Regulation of Sexual Behavior in Victorian Colonial India

Navarun Jain

History R1B 005: Jack the Ripper and Victorian London

Instructor: Katharine L Harper

11 May, 2015

Regulation of Sexual Behavior in Victorian Colonial India

On the City Wall, Rudyard Kipling’s story about an Indian courtesan begins, “Lalun is a member of the most ancient profession in the world.”1 Much of the action in the story narrated by an unnamed British resident takes place in Lalun’s salon, a place he visits regularly as do several others of almost every other race and faith. Through the narrator, Kipling goes on to say: “In the West, people say rude things about Lalun's profession, and write lectures about it, and distribute the lectures to young persons in order that Morality may be preserved. In the East where the profession is hereditary, descending from mother to daughter, nobody writes lectures or takes any notice.”2

Given that this story was published towards the end of the nineteenth-century, well over two and a half centuries after India had been colonized, the contrast between Eastern and Western morality of prostitution, as presented by Kipling, underscores two key points. First, that ‘morality’ mattered to the Victorians. Second, that the widely held belief of the time was “that ‘prostitution had existed in India from time immemorial’, and, indeed, that a specific prostitute ‘caste’ could be clearly identified.”3 After almost two hundred and fifty years of being colonized by the West, if, as Kipling suggests, people of the East were still not bothered by the morality of prostitution and that they tolerated, or even accepted it like they would any other profession, it is worth exploring the attitudes that the Western rulers had towards prostitution in colonial India during all these years. As the Victorian era was characterized by several dramatic changes and was a period when the moral rhetoric not only dominated all aspects of society but also influenced governance, this paper examines colonial attitudes towards prostitution and the history of the regimentation of prostitution in India during this period. The article attempts to explain the forces that shaped these attitudes, and the conditions that influenced the imposition of legislation to regulate the behavior of prostitutes in Victorian colonial India.

When Queen Victoria ascended the throne in 1837, India was under the administrative control of the British East India Company. Around this time, more than 20,000 European soldiers were deployed in India. Some of these regiments had been around for as long as twenty years. However, since Company officials were “extremely wary of allowing any increase in the number of European women in India, fearful that any such change might pose a threat to the stability of their relationships with Indian rulers,”4 all women desirous of travelling to India had to explicitly obtain prior permission. Consequently, all through the eighteenth-century and well into the early nineteenth-century, the prevailing unofficial social practice among European men stationed in India was to monogamously cohabit with Indian women.5 It was a period when courtesans, devadasis6, nautch girls7 and the Indian wives and mistresses of European men, were all “accepted as an important part of the functioning framework of society,”8 and concubinal relationships were viewed as “‘equally sacred’ to marriage.”9 However, coinciding with the Company’s expansionist policies and owing to the combined might of evangelical missionaries and the military and medical establishments, attitudes towards these groups of women underwent a radical transformation by the middle of the nineteenth-century.