From being born in Kamatipura, India's biggest redlight area, to studying in best universities abroad, daughters of bar dancers and sex workers have risen to great heights. All this because of Robin Chaurasiya who was forced to quit the US Air Force because she is a lesbian. Sangeeta Yadav talks to Chaurasiya & the girls she has mentored under the NGO, Kranti
Kamatipura, the infamous redlight area in Mumbai, is bustling with entirely different stories — the success stories of teenaged daughters of sex workers pursuing their dreams, making a mark for themselves and studying in the best of universities abroad.
All this is happening through Kranti, an NGO that empowers girls from Mumbai’s redlight areas to become agents of social change.
Started in 2011 by Robin Chaurasiya, a 30-year-old woman who was forced to leave her job with the US Air Force because of being lesbian, returned to India to start a new life for herself. She came across a friend working with an NGO that exposed her to the plight of sex workers’ daughters. To bring about a change in the perspective of people towards them, Kranti was born. Run by Chaurasiya and co-founders Bani Das, Trina Talukdar and Maya Jhaveri, the efforts of Kranti have become the talk of the town.
“Five years ago, I met my co-founder Bani who was working in a Mumbai-based NGO. There were many NGOs who take out these girls from brothels but they didn’t know what to do with them after that and how to give them value education. The shelter homes were crowded with more than 100 girls. One of my Kranti inmates was born and raised in a brothel. Her grandmother used to be the brothel keeper. A co-founder is from the brothel too and looking at the plight of these girls, we decided to set up Kranti,” she says.
Born and brought up in US, Chaurasiya had a tough life back. “I grew up with a lot of domestic violence and abuse in an Indian-American family. My mother has schizophrenic. To escape that, I joined the forces at a young age and worked with the US Air Force for eight years. I knew early in life that I was a lesbian but didn’t share this with fellow troops under the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy which means you can be lesbian or gay but you can’t ask anyone or tell anyone about it.
“As time passed, I got tired of being a second class citizen in the forces. So I decided to tell everyone that ‘I am a lesbian and have decided to get married.’ I became the first person in the history of US military to marry in the same sex and still serve in the forces,” Chaurasiya says. The news didn’t go down well. After various campaigns and a change of policy, she was kicked out of the air force.
Chaurasiya left the US and came to Mumbai where she found her purpose of life. “With Kranti, I got to experience a lot of things. It’s up to you how you take discrimination. The world will discriminate against you but you have the option to live the way you want to. From being a victim to becoming a survivor and an agent of social change today I am genuinely happy. As activists, we sometimes spent a lot of time being angry about how the system is and what’s wrong in the world. I realise that I can change that mindset and instead of thinking with anger, start approaching activism to seek and spread happiness,” she says.
Chaurasiya calls her girls revolutionary leaders. “We have mentored 18 girls till now who are daughters of bar dancers and sex workers of Kamatipura. They don’t have access to education or any other facilities. We encourage them to think about how they can have a positive impact in the world by making them able enough to live a dignified life and get a good job,” Chaurasiya tells you.
For her, every girl is a success story in their own right. “There are four girls who are currently studying in the United States. Shweta Katti went to study at Bard College in New York under a full scholarship. She was the first girl from an Indian redlight area ever to study abroad. She was also awarded the UN Youth Courage Award for Education and won a full scholarship to Semester at Sea in 2015. Her mission in life is to build a community centre, café and school in Kamatipura for the development of sex workers society,” Chaurasiya says.
The second girl is Amrin, a special child currently studying in the United States. “Amrin is deaf and mute and studies at Aspen Camp of the Deaf and Hard of Hearing in Colorado. Before this, she was at the Bombay School for the Deaf. Her three sisters stay with us at Kranti. We run campaigns to raise funds for their education and seek scholarships so that they can study in the best possible universities or schools. One of them has got through a fellowship programmme in Washington for a year.
Another 19-year-old girl is interning at Ashoka University in Bengaluru. Yet another is studying Arabic and English at an Israeli university for the past six months and is all set to volunteer for six months in a refugee camp. She plans to go to Chicago for further studies,” Chaurasiya says.
Indeed, it has been an uphill task to provide a safe environment to girls who had grown up watching their mothers servicing clients while they were made to hide under the bed or in the next room, or being sexually assaulted themselves and surviving under the danger of trafficking.
This year, Chaurasiya got nominated as one of the 10 finalists for the Global Teacher Prize from over 8,000 entries across the globe. Though she did not win the prize, her star moment was when Stephen Hawking announced her name as one of the finalists.
At Kranti School, Chaurasiya created a unique education model titled 5Cs that stands for communication skills, creative thinking, critical analysis and community organising and compassion. These girls get to learn music, dancing, painting and theatre through innovative concepts like Music Mondays, TED Talk Tuesdays, Worldly Wednesdays, Thinking Thursdays and Field Trip Fridays.
For her, the biggest challenge is to change the perspective of society towards daughters of sex workers. “Their mothers couldn’t get to study and they don’t know who their fathers are. The mothers want to give better education to their children but don’t know how to do it. The schools refuse to take them in and even if they do, the attitude towards these girls is very discriminatory. They are told ‘you are a sex-worker’s daughter so you will also become like her one day.’ So many times schools have ousted these girls after finding out that their mother is or has been a sex worker. They would ask questions like ‘who is your father and what is his nameIJ’ to which these girls had no answer,” Chaurasiya says.
“It’s really hard to bring about a change in society for the acceptance of these girls and not judge them on who they are. The schools need to be sensitive towards this issue and not discriminate against these children. We need more support from the community to help these children grow and progress in life and realise their potential to bring a change in the society,” she says.