Falkland Road: Les prostituees de Bombay
by Mark, Mary Ellen
Paris, France: Filipacchi. dust jacket. 1981. First French Edition; First Printing. Hard Cover. 2850184241 . Numerous full page color plates. Text in French. This is the First Printing of the First French edition, "Falkland Road: Les prostituées de Bombay", published simultaneously with the American Edition, and with the same ISBN. ; 0.71 x 11.1 x 10.16 Inches; Unpaginated pages .
Photographer Mary Ellen Mark explores the lives of Bombay cage-girls
Mary Ellen Mark, a leading photographer with Magnum, an international photograph agency, came to India way back in 1968. Landing in Bombay, she came to visit Falkland Road, the city's notorious red-light district. Those images of the famous "cage-girls" haunted her for many years. In 1978, Mark devoted three months to explore the lives of the Bombay cage-girls. An interview with Mark, accompanied by thought-provoking photoeraphs of the "inmates" of Falkland Road.
Sunil Sethi
November 20, 2013
ISSUE DATE: July 15, 1981UPDATED: October 14, 2014 15:01 IST
Mary Ellen Mark, 41, leading photographer for Magnum, the international photography agency, first passed through India on her way to Nepal in 1968. Landing in Bombay, she visited Falkland Road, the city's notorious red-light district "out of a tourist's curiosity". But the images haunted her for 10 years before she could return to document them fully. In the intervening period, India almost "became my second home, a country whose fascination I can never recover from".
She has been here eleven times since on assignments that have yielded some of the best known photo-essays on India published internationally: her feature on Indian street performers appeared in Geo magazine last year; Life magazine carried her epic pictures of Mother Teresa at work in Calcutta: and Sir Richard Attenborough hired her to shoot stills far Gandhi on location.
Yet Mark admits that all these years, her chief object was to somehow penetrate the superficial view of Falkland Road: "I wanted to find out what the lives of the girls who lived there were really like." Then, in 1978, 10 years after she had first faced the hostility and suspicion the street reserves for intruders into its inner life, Mark came to slay. For three months she devoted her days and nights to explore the lives of Bombay's "cage-girls".
In the process, she found herself exploring their hearts and minds as well; and discovered in the garish bargain basement of vice, virtues that made" those months realty joyous". Says Mark, who now counts a few of Falkland Road's professional whores as among her closest friends: "They were warm and intelligent, caring, courteous and giving."
Last fortnight Mark, who hopes her book on Bombay's prostitutes will instill a sympathetic reaction among people to prosiitutes everywhere, spoke on the telephone from her New York home to India Today's Sunil Sethi. Excerpts from the interview:
Q. What made you focus on Falkland Road as a subject for your hook, when there are probably more notorious and sordid red-light areas in other Asian cities?
A. First of all, India to me is the most interesting country in the world. It has been a fascinating and rich experience to work there, and over the years I have come to regard it as my second home. And Bombay is a city I love even more. It has a vitality that is special. That vitality extends to Falkland Road also.
Q. Do you think it was easier for you to do the book because you were a woman and also a foreigner ?
A. As a woman definitely, yes. They are a very closely-knit community of women and only a woman could have become part of the community. As a single foreign woman they identified with me, especially my single status They were very curious about my aloneness. Also they would ask me why I dressed so badly, why I wasn't married but most of all the fact that I lived and worked alone - like them - established a bond between us. One of the madams there said to me: "You and I are sisters, because we sleep alone".
Q. Do they regard themselves as social drop-outs ?
A. No, not at all. They consider themselves participants in society and life-as survivors of life.
Q. Did they regard your camera as an intruder into their lives?
A. My camera was part of me, they were used to it from the beginning. They always knew me as a photographer. In fact, they were amused at my persistence and, if I didn't have it on me they would ask: "Where's your camera?" Also it depends how you approach them: if you regard them as odd or strange they will resent your taking pictures of them. But if you are spending time with them, then they accept you and also your camera.
Q. Did you become close friends with any of them?
A. I know I did. I made very close friends. They are warm and intelligent and caring women-I love that street. Some of my moments of greatest sharing were spent there. And their pride is tremendous: not once did they make any demands on me, for money or anything. Of course, I used to make pictures of them and give them, but that was all.
Yes, some of the eunuchs did ask me to send them wigs from America, but that's in their nature. The women never did. They just gave and gave, whatever they could, as true friends. One of the best Christmases I've spent was on that street. One of the madams cooked a special lunch for me, then we sat around and chatted.
Q. Would you regard their situation, even if paradoxically, feminist ?
A. No, I wouldn't call them feminist in the way we understand the word. But they are brave, courageous human beings, courteous and giving and supportive of each other.
Q. Yet you don't think your book is likely to feed voyeuristic fantasies?
A. That wasn't the purpose and intention. I was recording and documenting a lifestyle which I think is important. If people are voyeuristic then that's their problem.
Q. Don't you think the subject, at least to the Western media, has a built-in sensationalist appeal?
A. I've been very, very careful with the use of this material. It has appeared in publications that I trust absolutely, and who I am sure will not misuse it sensationally. For instance, Playboy sent me a cable in Japan that they were interested in the pictures, and I didn't let them have them. There is no way I would have let a magazine like Playboy use these pictures.
Q. Do you expect official Indian reaction to be explosive ?
A. I would be really surprised and disappointed if it was. My book is a metaphor for prostitutes not only in Falkland Road but for prostitutes all over the world. And all I'm trying to say is that they are genuine human beings with real feelings and real dignity. Perhaps we learn more about vulgarity through their lives. But we also learn about love, in terms of understanding and human survival. Nothing to me is at all vulgar about these women. This is a book basically about humanity.
Extracts from Mary Ellen Mark's book, 'Falkland Road, published by AIfked A. Knopf, below
For 10 years, each time I came to Bombay I tried to take photographs on Falkland Road. Each time I was met with terrible hostility and aggression. The women threw garbage and water on me and pinched me. What seemed to be hundreds of men would gather around me. Once a pickpocket took my address book, another time I was hit in the face by a drunken man. Needless to say, I never managed to take very good photographs.
In October 1978, I decided to return to Bombay and somehow try to enter the world of these women and to photograph them. I had no idea if I could do this, but I knew I had to try. The night before I left I dreamed about Falkland Road. It was a very vivid dream: I was a voyeur hiding behind a bed in a brothel, watching three transvestite prostitutes making love. I awoke amused and somewhat reassured by my dream. Perhaps it was a good sign.
Once in Bombay I started out by just going to the street. It was the same as always -crowds of men around me, and the women alternately hurling insults and garbage at me. Every day I had to brace myself as though to jump into freezing water. But once I was there pacing up and down, I was overwhelmed, caught up in the high energy and emotion of the quarter.
And as the days passed and people saw my persistence, they began to get curious.'Some of the women thought I was crazy, but a few were surprised by my interest in and acceptance of them. And slowly, very slowly I began to make friends.
Gradual Thaw: My first friends were the street prostitutes. They were the first to approach me because they are the most independent and the least inhibited. That is why they are on the streets and not inside a brothel - they are too independent to accept the restrictions imposed by the madam of a brothel.
When they find a customer, they take him into a cage or a bed in a brothel room rented out to them by a madam in return for half their fee. Some madams will also allow them to wash and change inside their house. At night they sleep out in the street with the beggars.
Soliciting in the street on their own, they are often arrested by the police and, without a madam to pay their fine, they have to go to jail. They are often sick with fever and often hungry. Many of them have boyfriends who are pickpockets and who, when they are not in jail, beat the girls and take their money.
So these girls really only have one another, and they form close friendships and are very protective towards each other. Their favourite refuge and meeting place is the Olympia cafe. This is the largest and most beautiful cafe on the street, with mirror-lined walls and is full of potential customers. It became my favourite place on the street too, and it was here that I made friends with the street girls.
Trapped: I spent hours in the Olympia cafe, drinking tea and listening to qawwalis and Hindi film songs on the juke box. My companions were Asha, 17, Mumtaz, 17, and Usha, 15. Asha is one of the most beautiful girls I have ever seen. Her parents are dead and she is completely alone. She has a boyfriend, Ragu, a local pickpocket who is constantly in and out of jail.
Once Asha disappeared for four days, I found out that she had been arrested for soliciting on the street, and I got one of the local men to bail her out. Whenever I came to Falkland Road at dawn, I saw Asha curled up with one of the other girls, in the street. I would wait until 8 a.m., then I woke her up and we had tea.
Asha hates being a prostitute, but she doesn't know how else to survive. She dreams of being a servant. I asked friends of mine whether they would hire her, and they told me that, while they themselves wouldn't mind, their other servants wouldn't tolerate her in the same house with them. Asha charges Rs 10 to Rs 12 from customers - a much higher price than most of the women in the street. She told me: "I wouldn't do it for less. It's not worth it. I don't have to; when people see my face, they will always give me some money to eat." Once she said to me: "What kind of a God is this - to give me this face and then to put me in these surroundings?"
Exhihitionistic: The next group of people I got to know on Falkland Road were the transvestites. It is in the nature of transvestites to be exhibitionistic, and seduced by the sight of me pacing up and down with my camera, they ultimately came out and asked to be photographed. The transvestites tend to live clustered together in a block of cages and small brothel rooms right next to each other.
My closest friend in that community was Champa, a transvestite madam. Like all madams-female as well as transvestite- he doesn't solicit customers for himself, but he does have-again like many madams- a very close relationship with a boy-friend. Champa's boy-friend is Yamin, a taxi driver, very handsome and very masculine.
Champa told me all about his own emotional troubles, and his financial ones (rents on Falkland Road are very high). We drank beer together, and he let me photograph him dressing like "an English lady". He introduced me to other transvestites, and I would arrive early in the afternoon to photograph them putting on their makeup and their elaborate dress for the evening.
I learned that many of them are eunuchs who have been castrated at an early age. Their customers are not homosexual but, on the contrary, super-macho masculine types who find their fullest satisfaction with transvestite rather than women partners.
Hard Exteriors: Champa also has some female prostitutes in his house. One of them is called Munni, 15 years old, small and beautiful. She was once a beggar on the street, and I think she chose Champa's house to live in because transvestite brothels allow more freedom than female ones. So she could retain the independence she had known on the streets and also have the protection of Champa and a place to live in. Champa told me, "She is like a daughter to me."
It was much harder to get to know the female cage-girls. These are the girls behind bars on display in Falkland Road, and they are considered very low class by the interior brothel girls. They are constantly abused and ridiculed by customers and other prostitutes, and this makes them defensive and resentful and very hard to know.
At first glance many of them look outrageous and obscene as they pose and gesture from behind their bars, with their madam sitting on the step in front like the keeper she is. But as I got to know these girls, I saw that many of them are beautiful and all of them, even - perhaps especially - the most aggressive ones, are very vulnerable.
A madam called Fatima allowed me to stay with her and her girls for several nights. Fatima sleeps on a huge bed with a bright cover on it in the tiny front room of her cage. Most of the socialising is done in this room. It is separated by a curtain from a very small, dark back room with two beds in it, both with curtains around them; behind the beds is a cement drain and an enormous vat of water. In this space her three girls work, sleep, and bathe.
Mysterious Disappearance: Fatima's sister is also a madam, with a cage across the street. One night this sister brought one of her girls to Fatima, who dressed her up in an expensive blue burqa and sent her away. I later learned that a pimp from a more expensive area in Bombay had come to Fatima's sister with a commission from an Arab customer who was willing to pay a lot of money for a girl from a good Muslim family. So the pimp had come to the cheapest street in Bombay to find a three-rupee girl to cheat the Arab.
Fatima's favourite girl, Abida, had once been rented by an Arab for a week. Fatima showed me a studio photograph of her with the Arab. She was 19 years old, very attractive, and successful with customers. A local merchant on the street was in love with her and wanted to take her away. There were terrible tights between Abida and Fatima, for Fatima didn't want her to go and Abida couldn't decide what to do.
About two weeks before I left Bombay, Abida disappeared. When I asked Fatima where she was, she was silent. One woman on the street told me that Abida had been stabbed, another said that she had run away with the local merchant. I never found out what happened to her.
Three days later Fatima sold her cage and left. Her two remaining girls were sold to another madam who took over the cage and repainted the interior a bright blue. I never saw Fatima or Abida again. I felt that I shouldn't ask any more questions. There were many secrets among the cage women, and a firm line was drawn beyond which I could never go.
The most elite brothels on Falkland Road are the interior rooms rising above the cages. They are not in the same class as the numbered houses in other areas, but on this street they are definitely the best. I felt very shy about entering there.
One of the girls (left) and Putla, a thirteen-year-old prostitute, was sold to the brothel by her mother
Whenever I climbed the stairs, the women ran out of the hallways into their rooms and hid behind the curtains, and some madam would start screaming at me. So I decided to concentrate on one house, in the hope that the people in it would get used to me. It was right next door to the Olympia cafe, so I felt I could always run down and take refuge there if necessary.
The house I chose was typical of the others, with three or four storeys rising above the cages on the first floor. You enter through a wooden door and mount steep wooden stairs. Directly to the left of the top of the staircase is a small brothel room, then further down the hallway there is a landing with three more brothel rooms opening out from it.
The stairway leads to another landing with six more brothel rooms. Each room is a separate "house" with its own madam and her own girls. The madams normally own anywhere from three to 10 girls, though five is about the average.
The girls only go into the hallway, they never enter rooms other than their own, or go upstairs or downstairs or-apart from visits to the doctor on brief errands - out into the street. During the day they stay in their rooms, cook on the floor, sleep, sew, play with the children - it is all very much like normal Indian family life.
Relationship: Saroja has two rooms on the third floor of this house. Since my attempts on the second floor had been so frustrating, I felt very inhibited about climbing up another storey. But Saroja said at once, "Welcome - come on in."
She is a madam, 26 years old, but she looks 40. Like all madams, she has complete control over her girls. The relationship is one of master and slave - but also of mother and daughter. The girls both worship and fear their madam. One night Putla, Saroja's youngest girl, allowed a drunken customer to have her for only Rs 3. I witnessed Saroja brutally beating Putla.
She had grabbed her by the hair and was pounding her with her fists. Putla didn't utter a sound, and the other girls stood by and watched silently. Five minutes after her beating Putla was ready for work again, her face washed and her dress changed. Later that night I saw Putla embracing Saroja and even giving her a back massage.
The girl being made-up was brought to the brothel by villagers when her husband deserted her
In Saroja's house all the sex takes place on two beds with brightly patterned curtains around them. In the same small room there is another bed used as a waiting bench for the girls and their customers. At the end of the narrow room is Saroja's bed and a dresser, and a window overlooking Falkland Road. The girls solicit customers at the doorway and in the hall along with the girls from the other brothel rooms. Sometimes there is a bit of competition among them, but there is also a strong feeling of solidarity - especially when it comes to protecting one another against the customers.
Life's Ambition: Each girl has her own little wooden box hanging on the wall with a small lock on it. At the beginning of the evening, when the first customer arrives, the madam blesses each girl, and at the end of the evening she divides the money in the box with her, fifty-fifty. At 1 a.m. the lights are turned out and the "all-night" customers come in. They pay Rs 30 upwards to spend the night with a particular girl (the ordinary customers pay Rs 5).
One night while I was there the police came into the house and arrested girls for illegally soliciting in the hallways. The madams went out to bargain with them, and one Nepalese madam hid me under her bed till it was all over. "I don't mind paying money to the police," she told me. "After all, the policeman has a family to support too." I felt very safe under her bed; safe and protected and accepted.
In garish costume, a prostitute solicits her
Saroja was kidnapped from her village in south India at 12 and taken to Bombay. She worked as a prostitute, then gradually saved and borrowed enough money to have her own girls and become a madam. She told me: "My dream is to have my own house - a bungalow like the numbered ones on Foras Road, with separate rooms for my girls. I could have a refrigerator and sell alcohol and cold drinks. I could have a guard in front to keep the police out. I could have a better class of customers - even foreigners."
Closeness: Saroja is very attached to her girls. One of them, Kamla, fell in love with a waiter and ran off with him. Huge tears fell from Saroja's eyes and all the other girls wept too. One day Saroja told me about one of the girls-"Rekha is actually my daughter. I had her when I was 13. See how much we look alike. She just got her period one year ago."
When the girls get pregnant, it is up to them to have the baby or not. Abortion is legal in India, and there is a local abortionist who is also a sex change doctor. He told me: "I charge Rs 100 for an abortion and Rs 50 more for hospital charges. But I can't understand why men go to prostitutes. I have only one woman, my wife. I say to men all the time, 'Don't go to a dirty prostitute - if you make love with your wife and close your eyes, it is all the same."
There are many children running in and out of the brothel rooms. In the same house as Saroja lives a beautiful 22-year-old girl, Sharda, with her two sons, Yellapa, about 11 months old, and Mari, three years old. Mari is the most extraordinary child I have ever met. He is absolutely beautiful, intelligent, and sensitive.
He is madly in love with Saroja and she adores him. He spends hours sitting on her bed, and when she has a headache he rubs tiger balm on her temples. When he has fever, which is often, he sleeps with Saroja and she takes care of him.
One of the brothel jokes is for Saroja to say to Vlari: "What does Putla do? What does Kamla do? What does Rekha do?" Mari answers by making an obscene sign with his fist, and the whole house roars with laughter. Whenever Saroja or any of her girls is upset, Mari is upset too.
Uncomfortable: Sometimes I stayed in Saroja's house until the lights went out and the all-night customers came in. We ordered tea from downstairs and sat and talked. We got closer and closer. I went to a street fair with her and her girls. One night I invited her to a restaurant. I wanted to take her to some place special, to a restaurant in another part of town, but as soon as we arrived there I knew I had made a mistake.
She was overdressed and felt terribly uncomfortable and out of place. I realised that I could only be intimate with her on her own ground. She didn't even like going down into Falkland Road-she would rush to find a taxi as soon as possible. The only place where she really felt comfortable was sitting on her bed in her own brothel room.
She never asked me anything very personal about myself. No one did. All anyone ever wanted to know was my age, why didn't I wear a brassiere, and why wasn't I married. I think the reason why I was finally accepted was because I was single-alone in the world like they were. "You and I are fated for the same life," one madam told me. "We are sisters. Both of us are alone every night. I say my prayers and I sleep alone."
Mary Ellen Mark, 20 maart 1940 – 25 mei 2015
Ze zocht het ‘iconische beeld’, dat zijn context niet nodig lijkt te hebben om betekenisvol te zijn. Maar nooit ging dat ten koste van de waardigheid van haar onderwerpen, de kwetsbare mensen die ze fotografeerde.
Jan Postma
3 juni 2015 – verschenen in nr. 23
Pas na het einde van een studie aan de Universiteit van Pennsylvania, kunstgeschiedenis en schilderen, pakte Mark op een dag een camera op en stapte met het ding naar buiten. Ze knoopte praatjes aan, begon de mensen die ze sprak te fotograferen en besefte al snel: ‘I love this, this is what I want to do forever.’ De herinnering aan die middag verdween nooit meer uit haar geheugen, het toestel nooit meer uit haar hand. Toen ze vorige week op 75-jarige leeftijd overleed, aan een beenmerg- en bloedziekte, sprak The New York Times van het verscheiden van ‘one of the premier documentary photographers of her generation’. Vice was minder terughoudend en noemde haar ‘one of the greatest photographers of humans who will ever live’. Vice’s karakterisering van haar oeuvre als ‘a body of work that sings truths about the humor, horror, and joy of being alive’ is raak.
Na haar studie ontving ze een Fulbright-beurs die haar in staat stelde naar Turkije te reizen, het leverde haar eerste boek op: Passport (1974). Haar eerste echte ‘break’ had ze toen al achter de rug: een tweetal opdrachten van het tijdschrift Look. Pat Carbine, een vrouwelijke redacteur (en die waren dun gezaaid) stuurde Mark op pad om Federico Fellini vast te leggen terwijl hij zijn Satyricon (1969) filmde. Direct daarna reisde ze, ook voor Look, naar Londen voor een verhaal over drugsverslaafden. Cinema en de zelfkant van de samenleving zouden in de daaropvolgende jaren haar fotografie domineren.
Mark was ‘still photographer’ op de set van meer dan honderd films, waaronder tal van absolute klassiekers – haar beelden van Marlon Brando als Colonel Kurtz, zwaarlijvig en kaal, vertellen in alles behalve woorden het verhaal van het maken van Apocalypse Now (1979). Maar belangrijker dan het vereeuwigen van filmsterren was het werk dat ze deed als fotojournalist en documentaire-fotograaf. (Hoewel die twee zaken in een tijd waarin de fotografie een langzamer proces was minder gemakkelijk te onderscheiden waren.)
Ze leefde maanden tussen prostituees op Falkland Road in wat toen nog Bombay heette en reisde naar Ethiopië en toonde de wereld hoe een hongersnood eruitzag. Ze probeerde universeel te begrijpen foto’s te maken en zei ooit: ‘Als het over hongersnood in Ethiopië gaat, gaat het over de hele menselijke conditie: dan gaat het ook over mensen die op straat sterven in New York.’
Voor haar werk op de set van Miloš Formans One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) ontving ze slechts een onkostenvergoeding, maar die ervaring leidde ertoe dat ze een jaar later kon terugkeren naar de instelling in Oregon waar de film werd opgenomen. Ze bleef langer dan een maand om de bewoners van Ward 81 – een ‘maximum security unit’ voor vrouwen – te fotograferen. Het resultaat was een reeks beelden die van alle opsmuk en ieder drama zijn ontdaan, beelden die mensen in de zwaarst denkbare omstandigheden tonen zonder hen ooit uit te vergroten tot iets monsterlijks of ze op andere wijze te ontmenselijken. Mark had geen moeite toe te geven dat wat ze in eerste instantie zocht het ‘iconische beeld’ was, het beeld dat zijn context niet nodig lijkt te hebben om betekenisvol te zijn. Maar ze liet die drang naar het sprekende en het betekenisvolle nooit ten koste gaan van de waardigheid van haar onderwerpen. Kunstcriticus Robert Hughes noemde Ward 81 in Time Magazine ‘one of the most delicately shaded studies of vulnerability ever set on film’. Het zijn woorden die op het leeuwendeel van Marks oeuvre hadden kunnen slaan.
Haar werk staat fier in de humanistische fotojournalistieke traditie van Magnum, het door Henri Cartier-Bresson en Robert Capa opgerichte agentschap waarvan Mark in de jaren zeventig en tachtig enige tijd lid was. Maar ze wist zich zelfs binnen een traditie die bestaat uit louter engagement te onderscheiden door haar betrokkenheid en haar schijnbare immuniteit voor iedere vorm van cynisme.
Een van de mooiste voorbeelden is het verhaal van Tiny. Mark stuitte op Erin ‘Tiny’ Charles toen ze in 1983 naar Seattle toog om kinderen die op straat leefden te fotograferen. Tiny was een dertienjarig meisje met een ontwapenende glimlach, permanent een sigaret in haar mondhoek en een leven dat vooral bestond uit op straat hangen en zo nu en dan in de auto kruipen bij een man die het portier aan de passagierskant vanachter het stuur openduwde. Je zou haar kinderlijke vrolijkheid voor zorgeloosheid kunnen aanzien, maar vanaf het allereerste moment is duidelijk hoe zwaar Tiny’s leven is. Op haar veertiende verjaardag is ze dolgelukkig met de paardenknuffel die Mark haar geeft, met Halloween verkleedt ze zich als een sjieke Parijse prostituee. De fotoserie leidde tot Streetwise (1984), een impressionistische documentaire over Tiny en een handvol andere kinderen. De film (te zien op YouTube) leverde Mark en haar man, regisseur Martin Bell, een Oscar-nominatie op. Zoals vaker bleven Mark en Bell ook in dit geval contact houden met mensen die ze hadden vastgelegd. Dit najaar verschijnt Marks laatste fotoboek, Tiny: Streetwise Revisited.
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