Stimulation, segregation and scandal: Geographies of prostitution regulation in British India, between registration (1888) and Suppression (1923)

Modern Asian Studies

Volumn 46, Issue 6, 2012, Pages 1459-1505

  Legg, Stephen ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NOTTINGHAM   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

CHILD WELFARE; GOVERNANCE APPROACH; HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY; HOMOSEXUALITY; LEGISLATIVE IMPLEMENTATION; MORALITY; POLICY IMPLEMENTATION; PROSTITUTION; REGULATORY FRAMEWORK; SOCIAL HISTORY; STATE ROLE; TRAFFICKING; WOMENS STATUS;

INDIA;

EID: 84870171470     PISSN: 0026749X     EISSN: 14698099     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/s0026749x11000503     Document Type: Article

References (166)

1. See Edwardes, S. M. (1924). Crime in India: a Brief Review of the more Important Offences included in the Annual Criminal Returns with Chapters on Prostitution & Miscellaneous Matters, Humphrey Milford, London. p. 75.
2. Howell, P. (2009). Geographies of Regulation: Policing Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century Britain and the Empire, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. p. 234.
3. Edwardes. Crime in India, p. 90.
4. Howell. Geographies of Regulation.
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6. Ballhatchet, K. (1980). Race, sex and class under the Raj: imperial attitudes and policies and their critics, 1793-1905, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London.
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11. Kumar, M. S. (2005). 'Oriental Sore' or 'Public Nuisance': The Regulation of Prostitution in Colonial India, 1805-1889, in Proudfoot, L. J. and Roche, M. M. (Dis)Placing Empire: Renegotiating British Colonial Geographies, Ashgate, Aldershot; Burlington, VT, pp. 155-174.
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14. Banerjee, S. (1998). Dangerous outcasts: the prostitute in nineteenth century Bengal, Seagull Books, Calcutta.
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17. 'Scalar' is used here to refer to processes that assume, and work to create the impression of, autonomous levels of social and material existence. These usually assume a vertical ontology, that is, of 'higher' (global, state, economic or demographic) realms and processes, with corresponding 'lower' (local, municipal, trade, family) levels. These assumptions can be worked against by investigating the material networks and discursive naming effects through which the impression of scalar processes are created. For a review of the debate over the concept of scale in geography see Legg, S. (2009). Of scales, networks and assemblages: the League of Nations apparatus and the scalar sovereignty of the Government of India, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers NS 34:2, 234-253.
18. For a discussion and deployment ofMalcolm Gladwell's concept of 'tipping point' see Sinha, M. (2006). Specters of Mother India: the global restructuring of an Empire Duke University Press, Durham. p. 1.
19. Levine. Rereading the 1890s
20. Estimated at an average of 25 per cent over the previous 18 years in Madras. Ballhatchet. Race, sex and class under the Raj: imperial attitudes and policies and their critics, 1793-1905, p. 35.
21. Ballhatchet. Race, sex and class under the Raj, p. 40.
22. National State Archives, New Delhi [henceforth NA]/Home(Public)/1869/112- 115A/February 20.
23. NA/Home(Public)/1869/112-115A/February 20.
24. NA/Home(Public)/1869/112-115A/February 20.
25. Wald, E. (2009). From begums and bibis to abandoned females and idle women: sexual relationships, venereal disease and redefinition of prostitution in early nineteenth-century India, The Indian Economic and Social History Review 46:1, 5-25.
26. NA/Home(Public)/1869/202-3/March 27.
27. For further examples see Legg, Governing Prostitution in Colonial Delhi.
28. Ballhatchet. Race, sex and class under the Raj: pp. 40-65.
29. NA/Home(Sanitary)/1877/19-35A/November.
30. Ballhatchet. Race, sex and class under the Raj, pp. 68-82.
31. Kaminsky, A. P. (1979). Morality Legislation and British Troops In Late Nineteenth-Century India, Military Affairs 43:2, 78-84, p. 82.
32. Legg, S. (2010). An intimate and imperial feminism: Meliscent Shephard and the regulation of prostitution in colonial India, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 28:1, 68-94.
33. Banerjee. Dangerous outcasts.
34. Tambe, A. (2006). Brothels as families: reflections on the history of Bombay's kothas, International journal of politics 8:2, 219-242.
35. On the shift from viewing prostitution as a problem of surveillance, as in registered and segregated spaces, to one of security and apparatuses throughout broader society, see Howell, P. (2007). 'Foucault, Sexuality, Geography', in Crampton, J. and Elden, S. Space, Knowledge, and Power: Foucault and Geography, Ashgate, Aldershot, pp. 291-316.
36. Cell, J. W. (1986). Anglo-Indian Medical Theory and the Origins of Segregation in West Africa, The American Historical Review 91:2, 307-335.
37. Arnold, D. (1993). Colonizing the body: state medicine and epidemic disease in nineteenthcentury India, University of California Press, Berkeley, p. 12.
38. These rates had risen from 166 admissions per month in 1873 to 409 in 1892, see Ballhatchet. Race, sex and class under the Raj, p. 80.
39. NA/Home(Police)/1910/3B/February.
40. NA/Home(Sanitary)/1898/737-738A/April.
41. NA/Home(Sanitary)/1898/737-738A/April.
42. NA/Home(Sanitary)/1898/737-738A/April.
43. NA/Home(Sanitary)/1899/207-214/October.
44. NA/Home(Sanitary)/1877/19-35A/November.
45. NA/Home(Sanitary)/1899/207-214/October.
46. NA/Home(Municipalities)/1900/15B/May.
47. The Cantonment Code (1899, XIII) Lahore, Civil and Military Gazette, p. 55.
48. NA/Home(Sanitary)/1899/207-214/October.
49. NA/Home(Legislative)/1901/6-9A.
50. NA/Home(Sanitary)/1899/207-214/October.
51. Central Provinces Municipal Act (1889) section 85.
52. The City of Madras Municipal Act (1884) section 413.
53. Punjab Municipal Act (1891) section 204;
54. Burma Municipal Act (1898) section 181.
55. Bengal Municipal Act (1884) section 352.
56. NA/Home(police)/1901/40-41A/December.
57. NA/Home(Police)/1902/20A/June.
58. NA/Home(Juridical)/1901/13-15B.
59. NA/Home(Legislative)/1901/6-9A.
60. NA/Home(Legislative)/1899/1-8A/January.
61. India Office Records, British Library [henceforth IOR]/P/4479/March 1894/123-124. I am indebted to Jonathan Saha for directing me to these Home (Municipal) proceedings.
62. IOR/P/4881/August 1896/71.
63. NA/Home(Legislative)/1901/6-9A.
64. NA/Home(Police)/1920/24-29A/January.
65. NA/Home(Legislative)/1901/6-9A.
66. Ibid;.
67. Ibid;.
68. Ibid;.
69. NA/Home(Legislative)/1902/15-17A.
70. Also see Tambe. Codes of Misconduct, p. 107.
71. NA/Home(Legislative)/1902/15-17A.
72. Tambe. Codes of Misconduct p. 167.
73. Kidambi, P. (2007). The making of an Indian metropolis: colonial governance and public culture in Bombay, 1890-1920, Ashgate, Aldershot. p. 136.
74. NA/Home(Police)/1903/79-82A/March.
75. Ibid;.
76. Ibid;.
77. Risley is discussed at length in Dirks, N. (2001). Castes of mind: colonialism and the making of modern India, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey.
78. NA/Home(Police)/1919/327B.
79. NA/Home(Police)/1903/20-23A/July.
80. NA/Home(Police)/1904/21-23A/February.
81. Ibid;.
82. Agnes, F. (1999). Law and gender inequality: the politics of women's rights in India, Oxford University Press, New Delhi. p. 58.
83. DA/CC(General)/1938/694.
84. Delhi State Archives/Chief Commissioner's files (General)/1938/694.
85. NA/Home(Police)/1920/24-29A.
86. Ibid;.
87. Fischer-Tiné, H. (2003). 'White women degrading themselves to the lowest depths': European networks of prostitution and colonial anxieties in British India and Ceylon ca. 1880-1914 The Indian Economic and Social History Review 40:2, 163-190, especially p. 187.
88. NA/Home(Police)/1920/24-29A.
89. Women's Library, London [henceforth WL]/3AMS/C/05/03: Alison Neilans, General Secretary of the Association for Moral and Social Hygiene, to Meliscent Shephard,16/4/30.
90. O'Malley, P. (1996). Indigenous governance, Economy and Society 25:3, 310-326.
91. Tambe. Codes of Misconduct p. xiii;
92. Peers, D. M. (1998). Privates off Parade: Regimenting Sexuality in the Nineteenth-Century Indian Empire, The International History Review 20:4, 823-854, p. 826.
93. Dirks, N. (2006). The scandal of empire: India and the creation of imperial Britain, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts; London.
94. Arnold, D. (1994). 'Crisis and contradiction in India's public health', in Porter, D. The history of public health and the modern state, Rodopi, Amsterdam, pp. 335-355, especially p. 335.
95. Rajan, R. S. (2003). The scandal of the state: women, law, and citizenship in postcolonial India, Duke University Press, Durham, North Carolina. p. 49.
96. Peers. Privates off Parade
97. Peers, D. M. (2009). 'The More the Foul Case Is Stirred, theMore Offensive It Becomes: Imperial Authority, Victorian Sentimenality, and the Court Martial of Colonial Crawley', in Agha and Kolsky, E. Fringes of Empire: People, Places and Spaces in Colonial India, Oxford University Press, New Delhi.
98. Rao, A. and Pierce, S. (2006). 'Discipline and the other body: humanitarianism, violence, and the colonial exception', in Discipline and the Other Body: Correction, Corporeality, Colonialism Duke University Press, Durham, pp. 1-35.
99. Kolsky, E. (2010). Colonial Justice in British India:White Violence and the Rule of Law, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. p. 195.
100. Sinha. Specters of Mother India,.
101. Sinha, M. (2000). Mapping the imperial social formation: a modest proposal for feminist history, Signs 25:4, 1077-1082.
102. See Anderson, B. and McFarlane, C. (2011). Assemblage and geography, Area 43:2, 124-127.
103. Duncan, J. S. (1990). The city as text: the politics of landscape interpretation in the Kandyan kingdom, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. p. 89.
104. Dalrymple, W. (2006). The lastMughal: the fall of a dynasty,Delhi, 1857, Bloomsbury, London.
105. Hall, C. (2002). Civilising subjects: metropole and colony in the English imagination, 1830-1867 Polity, Cambridge.
106. Valeska Huber, 'The City of Port Said as a Nodal Point in Networks of Crime and Prostitution around 1900', 8th International Conference on Urban History, Stockholm, 2006.
107. Briggs, L. (2002). Reproducing empire: race, sex, science and US imperialism in Puerto Rico, University of California Press, Berkeley, California. p. 58 on the role of scandal in the regulation of Puerto Rican prostitutes.
108. NA/Home(police)/1901/40-41A/December.
109. Joyce, J. (1922 [1986]). Ulysses, Bodley Head, London. p. 266. Many thanks to Gerry Kearns for the ball of string to this quote.
110. On homosexuality and colonialism in India and beyond see Aldrich, R. (2002). Colonialism and homosexuality, Routledge, London; New York;
111. Arondekar, A. (2009). For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India, Duke University Press, Durham; Peers. Privates off Parade;
112. Vanita, R. (2002) Queering India: same-sex love and eroticism in Indian culture and society, New York; London, Routledge.
113. Foucault, M. (1979). The history of sexuality volume 1: an introduction, Allen Lane, London, p. 43.
114. Hyam, R. (1990). Empire and sexuality: the British experience Manchester University Press, Manchester. p. 123.
115. Bhaskaran, S. (2002). 'The politics of penetration: section 377 of the Indian Penal Code', in Vanita, R. Queering India: same-sex love and eroticism in Indian culture and society, New York; London, Routledge. p. 17.
116. Fischer-Tiné. 'White women degrading themselves to the lowest depths': European networks of prostitution and colonial anxieties in British India and Ceylon ca. 1880-1914, p. 185.
117. NA/Home(Port Blair)/1914/34A.
118. Peers. Privates off Parade, p. 843.
119. NA/Home(Police)/1920/24-29A.
120. NA/Home(Police)/1920/24-29A/January.
121. NA/Home(Police)/1919/327B.
122. Public prostitution in Rangoon: Report to the Association for Moral and Social Hygiene on brothel-keeping, prostitution, segregation and immoral conditions in Rangoon and other towns and stations in Burma (London: AMSH, 1916), p. 8;
123. WL/3AMS/D/37/02 or IOR/L/P&J/6/1448(2987). Henceforth referred to as Public prostitution in Rangoon.
124. For instance: as the centres of sexual corruption in Bloch, I. (1908). The sexual life of our time in its relations to modern civilization, William Heinemann, London. p. 304;
125. as centres for the '. . .arithmetic progress of mutations of sexual intercourse' in Forel, A. (1908). The sexual question: a scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study for the cultured classes, Rebman London; New York. p. 304;
126. and of sites of servitude and entrapment in Ellis,H. (1910 [1925]). Studies in the psychology of sex, vol. VI: sex in relation to society, FA Davis Company, Philadelphia. p. 302.
127. Neville-Rolfe, S. (1924). 'The relationship between venereal disease and the regulation of prostitution', inNCCVDImperial Social HygieneCongress, NationalCouncil for Combating Venereal Diseases, London, pp. 36-55.
128. IOR/L/MIL/7/13902.
129. See Trotter, D. (2008). Dockside Prostitution in South African Ports, History Compass 6:3, 673-690.
130. Fischer-Tiné. 'White women degrading themselves to the lowest depths', p. 172.
131. See Legg. Of scales, networks and assemblages: the League ofNations apparatus and the scalar sovereignty of the Government of India;
132. Metzger, B. (2007). 'Towards an international human rights regime during the interwar years'; the League of Nations' combat of traffic in women and children', in Grant, K., Levine, P. and Trentmann, F. Beyond Sovereignty: Britain, Empire and Transnationalism, c.1880-1950, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke; New York, pp. 54-79.
133. On the cosmopolitan and border transgressing nature of Ceylon see Sivasundaram, S. (2010). Ethnicity, indigeneity, and migration in the advent of British Rule to Sri Lanka, American Historical Review 115:2, 428-452.
134. On the role of the British in blurring the lines between India and Ceylon, through labour migration, see Duncan, J. S. (2007). In the shadows of the tropics: struggles over bio-power in nineteenth century Ceylon, Ashgate, Aldershot.
135. NA/Home(Police)/1903/20-23A/July.
136. WL/3AMS/C/4/1 BOX 93.
137. Levine. Prostitution, race and politics Chapter nine;
138. Tambe, A. (2005). The elusive ingénue: a transnational feminist analysis of European prostitutes in colonial Bombay, Gender and Society 19:2, 160-179; (Pubitemid 40465746)
139. Fischer-Tiné. 'White women degrading themselves to the lowest depths'.
140. NA/Home(Judicial)/1913/6-23A/August.
141. Levine, P. (2000). Orientalist sociology and the creation of colonial sexualities, Feminist Review 65:Summer, 5-21, 11.
142. See Blunt, A. (2005). Domicile and Diaspora: Anglo-Indian Women and the Spatial Politics of Home, Blackwell, Oxford, for the anxieties prompted by Anglo-Indians.
143. Kerr, R. (1886). The Social Evil in Calcutta T. S. Smith, Calcutta.
144. Ibid;., p. 11.
145. 'Quean' originally referred to any woman or female but later came to refer to 'a bold or impudent woman; a hussy; spec. a prostitute.' Oxford English Dictionary (OED), draft revision March 2010, accessed online at http://dictionary.oed.com/.
146. Spirituel, -elle: 'Of a highly refined character or nature, esp. in conjunction with liveliness or quickness of mind' (OED 1989).
147. Anonyma 'A women of doubtful reputation and social standing, upon the outskirts of 'society.' (OED 1989).
148. Drab: '1. A dirty and untidy woman; a slut, slattern. 2. A harlot, prostitute, strumpet.' (OED 1989).
149. Kerr. The social evil in Calcutta, p. 12.
150. Tambe. Codes of Misconduct, p. 67.
151. Copland, I. (1997). The princes of India in the endgame of empire, 1917-1947, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. p. 21.
152. Chatterjee, P. (1989). 'The nationalist resolution of the women's question', in Sangari, K. and Vaid, S. Recasting women: essays in colonial history, Kali for Women, New Delhi, pp. 233-253.
153. MacMunn, G. (1935). Turmoil and Tragedy in India, 1914 and after, Jarrolds, London. p. 91.
154. Josh, S. S. (1977). HindustanGadar Party: a short history, People's Publishing House, New Delhi. p. 67. Iamindebted toMuhammadAli Raza for directingmeto this source.
155. NA/Home(Police)/1914/168-169B/January.
156. For an alternative reading seeNair, J. (2008). 'Imperial reason', national honour and new patriarchal compacts in early twentieth-century India, HistoryWorkshop Journal 66, 208-226.
157. Ibid;.
158. NA/Home(Police)/1912/124B/July.
159. NA/Home(Police)/1914/168-169B/January.
160. Ibid;.
161. NA/Home(Judicial)/1913/6-23A/August.
162. For an alternative reading see Tambe, A. (2009). The state as surrogate parent: legislating nonmarital sex in colonial India, 1911-1929, Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 2:3, 393-427.
163. Rule, P. (1987). 'Prostitution in Calcutta, 1860-1940: the pattern of recruitment', in Pearson, G. and Manderson, L. Class, ideology and women in Asian society, Asian Research Service, Hong Kong.
164. Tambe. Codes of Misconduct, Chapter four.
165. Public prostitution in Rangoon,.
166. Schmitt, C. (1932 [2011]). trans. Matthew G Hannah 'Forms of modern imperialism in international law', in Legg, S. Spatiality, Sovereignty and Carl Schmitt: Geographies of the Nomos, Routledge, London. p. 29-45.