Embezzlement of Equity and Rights: Government Acts that monitored Livelihood of Prostitutes

Article Written By EIH Researcher And Writer

Digantika Daschowdhury

Abstract

Anxiety about the intemperance and misbehaviour of the European soldiery in Nineteenth century India prompted a raft of regulations which imposed a punitive regime on those living and working in and around the cantonments, especially brought upon women prostitutes. This article specifically aims to throw light on the circumstances that developed as a result of Cantonment act impositions on a discrete societal realm. Not just Cantonment act but Contagious Disease Act inflicted unjust regulations also. Once a dignified stance now lay in shambles as a result of laws and regulations inflicted upon them aeons ago to curtail their free will and livelihood owing to colonial military benefits. Alongside scrutiny of Cantonment acts the article thoroughly assess and evaluates prostitution milieu. A major question arises that whether such inequitable laws were thrusted on prostitutes simply because they were women or was the government extremely wary about their army as their robustness and future depended on cavalry. There is a great paucity of information in this respect because of probable restrictions foisted in historical documentation.

Introduction

From the mid-nineteenth century the existence of a large number of native prostitutes in the British military cantonments confirmed the widespread prevalence of state-authorised prostitution in colonial India. The colonial administration induced new laws that tried to restrict prostitution as a practise exclusively for the service of British military men and also made it a sanctioned part of military establishment. Consequently, a new form of regulated military prostitution evolved that radically changed the nature of prostitution as it used to be in pre-colonial period.

Exploring how the advent and consolidation of British colonialism changed the definition, meaning and practise of prostitution is a necessary starting point for understating the social possie of women workers. By the end of nineteenth century, colonial governance of commercial sex had changed from restricted inter-community mobility to legislative and biopolitical mechanisms in preventing diseases within British military cantonments. The Cantonment Act of 1864 structured and regulated prostitution in British military bases, providing for compulsory registration and health checks for women who served British soldiers. Military concerns for regulating prostitution also affected governance of civilian spaces, long after the Indian Contagious Disease Act was repealed.

These intense legislative deliberations created a less amendable environment for prostitutes within the cantonment and subsequently led to their ejection from military spaces, and hence from textual archives and research. Between 1899 and 1913, prostitutes in urban spaces came to be defined as an ‘urban’ problem, while segregationist legislative and administrative discourses had the material or social impact of casting brothels as scandalous zones: sites for perversion, sodomy and trafficking.

GOVERNMENT ACTS THAT ADMINISTERED LIVELIHOOD OF PROSTITUTES 

In her ‘re-reading of the 1890s debate’ about India’s Cantonment Regulations, Philippa Levine charted out the spatial crisis that the debate provoked regarding prostitutes who had been ejected from military compounds. The Cantonment Act (XXII of 1864) was passed in response to the Royal Commission into the Sanitary State of the Army of India (1863), which had documented high levels of venereal diseases amongst British soldiers in India. Large numbers of British military were arriving in India to increase their ratio to Indian troops, following the uprising of 1857, and they needed to be kept healthy to guarantee the security of the Raj. The Cantonment Act provided for the registration and inspection of prostitutes who served British soldiers. Ballhatchet has shown that these women were registered within the cantonment, examined fortnightly, and detained in a lock hospital if infected.

This act was, however, confined within a four-mile radius of the cantonment, prompting consideration within a few years of an Indian version of the British Contagious Diseases Acts for cities without major cantonments. A Home Department circular was issued on 24th July 1867 to the governments of Burma, Bombay, Madras and Bengal to solicit opinion on the prevalence of syphilitic disease amongst sailors at Indian ports and the best means to prevent it. The consensus was for legislation, but the resulting correspondence revealed a variety of opinions regarding segregation. An analysis of this discussion provides a route into considering the origins of segregation as a spatial solution to the problem of prostitution, one that was subjacent to the more commonly acknowledged geographies of registration associated with the Contagious Diseases Act. 

A note from Bengal argued that localizing prostitutes in a particular quarter would produce greater ‘…scandals and evils’ than the present flaunting of vice in Calcutta. A submitted note by Dr. T. Farquhar suggested that while in England the prostitute was in an outcaste state, in India ‘…. the condition of the women is far less degraded, and their influence in the community often considerable, so that unwise interference would be frequently resented even by the influential classes of people. This reflects the extent to which the term ‘prostitute’ was still making its awkward transition from Europe to India. Farquhar’s comments would have been referring to what came to be distinguished as ‘courtesans’, who would later be categorized with prostitutes.

In 1888 the Indian Contagious Diseases Act was withdrawn but a new Cantonment Act (XIII of 1889) was erected in its place, allowing the expulsion from a cantonment of anyone refusing treatment for a contagious disease. Debates about the coercive elements of the latter led to revisions in 1895, 1897 and 1899. These regulations prohibited prostitutes from residing in regimental, but not central, bazars and did allow the inspection of women under suspicion of disease, leading to further anti-regulations campaigns. What the Cantonment Act and the furore surrounding it created was a less and less amenable environment for the prostitute within the cantonment, just as urban expansion, social change and commoditized economies began to accelerate across India at the turn of century. Harassment of prostitutes had driven them from the cantonment, but it has also driven them from historiography of twentieth-century India―their ejection from military space marking her textual exclusion from our archives and research. Following the prostitute into the galis and bazars of the new century necessitates narratives not just of her changing culture and domestic arrangements, but also of the regulations that sought to bring her back within the purview of the colonial state.

Conclusion

By the end of nineteenth century, attitudes in India appear to have reached a tipping point regarding the toleration of prostitution, trafficking, and segregated brothels. The Secretary of State for India (the Earl of Kimberley) and the Viceroy (the Marquess of Lansdowne) along with the police tried to create an atmosphere of supervision over prostitutes, perhaps it was clear that women were made subservient to government. Furthermore, prostitutes were confined and condemned in medical compartments against their will, which demonstrated the extent to which the government mobilized to acquire their goal of utopian administration over the Indian subcontinent. This exclusionist and alienist attitude towards prostitutes by the sovereign devised huge gaps within the societal framework which also consequently led to ignorance of their history by eminent historiographers. Hence sporadic data have been gathered, collected and documented this far.

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