White Saree & an Iron Will: Gangubai Kothewali

Mumbai's Red-Light District in the 1970s

In the 1950s, before Mumbai’s skyline was filled with buildings and concrete jungles, there was Kamathipura, one of India’s several red-light districts. Behind the doors of the thousands of brothels was the cruel truth of India’s red-light districts. They wanted the bodies of women and sexual satisfaction but never granted them their humanity. Constant trafficking of girls as young as 13. The physical and psychological abuse. In the eyes of the men that roamed the fourteen lanes, women were nothing but objects. Prostitutes were denied medical care, deprived of identity, their children unwanted by schools and untouched by society. They were stripped of basic respect.

Into these dark lanes came arguably the greatest woman Kamathipura would ever see. Ganga Harjivandas. She came to Mumbai as a teenager with dreams of cinema, eloping with the boy she loved. Instead of greeting a camera, however, she was betrayed by the man she trusted and sold into prostitution at the age of sixteen. But the woman who walked out of the brothel was no longer Ganga: it was Gangubai Kothewali. The woman who would change the lives of every prostitute in Kamathipura forever. 

Gangubai turned her unfortunate fate into a tool for power. Power that would protect the women of Mumbai’s red-light district. Under her activism, she saw demanded protection for prostitutes and education for their children. She sat across a table of police officers and political leaders and demanded justice for the tens of thousands of women. 

She fought for:

• Safe housing and legal recognition for sex-workers

• Healthcare access in a community full of untreated diseases

• Education for children so that their mother’s fate would not define their future

• Protection from police brutality and street violence

Most importantly, she fought to break the oldest punishment placed on these women: shame. She forced India to confront a truth it had buried for years. The fact that prostitution was not just a trade, it was the product of society’s lack of compassion. With her leadership, women who were once invisible to the rest of the world finally gained the respect they deserved. An entire district learnt that dignity is not a privilege. It is a right.

Gangubai did not simply change a neighbourhood in Mumbai. She changed the way a nation looks at women it once refused to see.