On the rickshaw, in the evening rush hour. An elderly driver, hands on the steering wheel, khaki shirt, marking his station. His neck hesitantly swivels, as if to say something: they have arrived at their destination. An alien territory in the white-washed city. Coquettish beckonings are lined up on fractured doors as street lamps in the narrow alleys. Collapsing buildings constrict ventilation and light. A landlord’s greed is made manifest: two-storeyed houses buried beneath off-balanced extensions of disparate parts and assorted junk. Space is not given but taken. All roads lead to shining highrises looming outside. Redevelopment adverts promise a “World-class Neighborhood.” Around it, leaking pipelines crawl. Ramshackle windows remain shut. Neon lights conceal work. Others gape open, women perched behind rusting bars: bright skirts against the home’s squalor, glittering cleavages, hair bound in jasmine, and kohl-rimmed eyes popping up. Police sirens wail. NGOs offer aid. Houses lean into each other, tight-lipped and huddled, yet a sacrosanct atmosphere emerges. Ganesh pandals rise, temporary altars sprouting where light and air do not. Informality lingers: scrap wood and metal dealers, electronics recycling over carpets on streets, temporary shoe shops crouched beneath fabric awnings, recycled tins stacked as bricks, women spinning on thresholds, cinemas with in-house shrines, intermediate tea shops, perfume-making industry, liquor shops, jeans dyeing on terraces, beedi-industry on pavements, women hunched over tobacco and leaves. Time shapes these rhythms. As dusk thickens, a guided group of tourists uneasily skitters along. Kamathipura stirs.
An anatomical mental map of the dense lanes and low-cost housing of Kamathipura by artist Majid Abidi. All photos and collages courtesy of Majid Abidi.
Kamathipura, India’s most notorious red-light district, stands as a testament to resilience and survival ‒ a culturally heterogeneous and economically vibrant space shaped by generations of migrants, marginalized communities, and especially sex workers. It holds unparalleled iconicity in the discourse of prostitution, spatialising carceral mechanisms that enforce the marginalization and vulnerability of these stigmatized workers, growing manifold well into the 21st century with scarce provisions toward housing, healthcare, education, or labor rights. Due to its central location in Mumbai, after suffering years of stigmatization, physical neglect, and egregious hostility, the area is now a prime land. Kamathipura currently faces neoliberal redevelopment juggernauts that threaten to displace sex workers under the pretext of modernization, banishing them to grievously invisible peripheries and reducing Kamathipura to a sanitized urban landscape that ignores its layered past. Mumbai, formerly Bombay, was once a cluster of seven islands, unified through reclaimed marshland into a fortified port city by the British colonizers. Here, Kamathipura emerged in 1795, settled by lower-caste construction workers from Hyderabad, known as Kamathis. Kamathipura’s distinctive street layout, reflecting a structured approach to urban planning during that period—comprising 14 numbered lanes arranged in a grid-like, orthogonal pattern—is a legacy of its colonial-era planning. Its proximity to the Bombay Port, railway lines, and cantonment areas made it an ideal location for what became known as Lal Bazaar (Red Market), established in the 1880s as a “tolerated zone” for European sex workers. The neighborhood’s existing numbered streets, migrant labor population, and dense, low-cost housing made it easier to marginalize the area, creating a spatially confined zone for sex work, surveillance, and containment. Designed to serve as a “comfort zone” for British officers and sailors, its narrow lanes and enclosed spaces—limiting visibility and movement while reinforcing isolation—concretized this spatial logic of control, driven by colonial fears of contagion and inter-racial mixing.
In Kamathipura, the night pulses with life, crowds thicken, a police car weaves through, and an NGO’s sign watches quietly.
In 1864, the Cantonment Acts were established, and prostitution in British military bases became strictly regulated, with licensed brothels operating under military oversight and catering exclusively to soldiers. To protect soldiers from venereal diseases, the military enforced the Contagious Diseases Acts. As a result, sex workers were registered, licensed, and subjected to mandatory medical exams, and those infected faced forced treatment or imprisonment. Under this regime, sex workers were confined to designated areas, and their movement was heavily restricted. In the brothels of Kamathipura, this is spatialised through pinjras (cages), a grim architectural typology, and a harrowing symbol of confinement and exploitation. With nothing but an exhaust fan, a thin mattress covered in tarpaulin sheets, and curtains that act as partition veils, here is where sex workers were—and in some cases, still do—live and work. The pinjras enforce surveillance, with small, dark, prison-like rooms that deny privacy, safety, and dignity. Rather than enabling agency, these spaces contribute to a system that dehumanizes sex workers. Over the years, Kamathipura continued to be a place where poverty, exploitation, and oppression were rampant. Despite this, it became a hub for a complex array of marginalized communities who forged a survivalist space within the confines. After Independence, the new Indian government failed to prioritize the well-being of these marginalized communities as well, with Kamathipura increasingly becoming stigmatized as a “slum” and a site of extreme social exclusion. By the end of the 20th century, rapid urbanization and a widening influx of the working class in Mumbai fueled the demand for sex work, dramatically altering Kamathipura’s social, political, and legal landscape. The number of Indian sex workers had surged due to a lack of alternative work opportunities, often enabled by violence, and tacit police complicity. “Now, there is one identity. Cheap, dangerous sex,” says a sex worker in the article ‘The Fading Red Light.’ Legislation and social norms reinforced Kamathipura’s image as an immoral, crime-infested, violence-prone neighborhood. This was crystalized with the Immoral Traffic Prevention Act (ITPA) of 1956, which permitted sex work in private spaces but criminalized public solicitation, pimping, brothel operations, organized sex work networks, and operating within 200 yards of a public space. Trafficking networks, brothel managers, and societal oversight sustained the cruel infrastructure of pinjras as symbols of oppression.
Extreme density, makeshift extensions, and crumbling infrastructure—divided and subdivided into tiny tenements—define the tightly confined world of Kamathipura.
Once Asia’s largest and oldest red-light district, Kamathipura remains an overcrowded enclave spanning 16 lanes and 500 crumbling buildings over 100 years old, teetering in neglect with residents trapped in a decaying enclosure of dilapidated living conditions. Kamathipura’s architecture is defined by dense, low-rise structures, many of which are century-old chawls—tenement-style housing—originally built for industrial laborers but later repurposed as brothels and informal residences. The extreme density of these chawls makes private redevelopment of single buildings unfeasible, forcing functions to stack atop each other with encroachments and makeshift extensions: brothels occupy the street levels to lure customers, while upper floors house generations of migrant workers—Kamathis, sweepers, artisans, and shopkeepers—who have adapted the space to their needs. Families of up to ten people often squeeze into 8 x 10 square feet, partitioning rooms, building mezzanines, and stacking lofted sleeping areas to maximize every inch. This peculiar urban condition is rooted in the Maharashtra Rent Control Act of 1947, updated in 1999. Originally intended to protect vulnerable tenants from exploitative landlords, the Act inadvertently froze Kamathipura in time. Landlords, unable to charge market rents, abandoned maintenance, leaving properties to deteriorate. As communities remained in the same spaces for generations, organic urban renewal stagnated, locking Kamathipura in a cycle of physical decay. With Mumbai’s 1991 Development Plan, aimed at promoting private sector participation in real estate by relaxing land regulations, Kamathipura underwent violent fragmentation, trapped between transformation and gentrification. Luxury housing and commercial projects threatened to erase its original inhabitants, but, for developers, Rent Control became a financial roadblock. Redeveloping Kamathipura meant negotiating buyouts with long-term tenants or providing subsidized housing in new projects, cutting into potential profits. Some residents view redevelopment as a chance for better infrastructure, while others fear eviction. “We want redevelopment urgently because we are living on a ventilator. Buildings are falling,” quotes a resident in the digital exhibition Make/Break. Rising distrust between communities has become a significant barrier to broader alliances against displacement and exploitation.
Dilapidated buildings gasp for survival, while promises of a “world-class neighborhood” remain trapped in limbo.
Sex workers see Kamathipura as a rare space of community, while others wish to dissociate from the red-light identity. “This redevelopment will rid us of the ‘daag’ (stain) forever. We will also have bigger and new flats with in-built toilets and open spaces,” says one, while a sex worker laments, “the residents are against us now.” This fragmentation is rooted in competing interests, social stigmas, and historical divisions that redevelopment pressures have aggravated. Ultimately, redevelopment stalled due to financial constraints, low-profit margins, and fragmented consensus, leaving the neighborhood in limbo, partially demolished, abandoned midway, and trapped in a perpetual state of uncertainty. Once home to 45,000 sex workers in 1992, the community dwindled to just 1,700 by 2022, partially due to the rise of AIDS and partially due to the displacement effects of urban renewal. This overcrowded and unsanitary environment creates a claustrophobic form of housing, where residents live in conditions more restrictive than incarceration. By comparison, the United Nations recommends at least 32 square feet per prisoner in a jail cell, while the global minimum standard for long-term housing is 97 square feet per person, a stark testament to Kamathipura’s entrenched spatial injustice.
Dilapidated buildings gasp for survival, while promises of a “world-class neighborhood” remain trapped in limbo.
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