Grant Proposal Archive

Proposal Cover Sheet

Submitted to the American Institute of Indian Studies

Durba Mitra, History

Examining the “Prostitute”: Medicine, Sexuality, and the Body in Colonial Calcutta, 1860-1920

Posted October, 2008

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Examining the “Prostitute”: Medicine, Sexuality, and the Body in Colonial Calcutta, 1860-1920

I. Research Problem and Significance In July 1869, a group of women in Calcutta protested their classification as prostitutes under the Contagious Diseases Act of 1868, accusing colonial authorities of “violating their womanhood” by making them undergo “the process of hateful genital examination, in other words, gross exposure.”1 This rare archival source reveals the importance of colonial

classifications like “prostitute” in contestations over changing government policies, social practices, and gender roles—categories that resulted in invasive practices conducted on colonized women and their bodies. Yet the protest of these women against classification by the colonial state challenges the historian: How does one write a history of the prostitute in colonial when a range of women and bodies are labeled as “prostitute”?

My dissertation research addresses the meanings and uses of the classification

“prostitute” in overlapping arenas of law and medicine in colonial Calcutta, examining a social category that was pivotal in colonial and Bengali discourses of propriety, criminality, and sanitation. Spanning from 1860 until 1920, my project starts with the passage of the Indian

Penal Code of 1860 and ends with debates on Calcutta’s Immoral Trafficking Act of 1923. I

will examine how colonial conceptions of sexually deviancy combined in contradictory ways

with Bengali social categories of “public women” to produce certain women as “prostitutes,”

and how these classifications were invoked in medico-legal practices that investigated and

controlled women’s bodies. Further, I will explore varied Bengali elite and lower-class

responses to policies that mandated “public” women undergo invasive medical examination.

1 Petition from Women of Calcutta against Act XIV of 1868, Nos. 1-2. Department of Sanitation, August 1869. State Archives. Kolkata, India. Mitra 2

How do authorities use colonial and Bengali ideas of the ‘prostitute’ to classify and control women and their bodies? How do women inhabit, contradict, and transgress practices directed towards the

“prostitute”?

Preliminary archival research reveals that the classification “prostitute” became central to colonial policy and elite Bengali bhadralok (upper-caste, upper-class) social conventions that controlled a range of women who were unmarried or working in “public” spaces, including upper-caste widows, women performers, and low-class laborers. The Contagious Diseases Act of 1868 in Calcutta required the genital examination of any woman classified as a “common prostitute” for the prevention of venereal diseases. In correspondence for the Contagious

Diseases Act, colonial authorities assert that all unmarried “native” women over the age of 15 in Calcutta were potential prostitutes, especially young widows and workers. Colonial classifications of Bengali women as “clandestine prostitutes” related to changing bhadralok ideas of sexually deviant women, including Bengali terms like patita, literally "fallen woman," used to describe women workers and performers, and the 19th-century use of the term rarh,

which denoted both the widow and the sexually promiscuous woman. With the outlaw of

abortion in 1860, Bengali medical doctors and colonial authorities also explicitly tied the

widow to the “common prostitute” in investigations of criminal abortion, forcing women

accused of abortion to undergo genital examination for criminal evidence.

Medical and judicial authorities argued that forensic investigations of women’s

genitalia, specifically the scientific assessment of the hymen and vagina, proved “diseases of

immorality” and criminal abortion. Women reacted to their classification and examination as

“prostitutes” through petitions and mass evasion of genital examinations. Visible “public Mitra 3

women” like actors on the Bengali stage accused elite Bengali society of creating the helpless

conditions of the “public” woman. The forced examination of women faced intense scrutiny

from British reformists and the practice was officially banned in 1888. Yet my research reveals that examination of “prostitutes” continued through the 1920s under fluid definitions of

“contagious disease” and “illicit crimes” of abortion.

I will research colonial debates and practices around the “prostitute” to explore how a

range of women come to be seen and examined as “prostitute” in colonial Calcutta. By

analyzing the deployment of sexual categories in the colonial period, this project challenges

scholarship that recuperates the history of sexualized outcasts without interrogating the

categories that appear in official archives, equating the colonial “prostitute” with the

contemporary sex worker. I argue that under colonial rule, sexual categories became a key

nexus of social, medical, and legal control that defined gender relations and authorized the

investigation and control of women’s bodies.

II. Relevant Literature and Research Contribution

My research will contribute to scholarship on law, medicine, and gendered relations of

power under colonial rule, as well as the scholarship on sexuality and Empire. Scholars of

women and colonial law have addressed social reforms that produced women as subordinated

legal subjects and prohibited practices around categories like the devadasi (“servant to the

gods”) (Gupta 1999, Jordan 2003, Nair 1996, Vijaisri 2004). Yet histories of women and law do

not consider colonial categories as sites of interaction between medical practice and judicial

control, thereby overlooking the role of medical knowledge in defining the gendered legal

subject. By focusing on overlapping areas of law and medicine, I consider how medical Mitra 4

evidence informed the legal regulation of sexuality and women under colonial rule. I also

challenge scholarship on gender and medicine in India that limits its focus on family and

reproduction by arguing that investigations of the “prostitute” body produced medical and legal knowledge of non-reproductive sexuality (Hodges 2006, Ahluwalia 2008).

This project will also engage with scholarship on colonial conjugality that has largely

looked at Bengali middle class, upper-caste society to understand women and gendered

relations of power, making Bengali elite society and colonial Calcutta central to

historiography on gender in India (Chakrabarty 2002, Chatterjee 1993, Sarkar 2001, Sinha

1995). Scholarship on bhadralok society emphasizes the importance of the nuclear household

and idealized upper-caste womanhood in colonial politics, but does not address how elite

discourses on sexuality affected lower-class relations. My project shows that the label

“common prostitute,” applied to lower-class women, is pivotal to understandings of deviant

sexuality and “normal” conjugality under colonial rule (Sen 1999).

Further, this research will address the field of comparative Empire Studies, which

studies gender and sexuality in terms of imperial views of different colonies. While this

scholarship emphasizes the control of sexual relations in the administration of colonial rule, it

does not take an analysis of local language texts and vernacular categories about sexualized

subjects into account (Ballhatchet 1980, Stoler 1995, 2002, Levine 2003). This scholarship

makes colonists and colonial power the subject of their account without investigating the local

implementation of imperial policies, eliding the complex social contexts of colonized elite and

subaltern groups that reveal contradictions of living under colonial rule. Mitra 5

Studies on prostitution that do utilize Indian languages take the existence of prostitutes

in the historical record as self-evident, easily translating a diverse set of indigenous terms into

the English term ‘prostitute’ (Banerjee 1998, Oldenburg 1988). Following the groundbreaking

work of Luise White charting differentiated and variable Kiswahili and Kikuyu categories of prostitution in colonial Nairobi, Kenya (1990), I analyze how the development of colonial

categories related to shifting Bengali classifications of sexualized women. How did 19th- century Bengali categories for sexualized women relate British colonial ideas of sexual deviance? However, I intend to push White's analysis of diverse sexual practices and terminologies further by investigating how categories of sexual deviance produce certain

women as prostitutes, embedding different “types” of women under the idea of the

“prostitute.”

IV. Research Design and Methodology

My project will explore the diverse and often contradictory representations of

“public” women and sexuality in colonial Calcutta by putting different textual forms and

contents in conversation, including official medical and judicial records, medical texts, Bengali

social tracts, and “public” women’s writings. In my exploration of official reports on the

Contagious Disease Acts and medical investigations of abortion, I will examine official

classifications of sexually deviant women and consider how medical knowledge is used to

prosecute women in judicial cases. Further, I will analyze testimonies and petitions to

consider women’s responses to regulation and examination. Through a comparison of medical

journals and social tracts, I will investigate how discourses on sexuality related to changing

medical technologies that facilitated the surveillance and cataloging of female sexuality and Mitra 6

‘native’ bodies. Finally, I will analyze writings by “public” women who discuss colonial and

Bengali elite perceptions of the “prostitute” as a social and medical disease.

My analysis traces the emergence and interaction of colonial and indigenous social

categories in different forms of archival material. How do the various powers at play in

colonial Calcutta constitute and reconstitute categories like “prostitute”? Building on my

coursework on subaltern history and women’s studies, my approach to reading materials includes reading sources carefully to identify fragmented evidence which resists assimilation into colonial constructions of the sexually deviant “prostitute.” Central to my archival reading is a detailed investigation of the categories appearing in medical and judicial texts that make the sexuality of women scientifically knowable. I will juxtapose medical and Bengali reformist portrayals of the “prostitute” with writings and testimonies made by “public” women in order to investigate how the “prostitute” was constituted and contested through debates on sexuality and the control of women’s bodies.

I will conduct research in Kolkata and Delhi, India for nine months, from mid-August

2009 until May 2010, working with sources identified during archive work in 2007 in Kolkata,

West Bengal and in 2008 in London, England. I will spend 6 months in Kolkata at the West

Bengal State Archives (WBSA), National Library (NL), Asiatic Society of West Bengal (AS), and the archive at the Center for Studies in Social Sciences (CSSSC). Following my work in

Kolkata, I will work in the National Archives of India (NAI) in Delhi for three months.

In Kolkata, I will work on legislative, judicial, and sanitation records at the WBSA.

During my pre-dissertation research, I identified important articles in Bengali and English medical journals at the NL, AS, and CSSSC, especially articles in Calcutta Journal of Medicine, Mitra 7

Calcutta Medical Gazette, and Chikitsa Sammilani. At the NL, I will analyze writings of

bhadralok reformers and “public” women, including Binodini Dasi’s autobiographical writings,

Amar Katha (My Story) (1902), Tinkari Dasi’s autobiography, Amar Jiban (My life) (1910), and

Sukumari Dutta’s play, Apurbosati (The Chaste Woman) (1875). I will examine Bengali social

tracts for commentary on who constitutes the “fallen woman,” including Pearimohan Sen’s

Rarh Bhand Mithey Katha Tin Lo-e-Kolkata (Sexually Deviant Woman, Buffoon, Lies-These

Three Make Calcutta) (1863), Yamini Mohan Ghosh’s Samaj Samashya (Society’s Problem)

(1889?), and Meghnad Gupta, Rater Kolkata (Calcutta at Night) (n.d.). At the NAI, I will

work on colonial court cases on prostitution and proceedings on abortion.

V. Researcher Qualifications and Contacts

I have studied gender, sexuality, medicine in India for many years and have completed

a certificate in Women’s Studies at Emory University. Growing up, I learned read, write, and

speak Bengali under the tutelage of my mother. In the summer of 2003, I worked at B.R.

Singh Railway Hospital in Kolkata, training with my supervisor and a tutor to learn Bengali

medical terminology. During my graduate coursework, I have had two years of tutorial work

in Bengali reading and writing. While conducting research in Kolkata in 2007, I studied with a

tutor to learn variations in 19th-century Bengali script and word use.. I desire specific training

in 19th-century Bengali, and would like to attend the AIIS intensive Bengali summer program

before my dissertation research to improve my reading skills. I have contact with archivists

and historians in Kolkata, including Dr Bidisha Chakraborty, the head archivist at WBSA, Dr.

Samita Sen at Jadavpur University, and Dr. Pradip Bose, a professor at CSSSC and editor of a Mitra 8 primary source collection of 19th-century Bengali medical journals. In Delhi, I will work with

Dr. Tanika Sarkar at Jawaharlal Nehru University.

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