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

by Stephen Legg

Overview

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."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822357735
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	09/19/2014
Pages:	294
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.62(d)

About the Author

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.

Table of Contents

Preface vii

Introduction: Spatial Genealogies from Segregation to Suppression 1

Chapter 1 Civil Abandonment: The Inclusive Exclusion of Delhi's Prostitutes 41

Chapter 2 Assembling India: The Birth of SITA 95

Chapter 3 Imperial Moral and Social Hygiene 169

Conclusion: Within and beyond the City 239

Notes 247

References 259

Index 277

What People are Saying About This

Specters of Mother India: The Global Restructuring of an Empire - Mrinalini Sinha

"Stephen Legg's Prostitution and the Ends of Empire excels in providing an insightful analysis of how the 'brothel' in colonial India, once tolerated for its alleged socially useful fringe benefits, became during the interwar period the target of an extensive campaign for abolition. Legg is at his best in the meticulous care with which he charts the roles and motivations of a wide variety of civil society actors—individuals, institutions, and organizations—who were important players, alongside the colonial state, in this interwar shift, including the policy of the forced removal of public 'prostitutes' out of the city in Delhi, from places like Chowri Bazar and Ajmere Gate Bazar, to marginal locations. With the skills of a geographer, Legg tacks nimbly between the space of the brothel itself and the interlocking scales of the urban, provincial, national, imperial, and international that framed it as a problem. This smart and thoroughly researched book will be welcomed by students of colonial urbanism, of sexuality, and of transational methodologies in the study of India."

Prostitution, Race and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire - Philippa Levine

"Prostitution and the Ends of Empire deftly reveals that the attack on the brothel in interwar Delhi was more than just a city-specific act, but rather demonstrated the power of international, imperial, and local networks. Using Foucault's and Agamben's work, Stephen Legg persuasively shows the reimagining of the brothel as a space of danger that required its suppression. Legg's use of scalar analysis is carefully constructed and brilliantly conclusive. This is an important and original reading of colonial prostitution."

Editorial Reviews

"Legg has produced a detailed and well-researched account of colonial governmentality offering novel insights into the relationship between the state and civil society which speaks to scholars across many disciplines."

Social & Cultural Geography - Amil Mohanan

"This book is crisp and compelling and will be read with interest by those studying colonial South Asia, the regulation of sexuality, governmentality, scale, and empire, among others....Legg convincingly and provocatively argues for a study of empire that reveals its ‘nodes of violence, fragility, contradiction, and complexity’ (p.38), and that in this case this included a scale-inflected shaming of sex workers and deployment of scandal to defend empire and intervention, even as these interventions deepened the suffering of many women."

Journal of Historical Geography - Sara Smith

"This is an important book, one that refuses to accept the sexual contours of prostitution in the context of empire and insists instead on the legislative, spatial, judicial, disciplinary, and narrative aspects of colonial preoccupation with Indian morality.... The scalar reading the book employs is an elegant formulation of the need to consider the multiple trajectories of nation, city, gender, agency, and governance not only through the dualities of the colonial relationship between England and India but also within the expanded scope of the interwar period in Europe and Asia."

American Historical Review - Harleen Singh

"[A] smart and original contribution to the expansive literature on colonialism and prostitution.... Legg’s efforts to interweave archival and theoretical insights—to write across scales—makes Prostitution and the Ends of Empire a bold, exciting and ambitious project."

Pacific Affairs - Renisa Mawani

"[T]his book sheds new light onto still occluded areas and evokes productive questions that reach beyond the specific areas and topics under discussion."

Canadian Journal of History - Lesley A. Hall

"The fabric Legg weaves is indeed rich, and accessible to many different readerships, all of which will benefit from the important work undertaken here."

Journal of International and Global Studies - Jessica Namakkal

"Legg opens up the constitution of state/civil society, province/nation, international/national, and metropole/periphery.....Nimbly moving through a range of literatures, archives, and materials in a way that is itself multiply scaled, Prostitution and the Ends of Empire offers insights for scholars across disciplines."

H-Law, H-Net Reviews - Tara Suri

"Stephen Legg's Prostitution and the Ends of Empire excels in providing an insightful analysis of how the 'brothel' in colonial India, once tolerated for its alleged socially useful fringe benefits, became during the interwar period the target of an extensive campaign for abolition. Legg is at his best in the meticulous care with which he charts the roles and motivations of a wide variety of civil society actors—individuals, institutions, and organizations—who were important players, alongside the colonial state, in this interwar shift, including the policy of the forced removal of public 'prostitutes' out of the city in Delhi, from places like Chowri Bazar and Ajmere Gate Bazar, to marginal locations. With the skills of a geographer, Legg tacks nimbly between the space of the brothel itself and the interlocking scales of the urban, provincial, national, imperial, and international that framed it as a problem. This smart and thoroughly researched book will be welcomed by students of colonial urbanism, of sexuality, and of transational methodologies in the study of India."

Specters of Mother India: The Global Restructuring of an Empire - Mrinalini Sinha

"Prostitution and the Ends of Empire deftly reveals that the attack on the brothel in interwar Delhi was more than just a city-specific act, but rather demonstrated the power of international, imperial, and local networks. Using Foucault's and Agamben's work, Stephen Legg persuasively shows the reimagining of the brothel as a space of danger that required its suppression. Legg's use of scalar analysis is carefully constructed and brilliantly conclusive. This is an important and original reading of colonial prostitution."

Prostitution, Race and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire - Philippa Levine