Prostitution and the Ends of Empire: Scale, Governmentalities, and Interwar India - Hardcover

Legg, Stephen

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0822357593 ISBN 13: 9780822357599

Verlag: Duke University Press, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

Officially confined to red-light districts, brothels in British India were tolerated until the 1920s. Yet, by this time, prostitution reform campaigns led by Indian, imperial, and international bodies were combining the social scientific insights of sexology and hygiene with the moral condemnations of sexual slavery and human trafficking. These reformers identified the brothel as exacerbating rather than containing "corrupting prostitutes" and the threat of venereal diseases, and therefore encouraged the suppression of brothels rather than their urban segregation. In this book, Stephen Legg tracks the complex spatial politics surrounding brothels in the interwar period at multiple scales, including the local, regional, national, imperial, and global. Campaigns and state policies against brothels did not just operate at different scales but made scales themselves, forging new urban, provincial, colonial, and international formations. In so doing, they also remade the boundary between the state and the social, through which the prostitute was, Legg concludes, "civilly abandoned."

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Stephen Legg is Associate Professor in the School of Geography at the University of Nottingham. He is the author of Spaces of Colonialism: Delhi's Urban Governmentalities and the editor of Spatiality, Sovereignty and Carl Schmitt: Geographies of the Nomos.

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Prostitution and the Ends of Empire

Scale, Governmentalities, and Interwar India

By Stephen Legg

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2014 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8223-5759-9

Contents

PREFACE, 
INTRODUCTION Spatial Genealogies from Segregation to Suppression, 
CHAPTER 1 Civil Abandonment: The Inclusive Exclusion of Delhi's Prostitutes, 
CHAPTER 2 Assembling India: The Birth of SITA, 
CHAPTER 3 Imperial Moral and Social Hygiene, 
CONCLUSION Within and beyond the City, 
NOTES, 
REFERENCES, 
INDEX, 

CHAPTER 1

CIVIL ABANDONMENT

THE INCLUSIVE EXCLUSION OF DELHI'S PROSTITUTES

Governing Concepts

Between 1857, when Delhi was reclaimed from the "mutineers," and 1947, when it became the capital of independent India, the city saw the emergence of a class of "common prostitutes," whose existence posed the city's governors with challenging questions concerning the medical and moral security of the city. These new figures were reviled in biological terms, as contagion, and in social terms, as sexually licentious and transgressive, bearing, as always, the blame for satisfying the demands of their male clients. This revulsion was not represented in space, but constituted and reproduced in and through it. The bazaars in which prostitutes publicly solicited and enticed men into their brothels and kothas became the target of petitioning and reformatory zeal. The Municipal Committee selected particular places into which the women could be segregated, which sparked further protests from local residents unwilling to cohabitate with this abject community. This process did, at least, accept that the women had a right to dwell and work in this manner somewhere in the city. However, in the mid-1930s a new campaign in Delhi sought to abolish brothels and public soliciting in the city altogether.

These two campaigns, to segregate prostitutes into one part of the city or to abolish their infrastructures of support altogether, reflected the ideological positions that were struggling for supremacy in interwar India and the world at large. Broadly speaking, different branches of urban government in Delhi adopted these opposing measures. The partially elected Delhi Municipal Committee (DMC) responded to local complaints against prostitutes in bazaars by segregating the women in a series of locations, leaving them and their activities relatively unreformed. This resulted in the women's gradual exclusion from the confines of the walled city. In contrast, the centrally appointed Delhi administration began, in the 1930s, to support suppressionist legislation, in line with pressure from international campaigning groups and the military. To compensate for these measures, voluntary associations worked to provide basic infrastructures to socialize "rescued" women and children and to make prostitutes a topic of popular concern, thereby including these women in Delhi's emergent colonial civil society. The support for these women was, however, wholly inadequate and simply marked another stage in the persecution and punishment of prostitutes within patriarchal orders (British and Indian) that were already structured to exploit them to the fullest. This chapter will seek to explain the simultaneous processes of exclusion and inclusion operating through both civil society and the state, both of which came together to place Delhi's prostitutes in a state of civil abandonment.

This analysis will show how two imagined natures, or "domains," were central to this process: the city as a space of sexual propriety, and civil society as an ordering force. In terms of the specifically colonial context, the city apparently needed extra regulation while civil society had to be fostered by (not emerge in opposition to) the state. The attempts to rescue and include women and children in Delhi resulted in a dense networking effort, in an attempt to create the impression of a sexually civil city. But these networks clashed and betrayed the constant interventions of national and imperial people and ideas into the city. The parallel effort to exclude prostitutes named them as the problem, and too rarely as the victims, of the city. While the women resisted these categorizations, the need to protect Delhi's name was too great. The capital risked becoming, the Delhi YMCA had suggested, a "byeword for immorality." It appeared that Delhi was still, as Viceroy Hardinge (cited in Legg 2007b, 56) had insisted when he relocated the capital from Calcutta, a "name to conjure with."

The Nature of the Social

Nikolas Rose (1999, 101) has described the domain of the "social" as the conceptual space through which intellectual, political, and moral authorities, in certain territories, think about and act upon collective experience. Most definitions describe a belief in an autonomous domain with lawful dynamics that inform social institutions and aggregate in social agents (Poovey 2002, 47), the emergence of which Foucault (1977–78 [2007]) described as central to the sciences of government. Definitions of the social have included eighteenth-century considerations of abstract human nature, nineteenth-century organicist and evolutionary models, and the more structural formulations of the interwar period (Joyce 2002, 11). This evolution involved a shift from seeing the social as a natural and material force to it being conceived of as a product of conscious will and purpose, maintained by people and associations that were encouraged and regulated by the state, yet existed outside of it. The term's complexity can be comprehended through the different levels of abstraction used to define the social. These include first order, "empty" units such as society and economy; second order, historically specific, narrative paradigms of the social; and third order, public dynamics and desires by which these abstractions are lived out (Poovey 2002).

Within these complex genealogies, and from Mary Poovey's second order, the concept of "civil society" must have a special place. Both Hegel and Marx agreed that the distinctive feature of political modernity was the separation of state and civil society. Hegel described the latter as a sphere that was neither the family nor the state, but where private individuals came together under the regulation of the state. As such, while conceptually distinct, the state exerted its authority in civil society through administrative mechanisms. Marx radicalized Hegel by attributing the production of poverty to civil society, a superstructural product of wage-labor relations (Neocleous 1996, 13). As such, Hegel's mediating institutions were reinscribed as tentacles of the state that subsumed social struggle into the administrative machinery. Antonio Gramsci (1971, 12) later made the distinction between "political society," which was characterized by these very institutions and coercively exerted direct domination through the state and juridical government, and civil society, which achieved hegemony noncoercively. Churches, schools, clubs, and political parties marked the latter; police, the government, armed forces, and legal apparatuses marked the former.

Foucault also considered civil society a means through which to govern, but one that involved a more decentered power dynamic (see Cohen and Arato 1994, 255–98). Mark Neocleous (1996, 58) has argued that Foucault's assertion depoliticized social relations by dissolving the state into the "social body" and law into...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2014
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822357593
• ISBN 13: 9780822357599
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 281
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
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