SUBMITTED TO :- PROF.

JYOTI ATWAL

SUBMITTED BY :- NAYAN DHAWAL(MA. 3RD SEM.)

How did prostitution become part of the agenda of governance and law in colonial India?

‘Women and its position in society wasn’t discussed section in history, neither
its role and achievement can be regarded.’
Prostitution is called as a practice in which a female offers her body for
promiscuous sexual intercourse for hire. The Government of India document
‘Prevention of Immoral Traffic Act 1987’ defined prostitution as “sexual
exploitation or abuse of persons for commercial purposes.1 The behaviour and
position of women became one of the major criteria of judgment among the
colonial officials based on which they judged those whom they colonized.
Hence, women became an index and measure less of themselves then of men
and of societies2.
The study of prostitution and its regulation is very much essential field for
examining the nexus of sexuality, gender, class and race. According to Kenneth
Ballhatchet in his work “Race, Sex, and Class under the Raj: Imperial attitudes
and policies and their critics, 1793-1905.” the colonial state for the
management of prostitution, in the latter half of the 19th century, shows its
concerns over maintaining acceptable levels of race superiority of the British
officer and at the same time ensuring control over lower class white men 3.
Another major reason which marked the attempts to regulate prostitution in
colonial India in the mid-nineteenth century were motivated primarily by a
medical concern for the physical and social health of British subalterns residing
in military cantonments within the vicinity of Lal bazaars. Lal bazar means,
literally, “red market.” It was a term used by colonial officials to refer to the
red-light area. These red-light districts conjured up notions of filth, diseases,
and sexual laxity and can be seen as a place of unhygienic condition. Thus, to
regulate prostitution the system of ‘lock hospitals’- a concept which were
borrowed from Europe with a major purpose of checking the spread of
venereal diseases among the European Soldiers.
Phillipa Levine has studied four colonies: Hong Kong, Queensland, Strait
Settlements, and India in her work and she states that the British were anxious
to implement policies that could decrease the incidences of venereal diseases

1
‘Prevention of Immoral Traffic Act 1987’
2
Philippa Levine, ‘ Rereading the 1890s: Venereal Disease as "Constitutional Crisis" in Britain and British India’
in The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 55, No. 3 (1996
3
Ballhatchet, K. A. (1980). Race, Sex, and Class under the Raj: Imperial attitudes and policies and their critics,
1793-1905. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson
which could at any time leave up to 30% of the troops hospitalized4. This led to
regulation of the activity and those associated with it. Those who were
regulated were prostitutes by means of the Contagious Diseases [CD] Act that
were passed in England as well as the colonies in the nineteenth century.
These Acts set up a system of registration for prostitutes, providing for
compulsory medical examinations and hospital confinement of those found to
have venereal diseases. Levine and Ballhatchet both in their respective works
refer to institutions called ‘lock hospitals’ in which Indian prostitutes found
suffering from venereal diseases were kept forcibly and treated inhumanly till
they were cured. The British initially recognized their need as part of the
‘natural order’ of a soldier’s life. Ballhatchet comments that the British
perceived the lower order of soldiers as lacking the ‘high moral standard
required’ for sexual continence and they did not want to deny them their
needs for fear of ‘homosexuality and masturbation.5’
Deeply troubled by the bodily and perceived moral degeneration of British
troops, the Government of India implemented the 1864 Cantonment Acts,
followed by the 1868 Indian Contagious Diseases Act. Enacted in the decades
following the bloody 1857 Indian Mutiny, these laws reveal that concerns over
the health of the British army and the security of imperial holdings in the
subcontinent were paramount amidst a climate of paranoia. Political rationale
for the state regulation of prostitution was meant to promote a system of
“safe” sexual recreation for British soldiers in lieu of what the colonial state
deemed dangerous alternatives, such as cohabitation with indigenous women,
homosexual male relations, and masturbation. This intense preoccupation over
prostitution management by the colonial government had led several
historians to argue that the whole imperial British army was organized around
issues of sexuality and domesticity.
S. Legg in his article argued that the criminalization of prostitute made her the
subject of increasing control, yet the definitions of “brothels” were worked
around by prostitutes and pimps while police were loath to enforce the powers
they acquired. During this time prostitutes were divided into two categories
‘respectable’ or ‘decent’ prostitutes who resided in regimental bazar and went

4
Opcit.pp.29
5
Ballhatchet, K. A. (1980). Race, Sex, and Class under the Raj: Imperial attitudes and policies and their critics,
1793-1905. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson
for medical checkup and ‘idle’ or ‘disorderly’ prostitutes, who lived in ‘haunts’,
not under military control and didn’t come for medical checkup 6.
The Contagious Disease Act was suspended in Calcutta and later in Bombay but
Madras retained it. The act(1864) was abolished by the Secretary of the State.
The Inclusive Exclusion of Delhi’s Prostitutes’ focuses on the period after 1888
when the Contagious Diseases Act of 1868 was repealed on the basis of
petitions filed by local residents from Gandi Gali, Egerton Road, Khari Baori,
Sadar Bazar and Jama Masjid square. The Punjab Municipal Act of 1911 was
invoked to segregate prostitutes and prostitute homes, and brothels were
moved out to areas near slaughterhouse.
Legg has brought into focus many reasons for the shift from segregationist to
suppressions legislation concerning prostitution. He says that toleration of
brothels and prostitutes was putting a dent in the untarnished reputation of
the British Empire7. The missionaries and the activists alike were petitioning for
abolition of the activity. The League of Nations formed after the First World
War also took a firm stance on prostitution as women trafficking was an
essential part of the profession. As a founding member of the League, India
signed up to the legal conventions of the Advisory Committee on Trafficking in
Women and Children, which made it directly committed to efforts against tra
Dr Jyoti Atwal in her review of Stephen Legg’s work argued that how several
petitions to the offices of the Delhi Municipal Committee resulted in
segregation rules for prostitutes, generating a unique geography of inclusion
and exclusion of population in the city. Eventually, however, certain ‘social and
moral forces’ became intensively involved in a movement to abolish
prostitution in India

Dr Atwal in her review also argued that not much resistance seems to have
been put up by prostitutes or brothel owners to retain or defend their spaces
within the city. Legg cites only one such instance where some women refused
to accept that they were working as prostitutes8. These women formed a
deputation to the chief commissioner’s home where they styled themselves as
gramophone singers or cinema or radio artists and formed a colourful
6
S Legg, (2014). Prostitution and the ends of empire: scale, governmentalities, and interwar India. Duke
University Press
7
Ibid
8
Atwal, J. (2017). Book Review: Stephen Legg, Prostitution and the Ends of Empire: Scale, Governmentalities,
and Interwar India.pp-1
possession that marched to commissioner’s house but at the same time, a
strongly worded petition by the segregationist Lala Madan Mohan Lal, from
Chawri Bazaar in 1928, associated brothels with crime and the absence of
social and physical hygiene trafficking and, indirectly, encouraged it to quell
the demand for prostitutes.
The consequence of international interest in prostitution particularly in the
colonies led to a series of suppressions legislation by the colonial state.
‘Burmese Suppression of Brothels Act 1921’, ‘Bombay Prevention of
Prostitution Act 1923’ were some examples. The anti-trafficking and anti-
segregationist elements of these Acts were combined in the Calcutta SITA of
1923 which set the template that would be adjusted but not fundamentally
altered as the SITAs spread through much of British India over the next
seventeen years9. SITA or Suppression of Immoral Trafficking Act were a string
of acts passed for this very purpose. The irony that ‘Sita’ happens to be the
name of an Indian goddess associated with chastity and purity cannot be
missed here. Legg says that these acts were more concerned with abolishing
prostitution than trafficking. He also points out prostitution in India was never
abolished, in fact these legislations only made it more segregationist. By
deeming prostitution illegal, the state only intensified the problems faced by
prostitutes across colonies10. The women were forced to live in the
underbellies of cities, denied existence and were constantly persecuted.
Unsafe conditions often led to brutal physical abuse and sometimes murder.
Hence, the brothel went from being a site of social and biological safety and
visibility to one of risk and exclusion, tolerated zones of prostitution came to
be seen as signs of incivility, disease, and sexual slavery. The colonial state
abandoned prostitutes in face of international prestige. This was problematic
because the state did not provide any viable alternative to the prostitutes that
it sought to displace. Legg talks of resistance among these women in the face
of suppression and segregation. After ‘dyarchy’ was installed as a form of
government in India, prostitution came to be a local matter. Yet, there was a
definite push from the Central government to the local ones in the form of
directions to legislate regarding prostitution. Indian women’s reform groups
and broader civil society organizations campaigned in these legislative debates
and reviews.

9
S Legg, (2014). Prostitution and the ends of empire: scale, governmentalities, and interwar India. Duke
University Press
10
Ibid
The privileges and power that whiteness carried questions of racial mixing and
sexual control were crucial to the maintenance of imperial authority. Those of
mixed race could challenge the distinction between colonizer and the
colonized and acts as sources of subversion, a threat to the white prestige.
Thus, there was a colonial anxiety of choosing between sex and race and the
imperialist could not make the choice of preferring one thing over another.
These legalizations just focused on the politics and the ways of establishing
hegemony and control but it was women who suffered the most in this nexus
of domination and control, many prostitutes were left without jobs or any
financial footing. Statistical data suggested inclusion of few women into rescue
home and rest were left to live the life of hunger, deprivation shame,
abandonment etc. Stephen Legg mentioned that even after the post-colonial
period also Immoral Traffic Prevention Act (1986) failed to solve problems of
women’s work or female agency11. Legg also focuses on a group called
Association for Moral and Social Hygiene [AMSH] that vigorously participated
in the abolitionist campaign. He gives the example of Miliscent Shephard who
struggled for twenty years to network together the interests of the military,
the Government of India, and the League of Nations with the increasingly
influential interests of Indian Nationalists, women’s groups, and urban
politicians. She drew on remarkably diverse assemblage of actors, events, and
theories: from psychoanalysis to Christian theology, from Gandhi’s
Brahmacharya to texts on sexology, hygiene, and feminism. She decried what
she saw as the policing statics of the colonial state while applauding the output
of the League of Nations. The provincial governments that were coming up
comprising of nationalists were also tilted towards abolitionism as they were
anxious to prove their legitimacy as potential rulers of India. India emerged as
a contested, fraught, and anxious amalgam of states that jostled for patronage,
prestige, and solutions to the interminable question of the sexually
disobedient public prostitute.
In conclusion, it can be stated that the law and regulation come in with side
factor with colonial government to the prostitution. The imperial nozzle never
interested in such development, it was only for their army they have to move
in that direction. Laws and governance was not only sufficient in present
scenario, we should rely on Women empowerment and modern

11
S Legg, (2014). Prostitution and the ends of empire: scale, governmentalities, and interwar India. Duke
University Press
education( two bullets) which can encounter the existing evils in the society
against women.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
1) Stepehen Legg, ‘Prostitution and the Ends of Empire’(2014)
2) Philippa Levine, ‘ Rereading the 1890s: Venereal Disease as "Constitutional
Crisis" in Britain and British India’ in The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 55, No. 3
(1996).
3) Kenneth, Ballhatchet, Race Sex and Class under the Raj. Imperial Attitudes
and Policies and their Critics, 1793-1905,(London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson,
1980).
4) Atwal, J. (2017). Book Review: Stephen Legg, Prostitution and the Ends of
Empire: Scale, Governmentalities, and Interwar India