The topic of sexual commerce lurks on the margins of the sprawling literature on urban migrants and their access to space for living and working in the city. This neglect, observes Svati Shah, is only partly a consequence of the clandestine character of sexual practices in public areas. A more important reason for this invisibility is the widespread belief that sex-for-money is traded only in designated “red-light areas” by professional prostitutes and does not involve the wider swathe of city spaces and workers. In Street Corner Secrets, Shah sets out to correct the record by showing that sexual commerce occurs not only in brothels, but also on the street and at the naka (roadside daily wage labor market) where workers congregate. At the same time, she argues that sexual commerce is not a specialized occupation but occurs along a spectrum of work choices that poor women make under conditions not of their choosing.
A perspective that regards sexual commerce and daily wage labor as mutually exclusive categories, and views urban spaces as demarcated into discrete zones for different practices, ends up ignoring the considerable fluidity between them and, perhaps unintentionally, endorsing a patriarchal discourse about good and bad women, public safety, and morality. Shah persuasively argues in favor of situating prostitution within “the political economy of migration, urban informal economic sectors, state-sponsored regulatory practices, and parameters for material survival, including access to stable housing, water, and basic living expenses, that landless migrants negotiate daily in Mumbai” (p. 8). She points out that such a wide-angle view is also necessary to go beyond the stereotype of sex workers as a singular set of victimized women confined to the “cages” of famous red-light areas like Kamathipura and Falkland Road, an image that is reproduced by the campaign against the sexual trafficking of women. The political effect of the stereotyping is to make life more difficult for all sex workers, including those who have not been coerced into sex work and for whom the space of the brothel provides sustenance and shelter.
Shah explores the central theme of Street Corner Secrets, that “migrants who sell sexual services do so by actively negotiating urban spaces that are variably coded with respect to sexuality and legality, while accounting for structural power and the politics of poverty in everyday life” (p. 40), through ethnographic research with groups of migrants who solicit work at the naka, on the street, and in brothels. Although the naka was the most important site for substantiating Shah's argument about women shifting strategically between sexual and other work, the fact that workers at the naka gathered in caste- and region-based clusters and kept a keen eye on the behavior of “their” women made sex work more a matter of dark hints and whispers than an observable set of practices. Most of Shah's informants belonged to the upwardly mobile Mahar or Nav Bauddha community and zealously asserted their own respectability while pointing accusing fingers at “tribal” Banjara and Lambadi women. The formidable task of discovering the contours of sexual commerce at the naka thus remains incomplete.
At the same time, since the book provides only sketchy information on wage rates and negotiations for other forms of paid work, such as construction, domestic labor, and home-based craft and trade, it is hard to glean how age, marital status, caste, class, and differential perceptions of risks and rewards shape women's work choices. Such choices also affect family life. If space should be understood relationally, as Shah argues, then the dynamics of power extend from the naka and the street into the household and the kinship networks in which it is embedded. A discussion of how sex work shapes the domestic economy, conjugal and parental relationships, marriage prospects, and so on would have helped better explain women's actions.
The common thread that runs across women's narratives in all three sites is the sense of majboori (compulsion). Women everywhere said that sexual commerce was pet ke liye, necessary to feed themselves. This is a truism and does not illuminate why a woman turned to sex work rather than construction or domestic labor at a specific time in her life. Most of the women came from villages afflicted by dire agrarian distress (though a daily wage rate of two rupees, as stated in the book, sounds implausible), and were forced to migrate to Mumbai for a livelihood.
Piecing together forms of work and housing in the city is made more precarious by the police, who raid brothels and take streetwalkers into custody, and municipal authorities, who demolish the squatter settlements where migrants live. Here, too, the book could have been more nuanced. The role of the police is analyzed primarily in terms of colonial practices, without referring to contemporary sources. Shah attributes the demolition of the naka workers’ settlement to neoliberal reforms and the consolidation of corporate real estate power. In fact, the evictions resulted from an environmentalist group's public interest litigation in the High Court demanding protection for an urban forest, a classic case of bourgeois environmentalism that, in this case, does not converge with the interests of real estate developers. Thus, while Street Corner Secrets makes an important argument about sexual commerce and informal work, it falls short of doing it justice. Ethnographic vignettes that go nowhere and small inaccuracies irritate. Despite these flaws, Shah's respect and affection for her informants shines through.
