The Everyday Experience of the Working Women in Sonagachi in the Post-pandemic Situation

This chapter explores the everyday experiences of working women in Sonagachi, Kolkata, in the post-pandemic period, foregrounding how livelihood precarity, migration, and gendered labor intersect in one of South Asia’s largest red-light areas. Drawing on sustained fieldwork and oral accounts, this paper challenges both moralistic and celebratory framings of sex work in society by demonstrating the internal stratification, labor hierarchies, and uneven vulnerabilities that structure women’s lives within brothel economies. The chapter shows how the COVID-19 pandemic intensified existing insecurities by disrupting income, increasing debt, and deepening health and sanitation risks, particularly for women in lower-income and transient work arrangements. It situates sex work within broader working-class survival strategies, highlighting how women often enter or re-enter sex work following displacement from menial labor, domestic violence, or the collapse of household economies. Attention is also paid to state interventions, public health regimes, and anti-trafficking discourses, which simultaneously enable limited forms of protection while reproducing surveillance, stigma, and legal insecurity. By centering women’s lived experiences, the chapter argues for understanding Sonagachi not as a homogeneous space of exploitation or empowerment, but as a complex labor landscape shaped by class differentiation, gendered responsibility, and the enduring uncertainties of post-pandemic urban life in contemporary Kolkata and beyond.