouse, the hub associated with the night life of the city, leads up to congested lanes snaking through Kamathipura, Shuklaji Street, Foras Road, and Falkland Road which was named after the tenth Viscount Falkland, governor of Bombay for five years in the 19th century. At a modest estimate, 75 percent of the original residents of the neighbourhood have either shifted to the far-off suburbs in Mira Road, Jogeshwari, Mumbra, Kandivli, Dombivli and Dahisar, or ply their trade in other cities Jabbar Mallick, a septuagenarian resident According to a 1992 census conducted by the Mumbai Municipal Corporation, the number of sex workers was placed at 50,000. The number declined to 1,600 in a census conducted seven years later. Since then, no statistics have been accessible.“At one point, many of the sex workers and mujra girls had become beer bar dancers,” Mallick elaborates knowingly. When that was banned, many of them found an option in the cabaret parlours of the Middle East, particularly in Dubai. Today, many of the girls who stayed back, are working in escort service agencies and massage parlours. And I’m told, there is a lot of activity on computers. It’s called online dating, isn’t it? Jabbar Mallick, a septuagenarian resident While online encounters, bans and police raids proliferate, the city’s scarlet-shaded streets are being increasingly eyed by real-estate sharks (read developers).The Real-Estate SharksThe haphazard clean-up of Mumbai’s prime red-light zone is not official – unlike the drive by New York’s Mayor Rudy Giuliani to mop up the Gotham streets, or the ongoing ‘rejuvenation’ of Soho in London, where sex shops are being replaced with chic boutiques and peep-shows by patisseries. In Mumbai, if state government and civic authorities have a concerted plan for the zone, it has been a well-kept secret so far.In the event, covert bids have been on to take over innumerable chawls and street shops. A few gaalas – hole-in-the-wall shops housing timber marts and tea vendors—haven’t succumbed to the make-over though. Ask a clutch of middle-aged men playing street carom about the surviving shops and they shrug, “Obviously they’re attached to this place. As for brothels, they are closing down because their landlords were getting a pittance as rent. Now, they can be comfortable for the rest of their lives and pass on some savings to the next generation.”Talk is that three leading real estate dealers, are moving in silently but surely, to ‘clean up’ the area identified with sleaze and sex. Nouveau riche steel, ready-made garments and scrap merchants are jostling for space. And sky-high residential towers loom over the decrepit chawls, many of which about to go in for reconstruction.Quite quaintly, a section of the red-light stretch housed the city’s original Chinatown. Since time immemorial, immigrants from China had settled close to Playhouse, celebrating the Chinese New Year with a dragon parade and fireworks on the streets.Scores of Chinese dentists set up clinics there. Today, there’s the lone survivor Dr YS Chen in his mid-60s. Flashing pearly whites, he says, “My Chinese brothers have migrated to Canada, America and Europe. I’m too old to do that. This will be my home till my dying day. Property agents are most welcome to check their teeth here. But sorry, no sale.” After a pause, he asks seriously, “How much are you willing to offer? Just for my knowledge.” Right.Bang opposite Dr Chen’s clinic, the New Shirin Talkies – used as a location to depict the city’s underbelly in Slumdog Millionaire -- has been re-running Bollywood action films for decades. Single screen theatres Alfred, Daulat, Gulshan, New Roshan, Shalimar, and Super (dedicated to Bhojpuri movies) have also lasted the vagaries of time. “I never go in there,” Dr Chen smiles. “The crowds are very rough, whistle and cat call. That’s not my kind of entertainment.”Land Up For Grabs?At a 10-minute walk away, tabelas or stables for ageing Victoria buggy horses had stood for decades on Bellasis Road. Mysterious fires broke out at these tabelas, it is alleged, to secure insurance compensation.A story goes that a tailor on Bellasis Road with a shop barely big enough to house a sewing machine, was bought out for Rs 75 lakh which he accepted eagerly. The shop’s maximum price would have been Rs 15 lakh. The tailor has bought an apartment on the city’s outskirts and invested the rest of the money in bank fixed deposits.Afzal Khan, a Bellasis Road denizen, unusually insisting that he should be quoted by name says, “100 percent, there is a move to take over all the shops, restaurants and old buildings in the name of redevelopment. Surely we can do without fancy high-rises and malls out here.”Khan gets belligerent as he points towards the crawling traffic, “Just look at the roads here now. Development is one thing, total madness another. It takes 45 minutes in a car to get to Grant Road which is just a five-minute walk away. The builders should pay us a subsidy for petrol!”The question is: whom or what should the finger be pointed at for a clean-up which has turned purely killjoy?(The writer is a film critic, filmmaker, theatre director and weekend painter.)

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Topics: Mumbai Red Light Area