By Patricia Lee Sharpe
Expecting a gush of hard-core sentimentality, I stubbornly resisted this documentary for weeks. But it’s set in Calcutta, now Kolkata, where I lived and worked for two years, so I had to check it out....
I’m settling into my seat, shrugging off my jacket, when the woman in front of me twists around and calls to a friend a few rows back. “I’ve seen it twice,” she honks. “You'll love it! You’ll adore it!”
I cringe, feeling a little grinchy, recalling the blurb in the local grab-it-for-free alternative weekly. The film has been held over, again and again, so more good people can irrigate their tear ducts, evidently:
When even hardened film critics are weeping copiously during the press screening, you know you’ve got the real thing on your hands. Zana Briski’s Oscar-winning documentary parallels [?] her work teaching photography to eight talented boys and girls, the children of prostitutes from Calcutta’s notorious red-light district Sonagachhi. Over the brief but brutally affecting course of the film you become almost as desperate as Briski over their individual fates, as she struggles to find funding and a boarding school willing to accept the children of sex workers. Briski and her co-director Ross Kauffman are smart enough to stay mostly out of the way, letting the stunning, raw photographs of the children tell the story.
Notice those scene-setting descriptors: notorious, brutal, desperate, raw. Poor Calcutta/Kolkata, still seen through the lens of the horrendous “black
hole" which wasn’t a hole, only a chamber too small for all the English prisoners stuffed into it on a hellishly hot day before AC, which means a lot of them died of heat prostration. The local ruler, it seems, had briefly regained power, treating his English captives with the sort of disdain the English had shown toward Indians. Ever since, the West–Zana Briski included–has been taking revenge on Calcutta.
Sonagachhi itself, by the way, dates back to colonial days, when it served the “needs” of the lower ranks of the British military, those who couldn’t afford to set up “native” mistresses in private domestic establishments. Here is a passage from the prologue of a fascinating study entitled Dangeous Outcaste: The Prostitute in Nineteenth Century Calcutta by Sumanta Banerjee:
Like other pre-colonial socio-economic formations, the profession of prostitution also underwent a dramatic change in Bengal soon after the British take-over. It attracted a wide variety of women from different segments of the population from both within and outside Bengal, and acquired new types of clientele....It was also subjected to attempts at control and surveillance by the colonial administration, as well as reassessment by the newly [English] educated... descendents of the old Bengali households. From the relative obscurity of the periphery of rural society in pre-colonial Bengal, the prostitute suddenly emerged into the full glare of publicity in Calcutta, the capital of colonial Bengal....There was an explosion of morbid curiosity and prurient voyeurism around her lifestyle....
In those pre-AIDs days, syphilis was the uncurable dread of sexual adventurers, and too many British soldiers fell ill and died from malaria and other endemic diseases as well. It wasn’t easy to keep the occupying army up to strength back then, but military sanitary officers and civilian social workers were determined to protect the heath and moral fiber of randy soldiers by regulating the sex business.
Their successors are at work today, with funding from U.N. agencies, from non-profits and from individual countries, including the U.S., which is why I, too, visited Sonagachhi in 1998-2000. I came away impressed by the efforts of women in a tight spot to secure health care for themselves and their children. I was even more amazed by their determination to work together to put an end to their traditional exploitation by pimps and corrupt police. Even if their demands for honest enforcement of existing 
law are met and their vision of legalized sex work is realized, the prostitutes of Sonagacchi will still be prostitutes. But they will be healthier. And they will make a better living.
Everything I learned in Sonagacchi, and more, is contained in the book Guilty Without Trial: Women in the Sex Trade in Calcutta by Carolyn Sleightholme and Indrani Sinha, founder of the Sanlaap Women’s Rights Centre, a non-governmental organization that serves Calcutta sex workers. This book was published in 1996, and its data antedate Briski’s introduction to Sonagachhi, which means Briski couldn’t have been unaware of innumerable projects already underway to improve the lives and status of sex workers in Calcutta. Born into Brothels, however, has been edited to make it appear that Zana Auntie is the only fairy godmother available to the children she features in her film. She shows no clinics where doctors volunteer their time. She shows no literacy programs. Yet Briski would have found it a lot harder to insinuate herself into the confidence of her tutees and their families, had it not been for all those concerned people who preceded her--and those working all around her.
In fact, Briski shows no respect for the efforts of anyone but herself in this film. She focuses on the maddening inefficiency of clerks recording data with pen and ink, yet only grudgingly reveals that the paperwork needed for the kids' school and scholarship applications does indeed get where it needs to go. When a gallery agrees to exhibit the children’s photos, she leads us up a dark staircase to a dingy, crowded little room, giving little indication that this gallery belongs to the splendid Oxford Book Store on Park Street, where I, for one, always end up buying books by the bagful. She certainly doesn’t introduce us to the other people who made the exhibit possible, those who contributed the space, the mounting, the publicity, the video coverage.
But it doesn’t serve Briski’s purpose to share credit or make the scene look lively and sophisticated, like any other art opening, because the star in this film is Briski herself. We may seldom see her, but we are intended to believe that she, and she alone, makes things happen. Against a backdrop of squalor and indifference her good works can only shine more brightly.
Briski might proffer, in defense, an aesthetic and epistemological decision to show a world through the sparkling eyes of its engaging children (and they are engaging, like puppies, like kittens, like all young things). Try as she might, however, any expectation of total success would be delusive and presumptuous.
No doubt she believes that the children confided in her, that they told her the truth, that they bought without reservation into her vision for their lives. Yet even two-year-olds are capable of manipulating adults, and these children were seasoned survivors long before this foreigner appeared on the scene. How hard would it be for a Sonagacchi kid to figure out what Zana Auntie wants to hear, to psych out what’s to be said and done to maximize the gains of the relationship? Fun. Cameras. Schooling (maybe). Field trips by bus.
Let’s consider those two bus trips. Released from the claustrophobic narrow lanes of Sonagacchi, film goers may justly expect to be shown the context within which the brothels exist. That's Calcutta, the hub of a vibrant culture and part of an India in which poverty and prostitution are far from the whole story. No such luck. As the bus snakes through city traffic and zooms, relatively, into the countryside, Briski vouchsafes only a blurry sequence of images truncated top and bottom by bus windows, cut across by window bars. Even I found it hard to recognize streets and neighborhoods I know very well. This hackneyed cinematographic schtick, this realism gone amok, ensures that Briski’s film audience experiences only crowds, confusion, chaos, dirt and disarray, thus reinforcing her plot line: the children need help and she’s the good fairy who’ll save them. The savior theme swells into an emotional anthem when the bus stops and the children, twice, tumble out into cloying cliché-land. A zoo with its caged animals to represent the “before” part of the story! A beach to symbolize “after," the joyous freedom that Auntie Zana offers! Very heavy handed.
Poor Calcutta: the city of Nobel Prize-winning poet Rabindranath Tagore, of world-acclaimed film maker Satyajit Ray, of economist Amartya Sen, another Nobelist, of the world-respected teacher of religious tolerance Swami Vivekenanda, the place where modern India began, reduced always to mere squalor and destitution by Westerners with a savior complex they seem unable to satisfy at home. There’s Dominique Lapierre, lionized for revealing in his City of Joy that–surprise! surprise!–that even emaciated rickshaw pullers can find a bit of happiness on a rainy day. There’s Mother Theresa who elevated a merciful impulse to succor the dying rejects of an imperfect Indian social system into a cult of personality. And now there’s Zana Briski who will wrench the children born into brothels from their defective families and stash them safely in boarding schools.
“They’ll never get in,” Briski is told when she proposes to get her adorable shutterbugs into private boarding schools. Imagine, for a moment, an American headmaster or mistress explaining to her charges’ parents that their darlings will be sharing dorm and classroom space with the offspring, legit or otherwise, of prostitutes. Not very likely. But much maligned Calcutta comes through. All are admitted. All are funded.
The audience is thrilled.
Not for long. Only two kids are still in school by the time the film has been edited for distribution, according the notes that scroll against a funereal black background before the credits get going. Some ran away. Some went back home. That’s all we learn, but we can imagine why the children dropped out: homesickness, cruelty from schoolmates, teachers' disdain and snobbery, problems in meeting academic standards, family needs/demands, plain old lack of interest. Considering the spotty long term success rate for other projects involving profound social change, however, 25% isn’t so bad.
By now the lights are going up and there are sniffles all around me. I am wiping my eyes, too. This documentary is far from the "real thing," but Briski is damn good at playing on the emotions.
