Douloti and Jameela: Nationalism, sex work and the question of female agency

This article examines how female sexuality is regulated and politicized in postcolonial India through a comparative reading of Mahasweta Devi’s short story “Douloti the Bountiful” (1995) and Nalini Jameela’s The Autobiography of a Sex Worker (2005). While Devi’s Douloti is a bonded sex worker whose body is ravaged by casteist and capitalist patriarchy, Jameela narrates her self-authored experience as a lower-caste woman who voluntarily enters sex work to survive. Juxtaposing these two narratives reveals how state regulation (or lack thereof) around sex work and bonded labour in India produces contradictory responses to women’s sexual labour — at once condemning it and benefitting from it — thereby reinforcing dichotomies of “good” and “bad” womanhood that sustain nationalist ideals. This article argues that women come to be interpellated into differentiated subject positions — wife/prostitute, devi/veshya — through norms and practices that sustain the patriarchal family unit and facilitate the extraction of surplus labour from subaltern female bodies. While Douloti’s story exposes the brutality of sexual slavery sanctioned by caste and state collusion, Jameela’s narrative complicates abolitionist discourses on sex work by foregrounding agency as a contingent and classed experience. Ultimately, both texts show that the nationalist project depends on the disciplining of female sexuality through formal and informal mechanisms. This article calls for a more nuanced understanding of sex work and feminine agency within the structures of legal ambiguity, economic precarity, and social stigma.