'Imperial Reason', National Honour and New Patriarchal Compacts in early twentieth-century India

In a curious response to the perceived urgency of stopping white prostitutes from soliciting in Indian cantonments in 1912, F. J. Aylmer, Quartermaster General, revealed the dilemma posed by the imperative of prohibiting foreign prostitution while simultaneously tolerating Indian prostitution.

It is an Imperial and very urgent reason. As long as a woman is white the native does not much consider whether she is English or Foreign. Her degradation constitutes in his eyes that of the ruling and paramount power in India . . . One of the reasons always quoted by the GOI [Government of India] for their inability to follow the advice of the 'Ultra Purity Party' is that prostitutes in India belong to a regular caste, and that the prostitute is born such and has no means of livelihood. We cannot uphold the argument in the case of the white prostitute.¹

By the middle of the 1920s, when the new international patriarchal protocols of the League of Nations were being put in place, this structured ambivalence resulted in an interesting inversion of the racialized sexual relations in India that had sprung from earlier colonial concern with protecting the health of British soldiers. The confidence with which colonial military authorities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century had planned the control and effective containment of venereal disease among British subalterns in cantonments all over India yielded in the interwar period to a compromise with those Indians who were claiming a more assertive national honour. If earlier military authorities in India and indeed most parts of the world had been concerned about the medical threat posed to white subalterns by diseased 'native' women, in the period between the wars colonial anxieties were sharply focused on the moral threat to racial order posed by the appearance (and representation) of the sexualized white woman in the colonies before an indiscriminate 'native' eye.

How does this inversion relate to political transformations in late colonial India? It is imperative clearly to move beyond examining the activities and campaigns of colonial authorities and British feminists alike in the colonies (as Antoinette Burton and Phillippa Levine have so admirably done),² and to scrutinize the measures initiated by the Indian nationalist elite for the regeneration and transformation of sexual practices. Running parallel to the concerns of the military and colonial authorities were the gathering anxieties of an Indian moral-intellectual leadership about the need for further changes to the reproductive sexuality of the feudal family form. In southern India, for instance, and in particular Mysore – the region which is the focus of this article – a successful abolitionist drive under-girded by moral concerns was launched by the bureaucracy in the early 1900s against the devadasi or temple dancing women. Maintenance of the family order through delineating the boundaries between licit and illicit sexuality was legally sanctioned by the third decade of the twentieth century, in a parodic echo of earlier military discourse, though framed as a concern for the sexual health of the Indian population.

These parallel though contradictory concerns of colonial authorities and of nationalist elites were curiously made to intersect in the early 1930s. When the Government of India was asked, as a member of the League of Nations, to sign a new protocol for eliminating the age limit on the conventions of 1910 and 1921 for the Suppression of the Traffic in Women and Children, it declared its inability to do so, citing 'social and religious factors which make it impossible in present conditions to penalize the procuration within this area'.³ The resolution of these competing concerns in the international arena signalled a willingness of the colonial authorities publicly to endorse local patriarchal practices. After the passage of the Indian Contagious Diseases Act XIV of 1868, and its repeal twenty years later, it was now the colonial state, rather than the conservative Indian leadership, that upheld trafficking in women within India.⁴ The move pre-empted actions in this area on the part of the nationalist elites that could have conflicted embarrassingly with racialized principles of administration. The nationalist leadership meanwhile elevated concerns...