Way back in 1939, V Shantaram had made a film called Aadmi (Manoos in Marathi) about a cop who falls in love with a prostitute and tries to rescue her from her ignominious life by marrying her. The romance is doomed; still, for the time, it was a bold and progressive story like so many of Shantaram’s films.

Since then, movie heroes fall in love with tawaifs or hookers once in a while, but their noble intentions usually come to naught, unless the woman is — and this is possible in the movies — chaste. Otherwise, the only acceptable solution to the problem is her death. However, the attitude of the middle class writer or filmmaker towards the sex worker is one of fascination and/or discomfort. If they want to be moral police, they want the issue of flesh trade to vanish; if they want to be social reformers, then it’s rescue the women, rehabilitate them, get someone (not us) to marry them and make them ‘respectable’. Occasionally, like these days, the matter of legalising sex work comes up for debate, but nothing happens.