Daughters of the Red Light: Coming of Age in Mumbai's Brothels

by Shanoor Seervai

When Shanoor Seervai first visits Mumbai's red-light district as a young volunteer, she is shaken by the violence and despair that women there endure every day. Years later, now a newspaper reporter, she returns to gain a deeper understanding of the lives of sex workers.Daughters of the Red Light is a searing look at the poverty, injustice and stigma that keep entire families from escaping India's notorious sex industry. Seervai takes readers to Mumbai’s grittiest alleyways to discover the stories of these women and girls. As she unravels the brutal web entangling them, she finds an unexpected reason for hope. ABOUT THE AUTHORShanoor Seervai is an Indian writer and journalist. Her work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Daily Beast, Guernica Magazine, The Caravan and The Indian Express. Born and raised in Mumbai, she now lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she is pursuing an advanced degree in public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.EARLY PRAISE FOR DAUGHTERS OF THE RED LIGHT"This is a meaningful and important piece of writing that contributes in a significant way toward understanding the lives of sex workers and their families and how we might help alleviate their marginalization and suffering. Shanoor Seervai's book shows you the humanity of the mothers and children in the red light district, as she takes you on her journey of discovery into their world and her place in the world at large. It gave me new insight into the lives of the sex workers and their children, and how the tireless work of some offers real hope—the greatest gift of all."— Geeta Anand, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of The Cure"Most writing about India's underbelly treats people as passive victims. It is far too easy to find stories of misery in Indian cities and hold them up as one-dimensional examples of the country's uneven progress. Shanoor Seervai does not do cutouts. She dives into the world of Mumbai's sex workers, introducing us to real women with families and dreams we recognize. She brings the reader along for her journey, which is journalistic as well as personal, as she navigates the gender norms and class divides of urban India with sharp observations and true empathy. I've been visiting Mumbai all my life and feel I understand it better having read this heartfelt work."— Shashank Bengali, South Asia bureau chief, Los Angeles Times"A thought-provoking headlong dive into a little known culture."— Sonia Faleiro, Award-winning author of Beautiful Inside the Secret World of Bombay’s Dance Bars."With this honest and insightful memoir, Shanoor Seervai peels back a tattered curtain to reveal the complex and brutal world of Mumbai’s commercial sex trade. Through her eyes, we begin to really see the women — and children — behind the makeup. Through her journey we are challenged to consider our common humanity; and our own, personal response to the injustices that land (and keep) millions of the world’s most vulnerable children in the hell we call the 'Red Light.'"— Laura Entwistle, Founder and CEO of EmancipAction, an international non-profit organization working to end child sex trafficking around the world

Genres: Nonfiction, India, Memoir

55 pages, Kindle Edition

First published August 16, 2015

Reviews

[Josh · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a pretty poor treatment of a very important subject.

The author's continual "humblebragging" is grating on one's nerves. Readers who pick this up are probably not interested in how very awesome and privileged the author is -- rather, we're trying to get a glimpse into the lives of these poor children who grow up in awful circumstances, in a country that stigmatizes their very existence. That should be the focus of the book, not the author's travel itinerary and self-interested repetitious backstory.

Subject matter interesting; stories about the children and mothers are fascinating; execution is not great.

[Kerry · Rating 4 out of 5]

Many readers had a problem with the author's insertion of her own narrative into one about Mumbai's sex workers and their daughters. I didn't. Journalism is shaped by the perspective of the one telling the story, and in this situation--for the writer's level of experience and in the midst of her own search for identity and meaning--the topic is treated with sincerity and maturity. Many examples of writers using other people's suffering as an excuse to write about themselves exist, but this isn't one of them. Seervai offers up her own opinions and reactions as a proxy for our own if we were placed in a similar situation: in no way can such reporting be completely objective.

It's true that this topic could have been covered in greater depth and--for those who need more objectivity--included more facts and figures. But such techniques would obscure the human element of the piece. Seervai's personal observations and understanding is as intrinsic to the story as is the information she gets from interviewees. Seervai is highlighting an aspect of hope, not cataloguing woes. In doing so, she's created a text that many people will read--a great percentage of them those who would never have been aware of this topic otherwise.

[Nancy · Rating 2 out of 5]

This might be the introduction to a real book the author is intending to write some day, but it reads more like a student writing a report about the volunteer work she did over the summer. There is a bit of real information, but it mostly is reflections about how the author feels.

I downloaded this to my kindle as part of a trial of Kindle Unlimited. So far I am impressed with the available selections.

[Jill Paschal · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautifully written account of Shanoor Seervai's experience volunteering, and then reporting, in Mumbai's red light district. Seervai's tone is sensitive and honest, giving a glimpse of the lives of sex workers and their children (mainly their daughters). Although this is a “quick” read, it certainly leaves the reader fully absorbed still. Probably one of the best books I’ve read in a while!

[Kate · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was so looking forward to reading this book after being thoroughly engrossed by Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo and Sunil Malhotra. And while I think Daughters of the Red Light held great promise, I didn't realize before starting that it would end so suddenly. It's more an introduction to a book than a completed book and I am surprised it was published as such. I would recommend it to anyone with an interest in social issues and, especially, India, but I felt that the topic was no more an exploration of the lives of the children of India's red light districts than dipping your toes in the ocean is an exploration of the sea.

[Colleen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Overall, I was a bit disappointed. This is a really important topic, but to me it seemed that the book focused more on the author actually writing the story rather than on the workers themselves. I’m sure there were good reasons for this, but I think it would have been good to mention these reasons at the beginning of the text. I wanted to learn more about these women and their stories instead of receiving a general summary of the red-light situation in Mumbai.

[Rajesh Shanmugam · Rating 3 out of 5]

"They don’t see these women as fighting tooth and nail against exclusion."
Short read with a lot of takeaways.

[Victoria Van Vliet · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book felt like a way for the author Shanoor Seervai to virtue signal how good of a person she is. The book also read like Seervai was writing a report about her summer abroad volunteering with an at-risk population. It was a short read and I am thankful for that. Seervai took a very interesting and serious cultural problem and made light of it. I really wanted to know about the lives of the daughters of sex workers in a red light district. This book did not do that for me. The majority of the book talked about Seervai's feelings, emotions and thoughts behind the red light district. Not about her actual topic.

[Trevor · Rating 3 out of 5]

Many of the reviews of this book complain that it is primarily the memoir of the author's experiences working with the children of prostitutes in Mumbai. I think this comes more from poor marketing than anything else. Regardless, I went into the book knowing that that would be the focus and I quite enjoyed it.

The author does spend a lot of time talking about her experiences but I found them really interesting and relateable. She's very much a third culture kid, having lived in Mumbai as a child and then moved to the States, only to come back to Mumbai later and realize she no longer fits in. As such she deals with culture shock, especially regarding her relatively sheltered life in comparison with the lives of the children she is dealing with. She also spends a lot of time questioning the ethics of being a journalist writing about prostitution. Is she profiting from their misfortune? Is there a voyeuristic slant to what she's doing? They're provocative questions and I'm glad she asked them.

She also, of course, talks about the children who have been raised in the brothels of Mumbai and the unique difficulties they face throughout their entire lives. She gives some good critiques of most of the usual ways of ministering to prostitutes and their children and then points to one organization that is doing a better job.

The book is only 44 pages long and so feels like a mere sample of her story and her research but I appreciated it for what it is. This is a difficult subject that I have not spent enough time thinking about in the past.

[Laxmi]

All of 42 pages, this book begins with how the author got about signing up for volunteer work in the red light district of Mumbai and later gave up a career opportunity and instead came back to learn more about the lives of people in the area and decided to write about them. It also mentions some NGOs working towards the welfare of the daughters of the sex workers and how some even manage to get a decent education for themselves. It ends by drawing attention to how the young kids, who still need to be with their mother in the red light area until they grow up and may be shifted to a shelter home, get deeply influenced by the environment they are growing up in.

[Theresa Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

Shanoor Seervai has a great take on Mumbai’s Sex Worker’s Lives!

This is a very well written account of Sex workers and the social environment that Indians continue to emphasize in their society. Shanoor points out the dual problems caused by these beliefs, the “not in my backyard” to the inability of Indian society to recognize that these women need employment, and they are denied basic necessities simply because they have no other choice in order to have a means to feed and clothe themselves and their children. I’m eager to read more by Shanoor Seervai.

[Teri · Rating 3 out of 5]

Shanoor Seervai is an Indian American journalist who visited Mumbai as a young woman to volunteer for an organization that helped women of the red light district. Many years later, Seervai returns to the place she once volunteered as a journalist to write an article on the women of the Mumbai brothels. It is a sad situation for these women, with little to no hope for a future. Things have changed since her first visit and Seervai finds that there is hope for some of these women who strive to break the chains of bondage in India's human and sex trafficking business.

[Kathy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Maybe 2 1/2. I think it could be an important story, but I didn't realize it was only a "short". I expected a full presentation and exploration of the topic but instead it was more like a blog, and not that well written (tenses not in agreement, events not in order etc.) Many things could have been covered, such as the state control of prostitution; could have been really eye-opening, instead it only touched the edges.

[Gregory · Rating 1 out of 5]

Predictable. Nothing new.

Immature handling of what could and should be a deeper subject. It seems the author had the opportunity to delve deeper and be more descriptive. The book didn’t come to life for me. Kept waiting and reading to see if it gets interesting - nope. Flat and
Full of cliches and instead of helping the people of red light districts image, the author just substantiates the usual stereotypes. It could’ve been written without any real life encounters.

[Lauren Garcia · Rating 2 out of 5]

While the writing was good and many of the women's stories very interesting, I was disappointed how much of this short non-fiction essay/book was focused on the author herself, especially when she originally talks about her privledge in coming from an upper class background in India and then usurps the stories of so many women to focus on her own and how everything affected her. A little of that is okay for context, but there was way too much of it for me. It also made me uncomfortable when she describes many of the women as being unwilling to speak to her or uncomfortable to speak with her but then subsequently badgers them into telling their stories. To my knowledge, none of the subjects in the book were compensated in any way for their stories. That just felt like exploitation.

[Nancy Oudith · Rating 5 out of 5]

difficult

It’s very difficult to write about these issues especially when there are children in the midst without wanting to scream and shout at the unfair treatment that comes from people in authority who preach about liberty and justice for all… but only give it to the privileged few…

[Susan Campbell · Rating 3 out of 5]

I agree with other reviewers here. I was disappointed to find the author telling of her travels, her life, and veering so far from the topic at hand, which deserved much more than she gave it. I cannot recommend this book.

[Vaibhav · Rating 4 out of 5]

Daughters of the red light is one of the many books that tries to shed light on the lives of women in the red light areas of Mumbai and their daughters. The societal stigma, mental and physical abuse, rejection and abhorrence- this book bares it all for the readers.

[Sandra K. Rodriguez · Rating 5 out of 5]

A noteworthy book

Very educational in that a lot to be learned is covered in this book. It is enlightening to read about the struggles of other people, and many times their experiences are quite different from our own.

[Tamara Curtin · Rating 1 out of 5]

This feels more like a grad school application essay than even a sketch for a longer piece. It's scattered and given it's length, can't afford to wander pointlessly for so long. Not an informative or especially gripping read.

[Aruna Keswani · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quick, interesting read. I’d actually like it to be longer and hear more personal stories, views of other girls. It read more like a quick essay than anything else but the information was great. Interesting viewpoint on a world that many of us know little to nothing about.

[Ariel Wolf · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book was very well written, I just wished it went into the topic deeper. It feels like an introduction to the topic more than a complete book, but what was written was well put together and pulled me into a problem I didn’t know was a problem.

[Girlfren · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tragically sad. This story tore at my heartstrings that this caste of women and children are condemned to a hopeless life. Very interesting read.

[K · Rating 1 out of 5]

There’s nothing to read. Totally crap

[Pinky · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting Read

An Interesting insight to a different but true world that exists among us. Was hoping for more of an ending.

[Lichakk · Rating 2 out of 5]

Shallow

There is no depth here. I do not learn much. The people Ms Seervai talks about in her book, because she gives us little insight, did not stir emotions.

[Theresa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Enlightening...

It never cease to amaze me what we as humans do to one another. It was enlightening. I commend the author for shining a light on this issue.

[Megan · Rating 1 out of 5]

This was more about the author and her thoughts and feelings rather than focusing on the victims of sex trafficking.

[Ayva · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was amazing and beautifully written and so sad and emotional and mournful. My hatred for men is honestly intensified everyday

[Jennifer Hines Hansel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Non-fiction. True reporting, interviews in part of Mumbai’s red light district.