Foreign News: Les Girls

Not for months had Calcutta’s drowsy Government Book Depot, which handles the dreariest of official publications, experienced such a brisk burst of activity. No sooner had the first 500 copies of the central government’s Act to Suppress Immoral Traffic arrived than a flood of customers snapped them up. The act, designed to outlaw brothels and subject pimps to severe punishments, was passed in 1956; but Parliament delayed enforcement so that India’s prostitutes could find other ways to make a living and state governments would have time (though few bothered) to build “rehabilitation homes.” Last week, just after the law finally went into effect, every red-light district in the nation buzzed with indignant schemes for getting around it.

In India, where young girls were once dedicated to temple gods as devadasis, whose mission was to serve worshipers with their bodies, whole castes and communities engage in prostitution, and the government’s long war against the profession has met with singular lack of success. When the state of Bengal tried to shut down brothels after World War II, it merely found itself confronted with a sudden rash of “Bath and Massage Clinics.” Now much the same story seemed to take place again. Outside New Delhi’s Parliament building 75 sari-clad young women protested to M.P.s, in a classic argument used by shady ladies everywhere, that to close red-light districts would be to make respectable women prey to “sex-starved people like bachelors, widowers and the like.”

Some of Calcutta’s prostitutes have begun marrying the pimps they work for, on the theory that no court could prosecute a husband for bringing “friends” home for dinner. In one Uttar Pradesh area, police faced another difficulty: by custom, a girl can take on as many lovers as she wishes, so long as she lives in her father’s house.

At week’s end, from Bombay’s squalid rows of cagelike prostitute cubicles to Calcutta’s exotic Places of the Golden Trees, where the girls regale their more cultivated clients with recitations from Bengali poets, business seemed to be going on pretty much as usual. But one Allahabad prostitute, more militant, went to court, arguing that, by depriving her of her livelihood, the new law “frustrated the very purpose of the welfare state.”