Abstract
The present study examines the intersection of widowhood, migration, and sex work in Sonagachi, Kolkata, exploring how widowed women negotiate stigma, survival, and agency. Situated within feminist political economy, intersectionality, and postcolonial urban theory, the study conceptualises Sonagachi as a “subaltern counter-space” where alternative moral economies and solidarities emerge. Drawing on N = 20 ethnographic, semi-structured interviews, the article identifies a critical generational differentiation in labour trajectories and experiences of marginalisation. Findings suggest that younger widows often experience a “fragile emancipation,” utilising urban economic selfhood to rupture rural ritualised patriarchy and renegotiate identities beyond traditional bidhoba (widow) constraints. Conversely, older widows encounter a “compound invisibility”; as their bodies cease to be economically productive within the sexual economy, they are relegated to the margins of both the red-light area and the very collectives designed for their empowerment. This internal stratification produces what the study terms as the “subaltern within the subaltern,” where the political economy of visibility mediates recognition and rights. The research challenges binary understandings of empowerment versus exploitation, revealing how older women reassert ritual moralities as a compensatory strategy for declining status. Ultimately, the study calls for gender-responsive urban policies and inclusive organisational practices that move beyond paternalistic rescue frameworks to recognise the labour, dignity, and political subjectivity of ageing sex workers.
Introduction
Widowhood remains one of the most persistent yet under-examined forms of gendered marginalisation across postcolonial societies in Asia and Africa. While legal reforms and development mediations have sought to improve widows’ material conditions, empirical evidence suggests that widowhood continues to function as a site of moral regulation, economic dispossession, and social exclusion, particularly among lower-caste and economically vulnerable women. In many contexts, widowhood precipitates not only social stigma but also forced mobility, pushing women towards informal and stigmatised labour markets in rapidly urbanising settings. In India, the intersection of widowhood, gender norms, and informal labour has received limited scholarly attention despite the country’s deep rural–urban inequalities and expanding informal economy. Existing studies have largely focused on widows as recipients of welfare or subjects of cultural oppression, often overlooking their labour trajectories and spatial mobility. At the same time, feminist and political science scholarship on sex work has tended to examine agency, coercion, and labour rights without systematically addressing widowhood as a distinct pathway into the trade.
The study addresses this gap through an in-depth qualitative study of widowed women engaged in sex work in Sonagachi, Kolkata, one of South Asia’s most prominent red-light districts. As a historically significant and strategically located site of sex work, Sonagachi provides a critical lens to examine the intersections of gender, labour, and urban marginality, additionally offering insights that resonate beyond the regional context. Situated within feminist political economy, intersectionality, and postcolonial urban theory, the study explores the transition from widowhood to sex work that reflects overlapping regimes of marginalisation, from ritual stigma to moral stigma. In doing so, it interrogates whether urban red-light districts function as spaces of labour autonomy and renegotiated dignity, or whether they reproduce existing hierarchies in new forms. Hence, rather than presenting sex work as inherently emancipatory or wholly oppressive, this article tries to advance a more definite argument: migration into sex work constitutes an ambivalent process marked by both constraint and agency. While widowed women continue to navigate stigma and structural exclusion, they also engage in context-specific negotiations of survival, economic autonomy, and social belonging. These negotiations, however, are not uniform and vary across life stages, particularly along generational lines and broader social positions. By bringing widowhood and sex work into the same analytical frame, the paper rethinks the relationship between gendered stigma and labour in postcolonial contexts. It highlights how transitions across regimes of marginalisation reshape conditions of exclusion, producing both fragile forms of agency and new configurations of hierarchy. In doing so, the study contributes to a more grounded and humane understanding of embodied labour, moving beyond reductive moral binaries to foreground the lived complexities of marginalised women’s lives.
Conceptualising gendered marginality: Themes and gaps
The historical trajectories of widowhood and sex work in Bengal are deeply intertwined through shifting moral economies that have regulated women’s sexuality, labour, and social worth. While these figures have often been examined separately within existing scholarship, their intersection reveals their gendered marginalisation historically produced and sustained through religious doctrine, colonial governance, and postcolonial regulatory regimes. Despite this shared structural grounding, academic engagement with widowhood and sex work has largely evolved along separate trajectories. Scholarship on widowhood has focused on ritual exclusion, social regulation, and welfare marginalisation. On the other hand, studies on sex work have centred on questions of agency, labour, and governance. This separation has limited analytical attention to how gendered life-course events like “widowhood” shape women’s entry into informal and stigmatised labour markets. This section, therefore, brings these bodies of literature into conversation to identify the gaps that this study seeks to address.
Widowhood, patriarchy, and social regulation
Within the Brahmanical patriarchy, the widows were perceived as the embodiment of ritual pollution, and their bodies were rendered inauspicious, minimising their social worth to abstinence and silence. In addition, the persistence of practices such as food restrictions, social isolation, and exclusion from rituals (Lamb, 2000) demonstrates how traditional idioms of purity structurally marginalise them. Chakraborty (2018) argues that the construction of widowhood extends beyond cultural practices, often functioning as an institutionalised mechanism of patriarchal control legitimised through religious and social norms. Rather than dismantling existing patriarchal structures, colonial interventions reconfigured them through new modes of legal and bureaucratic governance. Landmark social reforms, most notably the Hindu Widow Remarriage Act of 1856, were effectively embedded within broader anxieties regarding social order and the regulation of female sexuality. As scholars such as Mani (1987) and Bandopadhyay (2003) demonstrate, this reformist idealisation of “moral progress” frequently collided with a deeply stratified social reality, where the practical application of legal provisions remained hostage to entrenched hierarchies of caste and kinship control. Consequently, as highlighted by Chen (1998), a widow’s trajectory was determined by a precise intersection of material precarity and social status. While upper-caste remarriage was largely restricted to childless women to preserve lineage purity, lower-caste widows utilised the provision as a pragmatic instrument for economic security, often regardless of their maternal status. Hence, “remarriage” remains stigmatised and tightly regulated by the family, reflecting that a widow’s sexuality and autonomy remained under patriarchal authority. This body of work provides important insights into the regulation and marginalisation of widowed women. It largely focuses on ritual, cultural, and legal dimensions, with limited attention to their economic trajectories, migration patterns, or entry into informal and stigmatised labour markets.
Sex work, labour, and governance
Parallel to scholarship on widowhood, political science and socio-legal studies have examined sex work as a site of contested governance, labour, and regulation. Colonial interventions, particularly through the Contagious Diseases Act, marked a shift towards the bureaucratic management of sexuality by linking public health, morality, and state surveillance (Kotiswaran, 2011). This disciplinary regime was further solidified by the alignment of colonial missionary values with emergent Bhadralok respectability. Scholars (Chatterjee, 1993; Ghosh, 2022; Mani, 1987) illustrate how this cultural convergence reframed sexual performance as inherently indecent, systematically criminalising the performer and reconstituting them as a passive object of reform and invasive medical surveillance.
Postcolonial legal frameworks in India have largely preserved this ambivalence. Governmentality in India has worked out an elaborate system for the surveillance and censorship of sex work, where the legal framework has been arranged in such a way that it embodies a mix of suppression of “promiscuous” sexual activities with toleration of prostitution on one hand, and a gendered understanding of what sexualities are on the other hand (Lakkimsetti, 2014). The Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act exemplifies what scholars describe as regulatory governance, and political economy approaches further situate sex work within processes of labour precarity and migration, arguing that women’s participation in sex work must be understood as a response to structural constraints rather than individual deviance (Agustín, 2007; Kotiswaran, 2011). More recent scholarship has shifted towards recognising sex workers as political actors. Studies of collectives such as the Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee (DMSC) highlight that sexual labour has been reframed as a site of economic assertion, collective identity, and rights-based mobilisation (Ghosh, 2022; Jana and Mukherjee, 2013). These works challenge victim-centric narratives and foreground the agency of sex workers within informal economies. Political economy situates sex work within broader processes of labour precarity and migration, arguing that women’s participation in sex work must be understood as a rational response to structural constraints and not individual deviance (Agustín, 2007; Kotiswaran, 2011). However, despite these advances, much of the literature treats sex workers as a relatively homogeneous category. It engages in questions of consent, coercion, and labour rights but pays limited attention to how prior life-course events shape women’s pathways into sex work.
Collective mobilisation, subaltern politics, and internal differentiation
From the late 1990s onward, research on sex-worker collectivisation has introduced a more nuanced political lens, emphasising questions of citizenship and representation. Analysis of organisations such as DMSC demonstrates the mobilisation of sex workers to collectively claim health rights, labour recognition, and political visibility, thereby contesting dominant governance frameworks (Jana and Mukherjee, 2013). Drawing on Fraser’s (1990) concept of subaltern counterpublics, scholars argue that such collectives produce alternative political spaces in which stigma is reframed as labour identity, and marginalised groups engage the state through negotiated forms of recognition. These studies are significant in shifting the analytical focus from victimhood to political agency.
While these studies have been instrumental in shifting the analytical focus from passive victimhood towards a more robust framework of political agency, the resulting body of scholarship often prioritises collective identity and organisational success. Rather than exploring individual nuances, this literature tends to foreground sex-worker collectives as singular sites of empowerment and political assertion, a narrative that risks overlooking the internal stratifications and diverse life-course trajectories within these communities. These contributions are significant, but they also risk producing a somewhat homogenised account of sex-worker experiences, with limited attention to internal differentiation within these communities. Existing literature rarely interrogates whether such processes are equally inclusive across diverse groups of sex workers, particularly those marked by age, marital status, caste location, or differing physical and social capacities. Implicit within many analyses is a normative imagination of the sex worker as a uniformly productive and politically visible subject, which can obscure the uneven ways in which marginalised women inhabit and negotiate these spaces. As a result, widowed women – especially those shaped by rural displacement, ageing, or layered forms of vulnerability – remain analytically marginal within studies of sex-worker mobilisation.
Intersectionality, state capacity, and urban governance
More recent political science and gender scholarship have employed intersectionality to examine how multiple axes of power – gender, caste, class, and space – shape access to rights and resources (Crenshaw, 1989; Rege, 2003). In the Indian context, studies of urban governance highlight how weak welfare regimes, uneven state capacity, and moralised policy frameworks disproportionately affect marginalised women (Menon, 2015; Roy, 2009). Research on widows in contemporary India has begun addressing migration, displacement, and welfare exclusion, particularly in ecologically and economically vulnerable regions (Jalais, 2010). These studies underscore the limitations of state-led welfare approaches that frame widows as passive beneficiaries rather than political actors. Comparative research similarly documents how widowed and displaced women are absorbed into informal labour markets in the absence of robust social protection. Nevertheless, existing political science literature rarely integrates widowhood and sex work within a single analytical frame. Widowhood is examined primarily through welfare and family policy, while sex work is analysed through law, informality, and rights-based mobilisation. The absence of a unified framework obscures how state policies, moral governance, and informal labour markets intersect to shape widowed women’s political and economic trajectories. Taken together, existing literature reveals important insights into the regulation of widowhood and the governance of sex work, yet leaves a critical gap in understanding their intersection. The absence of a unified analytical framework obscures how widowed women navigate transitions across distinct yet overlapping regimes of marginalisation. In particular, the literature remains limited in its attention to life-course dynamics, generational differences, and how prior social identities shape experiences within sex work. By bringing widowhood and sex work into the same analytical frame, this study addresses this gap, examining how migration, stigma, and labour intersect to shape the lived realities of widowed women in urban informal economies.
Methodology
Three interrelated gaps emerge from the political science literature:
Research questions
Building on these gaps, this study advances the following research questions:
How does widowhood function as a form of gendered governance that shapes women’s migration into informal and stigmatised labour markets in urban India?
In what ways do caste, class, and rural–urban displacement intersect with widowhood to structure women’s entry into and experiences of sex work?
How do widowed sex workers negotiate state regulation, social stigma, and economic survival within the urban governance context of Sonagachi?
How does participation in sex-worker collectives reshape widowed women’s claims to labour identity, citizenship, and political recognition?
What do the experiences of widowed sex workers reveal about the limits of welfare-centric and rescue-oriented policy regimes, and what alternative models of gender-responsive urban governance emerge from their lived practices?
Research design
To answer these, we adopted a qualitative, interpretive research design to examine how widowhood operates as a form of gendered governance shaping women’s labour trajectories, mobility, and engagement with urban regulatory regimes. Grounded in feminist political economy and political sociology, the research conceptualises widowhood and sex work not as isolated social conditions but as politically mediated categories produced through law, welfare arrangements, kinship institutions, and moral regulation. Fieldwork was conducted in Sonagachi, Kolkata, one of South Asia’s most prominent red-light districts and a key site of contested urban governance. Sonagachi offers a strategic empirical setting where informal labour, legal ambiguity, surveillance, and collective mobilisation intersect. The presence of the DMSC further situates the field site within a broader landscape of subaltern political action and rights-based engagement, allowing analysis of how marginalised women negotiate claims to labour identity and citizenship. The study draws on in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 20 widowed women (N = 20) currently engaged in sex work. Participants were selected through purposive sampling based on marital status (widowed), active involvement in sex work, and migration from rural or semi-rural regions of Bengal. This sampling strategy enabled a focused examination of widowhood as a life-course event that restructures women’s access to labour and urban space. While the sample size does not permit statistical generalisation, it supports analytical generalisation by enlightening how governance structures shape marginalised women’s trajectories across comparable postcolonial contexts. Interviews explored participants’ experiences of widowhood, migration, labour entry, interactions with state institutions, exposure to regulation and stigma, and engagement with collective organisations. Interviews were conducted in Bengali and later translated and transcribed into English, with attention to preserving contextual meaning. Data analysis followed a thematic and interpretive approach, combining inductive coding with theoretically informed categories such as governance, informality, stigma, and constrained agency. Agency was conceptualised relationally, capturing women’s capacity to make decisions within structurally limited options rather than as an absolute condition.
Ethical approval was obtained in accordance with institutional guidelines. Informed consent was secured, and all identifying details were anonymised to minimise risk given the legal and social vulnerabilities associated with sex work. Reflexivity was integral to the research process, recognising the power asymmetries involved in studying marginalised populations and the political implications of representation. Despite its qualitative scope, the study offers theoretically grounded insights into gendered governance, informal labour, and subaltern citizenship relevant to wider debates in political science and gender studies. The interviews were conducted during a concentrated four month period (August 10–December 05, 2025). This “intensive qualitative burst” allowed for a focused immersion into the community during a period of high organisational activity. While the short duration limits longitudinal observation, the depth of the 20 semi-structured interviews provides the “analytical generalization” necessary to understand how governance structures shape marginalised lives. Reflexivity was integral to navigating the power asymmetries between the “Bhadralok” academic researcher and the subaltern participants. We observed that participants, especially older widows, often utilised the idiom of “Bhadromohila” (the respectable lady) to negotiate their dignity within the interview space, performing a moral superiority to distance themselves from the stigma of their labour.
Historical and social context: India, with a focus on Bengal
Sex work: Historical trajectories and contemporary transformations
In precolonial Bengal, the tawaif and baiji were patrons of art, music, and literature, responsible for the refinement and education of the elite (Banerjee, 1998; Oldenburg, 1990). The courtesan’s erotic artistry and literacy made her a subject of admiration in early modern Bengal. The precolonial city permitted certain women to circulate within the public sphere as performers and poets, and their social values were not always necessarily equated with moral degradation. Classical texts such as the Kāma Sūtra and Nāṭyaśāstra recognised these women as custodians of specialised aesthetic knowledge and legitimate participants in elite sociability. Colonial rule integrated with missionary moralities and emergent Bhadralok respectability reframed sexual performance as indecent and criminalised the performer as an object of reform and medical surveillance. 1 With British rule, they were forced to segregate in a geographically marked area (red-light zone) reserved for them. “Red” in this context was symbolised as the evil part of society. The prostitutes served the colonised as well as the colonisers. The British soldiers stationed in a foreign land frequently visited local prostitutes, leading to a rapid spread of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) like syphilis. Although the disease had European origins, the colonial administration and public discourse shifted the blame onto Indian women, particularly prostitutes, portraying them as the source of moral and physical contamination. In response, the Contagious Diseases Act was implemented, authorising the medical examination, registration, and segregation of women suspected of infection (Ghosh, 2022). This process made a direct intervention into their bodies for the first time through the western medical process, and they were considered as the subjects of the colonisers. The ideals of dangerous and criminal were associated with prostitution, and the state had the power to raid them anytime (Kotiswaran, 2011). This transformation of the prostitute from cultural performer to moral outcast thus reflects India’s broader transition from feudal patriarchy to bourgeois patriarchy, and this narrative continues to redefine women’s sexual autonomy in the postcolonial state. Although STDs among colonial troops prompted these measures, blame was disproportionately placed on Indian women, particularly prostitutes, who were cast as vectors of disease and moral decay.
In postcolonial India, the residues of colonial moral regulation persist through legal frameworks, social attitudes, and governance practices. Governmentality in India has produced a system of regulated autonomy, wherein sex workers’ visibility is permitted within tightly controlled spatial and moral boundaries (Lakkimsetti, 2014). Swati Ghosh, in this context, states that sex work, unlike any other form of labour, cannot be reduced to standard economic categories such as wage or salaried labour. Instead, it is “embodied” – work through the body, on the body and of the body. Here, the body becomes the instrument, site, and means of production. Hence, sex work can be seen in terms of a personal service provided privately to an individual and is not available in the market as a standardised commodity, and most importantly, it is not value-producing (Ghosh, 2022). Ghosh adds that while sex work has a market and involves payment, it fails to qualify as work in a strict economic sense as it does not produce measurable value. It also generates no tangible surplus value, as its product (sexual gratification) is personal, non-reproducible, and immediately consumed. This form of intimate, corporeal, and servile labour operates in an affective domain, and unlike a beautician, physiotherapist, or salon worker who performs bodily services while maintaining professional authority in defining and standardising their labour, a sex worker’s power is inverted where the client dictates the nature of service, and the service is inseparable from the worker’s own body. In Postcolonial India, the prostitute transformed herself into a sex worker, asserting her own rights. In 1986, through the Immoral Trafficking Prevention Act (ITPA) act, the government kept the same rules but made some amendments regarding the functioning of the prostitute, which was very repressive. The basis of voluntary engagement in sex work is not at all acknowledged by the state machinery. Smarajit Jana recalled that state programmes were ineffective as they failed to sensitise the marginalised sex-worker community about condoms, due to which they were unable to negotiate with clients (Jain, 2017). The government maintained the segregation of sex workers within the red-light areas in very strict terms through medical surveillance. Clients never used contraceptives, but it became the responsibility of the sex workers to use them since they were considered carriers of diseases.
Sex workers collectively protested against the state, where they wanted to be identified as any other worker. It is here that a wave of transformation was noticed in the gendered subject from the objectified status to a subject for the first time. The “sex worker” term simply wanted to be referred to as an income-generating profession without any moral connotation. This evolution reflects an ideological shift from the social to the economic, from a way of life of a prostitute to a mode of work of the sex worker, from an immorally laid notion to a personal individuality of a worker (Kotiswaran, 2011). The contemporary sex worker is no longer a passive recipient of stigma. She is an organised sex worker demanding recognition of her work and bodily autonomy. Despite this, they are subjected to patriarchy because of the nature of their work as an equation of power between man and woman, where she is dominated and exploited. But through civil society associations like Durbar, there is a reorientation of the sexuality discourse, which gives them a visibility and a ground of negotiation that can be considered truly remarkable. It is additionally highlighted how sex workers’ mobility across bonded labour to independent work or brothel ownership reveals a multi-layered form of agency of women. Many women choose sex work to earn money. Similarly, some discontinue sex work for a variety of factors, including the social stigma and desire for respectability, as well as the fear of exposure. On the other hand, there are reasons to continue: for example, despite being paid money by a sympathetic customer to escape sex work, Sumangala remained in sex work; and after leaving sex work to get married and have children, Banu got bored with being a housewife and returned to Sonagachi. The desire to earn one’s own livelihood and to rise above poverty pushes these choices.
Widowhood: Ritual marginalisation and social exclusion
Early political and historical scholarship on widowhood in South Asia situates it within regimes of social regulation and moral governance, rather than merely as a cultural or familial condition. From birth to death, the freedom and dignity of women were neglected by their families and the state. Even the government policies were framed according to the religious scriptures, and the widows were the worst sufferers. Widow remarriage was unthinkable in the orthodox Hindu society. Sarah Lamb observed that rigorous dietary practices imposed on widows, which include abstaining from rich or “hot” foods by limiting meals to dry, simple items, shaving of the head, wearing plain white sarees, and forsaking jewellery, were designed to weaken the body and diminish its sexual appeal (Lamb, 2000). At this historic juncture, there were some liberal minded Bengalis who resonated with the inhuman sufferings of widows on account of kulinism, child marriage, and Sati, and as a result, these practices were eliminated. It was observed that even after the legalisation of widow remarriage through the Hindu Widow’s Remarriage Act of 1856 and subsequent reforms, which aimed at dismantling the exploitative structures of widowhood, the reality revealed a continuation of stigma through deeply rooted Brahmanical Patriarchy and caste-based hierarchies, which continued to perceive widowhood as a condition of moral pollution and sexual danger even in Postcolonial Bengal. Sekhar Bandopadhyay (2003), in the colonial context, argued that the Widow Remarriage Act of 1856, hailed as a victory for reformers like Vidyasagar, in reality, generated an ambivalent legacy by re-inscribing the widow as a morally fraught and socially anxious category. This act created a paradox of the Hindu widow who, at once, is “socially dead but sexually alive.” In the reformist thought, widowhood was treated as a social malaise threatening the moral order and sexuality, and if left unregulated, it was imagined as degenerative, producing adultery and abortion. Vidyasagar and his liberal contemporaries sought to redirect this sexuality into lawful domesticity through remarriage.
The revivalists, on the other hand, redefined the widow as the brahmacharini, whose lifelong celibacy purified her body and symbolised the spiritual strength of a nation resisting Western corruption. These practices framed the widow’s supposed guilt in outliving her husband and as a mechanism for controlling the dangerous potency of female desire. Hence, in the colonial era, finding no alternative, a section of widows migrated to brothels to escape strict societal restrictions. Calcutta (the modern Kolkata, the capital of West Bengal) became the most populous abode of prostitution in the 18th century. The adoption of women into prostitution was publicised in vernacular newspapers, and it was reported that lakhs of Rarhi Kulin widows and unmarried daughters were becoming prostitutes as the East European Company had been unable to alter their marriage laws (Chowdhury, 2022). The postcolonial condition of widowhood reflects a structural transformation that is far from the ideal of emancipation. The legal dismantling of explicit taboos has led to subtle, class-coded exploitation in cities and moral-economic dependency in villages. Urban widows navigate exploitative labour markets under the guise of autonomy, and rural widows remain bound by caste, landlessness, and kin control. In modern Bengal, deeply internalised values continue to dominate the worldviews of widows and a frightening statement that Chen makes is that for all the hype around the symbolic power of the chaste sati on the part of those guarding our “traditions,” more widows are murdered for a variety of reasons than supposedly immolate themselves (Chen, 1998). Hence, it is not surprising that large numbers of widows seek employment as domestic labourers, beg, become religious mendicants, or end up in sex work. Widowhood thus persists as one of the most visible sites of caste, gender, and economic subordination, and the rhetoric of reform conceals the endurance of systemic control over women’s bodies and labour.
Convergence: Migration, survival, and structural alignment
The trajectories of widowhood and sex work, as stated earlier, reveal a complex interplay of exclusion and survival where women are empowered and subordinated at the same time. The colonial discourse, with its Victorian morality and nationalist reformism, romanticised the desexualised widow and criminalised the sensual courtesan, and in postcolonial societies, the residue of this colonial moral economy continues to shape the lived realities of women, denying them any form of subjecthood. The courtesan, who was regarded as the performer of aesthetic pleasure, was reconstituted as the “fallen woman,” and prostitution became a site of criminalisation (Banerjee, 1998). On the other hand, widowhood remains bound to ideals of chastity, restraint, and social invisibility and is denied access to education, inheritance, or respectable labour, particularly in rural settings where caste and religious orthodoxy are deeply embedded. For instance, ethnographic studies from the Sunderbans, such as those by Amrita Dasgupta (2018), document the plight of tiger widows who are termed as “bagbidhoba” and are blamed for their husband’s deaths and exiled from communal and ritual life. Mourning prescriptions, popularly termed as “baro masher achaar,” are documented across South Asia. Devoid of land rights and familial security, many women, as reflected by Agarwal (1994) and Jalais (2010), face both economic exclusion and symbolic death as ritual seclusion and purity taboos translate directly into labour exclusion. In fleeing rural stigma, widows enter urban spaces like Kolkata that provide them with a sense of “anonymity,” leading to their escape from caste and kinship surveillance.
In contrast, the figure of the sex worker in Postcolonial India reveals a significant arena of transformation. The rearticulation of sexual labour as work through collectives like the DMSC signals a palpable empowerment in the moral avenue of stigma, where sex workers exercise economic assertion even after facing continued prejudice. Hence, there has been a shift in the identity of sex work from a moral identity to a political identity, but this form of empowerment remains fragile and incomplete. What connects these two apparently distinct categories is the shared experience of subalternity. The experiences of both the widow and the sex worker render a systematic erasure of agency and dignity under ritual and moral regimes of power. For many widows in the rural landscape of Bengal, migration to urban spaces becomes the only viable escape for mainly economic survival. This migration, however, does not necessarily lead to emancipation but often redirects this vulnerability into another domain of stigma. This paper, therefore, treats sex work and widowhood as intersecting subaltern experiences that have evolved through time and consists of layered interpretations of empowerment and disempowerment.
Fragile emancipation: The rupture of ritualised patriarchy and the transition to urban economic selfhood
This section examines the lived experiences of widowed women engaged in sex work in Sonagachi, drawing on qualitative interviews to understand how the transition from widowhood to sexual labour is negotiated in everyday life. While the preceding sections have outlined the historical and structural conditions that shape these trajectories, the analysis here centres on women’s own narratives, focusing on how they interpret, inhabit, and respond to overlapping regimes of marginalisation. Within this context, migration to urban spaces like Kolkata does not mark a linear journey to emancipation. For many participants, entry into sex work represents both avenues of survival and profound moral contradiction. The convergence of sex work and widowhood within the red-light area produces a complex spectrum of experiences that have to be comprehended beyond the binaries of empowerment and victimhood. Based on the narratives of widows working in Sonagachi and its adjoining areas, this study highlights plural experiences of widowhood within sex work, which is shaped by factors like age, personal history, economic position, and cultural norms. Importantly, the interviews reveal how widowhood and sex work are perceived and negotiated, which forms the central analytical thread of this section.
All participants in this study migrated from rural Bengal, primarily from districts such as North 24 Parganas, Murshidabad, Midnapore, and Nadia in search of livelihood. Among the younger widows, two have remarried, while the rest continue to identify themselves as bidhoba (widow) alongside their identity as sex workers. The interviews reveal a generational shift in their perception of widowhood, sexuality, and sex work due to the differentiation of age distribution and lived experiences of these women. The worldviews of younger widows reveal that the transition from ritual widowhood to sex work can be perceived as a pathway to fragile emancipation. Most of the younger participants (aged 31–50) had entered marriage early, between 15 and 18, and were exposed to gendered violence, dowry abuse, and economic dependence. Widowhood deepened their vulnerability, making their lives difficult and socially undesirable.
Shanti Das 2 (35) (name changed for anonymity) recalled that she was married off before finishing her matriculation and endured years of physical torture from her alcoholic husband. After he died in a road accident, she was denied shelter by her in-laws and condemned by her community for wearing colourful red sarees as a young widow. Her interview reflects tendencies of moral policing, where she was suspected of having an affair due to her young age. Migration to Kolkata was, therefore, less a choice and more of a compulsion for survival. Initially, she entered domestic work, but due to financial constraints, later on, she joined sex work in Bowbazar through the suggestion of a friend. She added, “Initially, just like other workers, it took a while for me to adjust here, but afterwards I realised that women of Sonagachi are not judged by caste, religion and even widowhood,” emphasising that the so-called “red-light” area, looked down upon by people, gave her a sense of equality she had never experienced before. Her remarriage and her decision to break ritual codes (such as Ekadashi) signify her emancipation in a space that is commonly imagined as immoral, polluted, and dangerous in the Bhadrolok imagination of the city. Her perspectives reflected a counter space of belonging and self-definition for women who are excluded from the mainstream city.
Similarly, another participant stated that “I always felt depressed in auspicious ceremonies like weddings.” 3 Migration and voluntary entry into sex work gave her a sense of economic liberation as she is now able to support her family, although they remain unaware of her occupation. She added that she is not ashamed of her work but fears exclusion from family ties if the truth is revealed to them. Jhumpa’s 4 (42) perspectives were more radical and coherent. She recalls that she was blamed for her husband’s death by cancer and felt a sense of exclusion from her village. Her entry into sex work made her realise that this profession also provides dignity. “Even the bhadrolok girls come here at night and hide their faces. I don’t hide mine. I work proudly as I consider my work as a form of social service.” Her statement here reframes the idea of sex work as a form of civic labour through the occupation of urban spaces perceived as an act of defiance. She additionally described Sonagachi as the safest place in Kolkata, stating, “no one can violate us here as we own these streets.”
Like Jhuma, Sujata 5 (46) (name changed due to anonymity) stated: “No man would ever dare to look at us inappropriately within Sonagachi. Have you ever heard of a rape happening here? No, because we are the ones who keep the city safe. No man can cross the line of consent here. But the moment you step outside Sonagachi, you feel the fear of the male gaze and the threat of violation everywhere.” While the narratives consistently foreground widowhood, they also reveal how caste, class, and spatial displacement co-produce vulnerability and channel women into sex work. Most participants originated from economically marginal rural households where land ownership was absent and kinship networks functioned as mechanisms of control rather than support. Widowhood in such contexts does not merely signify marital loss but activates a cascade of exclusions, denial of inheritance, withdrawal of shelter, and symbolic death, whose severity is mediated by caste position and class location.
Taken together, the narratives of younger widows suggest that the transition from rural widowhood to sex work in urban spaces like Sonagachi constitutes a significant rupture from what may be termed “ritualised patriarchy,” wherein the widow’s body is governed by invisible codes of abstinence and inauspiciousness. Field observations and interviews reflect that many younger widows exhibit a sense of confidence and self-acceptance in their present lives, with some even choosing to remarry – decisions that would have been unthinkable within the normative constraints of widowhood in their rural contexts. For these women, entry into sex work enables a partial dissolution of ritual stigma, allowing them to renegotiate their identities beyond the restrictive category of the bidhoba. This transition is closely tied to their location within a political economy that privileges youth and sexual desirability. As relatively younger, sexually active, and economically productive bodies, they can attract clients and generate income, which in turn facilitates a degree of autonomy and self-definition. Their narratives also reflect a diminished attachment to ritual prescriptions such as dietary restrictions or codes of dress that once governed their lives, signalling a shift away from internalised widowhood as a primary identity. In this sense, sex work emerges as a pathway to a form of economic and embodied selfhood that stands in stark contrast to their earlier experiences of marginalisation. At the same time, this emancipation remains fragile as it is situated within a stigmatised “Bhadrolok” imagination, where moral anxieties and social invisibility continue to persist in spite of women negotiating new forms of agency and belonging.
By contrast, the narratives of older widows emphasise the centrality of age as a determining factor in reshaping their experiences within sex work. While many of them initially entered the profession under conditions of coercion, survival, or limited choice, their early years in Sonagachi were marked by a degree of economic stability and relative visibility. This trajectory, however, undergoes a significant transformation over time. As these women age, their position within the red-light area shifts towards marginalisation and gradual erasure. Out of the 20 respondents, 12 were between the ages of 51 and 60, and their accounts consistently point to the emergence of new hierarchies structured around youth, sexual desirability, and economic productivity. In contrast to younger widows, whose bodies remain economically viable within the sexual economy, older widows experience a steady decline in income, visibility, and social belonging. This transition alters their material conditions as well as their self-perception, leading to internalised stigma, moral repositioning, and a reassertion of ritual identities that had earlier been disrupted.
Aroti Mondol’s (61) narrative illustrates this transition across the life-course. 6 She married at 12 and was widowed soon after; she was abandoned by her in-laws and trafficked under false pretences. In Sonagachi, she endured extreme violence where she was confined, beaten, and starved by her pimp before being rescued by her family. Driven by persistent poverty, she returned voluntarily to sex work, where, during her younger years, she was able to earn sufficiently to support both herself and her family. “I felt proud when I could send money home,” she recalled, situating economic contribution as a source of dignity and belonging. She also acknowledged the role of the DMSC in reducing instances of sexual violence. During this phase, economic productivity appeared to partially offset the effects of social stigma, as the ability to generate income enabled a degree of familial relevance and self-worth that momentarily reconfigured her marginal status.
However, this relative stability proved to be contingent upon age and bodily desirability. During fieldwork, Aroti was found seated beside a garbage vat, operating a small makeshift stall selling boiled eggs and ghugni, with minimal footfall and negligible earnings. This spatial location on the margins of an already marginal economy visibly points to her displacement from the circuits of sexual labour. Despite expressing a continued willingness to engage in sex work, she noted that “no one comes” to her anymore. “When I was young, I earned like a babu. Now I earn fifty rupees in a week,” she said quietly, encapsulating the stark decline in her economic viability. Her assertion that “sex work has an expiry date” shows an acute awareness of ageing and how it renders women economically redundant within a system that privileges youthful, desirable bodies. In this sense, her present condition signifies a profound loss of identity, as she is gradually excluded from the very profession that once enabled her survival and self-worth.
Anjali Pal 7 (60) expressed similar contradictions but through a different moral lens. Abandoned by her family after her husband’s death, she entered sex work for survival but remained deeply enmeshed in her bhadrolok upbringing. “I never forgot what my parents taught me,” she said. “I don’t drink, I don’t wear short clothes or loud makeup, nor do I smoke or drink alcohol. I work only for food, not for sinning, and I ask God for forgiveness every day.” She wears only white sarees and no makeup, even while attending clients. For her, this performance of widowhood within sex work signifies her moral superiority over other “indecent” and “immoral” women. She recalls being regularly beaten and humiliated by her husband and her social isolation in the village due to widowhood, but this ritualised identity for her differentiates her as a “Bhodromohila” (Gentlewoman) from other sex workers. Poverty here serves as a moral justification by framing her labour as a necessity rather than bodily desire, which, according to her, is a karmic sin.
At this stage, the narratives begin to reveal a more unsettling dimension of subjectivity among older widows. Despite being subjected to severe forms of patriarchal discipline – early marriage, domestic violence, and the social exclusion of widowhood – many participants continue to draw upon the very moral and ritual codes that governed their subordination. This raises a set of difficult but necessary questions. Why do women who have themselves endured the violence of ritualised patriarchy continue to uphold its moral language? What explains this persistent need to perform respectability through widowhood within a space that had earlier enabled their survival? Is this shaped by the internalisation of Brahmanical and religious norms over a lifetime, or does it emerge more sharply with age, as economic decline and reduced visibility compel a search for alternative forms of dignity? It may also reflect shifting hierarchies within the red-light area itself, where younger, more economically productive bodies occupy positions of visibility, pushing older widows to reassert moral superiority as a compensatory strategy. These tensions complicate any straightforward understanding of subaltern consciousness, where the interviews suggest a more ambivalent process, as in such frameworks, domination is reworked and, at times, reproduced in the effort to reclaim self-worth.
Kajol Singh’s (60)
8
narrative further consolidates this pattern of moral self-positioning among older widows. She confided that her family was supportive and attempted her remarriage. But the people of her village shamed her parents, and thus, she refused to get remarried to uphold the “respect of the family.” She said, “I did want to marry again, but couldn’t bring more shame to my parents.” Hence, she migrated to Kolkata from Midnapore and worked initially as a domestic worker, but due to a very meagre income, she chose to enter sex work willingly. She added that she was able to preserve her widowhood by wearing white sarees, avoiding jewellery, and avoiding bright colours. She is sometimes taunted by her neighbours, reminding her that “she will never rise in life as she has no husband,” but she dismissed such remarks. In her words: I have done my business wearing a saree, standing inside the lanes of Sonagachi, and I never faced any difficulty. But the girls nowadays stand on the main road wearing short dresses. Why do they need to do that? They are the greedy ones, the real prostitutes, not me. I have always done my work with dignity, without crossing the line.
Her articulation of “dignity” is deeply embedded in Brahmanical and bhadrolok moral codes, which are actively reproduced within the red-light area. The distinction between “respectable” and “immoral” women is spatially enacted beyond discourse. Field observations indicate that many older widows operate from the interior lanes of Sonagachi, often outside their quarters, deliberately avoiding the more visible spaces of solicitation on the main roads. Their withdrawal from these sites of visibility is accompanied by a conscious rejection of markers associated with sexual display, that is, makeup, bright clothing, alcohol consumption, and overt client solicitation, which are attributed to “lower” or “impure” women.
At the same time, these interiors are symbolically reconstituted through practices of ritual and religiosity. Small temples within their living quarters, along with the continued observance of prayer and codes of austerity, reflect an ongoing effort to align themselves with notions of purity along with moral restraint. In this context, the performance of widowhood becomes a crucial strategy where older women negotiate dignity by reframing it as compelled labour devoid of desire. As a consequence, there is a reconfiguration of moral hierarchy within the red-light area, as distinctions are formed within the sex-worker community itself. Older widows, particularly those facing declining economic opportunities, appear to reclaim status through moral differentiation, positioning themselves as disciplined, restrained, and closer to respectability, while displacing stigma onto younger, more visible workers.
Contrastingly, Bula Chowdhury 9 (52), originally from Nadia, recounted that her husband had two wives, both subjected to his physical and emotional abuse. His death, she admitted, came as a form of relief. Although her family accepted her after her husband’s death, she felt guilty for becoming what she called an extra burden in a household already struggling to support five siblings. Driven by this guilt and a desire for self-reliance, she decided to migrate to Kolkata. Unlike most respondents, Bula did not report experiences of stigma in her village for being a widow. She first sought employment as a domestic worker and later as a factory labourer, but in both sectors, she faced gendered exploitation and economic subordination. She stated that, “Men in the factory used to stare, touch, and make dirty jokes,” and added that “Even in people’s homes, male members tried to touch me. I never felt safe anywhere.” Due to these unsettling experiences, she entered sex work. On asking how she perceives this profession, she replied, “People say sex work is dirty, but tell me where it is clean for women.” She additionally states that sex work offered protection to her, unlike her previous experiences. She reasoned that “outside, women are forced into sex or touched without consent; here, I do it on my own terms and earn from it.” Her perspective on sex work tends to dismantle the binary of “moral” and “immoral” labour, as it is a known fact that gendered and sexual violence is subtly present in organised sectors. She adds that, “Even educated women like teachers, office workers come here at night to earn extra, so why should this be seen as different?” It is important to observe that the aforementioned understanding of sex work emphasises the elements of economic and sexual agency, which are absent in other forms of employment. Her narrative thus complicates dominant moral discourses by positioning sex work as a comparatively safer and more self-directed form of livelihood within a broader landscape of gendered precarity.
Similarly, Basanti Das 10 (55) and Rita Sarkar 11 (53) both recalled how, after becoming widows, they were subjected to rigid social control within their villages. “We were not even allowed to step out after dusk,” Basanti said, “being a widow meant losing the right to breathe freely.” Eventually, both fled their villages in search of livelihood. After engaging in unstable and poorly paid forms of labour, both entered sex work, experiencing a relative degree of autonomy that was absent in their previous occupations. “This profession is ours,” Rita asserted, emphasising the absence of external control over their mobility and self-presentation. They attributed this newfound confidence to the DMSC, whose collective efforts, they believe, have helped them assert their rights by resisting violence. When asked whether they would like researchers to advocate for the recognition of sex work as an organised labour sector, their response was revealing: “We want people to know our struggles and respect us for who we are, but we don’t want this work to become organised. If that happens, where will we go? This is the only space that is truly ours.” Their statements encapsulate recognition within public discourse by not blending with the mainstream discourse due to the fear of subordination in their own space. So, for the sex workers, these marginal spaces give them a “sense of belonging,” and they want to preserve this element of “subalternity” of their space to assert their territorial agency within marginality itself.
The older widows like Kajol, Aroti Mondal, and Basanti Das further spoke about Durbar’s role, acknowledging that its intervention has indeed transformed their lives significantly, where, unlike before, they no longer faced direct criminalisation, and there is a significant decline in physical violence by their customers. In their youth, the collective efforts of the organisation empowered them to find a degree of economic and bodily autonomy within a peripheral urban space. However, as they aged, their worlds took a different turn, as with ageing, their bodies felt invisible and unwanted. Their income collapsed, and their identities began to blur. Kajol remarked, “You stop existing in sex work when the body stops earning.” As a result, they navigate their survival through a widow’s pension and public ration, with little or no institutional support. They expressed disappointment that Durbar, despite being a voice representing marginal narratives, appeared to prioritise the younger and hence more “visible” members, as their bodies remain economically productive. They added that they were only “called for photographs during festivals and given one saree a year.” This leads to a very essential question about the internal dynamics of representation: Can a movement that claims to voice the subaltern actually represent those whose bodies no longer serve the political economy of visibility?
Taken together, these narratives reveal a deeply contradictory relationship with the DMSC. On the one hand, participants repeatedly acknowledged that Durbar has been central to transforming the landscape of sex work in Sonagachi. Its interventions have enabled forms of autonomy, reduced everyday violence, and allowed women to imagine themselves as workers with a collective political identity. For many women, it was this space that first made dignity thinkable within a profession that was inherently marked by stigma. This remains the Durbar that is visible to the outside world as an organisation that has historically redefined sex work as labour, challenging dominant moral regimes.
At the same time, there exists a more unsettling set of experiences that complicate this narrative. Older widows, in particular, spoke about the organisation with a sense of distance. While they were aware of Durbar’s public presence and its efforts to challenge stigma, they did not locate themselves within these transformations in any meaningful way, as many continued to depend on widow pensions and state welfare schemes for survival, with little access to the forms of economic independence that the organisation is often associated with.
Hence, what emerges in this perspective is not a rejection of Durbar, but a feeling of being left at its margins. The interviewees described that the collective seemed to correspond with those who remained economically active and publicly present, while ageing bodies, no longer central to the economy of sex work, became less visible within the same space. This sense of marginalisation is striking because it takes place within a space that is otherwise perceived as liberatory. Several participants emphasised that caste-based discrimination had significantly reduced in Sonagachi compared to their villages, but other forms of differentiation persisted in subtle ways. Age, widowhood, and declining sexual desirability became means of reorganising hierarchies within the red-light area. For many older widows, the deeper sense of exclusion did not stem from clients. On the contrary, they felt a gradual distancing within the very collective that once preserved their survival. It is this internal fracture, this quiet dislocation within a shared space of marginality, that intensifies their vulnerability and complicates the emancipatory promise of collectivisation.
Conclusion
The worldviews of widows in Sonagachi reveal that sex work and widowhood cannot be treated as two isolated social categories. On the contrary, they are deeply interconnected conditions through which women channelise and negotiate survival, stigma, labour, sexuality, and dignity. For the women of Sonagachi, widowhood does not end before sex work begins, nor does entry into sex work erase the social life of widowhood. Instead, each reshapes the meaning of the other across the life course. The findings demonstrate that Sonagachi, which is often represented within a dominant urban discourse as the immoral underside of the city, also functions as a fragile space of emancipation, providing forms of dignity many women did not experience within the so-called respectable spaces of family, village, marriage, domestic labour, or factory work. In the red-light area, several women described earning independently, forming intimate relationships, remarrying, socialising freely, and refusing ritual restrictions imposed upon widowed bodies. In this sense, spaces condemned by mainstream morality were experienced by these marginal women as more humane than the moral worlds that had earlier disciplined and silenced them. The city, therefore, appears differently when seen through subaltern eyes: what is called polluted from above may become enabling from below.
At the same time, the narratives of older widows complicate any romantic reading of liberation as they continue to value ritual widowhood, modesty, and symbolic distance from younger sex workers, reflecting the presence of internalised patriarchy and inherited moral codes in new labouring spaces. More significantly, ageing transformed their relationship to labour, recognition, and belonging. As their bodies ceased to be economically profitable, their visibility within the red-light area declined, and many felt socially abandoned within the very locality that sustained them. On the contrary, for many younger widows, the presence of income itself altered the force of stigma. With earnings, visibility, and self-reliance, ritual shame lost some of its power. This suggests that widowhood is also mediated by material conditions, where, with economic autonomy, social death can be negotiated differently.
It is here that the paper locates its central theoretical intervention: the production of the “subaltern within the subaltern.” Marginality in this context is not a flat or homogeneous condition but an internally stratified and constantly reorganised mechanism. In Sonagachi, the axis of exclusion shifts from village norms of caste and widowhood to urban regimes of youth, desirability, productivity, and visibility. The older widow becomes doubly displaced: once by the patriarchal order outside, and again by the political economy of desirability within. Her silencing is especially profound here because it occurs inside a space from which she expected recognition, solidarity, and understanding.
The interviews further reveal a second contradiction. Some older widows who had themselves suffered through widowhood continued to perform widowhood as a moral superiority. White saris, refusal of makeup, distance from remarriage, disapproval of younger women’s dress, and claims of being “decent” or “pure” distinguished them from those they described as immoral or greedy. Here, women subordinated by patriarchal codes also reproduce those codes to claim dignity. This does not make their consciousness false or irrational but shows how deeply social power works, that is, when economic visibility declines, moral respectability can become an alternative resource of self-worth, and ritual identity strangely becomes a language through which injured subjects seek recognition.
The role of the DMSC must therefore be understood through this same complexity. The narratives repeatedly acknowledge Durbar’s historic interventions: reducing violence, resisting exploitation, enabling health access, organising labour, expanding education, and transforming how sex workers are seen in public life. These interventions reshaped public understandings of sex work and remain historically significant. Yet the same narratives suggest that collective empowerment has been unevenly distributed. Older widows, in this context, often perceived themselves as symbolically included but materially neglected. These perspectives do not nullify the presence of Durbar as a historic counter-narrative for the political, social, and economic visibility of sex workers, but they reveal the internal stratifications that produce a “subaltern within the subaltern,” where collective empowerment is increasingly mediated by the political economy of visibility and the decline of the economically productive body.
Ultimately, this study demonstrates that the transition from widowhood to sex work is a narrative of subaltern negotiation rather than static victimhood. To humanise the urban landscape is to recognise spaces like Sonagachi not as the “polluted” underside of the city, but as subaltern counter-spaces where marginalised women create their own systems of ethics, solidarity, and belonging. Consequently, there is an urgent need for gender-responsive urban policies that move beyond paternalistic, rescue-centric frameworks towards rights-based inclusion. This requires both the state and collectives like the DMSC to expand their recognition beyond the economically productive body to include those who have “aged out” of sex work, ensuring that the subaltern within the subaltern is no longer silenced within the very movements designed for their liberation. By integrating these voices into the “subaltern city,” urban planning and social research can finally honour the labour, dignity, and political subjectivity of women whose lives remain invisible within the mainstream public imagination.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The authors wish to express sincere gratitude to the members of the Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee (DMSC) for facilitating access to the field and for their cooperation during the course of this research. Their long-standing work in advocating for the rights, dignity, and collective well-being of sex workers in Kolkata provided an essential context for this study. The authors are especially indebted to the sex workers who participated in this research, whose willingness to share their life histories, experiences, and reflections made this study possible. The authors acknowledge their trust and generosity in contributing to a study that seeks to foreground marginalised voices with care and respect. The authors also thank colleagues and reviewers whose feedback helped sharpen the analytical framework and improve earlier drafts of the manuscript. Any remaining errors or interpretations are solely the responsibility of the authors.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.