Table Of Content«SMo
The boot-shaped outline in this map of Calcutta is the ‘ring fence’
proposed to be set up by the city’s Commissioner of Police in 1881 in order
to enforce the Contagious Diseases Act within this area to protect the
soldiers of Fort William
U N D E R T H E RAJ
PROSTITUTION IN COLONIAL
BENGAL
SUMANTA BANERJEE
Monthly Review Press
New York
Frontispiece
A diagram of the ‘ring fence’ proposed to be set up in 1881 in order to
enforce the Indian Contagious Diseases Act.
Based on Plate 8A in Atlas of the City of Calcutta and its Environs (National
Atlas and Thematic Mapping Organisation; Ministry of Science and
Technolog)׳. Government of India. Calcutta. 1990)
© Seagull Books, 1998
Cover image: Chittrovanu Mazumdar
Cover design: Naveen Kishore
Printed in India by Seagull Books
First published as Dangerous Outcast: The Prostitute in Nineteenth Century
Bengal in 1998 by Seagull Books
26 Circus Avenue, Calcutta 700 001, India.
US ISBN 1-58367-035-1 Hbk
Published in the US by:
Monthly Review Press
122 West 27th Street
New York, New York 10001
C O N T E N T S
1
PROLOGUE
18
INTRODUCING PHULMONI AND HER SISTERS
37
BRITISH ‘SAHIBS’ AND ‘NATIVE WOMEN*
51
WHITE MARS AND BLACK VENUS
72
THE ‘BESHYA’ AND THE *BABU’
105
VOICES FROM THE PIT
126
THE BURDEN OF THE ‘BHADRALOK’
142
OFFICIAL LAWS VERSUS UNOFFICIAL NEEDS
177
EPILOGUE
192
NOTES
216
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
221
INDEX
Acknowledgements
I am indebted to many friends who have helped me—directly
or indirectly—with information and suggestions, during my work
on a subject, which, to my knowledge, generally provokes
prurient curiosity or shocked silence in ‘respectable’ society as
well as ‘academic’ circles.
I must, however, express my gratitude particularly to two friends
who are working in allied fields, and were gracious enough to
share their findings with me—Ms Rimli Bhattacharya, former
Fellow, Indian Council of Social Science Research, and Ms
Ratnabali Chatterjee of the Department of Islamic History and
Culture, Calcutta University. Of the other two friends who
deserve special thanks, one is Robi Mukherjee, an aficionado of
the old Calcutta pastime of spinning popular jokes and songs,
who over several sittings with me, unrolled his own collection of
songs and sayings from the red-light areas of the past, which have
uavelled down to the present through the oral cultural tradition.
The other friend is Dr Pradip Sinha of the Rabindra Bharati
University of Calcutta, who rem ained unfailing in his
encouragement to me, with helpful suggestions garnered from
his rich research on 19th century Calcutta.
I also wish to acknowledge the help and services that I received
from the staff of the National Archives of India, New Delhi; the
Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi; the National
Libraiy, Calcutta; the Bangiya Sahitya Parishad Library, Calcutta,
and the Uttarpara Library.
Needless to say, the opinions expressed, and the conclusions
arrived at, are my own.
Finally, a few words by way of explanation—I have used the
word ‘prostitute’ all through the book, instead of the recently
introduced term ‘commercial sex worker.’ Although the well-
meaning inventors of the new term may feel that they are using a
less depreciating word, some practitioners of the trade are
reported to have resented its use. During a recent educational
programme among prostitutes in a Calcutta red-light area, ‘in the
course of dialogue, they were asked if they liked their new name:
sex worker. At least three women said that they didn’t because
“after all (the word) sex is there.”’ (‘Education for Sex Workers—
A Unique Experiment’ by Sandip Bandyopadhyay, in Frontier, 8
June 1996). In the absence of a better term that would be
acceptable to the practitioners themselves, I feel that it is better
to stick to the old word ‘prostitute’, which originates from the
more generic, and less pejorative, Latin ‘prostituere-utum’,
meaning ‘to set up for sale.’
Sumanta Banerjee
New Delhi
1998
. . the cantonment authorities can keep . . . the immediate
vicinity of barracks free from the outcasts, who are so dangerous to
the men. *
From an official note prepared by the British military
department in India, 8 October 1886. (.File nos. 34-
58. Home Sanitary. June 1887.)
Prologue
Unlike the peasantry and the tribal population, the housewives
and the working women, the artisans and the fledgling industrial
proletariat of 19th century Bengal—the changed status of all of
whom in a colonial society has engaged the attention of some
Marxist scholars and the new breed of ‘subaltern’ historians in
the course of their efforts to reconstruct history from below—the
prostitutes of that period seem to have escaped such serious
attention till now.1
Yet, like other pre-colonial socio-economic formations, the
profession of prostitution also underwent a dramatic change in
Bengal soon after the British take-over. It attracted a wide variety
of women from different segments of the population from both
within and outside Bengal, and acquired new types of clientele
who were products of the colonial order. It was also subjected to
attem pts at control and surveillance by the colonial
administration, as well as reassessment by the newly educated
bhadralok descendants of the old Bengali households. From the
relative obscurity of the periphery of rural society in pre-colonial
Bengal, the prostitute suddenly emerged into the full glare of
publicity in Calcutta, the capital of colonial Bengal, and its
suburbs. There was an explosion of morbid curiosity and prurient
voyeurism around her life style—in the Bengali chapbooks and
farces that flowed from the cheap printing presses of 19th
century Calcutta and other towns. There were also nervous
outpourings of fright and consternation about her increasing
success in making inroads into vulnerable wings of the colonial
establishment (mainly the army—as expressed in contemporary
administrative records), as well as into Bengali bhadralok society
(as voiced in Bengali newspapers and literature). Both the
2 Sumanta Banerjee
colonial administrative responses and the indigenous socio-
cultural reactions to the phenomenon of prostitution in 19th
century Bengal could be indicative of a pathological society that
was developing during that period in a territory brought under
the aegis of a colonial administration, which had just introduced
new commercial relations in economy, and tried to bring in
simultaneously new ethical norms in social relations. The
tensions generated in the process threw up unpredictable and
intractable problems. One such quandary—for both the British
administrator and the Bengali bhadralok—was the proliferation of
prostitution in multifarious forms and polymorphic stages of
development, all through the 18th-19th century period in
Bengal.
The present work is an attempt at exploring some of the
cobwebbed corners of the profession of prostitution when it was
developing as a trade in 19th century Bengal. It investigates
group consciousness over a long period among the practitioners
of the trade. The method used here consists first in breaking
down the profession as it existed into its different constituent
elements, and then reassembling it, by observing the mentalities
and behaviour pattern of those who embodied and practised it, as
well as of those who observed it from the outside, including the
participants (i. e. the clientele).
The crucial areas in the commercial and social relations that
marked the profession of prostitution in that period—and which
are being examined in the present work—are: (i) the class
structure that emerged within the profession in response to the
different grades of status and demand, primarily of a new Bengali
clientele spawned by colonial, commercial and administrative
requirements; (ii) British official efforts to revamp the profession,
first to meet the needs of the ‘Tommies’, and later under various
pressures of what constituted the colonial ethos of Victorian
society at that time; (iii) the attitude and behaviour of the
Bengali bhadralok society—a colonized community, shaped partly
by the colonizer and partly by pre-colonial traditional social
norms—towards prostitution in contemporary Bengali society;
(iv) populai perceptions of prostitution as reflected in
contemporary folk literature; (v) and finally—the most important
and controversial also—the responses of the prostitutes
