Sex Work in Colonial India

When the British Empire colonised India, how did it treat their different ideas about sex? How did they treat sex workers like the Devadasi, meaning 'slave of God'? And did the Victorians fetishise Indian sexuality? Joining Kate today is the magnificent Anjali Arondekar, Professor of Feminist Studies at the University of California, and author of For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India https://dukeupress.edu/for-the-record. This episode was edited by Hannah Feodorov. The producer was Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Freddy Chick. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener surveyhere https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/6FFT7MK. All music from Epidemic Sounds. Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. Voting is now open for the Listener's Choice Award at this year's Podcast Awards! UK & Ireland listeners please place your vote on the Spotify mobile app here: https://open.spotify.com/s/xhg6PJa Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Kate Lister?

  Do you want even more shocking and scandalous history? Like why the ancient Greek statues had such small manhoods? Or what went on behind closed doors in the Georgian era? Well, sign up to History Hit, where you can see me discover the scandalous side of history, as well as hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, covering everything from prehistoric Scotland to the Treaty of Versailles. Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.

• 0:35Kate Lister?

  Hello, my lovely betwixters. It's me, Kate Lister. Welcome back once again to Betwixt the Sheets, the show where we get pervy with history for your entertainment and your education. But before we can go any further together, I do have to let you know it's an adult podcast. It's spoken by adults, to other adults, about adult things, an adult way, can range on subjects and you've been adult too. Right, do you feel safer? Well, I certainly do. Let's crack on.

• 1:02Kate Lister?

  As you know, one of my favourite and certainly reoccurring themes of the show is how the Victorians fucked everything up.

• 1:12Kate Lister?

  And they really did. And today's episode is a prime candidate for exploring this theme. Britain's involvement in South Asia, what is now known as India, far predates the Victorians. But there's a particular Victorian morality that they love to impose on anyone and everyone that they came into contact with. And of course, that meant the British Raj in India as well. Not only did they get themselves all het up about what the natives were getting up to, but sex work became a real focus for them. Of course it did. They were panicking about sex work at home, so why would they worry about it any less in India? But what happened when these two very different cultures collided?

• 1:55Kate Lister?

  How did the British attitude to sex play its part in colonising and subjugating India? Well, listen on to find out more.

• 2:32Kate Lister?

  Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society with me, Kate Lister. Today's episode is a fascinating one, if I do say so myself. I mean, they're all fascinating, but this is a really, really fascinating one because we are looking at the ways the Victorian Britons tried and failed, quite spectacularly, to come to terms with Indian ideas of sex and sexuality after they forced control of the country in 1757. But what were Indian views on sexuality and indeed sex work like before the British Raj established itself? How did the Indian class system play a part in shaping these viewpoints? And what has been the lasting legacy of colonial occupation in India today? Joining me today is the wonderful Anjali Arondekar,

• 3:17Kate Lister?

  professor of feminist studies at the University of California, whose own family history of sex workers plays a fascinating role in this conversation. And whilst I'm here, I want to let you know once again about the two Betwixt the Sheets live shows that are happening in May. They're almost sold out, they really are. We're at 90% gone now, but you know, maybe you wanted to sit in the aisles or something. But we've got one in Edinburgh and another one in London, and tickets are available at fein.co.uk. Just search for Betwixt the Sheets and I'd love to see you there. Right, without further ado, everyone, let's just crack on.

• 3:55Kate Lister?

  Hello and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Professor Anjali Arondekar. How are you doing?

• 4:02Speaker 01

  I am doing as well as possible in this global dystopia, but I await love, life and liberation.

• 4:10Kate Lister?

  Now, there's an answer. There, that's the answer that we're all clinging to, is there? It's just, how are you doing? Well, we're doing as well as we possibly can be right now, I suppose.

• 4:21Speaker 01

  Quite, quite.

• 4:23Kate Lister?

  You are a professor of feminist studies at the University of California, and you are, well, the author of many papers and books, but in particular, for the record, on sexuality and the colonial archive in India and abundance sexuality's history. So as a starter question, what brought you to studying?

• 4:42Kate Lister?

  India, colonialism and sexuality.

• 4:45Speaker 01

  Well, that's a great question and it allows me to say something about my own biography, which is always, I always tell my students, biographies are epistemologies, which is basically a fancy way of saying it provokes the questions that you want to pursue. So I come from a sex worker family in India, that community is called Devadasi, which is a Sanskrit word, which means slave of God, also interchangeable with courtesan, prostitute, etc. In fact, my second book is a history of that community and its refusal to be erased. So when we talk about sex work, which is why I was so intrigued and delighted that you asked me to come on over

• 5:28Speaker 01

  and share the couch with you, as it were, was because people assume that histories of sex work have been disappeared, erased, and I want to insist on the opposite. I mean, I come from a family, community that I exist because of the work that my grandmothers did. My mother and father were the first to be legally married. So there is a robust counter-history that exists right alongside us, which, you know, we often don't look for, which is why my first book was called For the Record, which is to say, snap, there is material in the archive that tells us about the existence of a robust, capacious, messy history of sexuality. And the second book

• 6:12Speaker 01

  is called Abundance, because that history is not only there, but it is efflorescent and everywhere. And the book that I'm working on right now, which is about the British Indian Oceanic Territory of Mauritius, is called Oceanic Sex. And it's about the continuation of this conversation within histories of indenture, which is that nasty little period, kind of switched in between slavery and colonialism. So I'll pause there, but it is both personal, political and intellectual.

• 6:43Kate Lister?

  Is that a family history you grew up knowing? Was that just quite an open?

• 6:47Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, quite, absolutely. In fact, that's the kind of opening proviso of my book, which is to say, um, we assume that histories of sexuality begin with origin stories of loss, right? Meaning something's erased, something's disappeared, and we've got to do a search and rescue mission. We've got to go look for it, we've got to recuperate it, we've got to give it value, and then we have to look for reparation. And the community that I grew up in, which is why the provocation of colonial India is also complex, because the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, India is multiply colonized. So my community comes from Goa, which I know you Brits love to holiday and ruin, but.

• 7:29Kate Lister?

  We're so sorry about that.

• 7:30Speaker 01

  You should be sorry about it, but that's, we need to have another conversation about the raves in Goa led by your people. But Goa, for example, was a Portuguese colony that existed alongside British India. And the Portuguese were in India for four hundred and fifty years. They didn't leave till nineteen sixty one.

• 7:50Kate Lister?

  Wow.

• 7:50Speaker 01

  So most people, I mean, most South Asians don't recognize this history. We also had little pockets of India that were colonized by the French, like Pondicherry. So the community I grew up in is from Goa and has always been open. And the most important part about them is that they kept their own records from the late nineteenth century. So the kind of fantasy that sex worker communities just recently have begun to get unionized and have representation is incorrect. There are, you know, so the book is about that story. And it's a story about how do we find a way to give visibility to a history of sexuality that is not just about pathos and objection and disappearance,

• 8:33Speaker 01

  but rather is about joy, intervention, invention, and at the same time, loss and disenfranchisement. Um, and caste, which is something I don't think we'll have time to talk about. But when we talk about colonial India, the kind of ravages around histories of sexuality are not just because of the colonial. State, which of course I would love to blame for everything, but the kind of messiness of sexuality is also because of the ravages of religion and caste, C A S T E, which for some of your listeners may be an unfamiliar term, but is a term which is a division of labour, which is predestined.

• 9:13Speaker 01

  You are born into a caste, unlike class, which is mobile, and it is a division of labourers, as Dr. Beidker says. So I think because of this messy, you know, and I think sexuality is always the perfect case to think about these questions, because it is where everything goes wrong and where everything goes right.

• 9:31Kate Lister?

  There will be people listening that aren't familiar with with any of this history at all. So I suppose for them, let's start with a real basic question of what was the British Raj in India? How did we end up there and what were we doing?

• 9:48Speaker 01

  Well, let me begin with the story that I always tell my undergraduates to explain to them the kind of immensity of the British colonial empire. So Joseph Conrad, in his very famous book Heart of Darkness, which I'm sure some of your readers are familiar with, begins the story, his central protagonist, with a map, right? And he sort of looks at a map of the globe and he says, here are some dark spaces and here are some blank spaces. And then he talks about the fact that Britain used to be a dark place, meaning a place worthy of civilisation. And then we move on to the 19th century and it becomes the civilising force. But one of the things about that map, and if you sort of draw up a map of the 19th century, late 19th century,

• 10:31Speaker 01

  Britain, which is the size of my armpit in terms of geographies, right? It's not very big, but it colonised almost one quarter of the globe, right? So I think your listeners need to understand the scale of colonial extraction, exploitation that we're talking about. I mean, in terms of dates, again, a reminder for your listeners, dates are our kind of historical hangers, things that we like to hang things on, but things don't always begin and end when we say they do. So the beginning of the East India Company. Which I would argue is one of the first transnational corporations. Begins in seventeen fifty seven with the famous Battle of Plassey.

• 11:12Speaker 01

  When Robert Clive, thanks to a conniving collaborator who is an Indian. Overthrows a major ruler in India, the East India Company arrive. They take over, fast forward a hundred years, they're not doing so well because militarization. Doesn't work without seduction of some other sort. And just like we see with any empire, today's US empire is about oil, about power. But there's all this nonsense about we want to help people, we want to civilize people. So where do you think they learned that from, right? So eighteen fifty seven, there's a massive, what we in South Asian history would call a war of independence. Colonial historians would call a war of rebellion, which is the major eighteen fifty seven.

• 11:58Speaker 01

  Battle, which of course, rocks the kind of grounds of the East India Company. The British state, the British people at the top say, well, you know, militarization isn't working. We need a bureaucracy, we need to set up machinery, infrastructure. We need more people on the ground who are managing rather than just using ruler force. So eighteen fifty seven is seen as the official installation of the British Empire, the Order of the Queen. And then, of course, independence in nineteen forty seven. But nineteen forty seven is also where India and Pakistan emerge as divided nations across a genocide. Of over a million people. So India and Pakistan are liberated. So that's sort of the very checkered history.

• 12:43Speaker 01

  But again, these are origin stories that we need just to remind us that time exists. But of course, the British were there and as early as the sixteenth century. As travelers, as, as, you know, as voyagers, as traders. But I think the official installation is what helps us mark these bookends of the, of the British Raj. And of course, the afterlife of the British Raj, the fact that you and I can have a conversation. And the fact that I have a colonial accent is not because. I'm English, it's because post-colonialism ensured that people like me, who were educated, continued on the legacy of the British colonial Raj.

• 13:22Speaker 01

  So it ends and doesn't end, right? So I would, I would say that uh the afterlives of the British colonial Raj, I've seen in London as well. I mean, I've spent a lot of time in London. I went to university uh as well in Oxford, is that London is a post-colonial city. Every second person looks like me, and that's a good thing, right? And that's an afterlife of British colonialism. So British colonialism is not just over there. It's also right here at your shores, right? The Windrush generation, when a lot of our kin from the Caribbean came over and so on and so forth.

• 13:55Kate Lister?

  We think of it very neatly, don't we? Is that, you know, the British arrived and then all of a sudden it was British colonial India. And then we sort of tapped out and then that was it. It was all done. Then everybody's neatly back in their boxes. But it doesn't work like that and it never has.

• 14:09Speaker 01

  It doesn't, but I think, you know, most of us like binaries before and after. They, you know, it's like sex. If you don't have a good time, it's not, it's like those, I tell my students, it's like those adverts for erectile dysfunction. That we see all the time is that you take this pill and magically everything's gonna be okay. But you know it's not gonna be okay, right? So, so the before, the before and after is a seduction. It pulls us in. We want to believe, uh, you know, that uh we can make up for things that go wrong and we can. And I think that's, and sexuality interrupts that binary, right? People have children, people have desires, people write books.

• 14:51Speaker 01

  Um, so all of these kind of binaries between black and white, between men and women, between whatever genders you pick. Those binaries start to collapse under the weight and the kind of pleasures of sexuality. And I think therein lies the rub. I think, which is why we can have this conversation with so much pleasure as well.

• 15:10Kate Lister?

  The British, when they arrived in India, actually they did it wherever they went, when they were colonializing all around the world. They were fascinated with the sexuality of India and the, what they saw as the sensuality of it. And what scholars like Edward Said have called the eroticization of, of the Orient. Um, why do you think that was? And do you think that, I mean, what, I suppose what I'm asking is that. How did Indian sexuality present before the British turned up? Were they right to be fascinated? Was it so markedly different?

• 15:44Speaker 01

  Well firstly, we are infinitely more interesting. So I will, I will take that.

• 15:49Kate Lister?

  That's so true.

• 15:50Speaker 01

  I will, I will take that. But, but in all seriousness, I mean, first, just to remind your listeners, Edward Said, when he talks about the Orient, he's talking about what we now understand as the, as North Africa and the Middle East. He's not talking about South Asia, right? And I think that's an important distinction, that the idea of the Orient has also means something very different in the 19th century. Now, in terms of the, you know, why India? What's the, what's the kind of fetish around sexuality? I would say two things. One is, you know, one could bring up the red herring of things like the Kama Sutra, you know, all of these sort of colonial, pre-colonial texts, which contain lots of discussions of sexuality.

• 16:34Speaker 01

  But I have many, many colleagues and comrades who work in Judaism and Islam and Christianity, and they'll say there's sex everywhere, right? It's about how you appropriate, extract and think about it. So again, like what I said about before and after, it is also organized around this idea of what those of us in the business would call colonial difference, right? So in order for me to travel somewhere else and extract, exploit, fetishize, I need to have a sense of what is different about you from me that allows me to rape, ravage, seduce, right? Think about that trilogy is because I have to rhetorically stage a difference.

• 17:17Speaker 01

  So one of the primary differences of the colonial difference was not just race, was also sexuality. So if you read, you know, what I call ethnopornographers, meaning all of these travelogues that are written from the 17th century on about people who travel to India, to Egypt, remember there was no India before independence, what was then Hindustan, which is the broader congenaries of states. All of these ethnopornographic texts basically hone in on. On the differences of practice, rituals, et cetera. Which I don't tell the whole story, but they tell a story that's different from what they've experienced, say, on the shores of England, right?

• 17:55Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 17:55Speaker 01

  So this this fetishization, this fantasy of Indian sexuality being free and and rampant and and more flexible, all puns intended, right? Is also an imaginative form. It doesn't mean it's not there, but remember in the nineteenth century, when our British friends are traversing across oceans, dying of diarrhea, only about one fourth of the people make it, right? Uh, England is also the largest producer of pornography, right? I wrote a chapter about this called The Story of the India Rubber Dilda, right? Which is about the fact that in the nineteenth century, England is producing more pornographic texts in England than the Bible.

• 18:35Kate Lister?

  That sounds like us.

• 18:36Speaker 01

  So this idea of, you know, us Victorians, us Brits, we are, you know, a little bit concerned is is we know it's complete rubbish. But the question is, how do you historically shore up this fantasy, right? How do you use it to make colonialism work, right? If I say mission civilisatrice, civilizing mission, I'm going to go to India uh, either through religion or through education, not just because I want their resources, because those barbarians need our help. They have too much sex, they're polygamous, they marry uh, younger women, all all kinds of things. It authorizes my ability to colonize, right? And remember, you've got to think about, I always give my students a stupid example. Whenever you watch a terrible action thriller,

• 19:21Speaker 01

  why do they first say, get the women and children out? I could take anybody, as could you, right? We are certainly not frail, vulnerable people.

• 19:29Kate Lister?

  Yes, good point, yes.

• 19:31Speaker 01

  But but but think about that. You don't even think about it because it's so ordinary, right? So sexuality, saving people from depraved sex, et cetera. So for example, there's a wonderful book that was written by a British, I guess anthropologist in the mid nineteenth century, which was called The Seventh Sense, which is about the fact that people in North Africa had a genital sense, meaning. Besides a sense of smell, et cetera. And these were all fantasies made up and corroborated by very, very dodgy statistics.

• 20:03Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 20:04Speaker 01

  But it's like fake news, right? We know it's rubbish, but it's still everywhere. So I think these kind of histories of sexuality, and the more you probe into the archives, you see that these questions percolate as we go along.

• 20:26Kate Lister?

  I'll be back with Angelie after this short break.

• 20:34Speaker 02

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• 21:02Kate Lister?

  Hello, Betwixters. I'm jumping in here because I have some very exciting news. Betwixt the Sheets has set up camp on YouTube. That's right, it took us a while, but we are there now. So if you are the kind of person who likes to see your podcasts as well as hear your podcasts, you can now go and find us right there and the link is in the show notes. And please remember to like and subscribe because the people in charge of the money really do like that.

• 21:32Kate Lister?

  Right, let's get on with it.

• 21:44Kate Lister?

  There is a sort of a narrative that the British turned up in India and then we exported Victorian views to India and we sort of wrecked everything. That's a sort of very clumsily put, but an idea that we exported. I mean, you mentioned your family come from the Devadasi and the British razz went, no, we don't think so very much. You want to stop doing that immediately. And we closed down a lot of practices. Is that just too clumsy to look at it? The idea that sexuality was completely liberated and lovely before the Brits ever turned up?

• 22:16Speaker 01

  No, I think that is, I I would say less than clumsy. I think it's too easy, right? It lets it lets everyone off the hook. It lets me blame Brits. It lets the Brits feel bad about what they did. And it lets South Asians and Indians forget that we had lots of other forms of hierarchicalisation, like the caste system, like religion, right, that already created divides that the British use. That's why it was called divide and rule. They use the differences that were already there to amplify the differences that they wanted to exploit. So I would say, yes, there is obviously, the British exploited and brought in education, infrastructure,

• 23:01Speaker 01

  all kinds of things, but they also used what was already there. I mean, I think that's why the empire lasted for as long as it did, right? They weren't a very hearty people, right? That's why, I mean, you know, all of the all of the kinds of foods that were eaten, they were dying, they were sickly, you know, these, it's what's remarkable is how did a small group of sickly white people colonise so much of the globe because they mobilised what was already there. And I think that's a lesson, you know, to be learnt in terms of exploitation and and collaboration, right? We know that from histories of slavery as well, but slavery would not have been possible without local collaborators. If you look at Ghana, any of the major slave trading points.

• 23:44Speaker 01

  So I think it's at this stage in history, I think where, you know, that is still a little bit of the past. And now that, you know, we can have these conversations freely and in a spirit of solidarity. I think it's important for us to think about the messy entanglements and how blame doesn't get us anywhere, right? We need to make sure we don't repeat those same mistakes.

• 24:05Kate Lister?

  Yeah, absolutely. So thinking specifically about, so I'm not even sure what word to use, because like I I would say like sexual labour or sex work, but these are very modern terminologies. And I'm not even, I didn't even, I I certainly know that the Brits turned up and they exported their Victorian understanding of the great social evil, quote unquote, and that what they saw as prostitution and being morally reprehensible and something that needs to be managed and basically stamped out at all costs. But before that came in, how was sexual labour understood in India?

• 24:39Speaker 01

  That's a great question, and let me give very concrete example. But before I go to, you know, how the arrival of the British altered the landscape. I would say, previous to the arrival of the British, sexual labour was distributed across different vocations. So, for example, the community I come from, which is spread out all over India, the community where I grew up and my mother was born is Portuguese India, was that it was often attached to temples and religion, right? So the idea of Davidasi. So for a long, so for example, the Portuguese took a long time to ban the practice of Davidasi's because they said it was a religious practice, right?

• 25:19Speaker 01

  So if you look across India, a lot of these communities of sex workers, who would probably call themselves other things, emerged and their sexual practices were not frowned upon or not pathologized because they were either attached to kings, courtesans, to religious forms, or to traditional hereditary practices like dance and performance, right? So that's one end of the story. So which doesn't mean that the sexual labour was perhaps also exploitative, but it was folded in to systems that made it ordinary, right? So there are many scholars who've written about Aved, for example, this princely state in North India, where it was very ordinary for courtesans to have places of power,

• 26:04Speaker 01

  as it was, to talk about my favourite subject, sodomy, right? As it was common for there to be men who had sex with young boys and vice versa, right? So the emergence of same-sex is, again, also part of the sexual labour. I think we understandably focus on women, and we'll use that word as a placeholder, given the period. But there was also all kinds of other sex going on, which is something I've written about, right? So there is this kind of past. And of course, there is on-the-ground exploitation, which whenever you have capital, there always is. But when the British arrived, something shifts. And it shifts not because of the depravity of the native, but because of the depravity of the English. And let me explain how.

• 26:49Speaker 01

  In eighteen sixty four is a very important period, which is of course the passing of the Contagious Disease Act, which is an act that regulates, surveys women's bodies and decides who is respectable and non-respectable. But the Contagious Disease Act, now, we've got to think about any law that's passed in the metropole. Metropole is a fancy word for saying London, and then travels to the colonies. It is not the same law because the law that is built in the metropole is designed for white people. So when you carry it over to the colonies, you have to figure out, how do I use the same law to, and translate it to brown bodies that, that work in different ways.

• 27:31Speaker 01

  So the Contagious Disease Act, which was of course an act to protect bodies and the spread of venereal diseases, was used by the British to also set up these lock hospitals, Lal Bazaar, which is basically Red Bazaar, the biggest of which was in Calcutta, which was the capital of the British Empire at the time in India, which were basically places that surveyed women's bodies, made sure that they were clean, so that they could service British soldiers.

• 28:00Kate Lister?

  It was checking for venereal disease, wasn't it, forcibly if necessary?

• 28:04Speaker 01

  It was a ruse because it was a way to just, um, to ensure that, they weren't worried about Indian women, they were worried about the British soldiers, not, but, but what's even more interesting is this is an open exception, or not exception, open, um, you know, agreement that, that in that British soldiers were using sex workers.

• 28:24Kate Lister?

  Yes.

• 28:25Speaker 01

  Right? So I mean, this is not open, this is an open secret. You can't have so many women in a hospital being checked out, even if it's for dodgy reasons, if there aren't so many men who are coming into contact with them, right? So, so eighteen sixty four is a super important moment, it's because it's an acknowledgement of the fact that the soldiers are crossing racial lines.

• 28:45Kate Lister?

  Yes.

• 28:46Speaker 01

  Right? And like any practical colonial power, the Brits decide, well, you know, they're going to do it anyway, let's make sure they're safe. But we don't care about the women. So, and it's no coincidence that the biggest Red Bazaar is also the police Headquarters in Calcutta, right? And many people have written about this. The second most important point is, and this is something I wrote about in my first book, is the fact that throughout this period, there's a constant kind of shadow hanging of sodomy. So there are lots and lots of reports filed about the spread of sodomy, about the threat of sodomy. And I wrote about this very famous Karachi Report that was commissioned by Charles Napier in the late eighteen forties. And Sir Richard Burton, the famous, not the actor, the famous anthropologist,

• 29:31Speaker 01

  was commissioned to do the Karachi Report. Now, what's the Karachi Report? The Karachi Report was about all these male brothels that were spreading across the North West Frontier Province, the place between India and Pakistan. And Napier was worried that too many soldiers were visiting male prostitutes, right? Now, this report was never found, I don't even think it exists. But the fact that something like that kept coming up meant that sex work was, or prostitution or whatever you call it, was not just restricted to women. It was proliferating and the fear of it had to be contained by sort of, you know, it's like creating a dyke and moving it men along into visiting women rather than.

• 30:12Speaker 01

  And, and you know, when, when you look at the archival records, there are so many cases of sodomy, right? And I wrote, and not sodomy of the depraved native, sodomy of British soldiers who were sent back, chaplains who were sent back because of inappropriate behaviour. So, so this is, you know, and this is the messy landscape, which should exist. I mean, you know, it shouldn't surprise us, but it does.

• 30:35Kate Lister?

  So the Contagious Diseases Act were laws that were passed in Britain where women could be forcibly detained and made to submit to a venereal examination if they were suspected of selling sex, and then they could be detained in a lock hospital or jailed unless they agreed to it. That's what they do for the women. Were there any kind of mechanisms in place for dealing with these men that were selling sex in India?

• 30:56Speaker 01

  No, I mean, that's why it's, to me, it's a delicious story because it's a story that circulates, but we don't really have much material evidence. So one of the, when I wrote about this Karachi report, I wrote about the fact that it was a story that refused to go away, even though there was no evidence. It kept being, it kept coming up over and over again. And Richard Burton also translated The Arabian Nights and wrote a very famous terminal essay, which is the last part, where he talks about the rampant homosexuality in the region. So there is, uh, in, in both in Middle East, North Africa and in South Asia. So there is, it's, it's kind of like a story that tells itself, right? Now, to go back, um, you know, to the idea of the, the Contagious Diseases Act.

• 31:41Speaker 01

  When you asked me before, you know, can we blame the Brits for everything, right? Here's another way in which the Contagious Diseases Act also helps the colonial native elites, right? So there are, like any, any structure of society, there are different classes of people who are colonized, right? There are people who are workers, there are people who are trade owners, there are landowners, and their relationship to the colonial state is very different. So the Contagious Disease Act, and there's a wonderful scholar named Durbal Mitra who's written about it, is also used by people who want to incarcerate troubling women, women who don't follow the rules, who want to run away from home, and they are forced into this category of prostitute by invoking the Contagious Disease Act.

• 32:25Speaker 01

  So if you look at the records, you'll see a lot of women who are, who are picked up and, uh, because their families complain about their unruly behavior. So it's a way not just of containing, it's sex work becomes this model for respectability. But what is respectability becomes something that whoever's in power decides, right? So I think that the Contagious Disease Act, that's why I said the translation across, across the ocean means that something else happens, um, to it. But it also opens up this fantastic new era. And I would say, any of your listeners, even if you're not historians, this material is available for free online at the British Library. What it opens up is this field

• 33:06Speaker 01

  Of medical jurisprudence, which is basically a fancy way of saying you can forensically examine bodies for whatever. So when I was doing my archival work, you have this prosecution and containment of sexuality on the one hand. And when you're reading these cases, you have, as I write in my chapter on sodomy, you have extended discussions of subtended anuses and onanism, which is basically another word for masturbation. Because the the language of medical jurisprudence allows you to say all those things.

• 33:38Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 33:38Speaker 01

  Right? So the two most important things in this period are pornography, right? In pornography, you could say what you like because it's pornography. But as I write in my book, if you read colonial pornography, it keeps the colonial racial logics in place, right? So you have black men who are rapists in this colonial pornography, but Indian men are not allowed to have sexual contact with white women. So even in this fantasy of, you know, racial transgression, Indian men are still kept as factotums. They are never seen as predators because that would materialize a fantasy and a desire and a fear that nobody wanted to calculate. And medical jurisprudence was another place, right?

• 34:18Speaker 01

  So if you're a doctor, so there are lots and lots of records and you're reading this and going, what the hell is going on, right? How are they giving us such explicit semen samples, all of this, right? At the same time as when they're saying we can't talk about sex.

• 34:32Kate Lister?

  That's the Victorians, isn't it? They absolutely mad as a box of frogs. They they were obsessed with sex.

• 34:38Speaker 01

  Quite. And but I think the the question is that we know that, but the challenge is what do we do with that knowledge? How does that help us think about how we study, think, organize, right? Because I think the the organization of sex workers is also important here, right? They learned from all of these strategies of erasure and manipulation. And and all of the wonderful unions of sex, the biggest union of sex workers, as you know, is in India, is, you know, learned from these mistakes and they they have used those to further their rights and responsibilities.

• 35:10Kate Lister?

  Who are the Devadasi?

• 35:12Speaker 01

  So the Devadasi is a Sanskrit word. Deva means god, Dasi means slave. And it would, as I said, mean literally in Sanskrit, the slave of god. But it is used interchangeably as courtesan, prostitute, sex worker, depending on your orientation. Devadasis are all over India, South India, Northern India, Western India, but they're very different. And so, for example, well, you live in the UK, so you may have heard of the death of Ashab Hosley recently. Or Latham and Gishkar, who are the two most famous singers who have collaborated with. They are members of the Devadasi community. So Devadasi is also very known for their talents in performance and dancing and singing.

• 35:55Speaker 01

  So a lot of members of my community are very, very famous classical singers in the Indian musical tradition. So they are both veneered for their performance and their talent, but their history of sexuality is often disappeared. And part of what I wanted to do was kind of insist that the history of sexuality is part of the story. Devadasis still exist in some parts of India and Devadasis are always attached to goddesses, right? As I said before, the profession of a courtesan or a Devadasi is allowed, is made permissible because it is attached to a goddess. Devadasis are also always lower caste. As I said before, the caste system is hierarchical.

• 36:38Speaker 01

  So I am from a caste oppressed community. We use the word bahujan, which means many, or dalit, instead of the word untouchable, which is a word that degrades us rather than empowers us. So Devadasis exist from all, but they are lower caste and they are, you know, different depending on which part of India you come from. And there was many efforts in the 1930s to, to disestablish this tradition. And it has had some success, but not entirely. So that would be one way of, a very shorthand way of describing that tradition.

• 37:24Kate Lister?

  I'll be back with Anjali after this short break.

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• 38:02Kate Lister?

  Hello, Betwixters. I'm jumping in here because I have some very exciting news. Betwixt the Sheets has set up camp on YouTube. That's right. It took us a while, but we are there now. So if you are the kind of person who likes to see your podcasts as well as hear your podcasts, you can now go and find us right there. And the link is in the show notes. And please remember to like and subscribe because the people in charge of the money really do like that. Right, let's get on with it.

• 38:43Kate Lister?

  So these are women and girls that they are dedicated to a temple and then they sell sex and give the money to the temple. Is that how it works?

• 38:55Speaker 01

  That is one way of words. The phrase that we would use is called given to the goddess. It's always a goddess, right? And there's a wonderful book by Lucinda Ramburg about this. So the idea is you give your labor to the goddess, right? And your labor can be anything that has to do with the temple. You could be sweeping, you could be picking flowers. And the priests, the yajmans, the mahajans, who are the Brahmins, who are the, we love to call them the white people of the caste system, right, are the ones who extract your labor for their own benefit. You don't get anything in exchange, except shelter. But you don't get prosecuted because tradition, right? So remember colonial states like to stay away from religion.

• 39:37Speaker 01

  They want to use religion to build divides, right? The division of India and Pakistan, where so many people died because of religion, was a manufactured feud that was, you know, lubricated by the British colonial state, right? So so the David Dasi tradition was left alone for a long time by the Brits because they were like, this is a, this has to do with religion. And it keeps, allows us to do different things and allows us to continue sex work in a different practice because we can say, look, it's already here. You guys are already doing it. And there's been a lot of work about this, but I think it's worth thinking about. It goes back to a question of you asked me before. Was it different before the Brits arrived? Yes, it was a bit different, but it was also hierarchicalized.

• 40:22Speaker 01

  It was also exploitative, even as, you know, like you look at the Greek texts, any other texts, they have fantastic efflorescence of sexual practices. Do they do them now? No, they don't. Why didn't they go colonize Greece? It's a balancing act between those stories. So I think that's how I would address your question.

• 40:42Kate Lister?

  So it sounds like the David Dasi, like it's not a simple case of transactional sexism. You give me money, I give you sex. It's more like they're in a world where their labor is given to the goddess and sex can be one form of the labor. Like sex is part of their world, but it's not the point of their world.

• 40:59Speaker 01

  Quite, but what's an interesting kind of wrinkle in that story is that once nineteen twenties come along or nineteen hundreds, once, you know, we have more modernization, people are migrating more. So for example, my community, which originated in Portuguese India, a lot of people like my mother and father's mothers, I don't have any grandmothers fathers because we don't know who the biological fathers were, migrated to Bombay, which was now called Mumbai during the nineteen twenties and thirties. So my grandmothers, for example, were not attached to a temple anymore because they moved into urban areas, but they continued the practice of. Serial monogamy with their patrons, right?

• 41:43Speaker 01

  So my grandmothers had multiple patrons, which means that my mother and father have multiple siblings with different fathers. But they were not considered prostitutes, entre guillemets, in quotation marks, because they had, they were monogamous. They were monogamous with whoever their patron was, who was normally a rich Brahmin businessman, who would pay them. It was like having a mistress.

• 42:08Kate Lister?

  Yes.

• 42:09Speaker 01

  So the practice gets codified, right? So it's still sex work. I mean, when I wrote my second book, a lot of people in my community were not happy with the fact that I was focusing, not because they had ever erased the history of sexuality. I was, I was always taught to be very proud of it. But they wanted to tell a story of rags to riches, right? They wanted to tell a story of, look where we are now, look where we used to be. And part of what I was saying is that you could tell that history, but you need to tell the history of these women who labored and continue to labor like my grandmothers. They were ordinary women, you know, who, who built homes and houses because they transact, they got apartments. So there's an entire street in Bombay where I grew up,

• 42:53Speaker 01

  which ninety percent of the apartments were owned by Davidassis, because they were really smart. They were like, we don't want money, give us property. And a lot of these Davidassis would have androgynous names, because according to law, women couldn't inherit. So they were super smart. So when you say transaction, that's why I think sex workers, you know, understand the power of sex as a form of transaction, right? And I think that's why the unions are so successful now, they understand. And there was no push to respectability. I mean, I wrote about this in my book, which is the first thing you want is, you know, when you have sex workers, the kind of liberal conservative model is, oh, if we reform them, we give them education.

• 43:33Kate Lister?

  Save them.

• 43:33Speaker 01

  Yes, and we marry them, they'll be great. But one of the big debates in our community in the nineteen twenties in the, in the archives is, why should we advocate for marriage? My father wrote about this, he was a student organizer and it might, you know, he was more queer than I was. No, my father was, wrote this beautiful. For peace, when he was seventeen years old, which is, which is in Marathi, which is my first language, which basically says, why are you telling us to get married? The men who come to visit our mothers are all married. So clearly, marriage is not the solution, right?

• 44:04Kate Lister?

  Wow.

• 44:05Speaker 01

  But it is, but you know, that's the kind of practicality. But it's also pleasure. I mean, these archives, one of the reasons why I love talking about this, and you could see in my excitement, is it's also full of joy. They are kalavans. Kala is a word that means art, right? They think about sexuality as a form of intervention. Surely, as a form of exploitation, there is plenty of that. And I could tell you so many stories of gas humiliation, but those are familiar stories. We do not hear stories of sexuality as a place of possibility, as a place of empowerment, as a place of organizing. And I think that's the story I I want to keep reminding. That's why abundance, there is always abundance.

• 44:46Kate Lister?

  Angela, I I'm gonna come to your family home. I need to hear more about your family history. This just sounds absolutely incredible.

• 44:52Speaker 01

  All in the book. You could read it over the toilet, as we say in India. That's the best place to read.

• 44:57Kate Lister?

  What about um the Hijra? They were a community that the the British colonialists had to encounter and also disapproved of as they disapproved of the Davidafi.

• 45:08Speaker 01

  Again, that's also a wonderful question and a question that should be asked again and again, especially as we live in such transphobic times. Not just in the United States, but in India, in the UK, everywhere. So the story of the Hijra is like the story of sexuality. It is not about one version of transness. It's about multiple versions. The term Hijra becomes an umbrella term that the British mobilize to fold in many different kinds of of non-normative bodies, right? So if you go to southern India, they're called Cortes. If you come to western India, they're called Joktes. So the word Hijra normally uh is associated with a certain kind of trans female figure, right?

• 45:52Speaker 01

  Someone who sings and dances and extorts money, claps in a certain way. But if you look at the long his. History of Hijras and again, there are wonderful scholars who have written about this. Hijras also, like Cortezans, emerge from from courtly sort of kings and other Darbars, et cetera, and we're seen as a very important placeholder for respect, right? So Hijras live in communities. So the the figure of the Hijra is again become this figure like the figure of the prostitute, right? Which is both damned and restored, right? We wanna bring them back, we wanna make them bigger bad. But Hijras don't tell only one small part of the story of non-binary people, right? In in the past.

• 46:37Speaker 01

  And Hijras were sometimes were attached to families. And if you talk to any Hijra community, they do not define themselves by their embodied form. They define themselves by their attachment to a community, to a god, to respect, right? So I think that's one of the biggest, I think, damages that the colonial sort of divide and rule thing did is that they made Hijras these kind of figures of evil and and disruption in a way that they were not. And I think that has continued today, right? But also Hijras don't describe all of the trans. Most people in India who are trans are not Hijras.

• 47:14Kate Lister?

  It's different, isn't it? It's Hijras, they they don't, if I'm right, probably not, but they don't identify as being transgender. They identify as being a third gender, a sort of beyond gender.

• 47:27Speaker 01

  Quite, and in in Pakistan, they are called the Quajja Sira. So I think when you say colonial India, it's important for us to include Pakistan because there was no India before nineteen forty seven, right? So if you use the word colonial, one must talk about Pakistan. So in Pakistan, a country that I have been to and I have enormous respect for. In fact, the first queer conference was held in South Asia, was held in Pakistan in Lahore. And I was the only Indian there and I gave the keynote. So when people say there's no queer studies in Pakistan, they are wrong. So the Quajja Sira in Pakistan, in a country where homosexuality is criminalized, are held with enormous respect. They hold government positions, they have one of the most famous talk shows is run by a Quajja.

• 48:10Speaker 01

  Khwaja Sira is basically Sanghidra in Pakistan. They have very different histories, they have very different genealogies, but their attachment to ritual, tradition, etc. Is the same. So I think, again, our job as educators, as people who talk to have, you have an amazing platform that a lot of people listen to. And I think the beauty of these conversations is to remind people that there is so much more to what you know. And not knowing is a good thing. It means that there are so many of us.

• 48:40Kate Lister?

  What's the plight of the Hijra today? I mean, they have a very, very rich history, but what conditions do they live in today? Are they respected? Are they outcast? What's going on?

• 48:49Speaker 01

  I think it's a little bit of both. So for example, let's take the example of the Arawani's, A R A V A N I, which is a community of Hijras that is in in Maharashtra, the state I live in, also in other parts of India. So they are at once revered. So if you have weddings or births, etc., they come and bless the child. I mean, so you see them, you know, it's very normal. But at the same time, because of the increasing conservatism that is rampant in India now, because it is an authoritarian state, it is very anti-Muslim, it is very anti anything that doesn't work for for Hindutva, they are becoming demonized.

• 49:29Speaker 01

  There are like here, there are many more deaths of trans people and of Hijra communities. But they are also ascending. I mean, it's like any community that's exploited, they are organizing. And the recent trans laws that are the government is trying to pass in India is a good example for us to think about your question. So even if Hijras don't identify as trans, they are folded into the trans demographic in India. So a few years ago, there was a wonderful ruling passed in India called Nalasa, which recognized third gender people more so than, say, in the UK or in in the United States where I live, where they extended them workplace discrimination, rights and and responsibilities.

• 50:12Speaker 01

  But now the the current government has said that we will only give you these rights and responsibilities.

• 50:20Speaker 01

  It is if you can prove you are trans, which is goes back to medical jurisprudence. They want people to be subject to medical examinations in order to be given the right to call themselves third gen. So you see what I mean about the colonial state reentering. So on the one hand, you could, they would say, well, why are you fussing? We're giving you rights. We just want you to prove you're trans, but in the language we understand. And most trans people and most even Heteros uh do not have surgery, right? As you know, it's not the only form of recognition. So again, it's always a mixed bag, right? I can tell you so many amazing stories about this Aravani project where they go around the country, do beautiful murals, do protests, do art activism.

• 51:05Speaker 01

  But on the other hand, they also do sex work, their women are beaten, uh you know, um so it's always a mixed bag. I mean, and I think that's the story of the world right now, and India is no different.

• 51:16Kate Lister?

  And as a final question then, although honestly, I could talk to you for forever. What is the state of play of sex work in India today of sexual labor? Is it criminalized? Is it decriminalized? Is it partially criminalized? Where are we up to?

• 51:30Speaker 01

  I think it's partially criminalized. I mean, India is like any good bureaucracy. If you know how to beat it, you can get away with anything. And we thank the British for that, but if you get caught in it, then you are, you know, so if you, so if you go to any part of of India, for example, there are open red light districts, right? Kamati Pura in Bombay and the Lal Bazaar, the place that I was telling you about that was established in in the nineteenth century. There are different versions of it that extend. So all across India. And there are wonderful films that have been made, right? About these sex workers who openly talk. And if anytime you have a union, it can't be criminalized, right?

• 52:09Speaker 01

  Think about it. If I say, you know, you got to respect my labor, but there are always police hovering around, right? So it's sort of in between. The state is not interested in enforcing or saying they are not for or against. But on the other hand, uh in cas- you know, casera logics, as we like to say, the logic of policing is always. hovering around. But sex worker unions are everywhere. And one of the most beautiful things about sex worker unions is that they are committed to prophylactics, they are committed to education, they are out and about, they are intergenerational, and there is a lot of focus on age, because there's a lot of sex trafficking, right? As a sex positive person,

• 52:52Speaker 01

  I would say sex work. But I also know, and there are many people who do this work, that a lot of women and young girls are sex trafficked, especially from places like Nepal and Bangladesh, because families who have too many children give over, you know. So, so again, it's not about demonizing anyone, but it's also thinking about as those of us who are advocates for sex work, we have to be generous enough to understand that coercion and exploitation can also be part of that story, but it's not the whole story.

• 53:24Kate Lister?

  Anjali, you have been incredible. Thank you so much.

• 53:28Speaker 01

  You're a perfect date. Let's do it again.

• 53:31Kate Lister?

  If people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you?

• 53:35Speaker 01

  Well, as I said, my name is Anjali Arundhiker, and I have all my materials are open access. I believe in everyone having a chance to read. So if you just Google my name, don't AI, because they'll tell you rubbish about what I do. You can buy my books, you can Google it, you can read anything. I've done a lot of public interviews. Just educate, as we say in India, educate, agitate, organise. That's the motto. And as a caster press person, I invite you to do that.

• 54:03Kate Lister?

  Thank you so much. You've been spectacular.

• 54:06Speaker 01

  It's my pleasure.

• 54:11Kate Lister?

  Thank you for listening, and thank you so much to Anjali for joining us. And if you like what you heard, don't forget to like, review and follow along, wherever it is you get your podcasts. Coming up, we have got episodes on the mystery of Princess Caribou with After Dark's Maddie Pelling, no less, and another on how to get cancelled in Judea. That really is the title we're going with. And of course, we're looking at Jesus. And if you would like us to explore a subject, or if you just wanted to say hello, or if you want to shout at us for blaspheming, then you can email us at [email protected]. This podcast was edited by Hannah Fyodorov and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Freddy Chick. Join me again on Betwixt Sheets, The History of Sex Scandal in Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.