Biswas 1

Stella Chitralekha Biswas

M.Phil in Comparative Literature

Enrollment number: 16301103

Central University of Gujarat

4th May, 2017

Policing the Sexed Body: A Re-inspection of Prostitution in the Colonial Era

“Prostitution is one of our oldest social problems.” (Banerjee 1)

This statement, made by Dr. G. R. Banerjee who is a faculty at the Tata Institute

of Social Sciences, bears a very close resemblance to the highly racist attitude shared by

the British rulers towards native public women in colonial India. The prostitute has

remained a problematic figure since the criminalization of her profession in the

nineteenth century which had denigrated her as basically a repository of disease and vice.

In fact, the very usage of the term “common prostitute” by the British authorities to make

an ambiguous and generalized categorization of temple dancers, courtesans and low-

ranking prostitutes alike led to the circulation of a particular discourse on licit and illicit

sexualities in the Indian socio-cultural scenario. “Though colonial officials often

disagreed on the boundaries of the prostitute category, they sometimes labelled all Indian

women not confined to ‘respectable’ domesticity as prostitutes…” (Hinchy 249) Another

governmental petition of 1892 claimed: “There exists in the Indian community a class of

women commonly known as nautch girls. And that these women are invariably

prostitutes” (Nevile 101). Colonial archives abound in records of the regulation of

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prostitution through forced registration, building up of lock hospitals, imposition of

several legal acts for medical inspection and rehabilitation, fines and penalties for non-

conformity to these strict rules, etc. This paper however seeks to trace an alternative line

of thought with regard to these public women and their regulated bodies by taking into

account certain evidences from selected Indian Mutiny fiction that propose a different

narrative of colonized sexuality. Adopting a historiographical and sociological strategy

to, this paper attempts to recognize sexuality as playing a crucial role in the struggle for

power within the colonial encounter with Indian courtesans or ‘tawaifs’. The bodily,

material and sexual excesses of these women posed the threat of invading not only

physical but also cultural boundaries between the colonizer and the colonized.

EARLY COLONIAL ENCOUNTER WITH THE ‘NAUTCH GIRL’

The ‘nautch girl’ as a term came to be coined through the various British men and

women who witnessed the dance and song performances of this group of public women

in their many travels to India. Although criticized extensively for the indiscriminately

totalizing and limiting the complex cultural nuances and functions of these performers,

there was a general fascination in the West for them, the latter being exoticized in several

travelogues, memoirs, letters, diaries, periodicals and literary writings of English men

and women. There was in fact a widespread interest in scholarly writers, missionaries and

anthropologists to categorically inscribe detailed information with regard to these ‘nautch

girls’, their lifestyles, artistry, performances, variances in class and hierarchies, etc. Thus,

the category of ‘nautch girls’, notwithstanding the crisis it encapsulates in its inadvertent

etymology, became an important part of the discursive knowledge produced about the
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Orient by the British. In the plethora of British accounts these women were recognized a

constituting an alternate model of Indian womanhood, different from that of passive

domesticity and rather enjoying a substantial amount of freedom, property rights,

education and artistic talent, and even a considerable amount of influence in society.

Abbe Dubois remarked that “The courtesans [or devadasis] are the only women in India

who enjoy the privilege of learning to read, to dance, and to sing. A well-bred and

respectable woman would for this reason blush to acquire any of these accomplishments”

(Dubois 586). This “disseminated knowledge about the matricentric empowerment of

tawaifs” (Jagpal 42) highlighted the elitist status and lucrative professional opportunities

of these women. There were also significant references to the sexual allure of the ‘nautch

girls’ who used it to extend and fulfill their own private interests. Women like Mrs.

Martha Sherwood wrote about the obscenity and pernicious influence of these ‘nautch

girls’ upon young European men (Sherwood 405-06). In the overall consensus regarding

these public women, there lingered amazement on the part of these colonizers because the

unprecedented agency of the former did not seem to tally with the colonial logic of the

Indian women being backward in condition.

CHANGE IN THE IMPERIAL ATTITUDES TOWARDS PUBLIC WOMEN

“What men call gallantry, and gods adultery,

Is much more common when the climate’s sultry…

Love rules the camp, the court, the grove─ for love

Is heaven, and heaven is love” (Byron, Don Juan)

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The above lines borrowed from Ronald Hyam’s work Empire and Sexuality: The British

Experience (1990) remarkably delineate the insatiable sexual appetite of the European

man, especially outside Britain. In fact, concubinage, interracial marriages and keeping of

mistresses were quite rampant in colonial India. Indian courtesans were regarded as far

better than their European counterparts on account of the former’s cleanliness, lavish

apparels, temperance, talent for dance and singing, etc. Captain Sellon had commented

upon Indian courtesans: “They understand in perfection all the arts and wiles of love, are

capable of gratifying any tastes, and in face and figure they are unsurpassed by any

women in the world…It is impossible to describe the enjoyment I experienced in the

arms of these sirens. I have had English, French, German and Polish women of all grades

of society since, but never, never did they bear a comparison with those salacious,

succulent houris of the far [sic] East” (Hyam 89) Interracial relationships went on to

become a policy of the East India Company in the interests of building up the company

since the mixed race Anglo-Indians could be utilized for territorial expansion and growth

of the company’s rule. However, by the end of the eighteenth century, such liaisons came

to be frowned upon with the influence of the Evangelical and utilitarian ideologies upon

the colonial rulers. A certain Captain Mundy writes in 1832: “…there is some danger of

[the courtesans] carrying the suppleness of their body…beyond the graceful and even

bordering on the disgusting. The situation of a gentleman in this case is irksome and

uncomfortable…[sitting] in constant dread lest these fair liberales in morality should

commit some, perhaps unintentional solecism against decency” (Dyson 345). In order to

firmly establish British rule in India, the distance between the ruler and the ruled was

created through various references to the “…temptation of ‘habitual indolence,

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dissipation and licentious indulgence’, the ‘peculiar depravity’ and endemic corruption of

Indian life” (Hyam 117). Fearing the overthrow of British rule by the increasing number

of Anglo-Indians who had the potential to officer the native Indians, or of the increasing

claims of the former and their native widow mothers to the patronage of the Company,

the colonial administrators made severe attempts to phase out interracial or cross-cultural

relations in the name of “making empire respectable” (Ghosh, “Gender…” 25). Growing

anxieties about race, sex and the legitimacy of rule in the colonial era increased in the

aftermath of the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857 and the greater tension in the relationship

between the British and the Indians. The gradual process of military and medical pre-

occupation with venereal disease paved the ground for the moral denigration and

criminalization of public women who were all indiscriminately grouped together under

the misnomer of ‘prostitutes’ with severe longstanding legal and social repercussions.

“The women’s separation from what was deemed ‘respectable’ Indian society and their

insertion into a ‘criminal’ category was crucial to surgeons’ and administrators’ attempts

to justify the invasive and socially disruptive methods they proposed to control venereal

disease among the European soldiery” (Wald 6).

CRIMINALIZATION OF PROSTITUTION

Since the revisal of the racial policies in the 1790s by the contemptuous

Governor-General, Wellesly the dynamics of social intercourse between the British and

the Indians had changed considerably. Coupled with this was the moral, spiritual and

professional reforms ushered in by the Protestant and Evangelical missionaries which

sought to distance the ruler and the ruled not only culturally and politically but also
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psycho-sexually. With the wiping out of concubinage and long-term interracial

relationships, prostitution was viewed as a much more profitable and desirous temporary

liaison. The high maintenance costs that were seen as normally associated with marriage

instigated the flourishing of low-rate prostitution but also led to the increase in venereal

infection among the British soldiers. The colonial administrators perceived this to be a

severe blow to their strength due to both the heavy costs incurred in the treatment of such

diseases and their fatal potential leading to the loss of manpower. The increased

dependence of the British upon their army especially in the years following the Mutiny of

1857 led to the greater concern for the health and virility of the soldiers. “…Thus, even

whore-mongering among the ranks had to be organized in accordance with the code of

British Army discipline! Like military drill, or maintenance of knife-edge creases on their

uniform, or honouring of ranks in order of precedence, fornication, also, had to conform

strictly to a new set of rules from the mid-19th century. While the administration took

pains to train the Tommies…it simultaneously began to groom a special class of Indian

prostitutes who would feel the need of the British soldiers according to the new norms”

(Banerjee 79). The need for controlling the spread of venereal disease was actualized in

the criminalization of prostitution and the establishment of rigid control over their bodies.

Although venereal disease had come down from the Portuguese to India, “…along with

the expansion of British imperialism, from the late eighteenth century onwards, the

British officials recognized VD as an outcome of the sexual indulgences between the

prostitutes and the soldiers─ an area that was ‘most troubling’ and ‘embarrassing’ to the

authorities” (Ballhatchet 91). In the colonial discourses, native prostitutes were

constructed as the sole carriers of syphilis while the British soldiers were mere hapless
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victims of his natural desires and therefore required protection from the ill outcomes of

his carnal indulgences. The body of the native prostitute was perceived as threatening the

very existence of the British Empire through the contagion of disease. This led to a

restructuring of the traditional identity of the prostitute and her profession “within the

purview of the state on newer terms wherein she came to be looked at and defined

through the categories of imperial hygiene…She now emerged as a criminal at the center

stage of the colonial rule─ as one infected colonizer and de-masculinized him” (Mishra

90).

The Cantonment Act of 1864 and the Contagious Acts between 1864 and 1869

sought to regulate prostitution by the establishment of ‘chaklas’ in the bazaars of various

military cantonments which would cater to the sexual appetite of the soldiers through

inspected, sanitized prostitutes. Registration and licensing of prostitutes, their periodical

medical examinations and treatments in specially-designed lock hospitals, maintenance of

proper hygiene and cleanliness, etc. were rigorously pursued in league with these new

laws. Little consideration was however given to the indignation of these women to the

humiliating or painful situations in which they were put during their routine check-ups

and their mal-handling by doctors, police constables or the paid native middlemen

assisting the colonial authorities in efficiently carrying out their mission.

THE IMPERIAL UNDERSTANDING OF NATIVE SEXUALITY

Janaki Nair rightly observes that colonial laws “built walls between the sexuality

of women in the familial and extra-familial domains” (Nair 150). Thus the normative
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model was that of domesticity while the women who fell out of it were devalued and

morally condemned. Homosexuality, prostitution, concubinage, entertainers, etc. were

clearly prohibited and excluded by law. “The ‘lax morals’ of Indian society became a

staple colonial discourse, and the tropical climate was said to conspire with the so-called

innate corruptibility of Indians to produce widespread depravity” (Tambe 13). Imperialist

claims for the moral inferiority of Indian civilization sought supported in several proofs,

one of them being prostitution which was regarded as an instance of native ‘barbarity’.

Colonial laws institutionalized the dichotomous binary between the prostitute and the

bourgeois ideal of domestic womanhood. It is interesting to note that although

prostitution was shamed and criminalized but it was not abolished entirely. Regulated

prostitution was seen as the most effective means to provide miscegenation or interracial

alliances as well as channelize sexual labour to becoming an additional economic impetus

for the British Empire. Victorian rules regarding sexual restrictiveness and a consensus of

the elitist Brahminical standards regarding purity overlapped to create a strict monitoring

of sexuality in general and prostitution in particular. Sumanta Banerjee is of the opinion

that the Victorian era in England had a paranoid concern with the human body and its

safeguard against filth and contagion. Thus, along with its ironical concern for

maintaining purity standards, it created a market for commercial sex in order to facilitate

colonial expansion through regulation of sexuality and state-sanctioned organization of

prostitution in India. “As the Colonial Empire was reaching its maturity with the increase

in the inequality between the colonizers and the native women that had the elements of

eroticism, fantasy and ‘relationship’ were all gone...” (Banerjee 72). The legal acts

enforced for the control of prostitution served a dual-fold function─ that of assuring the
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health and longevity of the soldiers as well as harnessing sexual labour with commercial

motives of “optimal functioning and productivity” (Banerjee 73).

What is generally glossed over in this entire “politics of sexual conduct and its

consequences” (Arondekar 151) is the equation of power that was constantly negotiated

between the prostitute and the white male. Sumanta Banerjee says: “What we see about

sexual practices in the context of prostitution in the late colonial period is about

exercising a power relation or domination of imperialist male sexuality to dominate the

female colonial sexuality, i.e., to say sex being used symbolically and physically as well

as deliberately as a mechanism of control and domination” (Banerjee 87). The unbridled

sexuality of the public women became a cause for genuine anxiety of the imperialists on

account of its potential to subvert their racial and cultural hierarchy. A close reading of

some selected Mutiny fiction testifies to the fact that the courtesan was not merely a

passive victim of regulated prostitution but possessed a subtle power in the form of her

sexuality, which in turn she used to exploit and resist colonial and patriarchal structures

imposed upon her body. Writing about the “dancer’s diseased and atavistic sexuality”

(Bhattacharya 135) was coupled with “discursive efforts to rule and contain that body”

(Bhattacharya 136). However, these writings also reveal certain slippages whereby the

carefully constructed tropes of racial and sexual hierarchies are subverted in the subtle

power-play between the colonizer and the colonized.

ANALYSING SELECTED MUTINY FICTION ALONG FOUCAULDIAN LINES OF

THOUGHT REGARDING SEXUALITY, POWER AND KNOWLEDGE

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In his History of Sexuality: An Introduction (1900), Michel Foucault talks about

the Victorian age as not merely a period of repressing sexuality but rather that investing a

great deal of intense attention to the care and protection of the body. This was done

chiefly for the preservation of selfhood and identity formation among the bourgeois

classes: “The science of the body ascended in importance, and along with it strategies and

discourses concerned with sexuality, which Foucault together terms an apparatus of

sexuality” (Tambe 17). Knowledge and control of sexuality was seen as enhancing a

better administration of the masses by the colonial rulers. Thus, the figure of the

prostitute with her deviant sexuality became a pathological target of legislative power and

corrective measures. Foucault however also proposes that these prohibitions upon

sexuality should not be seen merely as barriers to a particular activity but rather as

mechanisms enforcing the penetration or evasion of power: “Laws on prostitution may be

seen as repressing prostitutes while keeping intact a measure of freedom, thus inciting

their violation” (Tambe 19). The prostitute had suddenly become the centre of focus for

medical inspections and legislative discourses, thereby ironically endorsing her figure

with vital importance and concern and also providing scope for several instances of

protest and resistance against strict policing. Although it does not appear explicitly in

official records, yet the sexuality of the prostitute was viewed as one of her supreme

means of power that she wielded to her own advantage: her “influence steals upon the

senses of those who come within its charmed circle not unlike that of an intoxicating

drug” (Sherwood 422). The sexuality of the prostitute which had been one of her most

effective tools of power was recognized by the imperialists as dangerously threatening

and destabilizing to their cultural and sexual hierarchy as well as colonial rule. Thus, this
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crucial knowledge about the sexuality of prostitutes came under the inspection and

regulation of the British, leading to a constantly negotiable relationship of power between

the two. And as Foucault pointed out, this power relationship was always accompanied

by resistance. The prostitute’s body became sexualized through the very forms of power

that appeared to extract its sexuality and it also provided the scope for the prostitute to

resist such policing through various acts such as avoiding routine medical checkups by

bribing the authorities and middle-men, evading court summons, as well as using their

sexuality in particular instances to influence the colonizers in her favour.

In this context, the most outstanding figure of the public woman that comes to

mind is Lalun, the courtesan figuring in Rudyard Kipling’s short story ‘On the City Wall’

(1892) whose cleverness and wit is more palpably emphasized upon. “Lalun, the

narrative’s enchanting and shrewd courtesan, is covertly embroiled in anti-British politics

and her salon is a site of political ferment, a meeting place for diverse people who

‘assemble in Lalun’s little room to smoke and talk’” (Sen 48). Lalun is depicted as using

her wily charms to manipulate an unsuspecting British admirer to further her own anti-

colonial motives. The fact that the writer reverently refers to Lalun as a “member of the

most ancient profession of the world” (Kipling 294) seems to suggest that the courtesan’s

salon provides a scope for gaining knowledge through sex. The very geographical

positioning of Lalun’s room with its expansive overview of the city highlights its

strategic potential to transform from being merely a space of sexual exchanges to

becoming one of knowledge as well as ‘a site of male homosociality” (Arondekar 151).

The sexual prowess of Lalun and the possible threat it posed to the imperialists is

expressed very candidly: the “...beauty of Lalun was so great that it troubled the hearts of
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the British government, and caused them to lose their peace of mind” (Kipling 296).

Although Kipling ironically plays upon the colonial, racialized understanding of native

women’s sexuality as linked to venereal diseases and moral depravity, yet the linkages

between her sexuality and knowledge cannot be ruled out at all. In fact, one of the major

characters in the story, the native Wali Dad says to the white narrator: “Ask the pearl and

she will show you how much she knows of the news of the City and the Province. Lalun

know everything…Can you, with your telegrams and newspapers, do better?” (Kipling

301). Lalun appears to a native manifestation of the Jungian ‘wise old man’ archetype,

only in this it is a woman. Wali Dad further proclaims in one of his many songs: “Lalun

is Lalun, and when you have said that, you have only come to the Beginnings of

Knowledge” (Kipling 299). Lalun is not merely a sexualized body or a carrier of venereal

disease in Kipling’s narrative but her sexuality “…shoulders the promise of the archive,

slanting her offerings through the semantic entanglements of desire and knowledge. To

know Lalun is to know India” (Arondekar 154). Although it is repeatedly told that to

know Lalun meant gaining knowledge about the native mind, yet the courtesan’s little

room remains a befuddling site for exchanges of power. The narrator may have gained

access to the anti-colonial activities of the native mutineers through Lalun’s eyes but he is

not able to comprehend their import on his own terms. His vision is coloured by Lalun’s

knowledge of the Mutiny and at the end he realizes that he had been duped after all in

aiding the courtesan’s anti-colonial stratagems. “But I was thinking I had become Lalun’s

Vizier after all” (Kipling 331) reflects the narrator’s hopeless aspirations for the native

woman’s good will whose sexuality overpowers his imperialistic ambitions, making him

a mere pawn in her hands.

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Flora Annie Steel’s novel The Potter’s Thumb (1894) revolves around the figure

of the wily courtesan, Chandni who is the “brains” (Steel 40) behind all the anticolonial

conspiracy against the British government. Chandni is portrayed within the narrative as

“…a contaminant who ruptures the construction of physical and cultural boundaries very

chance she gets─ specifically through her uncontainable sounds and smells, and her

mimicry of English rituals” (Jagpal 100). Her sensuality however contains a spirit of

determination and rebellion as well as sense of asserting her ties with distinct Mughal

past. Critics such as Karen Huenemann condemn her as a “malicious woman” who

“connives for power” (Huenemann 239), thereby sidelining the fact that it is the

courtesan here that is at the helm of the power-equation between the colonizer and the

colonized. Jenny Sharpe had observed in her Allegories of Empire: The Figure of the

Woman that “Contrary to Western stereotypes of the passive Oriental woman, Indian

women [including Indian courtesans] are spoken of in mutiny reports as the worst

offenders of the rebel crimes” (Sharpe 74). There are numerous reports regarding the

instigation and rebellion of courtesans and other public women during the mutiny era,

their salons or ‘kothas’ being the site of interesting and more than often clandestine

political meetings and discussions. Similarly, Chandni is depicted as the stereotypical

female rebel within the fin-de-siècle British imaginary, with her plots to not only thwart

the British imperialistic missions but also by her infiltrating presence within the domains

of the Anglo-Indian home whereby she threatens to blur racial and cultural boundaries.

What is crucially important however in this highly sexualized figure is the intrinsic

knowledge she possesses: she “know[s] the ways and thoughts of these white people”

(Steel 173). Her knowledge about the hidden truths and secrets of the most private lives
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of English men and women give her the power to negotiate with her own interests which

correspond with anti-colonial motives. Chandni is the one who wields power over the

respectable white lady, Gwen Boynton who “…succumbs to Chandni’s demands,

becoming her accomplice, committing one anti-colonial act after another that, if

discovered, would bring her irrevocable public shame” (Jagpal 118). Chandni’s spectral

presences and invisible appearances invade and undermine the rigid British surveillance

systems implemented in the post-mutiny era in India. In this novel, interestingly enough,

the public woman whose body is otherwise open to the public gaze, subverts such a

power-equation by defying the imperialistic desire for panoptican knowledge of the

natives. It is the sexualized native courtesan who “…emerges as the sly, skillful voyeur

who invades the most private of British places (the home) to retrieve knowledge and to

gain mastery” (Jagpal 120). Throughout the novel, Chandni manipulates the servants

according to her own anti-colonial schemes in order to either gain or suppress or even

skew crucial information about the private quarters of the English home. Her repeated

invasions into the innermost sanctity of the Anglo-Indian home are anxiety-provoking to

the imperial mindset. She herself proclaims: “Lo! Ask thy servants who Chandni the

courtesan is, and what she has been─ aye, and will be, if she chooses!” (Steel 258). At

the end of her intimidating and manipulating mechanisms, she “secures political,

financial and social power of her own, serving as adviser to the new ruler of Hodinuggur”

(Jagpal 130).

Another crucial figure that plays upon the trope of the empowered ‘tawaif’ is Peri

Buksh in Philip Meadows Taylor’s well-known mutiny-novel Seeta (1872). In this novel

however, the courtesan is deliberately portrayed in a pro-British role, a loyal supporter

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and secret informer of the British in order to justify that colonial rule as desirable by

several natives in India. This enchanting courtesan is said to have originated “from a

‘good family’ of dancers and singers, the oldest in the province and most renowned”

(Taylor 98). Taylor also goes on to say that, “The family of the Peri were therefore

esteemed ‘highly respectable’, and she, by hereditary right, was the head of the district

guild of ‘tawaifs’, or dancers, and thus possessed considerable influence and authority”

(Taylor 99). This establishes the social, economic and political power that the courtesan

held in her society, a fact well known to the writer who was knowledgeable enough about

the courtesan tradition in India on account of his stay at Hyderabad for a considerable

period of time. Peri Buksh had managed to maintain her past elite status and property

rights, continuing her tradition even till the present day: “Centuries ago, her progenitors

had sung and danced before the kings of Malwa and Khandesh who had invested the

family with privileges and endowed them with lands” (Taylor 99). The overwhelmingly

sensuous courtesan had a “supple figure of exquisite proportions, which she well knew

how to use in her dances” (Taylor 100). She uses her sexual allure to routinely spy on the

natives who attend her entertaining performances, in order to gather information about

the Mutiny for the British. Although she is cast into the mould of the ‘loyal native

woman’ on purpose by the writer, yet what should also be realized is that she is a woman

who possesses knowledge that is so crucial for the imperial rulers. Her native sexuality

becomes her most effective tool of power which she uses to secure an important position

amongst the imperialists who look up to her as a reliable source of information and

knowledge. She is strategically posited alongside Seeta, the protagonist of the novel, who

is the perfect exemplary of native domestic passivity. Unlike Seeta who is portrayed as
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the self-sacrificing life, giving up her life for the sake of both her husband as well as

maintain the racial purity of the Empire, Peri Buksh is very much aware of her crucial

relevance to the proper functioning of the imperial rule. The eroticized public woman,

although shown as a complete British loyalist, becomes the body possessing power

through her native knowledge, making her not a condemned figure but rather

indispensable for the British.

CONCLUSION

Prostitution was one of the many areas which were not left out in the massive

shift that occurred in the socio-cultural, political and economic scenario with the advent

and establishment of British rule in India. “The creation of a ‘prostitute caste’ in the

mythology in the nineteenth century was vital to administrators’ attempts to justify the

socially and physically invasive methods of venereal disease control which they

proposed” (Wald 10). These subtly coercive methods of regulating the sexualized body of

the public woman however paved the path for several instances of resistances and

subversions of power against such stringent criminalization. Public women struggled to

retain their previous liberties and social status through various acts of resistance against

patriarchal colonial power structures. The coercive power of the imperialists that tried

desperately to suppress public women paradoxically gave rise to new debates and

ambiguities with regard to sexuality, nationalism and the position of the latter in the

various bourgeois reform agendas (especially those surrounding the “women’ question”)

at the turn of the nineteenth century. The seemingly more liberated status of the public

woman within the imperial and nationalistic paradigms can be traced in her sexuality
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which is not mere physical sensuality but a deeper extension of her innate knowledge and

power. This is aptly summed up in these lines from Flora Annie Steel’s novel, Voices in

the Night: A Chromatic Fantasia (1900): “We of the bazaar lead the world by the nose”.
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