Dr Sutapa Majumdar

Of Love, Longing, and Loss: Indian Sex Workers' Love Stories

Indian sex workers are represented by the international media as living lives of utter abjection, subject to appalling sexual abuse, exploitation, and violence. The stories sex workers tell about their own lives strike a very different tone.

This project works with the narrative biographies of twelve sex workers, their clients gathered by the applicant, and the principal institutional host. Arising from discussions about the role of the media in fueling violence against them with the multi-generational group of sex workers who formed a collective to defend their rights under the name of VAMP - Veshya Anyay Mukti Parishad, Sex Workers Against Injustice - the interviews initially began as part of a fact-finding exercise, with the intention of reportage. What we found was much richer. The project now seeks to bring this together into a form that can speak to the wider public with a popular book and an animated film.