Stimulation, Segregation and Scandal: Geographies of Prostitution Regulation in British India, between Registration (1888) and Suppression (1923) (original) (raw)
Related papers
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."
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.
History Compass, 2009
The seismic shifts in Indian society which took place over the course of the 19th century have been the focus of a number of studies in recent years. These changes permanently altered the lives and livelihoods of many groups across the socioeconomic spectrum. Among the most dramatically affected were those women who would come to be categorised as ‘prostitutes’. Prior to their inclusion in the category of ‘prostitute’, the women ranged from temple dancers, erudite courtesans and (monogamous) concubines to those women who come closest to our contemporary understanding of ‘prostitute’– working as they did in bazaars or cantonments as sex workers. Yet, in the century before, very few of these groups of women would have considered themselves to be of ‘ill-repute’. These ideas about ‘morality’ and ‘prostitution’ in India were not simply adopted from Europe. Instead, they were born out of a complex process of contestation and negotiation across the subcontinent, involving various parties, from army surgeons to pandits. As this article will argue, analysing the conditions which prompted these changed categories is as important as understanding the political and social implications of the practice of prostitution in India and the empire.
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.
The Indian Prostitute as a Colonial Subject: Bengal 1864-1883
Canadian Woman Studies, 1992
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.