By Sushma Joshi
Trafficking, as a cultural construct, national myth, media enterprise, and social issue, has generated discourses around it from multiple locations. Engaging with these discourses means interrogating notions of gendered bodies and sexuality, migration and work, transnational boundaries and capital, and the virtual circulation of media representations. By looking at the sites from which these discourses originate and are reproduced and disseminated, I hope to chart a rough guide that allows us to traverse the fault-lines of power of modern Nepal.
Within Nepal and in other parts of the sub-continent, trafficking has come to symbolize a process through which women and girls are taken across borders and sold in mass numbers into brothels and into sex-work without their knowledge, acquiescence or consent. This concept has been taken up as an issue by actors from diverse locations: activists, non-governmental organizations, international organizations, the media and the state have all started to act, write and represent the issue within their own frameworks and capacities. The term has elicited donor funding from a wide variety of sources, shaping the contours of the discussion.
This paper[1] is an attempt to interrogate some of the main discourses that have arisen and gained prominence around the concept of trafficking, the locations that they arise out of, and the various effects they have on different imaginative terrains, state policies and eventually on constructions of gender, citizenship and nation. I have chosen to focus mainly on discourses generated in and around Nepal, specifically around Nepali women and girls in India.
In the first section, I look at the main processes of gender formation within the Nepali nation, including the notion of women as kin and the concept of the nation as a natal home. I go on to analyze some of the assumptions behind rehabilitation, and the tropes of gendered purity that exist within Nepal and their value in maintaining existing power relations and hierarchies within the nation. I then go on to look at the main disjunction within the activist movement: the sex as slavery versus the sex as work issue, and how hegemonic formations of gender and sexuality are re-constructed and reified around this debate. I end by highlighting the role of the media and the symbolic violence that occurs with Orientalist representations, and how these representations help to reify concepts of a poor, backward and dependent nation, thereby allowing existing power relations to continue.
“Cheli-Beti”
Nepal, as a nation state ruled by a feudal aristocracy until the 1950s, has not had time to extensively conceptualize a theory of citizenship. In a world of feudal relations, power very much circulated within kinship networks and systems of patronage. Within this principle, family is the linchpin of the social network, and people are organized according to their kinship relationships. Kinship, within this cosmology, still plays a very strong role in access to any government or private institution. The concept of a citizen as it exists in other democratic states, imbued with “rights” that give them automatic access to certain privileges, has not been formulated in quite the same way within Nepal.
Because of this, women’s identities within the nation are still very much as kin: as mothers, daughters, sisters and in-laws. Although the Constitution guarantees the equality of men and women, discriminatory provisions in the National Civil Code still exist.[2]Women, for instance, still do not have legal provisions to inherit parental property unless they stay unmarried until age thirty-five, since sons are the people to carry on the family line. In the aftermath of the Democracy Movement, feminist activists were still struggling to carve out a gendered space where female citizenship could be articulated and defined. This indeterminate period was filled up very quickly by the conceptualizations of a very strong and articulate anti-trafficking movement. The movement, dominated by urban, middle-class Brahmin-Chettri women, was very successful in using the language of kinship to push forward its women-as-victims narrative of trafficking. “Cheli-beti” (literally, “daughters”) is used as a blanket term to refer to all Nepali women living and working in India, regardless of their age. The notion of women as “cheli-beti” has been so successfully disseminated that trafficking, in the Nepali language, is known as “cheli-beti bech bikhan” (“sale of daughters”). This has managed to consolidate and reify this status of women-as-dependent-kin within the nation, blurring any attempts to restructure women as citizen subjects.
I have used several sources of information in conducting my research, including NGO publications, conference narratives and personal experiences, to analyze the discourses about trafficking and their impact in Nepal. While personal experiences are never indicative of a larger framework, I would like to use one to illustrate several pertinent points about the trafficking discourse and its impact on gender roles, female citizenship and female mobility within Nepal.
In 1997, I was going on a professional trip to Dacca when I was stopped at the airport by the immigration officials. I had all my papers with me, including documentation from the organization that I worked for that corroborated that I was going on a professional trip. I had a male colleague with me from my office. The border official who stopped me started to interrogate me about my activities in Dacca. “Timi,” the form of address that he used to speak to me, is usually only used in informal situations between younger family members or very close friends, or as a patronizing form of address to a stranger. After ten minutes of this, I started to get angry and raised my voice. The man told me flatly that he was not going to allow me to get through immigration.
After I complained, I was approached by the head official who explained to me that he was only doing this to me for my own protection, because “hamro cheli-beti haru lai hamilay hayrnu parcha” (“we have to take care of our daughters and sisters”). He also explained to me that I might be trafficked in Bangladesh, and that I needed a male guardian to take responsibility and vouch for me that I would not get sold (bechinu) in Bangladesh. He told me that if I was travelling to the Gulf I would never be allowed to go, but since I was only going to Bangladesh, I could leave the next day if I came back with a guardian who would vouch for my safety.
The next day, when I came back with my brother, there was a higher immigration official who told me that he was only letting me go because he knew my brother personally. Then he said: “I heard you used all these foul words yesterday. Aimai bhayara pani testo garne kasto laj nabhayako” (how could you, as a woman, use such words without shame). Only after I was properly chastisedwas I allowed to take my delayed flight.
Due to this articulation of women-as-kin, it was perfectly acceptable for an immigration official to be calling me “timi” (as younger female kin) to take quasi-legal authority to stop me from making any moves, to defile my sexual purity, and to be chastising me for bad language inappropriate for a sister or daughter. Within this framework, it was also completely acceptable to ask for a male guardian to guarantee my safety, implying that I could cross the boundaries of home only with the full cognizance of my (male) guardian. As a woman, any work I did outside the home also did not have the same legitimacy that a man would have: while a man can and is expected to work outside the home/nation, within the frameworks of a middle-class, gender formation, women still stay at home and do not go travelling alone into dangerous terrains without their family’s permission. A Nepali woman still, to this day, cannot apply for a passport without her guardian’s permission: an official form signed by a guardian and attested by a gazette officer of His Majesty’s Government is prerequisite documentation for application. Any woman who stepped outside the familial territory and reproductive roles is therefore automatically under suspicion of breaking moral and social codes of appropriate behavior.
Perhaps more pertinently, as a woman, I was seen to be incapable of stopping myself from being sold without my knowledge—even when I was twenty-five years old, was working for the Harvard School of Public Health, and had spent six years living by myself abroad. Women, within this conceptualization, are seen to be very much dependent on men for their safety, their knowledge of the world, and the parameters of their activities. It was also acknowledged that I could “sell myself” (“afailai bechnu sakhuhuncha”), but while it was acknowledged that a woman would have the agency to “sell herself,” it could never be a voluntary act. By the very nature of the transaction, one cannot sell oneself. By consolidating the multi-faceted nature of people’s mobility and reducing multiple and complex economic, social, and political transactions under one mythical signifier, “selling” (“bech bikhan”), the discourse of trafficking within Nepal has managed to co-opt and reduce all issues of migration and labor to a single homogeneous event.
To summarize, the anti-trafficking discourse, voiced mostly by a middle-class, Brahmin Chettri group of female activists, has been very influential in creating a myth of trafficking that has been instrumental in shaping the relationship of women to the state and nation. Most of this discourse has been influential in reifying the notion of women-as-kin while obfuscating the need to define women as citizens of the nation.
“Maiti,” in Nepali, means “the natal home.” Before I go on to elaborate on the concept of “maiti,” I would briefly like to mention that the most influential and visible non-governmental organization in the anti-trafficking movement in Nepal in the past few years has been “Maiti Nepal.” This organization received international attention after Prince Charles decided to do a fundraiser by sending an open letter in The Sun appealing for funds by selling his limited edition of watercolors. Sun readers collected a total of £67,000; You Magazine another £20,000 for this organization. Since then, an enormous amount of attention has showered onto the organization, including unregulated amounts of funding from all over the world, citations in any media production on trafficking, fundraising dinners in wealthy areas of the West Coast, and even oil painting exhibitions. This has recreated “Maiti Nepal” into a virtual icon of all that symbolizes Nepali trafficking in the global imagination. In this section, I would like to tease out some of the implications of the concept of “maiti,” rehabilitation, and the way this discourse has impacted policy and gender formations within Nepal.
The term “Maiti,” in Brahmin-Chettri culture within Nepal, refers to the natal home, the home territory that girls grow up in before they get married and go off to their husband’s homes. In Nepali, the term is imbued with certain connotations: a space where women will always be treated with love, but also a space where they do not have any rights vis-à-vis their brothers. A space that evokes sadness, since it was the space that women grew up in all too briefly before they had to leave, and joy since they will be able to see their families again. While “maiti” offers women special privileges, like love, care, and limited financial support, it is also clearly defined as a space where daughters have no formal inheritance or economic rights. It is a space restricted to a woman once she formally leaves the space—the “leaving” imbued with the assumption that girls only leave the home on the occasion of marriage.
Once the woman is married, she cannot always come back to the maiti. The times that she can come back to her maiti are carefully controlled and regulated by both sides of the family. The visits are formalized over certain festivals and days, so that women in very orthodox Hindu families still only go on these days. These formalized visits apply social pressure to reluctant in-laws who control women’s mobility to the extent of not allowing daughters-in-law to visit their parents. On the other hand, women are also discouraged by their maiti if they try to stay for long periods of time, since that space formally belongs to their brothers, and by extension, to their sisters-in-law. Within this framework, the women are loved members of the maiti, but still outside the family parameters, and still can come only as visitors. It is a space where women can return in situations of extreme desperation, i.e., in cases of desertion or death of husbands, but this coming back is never a right: it is always a favor bestowed on the woman by her natal family, and the woman and her children, if she has any, are always treated as family members with limited rights. Within the hierarchy of the family, where gender and age privileges are paramount, a woman who returns to the maiti is usually a social outcast.
I would like to take up this trope of “maiti” as a defining feature of the anti-trafficking and rehabilitation discourse within Nepal, and its implications for national policy. After the raid in 1996, the Nepali government refused to take responsibility for rehabilitating the underage girls from Bombay, citing the spread of HIV/AIDS in Nepal as a reason. The Bombay organizations finally approached a number of Nepali NGOs, and the girls were formally divided between them. These organizations were CWIN, WOREC, ABC Nepal, Maiti Nepal and a few others. These organizations are not unified in their political positions: while half of them belong to the National Alliance against Trafficking, which views women as kin who have been victimized by poverty and evil criminals, and prostitution as sexual slavery, the other half belong to Alliance Against Trafficking in Women and Children in Nepal (AATWIN), with members who take into account questions of labor and migration. Most of the organizations have gained prominence through individual leaders who have appeared in print publications, on radio and TV, and in other forums, citing a discourse of kinship, sacrifice, and service to the cause of the helpless. Anuradha Koirala, the founder of Maiti Nepal, has been referred to as “Angel of Mercy” by Prince Charles, and although this title—also used to refer to Mother Teresa of Calcutta—has not gained currency in Nepal, it has been picked up and circulated through a variety of media in the West.
The history of professional social work in Nepal has been very brief. There are no institutions that train people in providing care in a professional setting. With the exception of a few classes in social work at some colleges, most people who work in non-governmental organizations have come from other professional backgrounds. In the case of organizations run by women, many have been started by women who had no particular work background but were personally committed to saving oppressed women. Anuradha Koirala, in earlier news articles, has been depicted as a committed housewife who started taking destitute women into her own home and overcoming big odds to help them. An Internet brochure[3]says that Maiti Nepal started off by facilitating an initial project at Gaushala, Kathmandu, which was:
“Aimed at providing a safe shelter to the destitute women living in the Pashupatinath area. A majority of these women had, at one time or the other, been forced to submit to the numerous social injustices so common in our society, and whose only means of a sustainable life was to beg for alms or indulge in prostitution.”
Pashupati, one of the main Hindu temples of the Kathmandu Valley, has always attracted women who have fallen out of the social net, and it has always been a long-standing tradition that bourgeois women did service by providing for the poor, the destitute, the sick and the ailing. This tradition of charity means that the relationship between the women being saved and the women doing the saving have always been conceptualized along the familiar lines of family and kin: the organization head as the mother or mother-in-law, with the authority and the power to control the other women’s desires, movements and morality, while the victims are often conceptualized, as in the trafficking discourse, as daughters or daughters-in-law—as younger female kin to be protected, but also to be disciplined, regulated, and brought within the confines of normal social behavior.
This model of social work becomes particularly problematic when one begins to take the ethnic dynamics in question: Nepal, a country of diverse ethnic cultures, also has many different acceptable models of marriage, sexuality, and sexual behavior. Although orthodox Brahmin Chettri mores of sexuality have come to define the hegemonic form of “Nepali culture,” with virginity as a valued social concept, and premarital sex, multiple marriages, and separations as unacceptable social practices. It is well documented that polygamy, premarital sex, divorce, and other social practices unacceptable outside of the mainstream “Nepali culture” exist and flourish in the diverse ethnic groups of the nation.
In the trafficking discourse, however, girls are still conceived to be the pure virgins, without knowledge and without sexual desire, waiting for their monogamous arranged marriages when they were spirited, duped, and sold off by criminals, including “lazy and parasitic”[4]men of their own community. This model brings up a few intriguing questions, including the sheer logistical impossibility of taking a supposed 200,000 women across borders against their will.
A revealing document that illustrates this mode of thought is a report on “Girls Trafficking in Sindhupalchowk,” brought out by ABC Nepal, one of the organizations involved in anti-trafficking activism. The document goes on to note that “In Nepalese society, women are respected and considered an important part of the society, but in these village committees, they were not only disrespected but even harassed by their own brothers, fathers and boyfriends.” The report further goes on to note that
“Tamangs comprise about 70% of the total population[…]Tamangs send their daughters and daughters-in-law to the brothels in India to supplement their income[…]In a place where most of the people are illiterate, one can see signs of relative prosperity[…]Further, when questioned, they seemed to prevent each other from disclosing facts[…]Information given to the interviewers showed that the trading of girls was in fact an open affair among Tamang households[…]when questioned, they were rather aggressive and arrogant about any sort of discussion about the issue and thus made the survey impossible.”
This report not only brings up questions about the exact nature of the power relations between the interviewers and the interviewees, including ethnic, class and religious dynamics, but also raises some pertinent points about the influx of wealth and how this is viewed by groups from outside the community. The exact nature of the relationships between the procurers, the brothels, the girls, women and their families, the symbolic market of expectations, and the nuances of negotiations are also subsumed and erased in this hegemonic representation.
This representation also assumes that women, once they have gone off to Bombay, become defiled and cannot come back without special symbolic purification rites. While women’s ethnic communities might accept girls who have left their homes to work, have earned money, have had sexual relationships outside of marriage, and might even accord them status, mainstream “Nepali culture” demands that women who have stepped outside their reproductive roles only come back as victims, because only then can they be embraced back into the home territory. As people without agency, their experiences can be blamed on evil criminals. As victimized bodies, they have had no hand in the experiences that they just went through, therefore exempting them from taking responsibility for overstepping social and sexual boundaries. As suffering, destitute victims, women have a right to the nation’s sympathy, compassion, and a moral right to return to the maiti.
While translating an interview for two British journalists with Bombay returnees in Maiti Nepal, I asked a sixteen-year-old girl: Did you know the man that you were going to Bombay with? Did you like him? While the girl smiled and acknowledged that she had liked him, one of the Maiti guards who had been present all through the interview, even when we had requested him for privacy, reacted angrily and answered: “She did not know him well. He was a stranger.”
While the discourse of victimization allows the girls to come back to the acceptable sphere of morality, and be suitably rehabilitated, it also eradicates any need to think about opportunities for knowledge, work and mobility that make young women leave in the first place. Within this mainstream trafficking discourse, individual desires to travel, to be with a man, to get married, to cross borders, to look for work are eradicated. The woman is presented as a pure victim who was entirely unaware of the designs of the evil trafficker, who then sold her body into sex slavery.
I am not disputing the fact that there is deceit and misinformation, that women suffer under tremendously difficult working conditions, that they contract diseases and often become destitute. My concerns are simply with the erasure of the woman/girl as a subject within this discourse, with her own thoughts, desires and experiences, as a subject within social and community networks, and the impact of this on how “Nepali women” get created in the national imagination. I am also concerned about the reconstruction of the female subject as a body vulnerable to the whims of other people, a body that can be used and thrown away. Issues of adolescent sexuality and the need for sexual education are also erased within this framework.
Without agency, women are immobilized. They are bound to the roles given to them: bound to familial roles of dutiful wives and daughters, subject to the whims of domestic violence, to the powers of the state that defines them as kin and does not allow them the legitimacy to demand any other rights. The discourse of Maiti, in this way, consolidates the familial gender roles of women within the nation. It also manages to co-opt younger and ethnic women’s overstepping of gender roles by bringing them back to within the hegemonic framework of what Nepali women are supposed to be like. By redefining girls once again as younger family members, vulnerable and in need of paternalistic protection, grateful to be back in the maiti, the discourse allows the state to evade responsibility for providing certain rights to women: rights to inheritance, rights to property and land, provisions for education and health care, non-discriminatory laws regarding labor and migration; rights that could potentially
transform cheli-beti into women who voluntarily, involuntarily or in-between, would not have to get ”trafficked” again.
“REHABILITATION”
After cheli-beti are trafficked, they are rehabilitated. What does this entail? A raid ordered by the Bombay High Court in 1996 led to raids on brothels in Kamathipura, which led to the “rescue” by police of approximately 400-450 girls and women. The figures vary as widely as 408, 437, 456, and 473 in various news accounts. These women were then put in ten children’s homes and schools, like St. Catherine’s home and Nirmala Niketan, which are institutions for “orphans and destitute children,” some of them against their will. Problems quickly arose, with the women demanding food besides the meagre rations allocated by the government, and threatening to get violent if they were not released. A percentage of the women managed to escape this confinement by running away. Finally, the Bombay High Court was forced to segregate the “prostitutes from the destitutes.”[5] After negotiation with the Nepali government, which refused to take the women back because they would spread AIDS in Nepal, several non-governmental organizations were approached and given the task of rehabilitating the girls and women. About 100 of them refused to go back to Nepal. In 1998, two years after the raid, 124 women and four children were sent back to their “homeland.”[6]
The discourse of “rehabilitation” within Nepal has focused on “an education, counselling and safe home.”[7] Rehabilitation has also focused on ” encouraging women to be financially self-sustaining by teaching them income-generating skills, and providing women with information about personal health care and disease prevention.”
An education in most cases is basic literacy, and basic literacy in most cases means adult literacy classes of limited scope where women learn, at the most, to write their names. The education that they receive often does not give them skills to get higher-paying jobs. Income-generating skills like embroidering tablecloths, while admirable in intention, also often does not provide women with any long-term sustainable skills or institutions through which they can make a living. As women who have been living for a long time in the city are unlikely to choose to go back to the village and farm, this means that many women have to find alternative, low-paying jobs in the urban sector. While there are neither clear statistics on the outcomes and experiences of women who have been “rehabilitated,” nor about the efficacy of the programs that women go through as they are “rehabilitated”, we are left with more questions than answers. Do women go back to working in environments like the carpet and garment factories, which are the main sites of recruitment by procurers? In one of my interviews with a twenty-five-year-old Nepali in Falkland Road, the woman told me that many of the girls/women who had been taken in the raid of 1996 were back in Bombay and were living under assumed names and in disguise to evade further raids and to avoid being sent back to Nepal.
Counseling, within the framework of bourgeois women’s organizations, is counseling to return to the family institution and back to a “good life.” Durga Ghimire, President of ABC Nepal, “an agency caring for 28 of the repatriated prostitutes,” is quoted in a news article as saying, “They are full of diseases, but we can accept that. It is their right to return to Nepal, and if they return, we can give them good lives.”[8] Women are also counseled out of their bad habits. An interview with Maiti Nepal revealed that “the girls” are often “very rough when they come back, and speaking foul language […] We reeducate them. It takes time, but eventually they stop swearing and start behaving decently.” In other words, the work of the rehabilitation home is to normalize women back into bourgeois behavior.
Another interesting aspect of rehabilitation homes connects to the notion of the “safe home” in Nepal. A safe home for bourgeois Nepali women is not easily accessible to outsiders, one where women can stay behind enough boundaries to be protected from any unwanted sexual or casual encounters, random violence, or force. A safe home creates women who are always under protection from the outside; women who, after a while, start requiring protection. A safe home entails setting up a certain number of boundaries so undesirable people cannot easily locate or enter the space. Most domestic violence shelters in other countries are also not easily locatable for the sake of security and for protecting the women from intrusive media. The rehabilitation homes in Nepal, on the other hand, have certain criteria of acceptable visitors, and are off limits only for certain people, not others. The houses are not off limits to foreign journalists, donors or visitors, no matter what their reason for visiting. Journalists from Nepal are also allowed to come in, but all Nepali visitors are discouraged, even barred. This raises the question about how many of the “outside,” specifically the Nepali outside, are seen to be undesirable and restricted to the girls. Are family members allowed to visit the girls if they are under suspicion of having sold them? Are men, boyfriends, or lovers allowed to visit, or are these unacceptable relationships? Do the girls/women want these visitors? Are their wishes overridden by the authorities? Is there a fear that women will want to go back to Bombay, in which case, they must be saved from themselves by sheer physical boundaries?
Barred doors, grilles and omnipresent guards watch every movement of the girls and visitors; one might expect this in the brothels of Kamathipura. So, there is a sense of psychic disjunction when one encounters this in the rehabilitation homes. Perhaps the most alarming aspect of the “safe space” of the rehabilitative homes is their similarity to the brothels: institutions where women’s mobility and access to the outside world is tightly controlled, where they are confined within a social system that provides them with very little opportunities to move on and do anything different and where their behaviors, bodies and speech are regulated to fit the social norm. Women are not allowed to leave the institution because they believe the outside world is unsafe, and they can be safe only within the confines and the protection of the home.
During my interviews with Nepali women in the red-light district of Bombay, I asked them if they knew the women in the other streets. They answered that they never left their area, and did not really know the other women even if they were living only a few rooms down the road. They were afraid to leave their area because it was “unsafe out there, one did not know what would happen or what people would do to you.” The brothel was safe because it was bounded and familiar, with people to take care of any outside danger. This sense of women who were immobilized in a bounded space by fear was reconfirmed by my interviews with a pimp who also had his own laundry shop, who reiterated to me not to leave his little cubby-hole while I was there: “This is Kamathipura. You never know what will happen out there. Don’t go out. Stay here and only then will you be safe.” He said this enough times and with enough conviction to make me uneasy about the street, even though I had been walking around it for many days without any sense of danger.
It is important to note that the brothel’s restriction of women’s mobility through fear, and the psychological paralysis created in women, is the same tool used by rehabilitative homes and bourgeois family institutions to control girls’ sexuality and keep them within limiting gender roles. Women in North America do not get trafficked or sold without their knowledge because they learn to walk down the street, take a bus, go to school, go to the market, get a job, and navigate a whole range of physical spaces without the notion that it is unsafe. Bourgeois women in Nepal, on the other hand, are always being reinforced with knowledge about the dangers of “the outside”: stepping outside the safe laxman rekha[9]of the home is always fraught with uncertainty.
This kind of fear, reinforced into women at an early age, provides for the debilitating sense of paralysis and immobility that allows hard trafficking to exist in South Asia. Women in the brothels of Bombay, who might not have come there voluntarily and who would like to leave, are unable to conceive of any other options because they do not have the knowledge or the skills to navigate beyond the bounded space that has been given to them. The rehabilitative homes, by creating the very same limiting environment for returnees, do not give them any more skills to navigate the social, cultural, and physical spaces that exist once the women leave the safe home, making them vulnerable once more to control through fear. More importantly, by reinforcing the notion that the only way to keep women safe/controlled is by putting them behind locks and bars, the rehabilitative homes continue to replicate the logic and the conditions that make trafficking possible. The “safe home”, ironically, is the very model that creates women who are vulnerable and need protection, who are unequipped with skills to navigate any space beyond a very limited one, and who, once trapped into a condition from which they can see no other alternatives, can be very easily controlled with the spectre of outside dangers.
PURITY
In a conference against sex trafficking in Dacca, a thirteen-year-old Nepali girl who had been rehabilitated in one of the homes told us her story in one of the panels for survivors of prostitution. In the beginning, the girl was unable to speak, and only did so after the head of the organization in which she was being looked after encouraged her. Then she burst into tears and went on to say that she was going to share her tale of suffering so other sisters might not also have to go through the same experiences. Her story, which was told in Nepali and translated, was long and complex, and involved many incidents and sub-narratives. At the end of her testimony, one of the participants remarked: I did not know that Nepal was such a barbaric place. Perhaps what struck me most about this narrative was the emotional resonance of the details in Nepali, details and themes that rang familiar bells to me from childhood fables: getting lost in forests, being found by millers, being adopted by a kind person, being treated unkindly and driven out of the home by a stepmother.
I am not disputing the nature of her sufferings or the exploitative conditions of her childhood. What I found striking was the form of the narrative that she chose to represent herself publicly, and the number of cultural themes of oppression and parables of suffering she included in her self-narration. Compared to the stories of other survivors from the U.S. and the Philippines, which were straightforward personal autobiographical accounts of economic deprivation and familial abandonment that led to a slow slide into prostitution as a means of survival, I found that the narrative of the thirteen-year-old Nepali girl was different in two fundamental ways. First, her story was not just her story; it was a parable of suffering and oppression of all destitute and abandoned girls. Second, she was very aware of it being a Nepali story.
Let me elaborate on these two themes. A Nepali girl who returns from Bombay is tainted in many ways: physically, sexually, socially, morally. Nepal, as bound to the ritual realm of unadulterated Hinduism, with an inner moral world separated from the outer immoral world, leads to a situation where crossing the border of the nation taints all Nepalis with the outside, and they become adulterated by their foreign experiences. The notion of people defiled by crossing the borders is symbolized by the pani patiya[10]: “complicated and time-consuming rites of ritual purification” mandated by Prithvi Narayan Shah and later Gorkhali rulers for any Nepali returning from outside the Hindu world.[11]It does not matter, therefore, that a woman left because she was destitute or abandoned; she still has to prove that her leaving of the inner, moral space was justified. The only way for her to regain a space in a society whose framework is built upon norms of sexual purity is to prove that she suffered from circumstances beyond her control. This, then, can only be done by including every single cultural trope of women’s suffering in the oral tradition. Putting all these parables together also creates a narrative that acts as a warning for other girls who might also be contemplating crossing boundaries. The woman who ran the organization that the girl came from had in fact produced a tape filled with songs that warned women about what would happen to them if they went to Bombay. A narrative with such resonance acts as a public expatiation: only somebody who has suffered so much, and who has come back to warn others about her experiences, one who, in other words, has redeemed herself with her sufferings, can come back into the sacred threshold of the home.
Secondly, the concept of “Cheli-beti bech-bikhan,” appropriated by many actors in many locations for their own purposes, has also been appropriated by the state as a Nepali national story. It encapsulates all the elements of Nepal’s national identity: poverty, destitution, forced migration for the sake of labor opportunities, long separations from family members. All these elements come together to create a public image of Nepal to the world and reinforce what we have always known: bad things happen to women in Nepal because it is a poor country. This myth allows for an elision that sidetracks people from bringing up other issues, including questions over political commitment to change gender discriminatory laws, efforts to make education accessible to girls on a national level, and provisions in the constitution that still treat women as kin rather than citizens.
In other words, trafficking has become a narrative that binds the nation together in certain fundamental ways: it keeps us secure in the knowledge of our poverty, and the inevitability of conditions of exploitation outside the nation. It also keeps Nepal united against India and Indians, the “Other” who exploits and uses the bodies of our women, sisters and daughters. This anti-India feeling, I argue, is fundamental in consolidating a national identity that keeps the boundaries of these two nations separate. Nepal, fundamentally dependent on India and the open border for the free flow of goods, capital and labor, has to be actively recreating the border at all times in order to maintain the separation of the two nations. This permeability of the border and the free flow of men and women into India looking for jobs upsets the equilibrium of sovereignty. By making the flow of women into India forced, and never voluntary, Nepal manages to recreate the inviolability of the borders. By making the clients into evil, exploitative Indian men, it reconsolidates the barrier to what is most threatening to its national identity: the violation of purity.
KUMARI: THE VIRGIN GODDESS
The myth of the virgin goddess is undisputably one of the biggest national myths of Nepal. Kumari, the Living Virgin Goddess, extensively photographed, painted, filmed, and written about in many languages, used as an icon for every single project representing Nepal, is a familiar symbol. The millions of tourists who come to Nepal every year are greeted by her image at the threshold between the airport and immigration. Kumari, as a national trope of purity, reinforces certain gender norms within Nepal that I will expand on in more length in this section.
One of the criteria for a five-year-old girl to be Kumari, the Living Goddess, is that she has never bled, so that even a girl who has cut herself is not accepted as a candidate. The girl is cloistered in the old Kumari Ghar, a safe home where she looks out of the window and occasionally receives the King. She is also anxiously watched to make sure that she never cries while she is giving tika[12]to the King, since a crying Kumari is an inauspicious event, and a sure sign that the present king is going to die. When she is around nine, before she reaches puberty, has her period and starts bleeding, she is replaced by another little girl. The Virgin Goddess, once she is symbolically defiled by her period and the permeability of her body, loses her divine status and can no longer represent the nation. Instead, she has to go back to being an ordinary little girl. But not just any other ordinary girl: once fallen from the status of divinity, she is feared and thought to have a mortally bad effect on the men that she may marry. Her fall from divine status imbues her with the power to cause death to men.
The trafficking myth of Nepal cannot be analyzed without taking this national myth into account. The Kumari is integral in consolidating and holding together the authority and legitimacy of another human divine: the King. The traditional power structure of the present Shah monarchy has always hinged on the notion of the Virgin Goddess, and the two institutions have always supported and legitimized each other. The King, seen to be an incarnation of Vishnu, is present at every Indra Jatra and at Dashain[13]to watch the procession and get blessings from the Living Goddess. With the advent of the Democracy Movement, and voices of dissent and treason that might almost do away with the monarchy altogether, the position of the monarchy has reached shaky ground where they must define themselves in more secular terms. Their political authority, while still derived from and tied to divine authority, has had to readjust to the changes in the power structures. Most people who support the King do so because they believe he is the one institution that keeps Nepal from being completely merged with India. With the historically friendly ties between the Nepali Congress Party and the Indian Congress Party providing no security or confidence in people that one party will not completely “sell and eat Nepal”[14]through the other, many people see the King as the only remaining bulwark between Indian intervention and encroachment, and eventual takeover, of Nepali territory and affairs. It is of interest to note here that the notion of “selling” the country has the same cultural resonance and generates the same outrage as “cheli-beti bechbikhan.”
Nepal, as a nation, since the time of Prithvi Narayan Shah down to the Rana regime, has always constructed itself as a geographically inaccessible, secluded, closed nation. National ideology has always stated that Nepal’s seclusion is the reason for non-interference from both of its big neighbors in its internal affairs. Nepal’s impermeability, in a way, has seen to justify its existence as a separate nation: unlike Sikkim, which was absorbed into the Indian state, Nepal sees itself as having managed to maintain its existence by being geographically and politically inaccessible.[15]
After the Democracy Movement in 1991, the new political leaders have been more amenable to opening the borders and allowing a better flow of trade between India and Nepal. This transitional time of national reinterpretation, where a closed feudal political system starts renegotiating with its neighbors, has been fraught with anxieties. The anxieties revolve around two themes: the need to maintain sovereignty, and the need to maintain Nepal’s impermeable boundaries.
With the advent of the change in political systems, there has been a high rate of two-way migration both to and from India. This free mixing of migrant labor has blurred the sharply maintained notions of an impermeable nation, sealed from the outside world. Another intrusion has been the free availability of Indian media and cultural productions in Nepal. India and Indian cultural influences are easily available and consumed at all levels: through Bollywood movies, through Doordarshan, through goods, through education, through travel and pilgrimages, and shared cultural notions. Prominent voices in Nepal have been raised about the need to maintain its own cultural and linguistic heritage against the onslaught of India. Nepal has at present felt a great need to create boundaries that cannot be breached. Women, the last frontier, by being publicly infiltrated by Indian men, add another blow to a carefully maintained sovereignty and purity.
The reactions of the Nepali police illustrate this with more specificity. The police, having been incorporated by women’s NGOs and INGOs into their anti-trafficking activities, have seized the issue with enthusiasm and have been active in promoting their anti-trafficking activities through mainstream media, especially over radio and television. Their involvement has meant that the nuances of trafficking have been reduced to a simple crime: an operation where women are drugged, duped or deceived into going to India. The TV programs, which are dramatized versions of police operations, are simple narratives of women who are intercepted at the borders and brought back to their homes. One TV program, called Beyond the Mountains, warns women that if they do not see mountains anymore, they could be in danger of being trafficked, and should therefore get off the bus and run away. The mountains, the omniscient symbol of Nepal, are used here as barriers between women and their eventual destruction in India. In another TV program, the issue was portrayed with flowcharts with the police sitting around the table and talking about how to stop the flow of women, reminiscent of a military operation. The process, while envisioning and re-envisioning national boundaries through the mythic female body, also played out the national anxieties of attack, adulteration, and inundation by India.
In order to reorder the inaccessible nation again, it is necessary to recreate the myth of involuntary desecration. These anxieties of cultural and national disintegration, by becoming reinscribed on female bodies, reinforce the notion of India as an encroachment. The discourse of trafficking in Nepal then, always looks at trafficking as a Nepali problem: never as a phenomenon also shared with Bangladesh, or poorer states within India. Within the framework of the Nepali nation, trafficking is purely an event that only happens to Nepali girls. The thought of young cheli-beti, who by extension are Virgin Goddesses, as being violated and desecrated by Indian men, is intolerable, and morally unjustifiable. The trafficking myth, in this way, gives a moral shape to Nepal as a sovereign nation and reinforces its separateness from India.
LEGAL STRATEGIES
Women, as naive and guileless cheli-beti, can be rescued from the borders. They can be brought back from Bombay and put in rehabilitative homes. But what happens if they have never crossed a border in their life, if they are still living at home and are defiling themselves by working voluntarily as sex workers? This fundamental paradox of prostitution as work has been a major challenge to the anti-trafficking movement. For many people, the idea of prostitution is fundamentally unacceptable. Influential lobbies from the West, including the Coalition for Trafficking Against Women (CATW), which has consultative status with the UN, have written strong rebuttals to the idea of sex as work.
In Nepal, the anti-trafficking movement is starting to work towards tying the trafficking issue to the prostitution one. Presently, the laws regarding prostitution are not clearly defined. There are no laws against prostitution; however, brothels and organized prostitution are not allowed. So while there are no clearly defined red-light districts in Nepal, there are plenty of areas where women run tea-houses and small restaurants, and have women who are attached to it in prostitution as a side business.
Legal strategies to control prostitution have been suggested with the increasingly vocal activism of the anti-trafficking movement, which sees the market and demand for prostitution as the reason for trafficking. In a talk given at the British Council by a prominent lawyer working with SNV, a Dutch INGO, on strategies of controlling trafficking, he talked about the need to control prostitution, including voluntary prostitution, to stop trafficking. If trafficking is the act of taking women across borders through misinformation and against their will, why is it so imperative that to stop trafficking, we need to also stop women from voluntarily working as sex workers within Nepal? What is the linkage between the crime of involuntary trafficking and the crime of voluntary prostitution?
Prostitution, by removing women from the bourgeois reproductive order, acts to destabilize the moral framework in fundamentally the same way as trafficking: it removes young women from their homes, makes them cross moral and social boundaries, and takes them beyond the control of the institution of marriage and family (sometimes). In other words, the phenomenon of “voluntary prostitution”—even though “voluntary” is a laden word and the voluntary/involuntary binary too simple a dichotomy—makes us revise our ideas about trafficking. If women can and do “choose,” even outside of direct coercion and duping, through whatever economic, social, and cultural factors, to work as sex workers, does that mean that there might be an element of “choice” in girls/women leaving in mass numbers across borders? To maintain the present narrative of trafficking, then, the anti-trafficking lobby has to suppress the idea that women could ever choose to practice sex as a profession, a side income-generating activity, a family business, as an exchange for favors. They must be defined as the victims of a crime; otherwise, the entire framework based on the ideology of women as dependent kin/victim would collapse.
In 1980, a revised human trafficking and control act was passed, establishing trafficking as a crime against the state—punishable with up to twenty years incarceration. The 1980 law also made the state responsible for proving guilt beyond reasonable doubt. Surveillance programs have also increased with the increased funding and activities around trafficking. The lawyer who gave this talk was involved in a program providing non-formal education to 2400 girls between 12 and 14 from untouchable castes seen to be at risk of being trafficked. This program seeks to register these adolescents with authorities if they want to leave their guardians’ house.[16]
In 1991, the Labor Department also legislated a law which made it illegal for single women to travel to the Gulf. While men also suffer from unregulated and dangerous working conditions in the Gulf, this law is not in force for men. These legal provisions and changes, while allowing for stricter control and regulation of women’s and girls’ mobilities and for their surveillance, do not let go of the two fundamental frameworks that structure gender within Nepal: first, that women need guardians to be protected, and second, that they need to be surveilled so that they will not do anything that will put them in danger. In other words, women are still wards of more responsible powers, whether family, state, or the police, and they are also objects who can be acted upon by other forces without their knowledge.
Working from these ideological assumptions, the state structures gender in a way that limits the roles that women can take: women can only be wards of the family and community, dependent kin and reproductive beings within monogamous marriages. As J. Ann Tickner (1992) observes:
“Building on the notions of hegemonic masculinity, the notion of the citizen-warrior depends on a devalued femininity for its construction. In international relations, this devalued femininity is bound up with myths about women as victims in need of protection; the protector/protected myth contributes to the legitimation of a militarized version of citizenship that results in unequal gender relations that can precipitate violence against women.”
By not acknowledging the fact that women, like men, are also citizens who require property rights, education, equal rights to cross borders, to work and to earn money, the state reinforces and legitimizes the conditions of trafficking.
Orientalist Representations
I would like to end by looking at the way the issue of trafficking has been actively embraced, recreated and reified by a media apparatus that spans print publications, radio, television and independent documentary and the Internet, in both South Asia and outside. In this section, I argue that a neo-colonial apparatus of representation has been active in creating and supporting Orientalist constructions of trafficking. These constructions have combined with the representations circulating within Nepal, and the two have merged to create a specifically virtual image of the “trafficked woman.” This process, in what Escobar has called an “objectifying regime of visuality,” is one where “the panoptic gaze moves beyond its function of control to encompass the production of the social.”[17]
Despite, or perhaps because of, the proportion this issue has taken, the dominant narrative about trafficking has remained a journalistic one: evil traffickers lure naive village girls and sell them wholesale at brothels in big cities, where they are kept in slave-like conditions and eventually die of a fatal disease. This hegemonic narrative is created out of a combination of the discourses present and actively created in Nepal: from the press, the state, the women activists, the non-governmental organizations, which all have a stake in maintaining this narrative, which is then taken up and reified by the discourses outside Nepal.
The international media has been very active in reifying this hegemonic representation: while a few articles written by Indian journalists on sex workers’ rights, on the nuances of the anti-trafficking movement, and on the poor rehabilitative measures of the government after the raid have appeared in newspapers and on the Internet, most of the articles that come up in a search for trafficking are written by big U.S. or British dailies or magazines, all of which reiterate and compound the dominant myth of trafficking. A few samples include: “Prince Charles appeals to save sex slave children,” by Paul Majendie; LONDON, July 15 (Reuters) 1998; “They Come Out of the Shadows,” Date: 03-05-1998 The Hindu Online, By Our Staff Reporter; “Prince brings hope to Nepal’s sex slaves,” etc. Questions of migration and labor are never touched upon. Depictions of living and working conditions, the state of the health of women, often depicted in horrific terms, fail to mention that working conditions are similarly horrific for many other men and women who do low-paid, low-skilled wage labor in poorer parts of the continent.
I would like to elaborate on this symbolic repression of representation by looking at the British media as a case study. Discourses cannot be separated from the means of cultural production that created them, and I have been especially interested in looking at how mainstream media has been instrumental in portraying and creating this story. No analysis of this journalism is complete without also looking into the imperatives of photography that accompany it, and the urge to virtually possess and capture the corporeal bodies that embody the fantasies of readers back home, and the visual violence, enabled by technological power, that can go into this process.
The process of image-creation is tied integrally to preconceived notions of what trafficked women should be like. Except for a few photographers who have done photojournalistic work in the realist tradition, most of the photographic representations around trafficked Nepali women focus their panoptic gaze on young and beautiful women, most of them with Tibeto-Burman features, which fit notions of what Oriental women look like. Although there are enough Nepali women in areas like Kamathipura from castes like Chettri, Sarki, Kami, etc, whose features look more like their Southern neighbours from India, these women are never shown in photographs in mainstream media as “trafficked Nepali women.” Ironically, these women might in many ways fit the definition of “trafficked women” more than the women from the other ethnic groups. Women from Tamang and Gurung communities often seem to come to India in family or community groups, whereas the Chettri, Kami, and Sarki women are often living alone in isolation, showing that they might have been brought and sold there individually.
But the vicarious gaze already has expectations: Nepali women without Mongolian features would ruin the careful constructions of a story that the audience knows already. The process of creating Art also requires that bothersome details like children, men, families, and other nagging reminders of social relations be eradicated, presenting a pure space where “the trafficked woman” is the only object.
The trafficking story is inescapably tied to the politics of representation which create it. The British media’s interest in the sex trafficking issue has soared in the last few years, with big dailies competing for their very own trafficking expose. The catalytic point seems to have been Prince Charles’ involvement in the issue. While motives of why royal personages and stars get involved in various social issues are always up for speculation, it is interesting to note that Prince Charles was at the lowest end of his popularity scale after the death of Diana, and the sex trafficking exposure managed to boost his ratings in the British public. Sex and death have always been hot sellers for the media, easily commodified and packaged for the mass market. The topic acquires special mention when this is tied to children, who, like dolphins and other endangered animals, represent something small, vulnerable and therefore demanding the moral activism of the socially conscious. The colonial imagination has also always found Nepal to be of special interest, with its special colonial links via the Gurkhas.
Mainstream journalism creates stories through processes which erase the nuances, the subtleties, the contradictions in the search for a simple, black and white, salable story. Complications ruin interest and lose readers, who require digestible chunks of news. Second, the story has already been written in the head office by the editors; the journalists are only sent out to the field to discover it when the decision on what the story is has already been made. The story, therefore, must mirror the British public’s expectations. This makes for an interesting working method: we basically have journalists who fly down for a week to ten days, who must then make all the connections, find an interpreter, and in the case of a child trafficking story, find a trafficked child within a limited span of time. This process becomes quite difficult if “the child” is already reified in the editor’s mind in some specific way: a child who is shut up in the brothels, who is being held against her will, who has AIDS, who is dying. So, when journalists find themselves in brothels that are apparently being run by women, with reasonably well cared for children, girls and boys, of all ages present, apparently not held in terrible slave-like conditions, but perhaps even the children of the women, the story is already lost. This is not the groundbreaking story that journalists are sent out to discover. These details become invisible, and therefore non-existent, in the search to discover the real, the authentic, the inside story.
The real story is a story that allows and legitimizes a perceived dichotomy: a moral and ethical West, with a civilized culture where women can be safe, and then the immoral and unethical space of the East, where women and children are brutalized by their men. This construction allows for several possibilities: it allows the superiority of Western civilization over Eastern ones to continue; it allows for a rescue mission where people can go in and record, expose, and then rectify, rescue, and save; and it allows for an elision over questions of global inequality, the effects of globalization and liberalization, the history of colonialism. All these difficult issues can be glossed over in the stark myth of Oriental brutality.
As a translator for this process of mythic creation, the disjunction between the questions asked by journalists and the responses of the girls who had been rescued from the brothels is striking. The journalist wanted to know: Was the girl beaten? Raped? How many times did she have sex with the clients every day? The girl laughed at the estimates, which she found ridiculous, and said that it was not how it was at all.
Another aspect of the way the trafficking narrative has been constructed is its strangely close parallel with narratives of sexual titillation involving Asian women in virtual spaces, especially the Internet. The trafficking story, with its stories of young, beautiful and caged girls, the physical details of bars and grilles, the images of forced sex, holds out a promise of a virtual reliving of captivity and bondage that draws a huge audience and participants within chatrooms, websites and other virtual spaces on the Internet. This point becomes particularly salient when we realize that most of the information about trafficking has been circulated through mailing lists, websites and other channels through the Internet.
Keeping within the theme of exotic, far-away, captured sexualities, a Los Angeles based group against trafficking has chosen to call itself “Captive Daughters,” neatly encapsulating all the issues of titillation and exotification. This group, whose site is up on the Internet, has recently held a fundraising dinner called “Flavors of Nepal”: An evening of authentic food and fun to raise funds for MAITE NEPAL and CAPTIVE DAUGHTERS. The fundraising event was covered by the Los Angeles Times as “One Night in Nepal—A famous chef recreates the royal cuisine of Kathmandu.” It describes how Preeti Singh, “of an aristocratic family in Kathmandu […] specializing in subtle, refined royal cuisine […] served the flavors of Nepal, in silver dishes, and desserts with costly garnish of edible gold leaf, saffron, pistachios and almonds.” It is perfectly appropriate that this was the event held to benefit captive women: after all, the Orient as a constructed idea where women are brutalized by men cannot exist outside of a vacuum. It has to be visualized, tasted, experienced.
By being recreated in Los Angeles, complete with gold leaf and silver plates, the Orient is partaken of by the Captive Daughters (the line is not so clear here: one assumes that members of an organization called Captive Daughters would also refer to themselves as the same, in line with standard norms of signifier/signified). Participating in an event derived from many fantasies of what “the Orient” is supposed to be like, filled with the smells, sounds, and taste of the lavish display of royalty, reinforces notions of difference about the Other, while at the same time becoming a tangible, consumable event of difference. By consuming the Orient, the Captive Daughters turn it into an edible creation, a corporeally absorbed reality. By making no clear distinctions between the captive daughters of the brothels of Kamathipura and the Captive Daughters of Los Angeles, the organization also leaves us with room to visualize, vicariously, all the imagined brutalities imposed on trafficked women being visited on middle-class American Captive Daughters. In this sense, the Captive Daughters take on the virtual identities of the trafficked women, and like characters in chatrooms and other virtually created spaces, turn into their referents. It is perhaps logical that the money raised from this night of decadence would go into an institution that reinforces the notion that women, once trafficked corporeally and secondly through the virtual capture and entrapment of their images as Captive Daughters on the Internet, are only safe within spaces that can protect them.
This critique of the reduction of a complex social event to a single homogeneous one can also be applied to a whole host of cultural productions that has recently sprung up around the issue of trafficking, including, among others: Tara, A Fleshtrade Odyssey, a novel by a former USAID employee, Selling of Innocents, the Emmy award-winning video by Ruchira Gupta, and All our Daughters, an oil painting exhibition by Jan Salter held in Kathmandu.
By fixing and freezing notions of what the “trafficked woman” is like, cultural productions are active in creating and disseminating, sometimes from long distance, a homogeneous representation of a fractured, multifaceted and diverse group of women. By appropriating the fragments and broken strands of discourses floating around in the sub-continent and reifying them, media productions also help in legitimizing mythical discourses that are actively being used to control women within very specific gender roles.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities, London: Verso, 1983.
Appuradurai, Arjun. Modernity At Large, Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. University of Minnesota Press, 1996.
Banerjee, Sumanta. “The ‘Beshya’ and the ‘Babu’, Prostitute and her Clientele in 19th Century Bengal.” Economic and Political Weekly, November 6, 1993.
Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. New York: The Noonday Press, 1957.
Chatterjee, Maitreya. Rehabilitation of the Prostitute, Workshop on Trafficking in Women and Children, Calcutta, Organized by Socio-Legal, Aid, Research and Training Centre, Calcutta, 24 August 1992.
Chatterjee, Ratnabali. “The Indian Prostitute as Colonial Subject, Bengal 1864-1883.” Canadian Women Studies, Vol. 13, No. 1 (2018).
COMBAT Newsletter on Trafficking on Women and Children, Vol. 1, No. 3.
Combatting Trafficking in Women and Children in South Asia: Recent Developments, Jagori, Women’s Training, Documentation and Communication Centre
Compendium on Child Prostitution: Socio-Legal Information Centre for UNICEF Maharastra.
Enloe, Cynthia. Bananas, Beaches and Bases, Making Feminist Sense of International Politics. The University of California Press, 1989.
Escobar, Arturo. Encountering Development, The Making and Unmaking of the Third World. Princeton University Press, 1995.
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, An Introduction. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Harmondsworth: Peregrine, 1977.
Friedman, Matthew. Tara, a Fleshtrade Odyssey. New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1997.
“Girls Trafficking in Sindhupalchowk”: A Situation Analysis Report, ABC Nepal
Gongoli, Geetanjali. “Prostitution, Legalization and Decriminalization, Recent Debates,” Economic and Political Weekly, March 7, 1998.
Liechty, Mark. “Selective Exclusion: Foreigners, Foreign Goods, and Foreignness in Modern Nepali History.” Studies in Nepali History and Society, 2, no. 1 (1997): 5-68.
Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses.” Feminist Review, 30 (1988).
Muluki Ain, 2055: Ashish Pustak Bhandar
Onta, Protoush. “Ambivalence Denied: The Making of Rastriya Itihas in Panchayat Era Textbooks.” Contributions to Nepalese Studies, 23, no. 1 (January 1996): 213-254.
Petchesky, Rosalind Pollack. “The Body as Property: A Feminist Revision.” In Conceiving the New World Order, The Global Politics of Reproduction. University of California Press, 1995.
Pheterson, Gail. “The Category Prostitute in Scientific Inquiry.” The Journal of Sex Research, 27, no. 3 (1990): 397-407.
Pigg, Stacey Leigh. “Inventing Social Categories Through Place: Social Representations and Development in Nepal.” American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, 1990.
Pike, Linnet. “Innocence, Danger and Desire: Representations of Sex Workers in Nepal.” re/productions, no. 2 (1999).
Rajan, Rajeswori Sundar. “The Prostitution Question (s): (Female) Agency, Sexuality and Work.” In Feminist Terrains in Legal Domains. Kali, Delhi, 1996.
SAARC Regional Convention on Combating Trafficking in Women and Children: Draft Report, 1997.
Said, Edward. Orientalism: Western Concepts of the Orient. London: Penguin, 1995.
Sangera, Jyoti. “In the Belly of the Beast: Sex Trade, Prostitution and Globalization.” Discussion paper for the Asia-Pacific Regional Consultation on Prostitution. Bangkok, Thailand: February 17-18, 1996.
Sontag, Susan. On Photography. Doubleday, 1973.
Tickner, J. Ann. Gender in International Relations, Columbia University Press, 1992.
[1] Cheli-Beti: Discourses of trafficking, gender and citizenship in modern Nepal was presented at the conference on Sexualities, Masculinities and Cultures in South Asia: Knowledges, Practices, Popular Culture and the State, Deakins University, Melbourne, Australia (6-8 July 1999). It was published in Sexual Sites, Seminal Attitudes: Sexualities, Masculinities and Culture in South Asia Edited by: Sanjay Srivastava SAGE India 2004
[2] Shadow Report on the Initial Report of the Government of Nepal on the Convention on Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW).
[3] http://www.captive.org/maiti.htm#MAITI NEPAL
[4] “Girls Trafficking in Sindhupalchow: A Situation Analysis Report,” ABC Nepal
[5] The Daily, 17 February 1996
[6] Bangladeshi and Nepali Girls are in the Indian Brothels: Toronto Globe and Mail, reprinted in COMBAT, Vol 1, No 3
[7] Maiti Nepal’s brochure
[8] Indian, Nepali Prostitutes rounded up, Detained in AIDS Raids, Scripps Howard News Service by John Stackhouse, Toronto Globe and Mail
[9] In the Ramayana, Laxman, brother of Ram, is left to guard Sita by his brother. Sita is enticed by a golden deer and demands Laxman get it for her. Laxman is reluctant to leave his sister-in-law to the dangers of the forest but eventually, at her insistence, goes, but only after drawing a line with his bow on her threshold. The line, known as the Laxman Rekha, would provide her with security as long as she did not step outside its boundaries.
[10] Mark Liechty, “Selective Exclusion,” Studies in Nepali History and Society, Vol. 2, No. 1 (1997).
[11] See note 10 above.
[12] A sticky preparation of vermillion, rice and yogurt put on the forehead as a blessing.
[13] “National Festival” of Nepal: Fifteen-day harvest festival around September-October which celebrates the nine Durga goddesses and also bring together the family as a social unit of meaning.
[14] Bechara khaidincha.
[15] Liechty (1997), in his article on selective exclusion of foreigners from the Kathmandu Valley, discusses some of the historical reasons for this “isolation and the efforts to “hold back time”, and how this became “state policies and increasingly state myths.”
[16] Tal Halpern, Report on Bol! mailing list about talk given by Yubraj Sangroula at the British Council Library, Kathmandu, Nepal.
[17] Arturo Escobar, “Power and Visibility: Tales of Peasants, Women and the Environment,” in Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton University Press, 1995).