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About the talk:

The town of Silchar, in India’s Northeast, houses the region’s only red light area for brothel based sex work. The red light area is located at the heart of the urban centre, surrounded by residential settlements and commercial establishments. Red light areas are often associated with their immoral and criminogenic influences by their neighbours, resulting in contestations over the use of space. While these tensions and the broader implications of spatial ordering have been well documented in metropolitan contexts, there remains a relative lack of scholarly attention to similar dynamics in smaller urban centres. This talk draws on my reflections as an ethnographer in Silchar, tracing the contested relationship between the brothel and its surrounding neighbourhood.

Speaker:

Tridib Mukherjee is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati and a Writing Tutor at the Centre for Writing and Communication, Ashoka University. Their doctoral work explores the relationship between urban space, morality, and governance in the context of sexual commerce in Silchar, Assam.

This is the one hundred and ninty three (193) in a series of Urban Workshops planned by the Centre de Sciences Humaines (CSH), New Delhi, and Centre for Policy Research (CPR). These workshops seek to provoke public discussion on the city’s development issues and address all its facets including its administration, culture, economy, society, and politics. For further information, please contact: Rama Devi at ramadevi2487@gmail.com, Champaka Rajagopal at champaka@cprindia.org or Partha Mukhopadhyay at partha@cprindia.org.