Reading Kolkata's Space of Prostitution as a Political Society

The present article builds upon the idea of political society to read a red-light district in the city of Kolkata. The district is the biggest in Asia and it has given its name to the biggest movement of the sex workers-Sonagachi Project. This article is an attempt to view the subaltern space as a resistant space and a political society by highlighting their habitat, economic and political roles. Being outside the ambit of citizenry, these societies exert their aspiration for acknowledgement of their anomaly. Their present situation has a colonial legacy that disempowers them but from which they have started recovering. Though their role of emancipation was also present in the colonial times, it got more explicit in the current decades. However, the emancipator journey is often not linear and shows signs of sporadic bumpiness. Highlighting on such events and histories, the article relies upon archival references, news and informal observation of the place.