The Once and Future New York: Historical Preservation and the Modern City (original) (raw)
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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.
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.
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.
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."