The Indian Prostitute as a Colonial Subject: Bengal 1864-1883 (original) (raw)
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Indian prostitute as a colonial subject Bengal 1864-1883
Reproductions, 1999
Bengal 1864-1883 by Ratnabali Chatterjee the Crimean War, when the alarming numbers of British soldiers suffering from venereal diseases were publicized. The military logic for the Contagious Diseases Act in India was made clear by the Quartermaster General's memorandum of 14th June 1886.
University of Nottingham Email: stephen.legg@nottingham.ac.uk This paper explores the regulation of prostitution in colonial India between the abolition of the Indian Contagious Diseases Act in 1888 and the passing of the first Suppression of Immoral Traffic Act in 1923. It challenges the commonly held assumption that prostitutes naturally segregated themselves in Indian cities, and shows that this was a policy advocated by the Government of India. The object was to prevent the military visiting these segregated areas, in the absence of effective Cantonment Regulations for registering, inspecting, and treating prostitutes. The central government stimulated provincial segregation through expressing its desires via demi-official memoranda and confidential correspondence, to which Rangoon and Bombay responded most willingly. The second half of the paper explores the conditions, in both India and Ceylon, that made these segregated areas into scandalous sites in the early twentieth century. It situates the brothel amongst changing beliefs that they: increased rather than decreased incidents of homosexuality; stimulated trafficking in women and children; and encouraged the spread of scandalous white prostitutes ‘up-country’, beyond their tolerated location in coastal cosmopolitan ports. Taken alongside demands that the state support social reform in the early twentieth century, segregation provided the tipping point for the shift towards suppression from 1917 onwards. It also illustrates the scalar shifts in which central-local relations, and relations between provinces, in government were being negotiated in advance of the dyarchy system formalized in 1919.(Online publication March 21 2012)
Social History Volume 34, Issue 4, 2009, 2009
This paper explores the social and governmental geographies of colonial Delhi, India. It seeks contrasts and comparisons between two periods in the city’s history. The first period is delimited by the “Mutiny” of 1857 and the transfer of the capital of British India to the city in 1911. The second period ends in 1947 with Indian independence and marks Delhi’s time as part of the capital region. The focus of study across these periods is the way in which governmental rationalities were devised to deal with the biopolitical problem of the prostitute. The first period saw a focus on disciplining prostitutes and registering brothels so as to protect the military from venereal disease. The second period saw an increasing focus on the health risks that prostitutes posed to the broader population, and the emergence of extra-governmental agencies that sought to implement programmes of social and moral hygiene in Delhi. Across both periods, Delhi was shaped by national and international forces, both within and without government, yet the social geographies of the city bequeathed legacies of the nineteenth century to the interwar era that international hygienists had to negotiate.
Prostitution and the Ends of Empire: Scale, Governmentalities and Interwar India
2014
Officially confined to red-light districts, brothels in British India were tolerated until the 1920s. Yet, by this time, prostitution reform campaigns led by Indian, imperial, and international bodies were combining the social scientific insights of sexology and hygiene with the moral condemnations of sexual slavery and human trafficking. These reformers identified the brothel as exacerbating rather than containing "corrupting prostitutes" and the threat of venereal diseases, and therefore encouraged the suppression of brothels rather than their urban segregation. In this book, Stephen Legg tracks the complex spatial politics surrounding brothels in the interwar period at multiple scales, including the local, regional, national, imperial, and global. Campaigns and state policies against brothels did not just operate at different scales but made scales themselves, forging new urban, provincial, colonial, and international formations. In so doing, they also remade the boundary between the state and the social, through which the prostitute was, Legg concludes, "civilly abandoned."
Guarding The Female Body: The Contagious Disease Act Of 19th Century British India
Ijcrt, 2024
The Contagious Disease Act was a series of legislative measures enacted in 19th-century colonial India and later in England, Scotland, and Ireland. These acts aimed to combat sexually transmitted diseases, particularly syphilis and gonorrhoea, by implementing mandatory medical examinations and treating women on the street. The rationale behind these acts was to protect the health of the military by preventing the spread of sexually transmitted infections. However, the act specifically targeted women involved in prostitution, largely ignoring the role of men in spreading the disease. This paper examines the unique history of prostitution in 19th-century colonial India, focusing on the intersection of legal, social, and moral dimensions under British rule. It explores the implementation of the Contagious Diseases Acts, which introduced Victorian moral values into Indian law, aimed at controlling female sexuality and venereal diseases among British troops. The analysis highlights the complex dynamics of power, gender, and class, revealing how these laws affected the social standing of women engaged in prostitution and the broader implications for Indian society. Through a critical examination of colonial and indigenous responses, this study underscores the lasting impact of colonial legal frameworks on contemporary social and legal challenges in India, contributing to a deeper understanding of the colonial legacy on gender and morality.
India of the nineteenth century could be taken as one of the most important and exciting periods for studying colonial laws and the logic (or the illogicality) of events that followed thereafter. The sheer density of events and the actors who peopled this 'colonial theatre' make an interesting read of the many 'sub-texts' and 'subject formations' that shaped up categories, identities, and relationships along the course of discourse on sexuality, class, gender and racial lines. The rugged contours of history and historiography in the past have unravelled the entangled and protean relationship between the metropole and the colonies and between the 1 (a) The term 'public women' meant those women who had left the household that is the private sphere or the sacred sanctum-sanctorum of the house and were out in the public sphere. This was a phenomenon specially true for women during the colonial period so much so that it became a metaphor for 'prostitutes' by the British as well as the Western educated high caste Indian social reformers. A reference to the etymology of this term is available in the book by S. M. Edwardes, 'Crime in British India', ABC Publishing House, New Delhi, Reprint, 1983. (b) Another rendition can also be seen in the Anglicized salutation 'baazar women' or 'women in the streets, or of 'manly women' or else 'fallen women'. 2 (a) The term 'Prostitute' comes from the Latin 'prostituere-utum' meaning 'to set up for sale'. The origin of this word has been taken from Sumanta Banerjee's book ' Dangerous Outcast: The Prostitute in Nineteenth Century Bengal' Seagull Books, Calcutta, 2000.