Prostitution in Nineteenth Century Bengal: Construction of Class and Gender

Author(s): Ratnabali Chatterjee

Source: Social Scientist , Sep. - Oct., 1993, Vol. 21, No. 9/11 (Sep. - Oct., 1993), pp. 159-
172
Published by: Social Scientist

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RATNABALI CHATTERJEE*

Prostitution in Nineteenth Century Bengal:

Construction of Class and Gender

In a critique made of Michelle Barret's Women's Oppression Today

(London 1980) Johanna Brenner and Maria Ramas pointed out that
Barret's analysis fails to decipher how the capitalist drive to
accumulate and use labour power left women out of capitalist
production and forced them to stay at home.1 Taking my cue from
critics I would like to argue that though Barret has stated that the
family household system is not inherent to capitalism but has come to
form a historically constituted element of class relations, she has left
out of her formulations (which have since formed the core of Marxist
feminist debates in the West) the pre-capitalist and colonial
experiences of non-European people in general.
In this paper I have tried to explore how in the specific context of
colonial rule, patriarchal norms in Bengal were shaped by both caste
and class considerations. The dominant ideology expressed itself
through certain indigenous categories like kula and vamsa, which dir-
ectly aimed at controlling womens' reproductive powers. I will also
discuss how an ideology of domesticity evolved in this period restrict-
ing women's labour and creative powers within the household. Any
movement outside this social space-through performance, religious
preaching even joining the labour force marked her out to be a deviant
and prostitute.

Beriye elem, beshya halem kula karlem khaya

Tabuo kina bhatar shala dhamke katha kay.'
(I came out became a whore blackened my kula [family] yet even
now this bastard of a husband yells at me).2

This lone voice calling out from the dark brings to the fore those cate-
gories which demarcated a woman's social space in nineteenth century
Bengal. The word kula derived from Sanskrit meant a generic collec-
tivity. Two other terms, gotra and vamsa were considered synonymous
with kula indicating shared blood and bodily substance.3 These terms

Dept. of Islamic H-listory and Culture, University of Calcutta, Calcutta.

Social Scientist, Vol. 21, Nos. 9-11, September-November 1993

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160 SOCIAL SCIENTIST

bore a direct reference to the reproductive powers of women in ensuring

the purity of the lineage.
The status ranking of kula was based primarily on ritual consider-
ation and applied mainly to upper caste Hindus. Any loss of face
particularly in the context of a marital alliance was marked as a blot
on the prestige of kula.4 Women were therefore reared and guarded
strictly as the fear of losing the honour of one's kula constantly
haunted upper caste Hindus. In the nineteenth century patriarchal
norms evolved in Bengal in response to these wider social anxieties
concerning the maintenance of the brahminical moral order in general
and the social prestige of one's own kula or vamsa in particular.
Due to the entrenchment of colonial rule, the period also witnessed a
shift in the political economy. This led to a general devaluation of
women's work. The gradual cheapening of labour and the creation of a
labour surplus in the agrarian sector forced marginal and peasant
households to depend more and more on participation of women and
children in the procurement of subsistence. Since they were paid a
lower wage compared to that of an adult male the women's
contribution to the household was progressively devalued.5
The rise in prices of agicultural commodities and the reduction in
wages made it easier for the middle peasant and trader to adopt
seclusion by foregoing women's visible labour whether in the family
farm or in selling the production of male members of the family.6 Since
freeing women from outside labour implied an ability to dispense with
their contribution to household income, dissociation from manual
labour distinguished the gentlewoman-the bhadramahila from the
women of the labouring poor-the dasi.
For secluded women the work adopted followed the facilities of
work space. Inside the house, separated by a courtyard upper caste
Hindu women had a private space-the andarmahal, constructed in
contrast to the man's outer domain of the bahir mahal or kachhari.
Women's invisibility or the notion of purdah was now inseparably
identified with social and moral status. While poor women's visible
and manual work was stigmatised by association with lower status,
the appropriation of an increasingly wider range of women's
productive activity within the household fed an ideology of
domesticity.7 The gender and class identity of the Bengali Hindu
woman depended upon her nurturing activities as mother and wife
within the home. These were codified through a number of moral
tracts.8 While the gentle-woman was deified as grihalaxmi and
kulabadhu, the deviant was marked as an outcast-alaxmi, asati and
kulata (the latter also meaning the prostitute).

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 PROSTITUTION IN NINETEENTH CENTURY BENGAL 161

Between 1858-73 the largest group of migrants from the surrounding

districts to Calcutta were widows or rejected wives from low caste
families of barbers, milkmen, malis, jugis, kaibartas and Haris. Most
of these women, unable to find any other work, were forced into prosti-
tution or into domestic services as maids. Although British accounts
condemn them as being notoriously unchaste they were merely peasant
and artisan women who had been thrown out of their traditional
occupations without any other alternatives offered to them.9
After the passing of the Indian Factories Act in 1881 women and
children were legally allowed to join the industrial workforce. As a
result the British parliamentary reports of 1884-85 state that unlike
the cotton mills of Bombay, the jute mills of Calcutta employed a
larger proportion of women and children.10 Yet because of their
association with low skill they were gradually concentrated in the
lowest paid jobs in the mills. They were regarded mainly as a reserve
supply of labour when male labour was short and the first to lose their
jobs in a slump.
The conditions of employment affected social and cultural attitudes
towards suitability of factory work as an occupation for women. Lower
wages and the perception that their earnings were secondary meant
that women often entered the labour market when they had exhausted
other alternatives. Sometimes they were pushed into the labour
market by the inadequacy or deprivation of male earnings. Social
reasons like widowhood, desertion or barrenness also forced women to
seek work outside the village.
Uncertainty of employment persuaded many men to leave their
wives in the villages. Wives of better paid workers replicated notions
of upward mobility by refraining from joining both the factory and
domestic labour force. The affirmation of such domestic ideology
tended to socially and economically marginalise those women who
continued to work in factories or as domestic workers in the houses of
the rich.11 Most of these women were regarded as part time prostitutes
by their employers and co-workers.12
By mnid-nineteenth century some of the Bengali bhadralok built
themselves town residences and even brought their families from the
villages. The social divisions of space, earlier limited to ritual
consideration, were now construed into actual living space. The
women's quarters became a refuge for a number of upper caste Hindu
widows. These women who had earlier eked out a living by spinning
and even observed the family rituals (of weddings and funerals) were
now thrown out of their occupation by the importing of yarns from
England.13 Forced to leave their village homes they either worked as
cooks or maids in the houses of the rich or ended up as prostitutes in
Calcutta's expanding brothels. (In 1881 the number of women domestic

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162 SOCIAL SCIENTIST

servants numbered 21,884. While prostitutes numbered 1,22,228 and

dancers 111).14
This state of things did not escape the British administration. In
1872, A. Mackenzy reporting on the ground of prostitution in Calcutta
had sharply pointed out-

In Bengal the prostitute class seems to be chiefly recruited from the

ranks of Hindu widows. The prominence of Hindu women among the
prostitutes of Bengal, often it is stated: women of good caste, and
that even in districts where a large Mohammedan population pre-
dominates, is the most curious feature disclosed in the cor-
respondence and quite different from what the Lieutenant Governor
believes to be the state of things in other parts of northern India.15

The sheer number of prostitutes increasing each year in the larger

Indian cities confronted the indigenous elites as a social evil which
reflected on their leadership position. At the same time colonial
education and missionary onslaughts held up images which shook
their faith in themselves. The more progressive among the elite found
an outlet in joining the campaign for reforms. Thus the major agendas of
reform, such as polygamy, widow burning, child marriage and
prostitution, brought Indian women continuously to the forefront of the
debates. In fact they were now used as a site on which agreements and
conflicts between colonisers and the colonised subjects took place.
In the nineteenth century, Bengal was considered to be in the throes
of a change by the rest of the country due to a number of social reforms
considered progressive by the civilising standards of the west. The
Bengali Hindus in their passage from babu to bhadralok assessed these
reforms as their particular achievements; while the more conservative
Hindus resisted the reforms as anti-traditional, liberals invested
them with the logic of enlightenment. The subjects of the debates,
however, remained passive and compliant. Their voices were largely
heard as echoes of the one or the other group.16
From the very inception of the reforms it was clear to the
campaigners that they were meant only for upper caste Hindu women.
As participants upholding the Hindu moral order, lower caste artisans
and peasants were kept on the very fringes of debates while Muslims
were completely excluded. The dominant ideology looked upon upper
caste Hindu women as the embodiment of moral order and a number of
Bengali texts of the nineteenth century project this image as the
central motif.17
The good woman, the chaste married wife and the mother
empowered by a spiritual strength were also perceived as the iconic
representation of the nation. She was at once a captive to be freed by
her morally inspired children and the central figure who created and
protected the sanctuary of the home, where the colonised
intelligentsia persecuted by a foreign ruler could take refuge.1

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 PROSTITUTION IN NINETEENTH CENTURY BENGAL 163

In order to contextualise these contradictory images of themselves

and the mother land, middle class Bengalis created new social binaries
which were pervaded by their class perception. The shift from earlier
Brahmin/Sudra categories to the bhadra/itar included women among
their constructs. Thus bhadramahila stood in equal distance from
magi. Interestingly the early nineteenth century common term for
widows and prostitutes, rarh,19 was now discarded for bidhabha
indicating the widow, and beshya and kulata indicating the
prostitutes. At the same time the latter was described by adjectives
generally used in English. Patita being a literal translation of the
words 'fallen' or 'degraded' was a common attribute applied to British
working class prostitutes in the same period.

II

The terms barangana and beshya were frequently used in Bengali texts
of the nineteenth century to indicate the prostitute. Textually it can be
traced to the classical manuals on erotics (Vatsayana's Kamasutra)
and dramaturgy (Bharata's Natyashastra). The Indian prostitute was
thus by tradition inseparably associated with professional
entertainers and the terms nati, ganika or barangana (considered
synonymous in ancient India) generally indicated the accomplished
courtesan.20 She was perceived as the product of a feudal society
which she also aesthetically represented. The hierarchy that was
built into the core of the feudal relations regulated the lives of the
courtesans and their aristocratic clients. This conception did not stretch
to peasant women since they usually catered for men of their own class,
or as the dasi (slave/servant) for the sexual needs of their masters.21
Muslim courtly norms confirmed the earlier position of the courtesan
in brahminical society and continued to grant them a space in the court.
As dancers and musicians they participated in public rituals and
moved into the zenana mahal to entertain the inmates. Often they
were incorporated into the household through contract marriages. This
practice continued well into the eighteenth century.
Mir Jafar who had with the help of the British in 1758 become the
Nawab Nazim of Bengal, married two dancing girls from Agra-Mani
Begum and Bubbu Begum. Mir Jafar had met them when they came to
perform at the celebration of Siraj-ud-daulah's wedding. He was
particularly smitten by Mani Begum and persuaded her to stay back on
a monthly allowance of 500 rupees. Mani Begum later married Mir
Jafar. After a time he also married Bubbu Begum. The Nawab had two
sons-Nazm-ud-daulah and Saif-ud-daulah by Mani Begum and
Mubarak-ud-daulah by Bubbu Begum. After his death Mani Begum
bribed the Company officials to make her the guardian of the minor
Mubarak-ud-daulah. The Company officials agreed to her proposal
and passed over the claims of Bubbu Begutm (the mother of minor

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164 SOCIAL SCIENTIST

nawab) to make Mani Begum the Nawab's guardian. (Her influence

over the East India Company officials, particularly Warren Hastings,
earned her the nick name of Mother-i-Company.) She won such respect
that the Company fired a gun salute after her death was announced.22
To take another example-Nawab Wajid Ali Shah of Oudh known as
an accomplished poet and musician, turned his entire harem into a
dancing school which he called the Pari Khana. Every dancer was
connected to the Nawab through the contractual form of mu ta
marriage.23
Veena Talwar Oldenburg in her book on Lucknow gives a vivid
account of the relationship between the courtesans and their patrons in
the nineteenth century. In order to show the contrast in the lives of
different prostitutes Talwar Oldenburg gives a description of the
courtesan's establishments-

A courtesan was usually part of a household establishment under

the chief courtesan or chaudhrayan. The latter owned and
maintained extra apartments, having acquired wealth and fame
through her beauty and music and dancing abilities. Typically a
wealthy patron, often the king himself, would set her up in
agreeable quarters and support her household in the style in which
he wished to be entertained and she would recruit budding young
singers and dancers to compete with other reputable establishments.
Every reputable house maintained a team of skilled lineages and
gharanas of musicians thereby enhancing the prestige of the
establishment. Doormen touts and other male auxiliaries screened
the clients at the door.24

Yet the courtesans were not the only persons involved in the
profession of commercial sex. Lower than the tawaifs in rank and
accomplishments were two other categories of women known as
thakahi and randi who lived in the market area and catered for lower
class clients including the labourers.25 The British refused to recognise
these hierarchical differences among prostitutes in Lucknow both out
of administrative convenience and because though the officials went to
nautch parties, they looked upon dancing girls as products of the the
customs of a static 'native' of society, they did not interfere in the
practice.
By the middle of the nineteenth century Calcutta had become an
important centre of cultural activities as more and more deposed rulers
of Indian states were forced to take up their exiled residence in the
city. With the migration of a number of musicians and dancers once
patronised by these Nawabs, parts of Calcutta were landmarked as
the Mughal City. Here the dancers of Wajid Ali Shah and the poets of
the Delhi darbar merged with the members of Tipu Sultan's deposed
family to create the cultural ambience for those who came in a
nostalgic search of the grand old days.26

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 PROSTITUTION IN NINETEENTH CENTURY BENGAL 165

This added to the already existing fashion of arranging nautches for

family occassions of a son/daughter's marriage or religious festivals
like the Durga Puja. The dancers were usually invited from Agra,
Benaras and Lucknow to come to Calcutta. The rich families in
Calcutta vied with one another to get the highest paid baiji. Local
newspapers in English and Bengali reported these social gatherings.
Samachar Darpan recorded on 16 October 1819 that the famous dancer
Niki had arrived in Calcutta and a fortunate gentleman had hired her
on a monthly salary of 1,000 rupees. Also on 22 November 1823 it was
reported in the same paper that on the occasion of the Rasa Lila
festival in the house of one Ruplal Mallick, the guests included
European Sahebs who attended the dance of a number of tawaifs:
'They had stayed on for many hours and had left after 11 P.M., well
pleased with their performances.'27
For European artists like Belnos and Solvyns these feasts offered a
colourful opportunity to look at the 'native' household and its luxuries
of which the dancing girls formed a part.28 By 1858, however, things
were starting to change even though the British administrators were
still not adverse to these feasts. A nautch was seen as an aristocratic
gathering of 'natives' and definitely to be distinguished from the
revelries of the vulgar.
Another group of women artists in the nineteenth century considered
to be semi- prostitutes, were mendicant singers known as vaisnavis.
These women were often referred to derisively as neris (shaven headed
women) by contemporaries.29 They belonged to a popular religious
order who looked upon the medieval saint Sri Chaitanya as their
guru. They tried to move away from the rigorous Hindu rituals and one
of their innovative reforms was to dispense with the formal system of
marriage. Professing love to be the central tenet of their faith, they
changed partners whenever it suited them. By the nineteenth century
these sects had bifurcated and multiplied and they mainly lived
either as mendicants or in a small settlements called akhras usually
built on donated lands. These became places of refuge for many
destitute women. In official perception the vaisnavis in general were
equated with prostitutes.

Prostitutes are recruited from all castes; but they generally become
Vaisnavis, for Vaisnavism unlike other forms of Hinduism, denies
not its spiritual consolation even to outcastes.0

For some of their contemporaries the vaisnavis were the main

upholders of popular culture, kept alive through their rendition of
folk songs, poetry and bardic narration, mainly among the poorer
people. Since they usually had free access to the homes of the gentry
(as religious mendicants) the vaisnavis acted as a link between the
private and public space from which the gentle women were barred

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166 SOCIAL SCIENTIST

The vaisnavis were also erudite women who tried to enter the arena
of reforms by becoming some of the early teachers in the schools set up
for women. Yet a systematic attack was launched against them by
gentlemen reformers both Indian and British-

Baisnabis, the loose morality of whose sect is separated by a very

slight line from that utter negation of feminine morality which
constitutes prostitution or line of separation which is in most cases
easily and imperceptibly outstepped.32

By the end of nineteenth century the moral indictment against the

vaisnavis was so strong, that it made it impossible for them to provide
shelters for destitutes. Their akhras were now regarded as the natural
habitats of prostitutes.
Indigenous categorisation of the Bengali prostitute thus fixed her in
a social space outside the home. Public performance, freedom of
movement (including that of religious mendicants) and even
participation in labour outside domestic sphere, pushed any woman
from her accepted social role of mother, daughter, sister and wife to
that of the prostitute-an outcast.

III

The image of the prostitute as the other of the good woman was
circulated by a number of Bengali texts throughout the nineteenth
century. Both high and low literature, subscribed to the theme of
moral decay brought about through the agency of sexually deviant
women. Her deviancy engrossed the male authors and they used
literary devices to make it a salacious subject for their male reade
Colonial education coinciding with the beginning of a print culture
allowed the indigenous intelligentsia a creative outlet, yet as colonial
experience deepened, a sense of alienation became evident mainly
among the members of the lower middle class. These men though
accepted as allies by colonial officials still smarted under the kicks
and blows which they received from their colonial masters. Their
feelings were expressed through the narrative of moral doom-the
Kali Yuga.34
This has been a powerful theme in the epics. In the Vana Parva of
Mahabharata, upper caste male anxieties are expressed through the
description of the Kali Yuga. Textually the period of doom is supposed
to have begun after the great war when existing power relations were
subverted. The mleccha (alien) rulers replaced the rightful kings.
Sudras appropriated the authority of the brahmins, and most
important of all, sexually deviant women made love to menials, slaves
and even animals, and wielded power over men.
The image of the deviant woman is constructed by establishing her
relations with male protectors, i.e. father and husband. She is shown

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 PROSTITUTION IN NINETEENTH CENTURY BENGAL 167

as rebellious and unwilling to remain contained within the restricted

sphere of the andar mahal. Her distancing from the good women also
situates her within a separate social space so that the deviant woman
is always projected as a homeless wanderer, her only refuge being the
prostitutes quarters on the fringes of cities and villages.35
In a number of moral tracts the binaries of the chaste wife
(patibrata stree) and the prostitute beshya are structured into visible
signs. This is best worked out by an anonymous author in his 'Advice to
Women' (Stridiger Prati Upadesh). He offers the formula in the shape
of two distinct moulds in which he casts all women. (The comparative
examples used are gems and glass.)

The good wife, patibrata, is shy, silent, does her duty and is totally
undemanding, stays away from men, keeps her whole body covered
and does not wear flashy clothes.

while

The beshya is loud mouthed, always restless, bares special parts of

her body, falls on men, demands jewellery and continuously wears
revealing clothes.36

The author writing in 1871 lays down social codes and through the
process of stereotyping casts the women into separate 'bodies'. Thus the
myth that develops around the prostitute is homogenised through
these physical signs of dress and manners to chart the prostitutes'
social moves, and works through the verbal recreation of the immoral
and decadent scene, which gives her a location. She is now
individualised and the story related in first person singular appeals
directly to the male readers.
In Swarnabai a novel written by Sri Nabakumar Datta (1888) we
have all the details the indigenous literary formula utilised to
construct the prostitute and her sinful habitat.37 The author, an
caste Kayastha, belonged to the group of traditional loyalists who in
this period formed the core of the lower middle class. These semi-
literate men worked as clerks, surveyors and technical assistants in
British owned commercial firms. They shared the dominant ideology
of the Hindu conservatives, and their identity rested on the
preservation of the 'home' as that sacred space where they would not
be invaded and punished by their colonial masters.
The opening pages of the book contains the following inscription in
English:

Woman thy name is Frailty.

Then follows the preface advertising the main aim of the author:

Sins are being committed every day. People cannot be freed from it
through preaching and religious advice. Their follies can be brought

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168 SOCIAL SCIENTIST

home to them only through an account from the sinners themselves

about the terrible consequences which they suffered. It is for this
reason that we have decided to publish the story of Swarnabai. If
after reading this even one person shuns the lure of sins we shall
consider our task to have been successful.38

The narration begins with this striking first sentence in first person
singular: 'My name is not Swarnabai. I was named Katayani by my
father, a brahmin priest from Bardhaman.' Thus the piece is set for
the social passage of Katayani from a respectable origin to a sinful
transformation and end as Swarnabai. The narrative begins with the
heroine's early life as a child widow in her father's family where,
though not rich, she lived in comfortable circumstances. This makes it
clear to readers that she was not forced to leave her home due to
economic circumstances and, even makes it imperative that they do not
waste their sympathy on her.
The first episode describes her as an impulsive woman who falls in
love with the man who saves her when she was lost in a crowd. This
fixes her image as wilful and self-indulgent. She leaves home to seek
out this chance met lover, but does this by first seducing a young male
relative. The two elope to Calcutta. When the money runs out the boy
returns to the village, but Katayani is picked up by an old prostitute
who turns her over to a rich old man. She now gets money, good clothes,
a palatial house, but not satisfied with these, driven by innate sexual
needs, she cohabits with a young servant and finally leaves the old
man to live with this servant.
This brings us to the second phase of the narrative when she leads
the life of a common prostitute, contracts venereal disease and is sent to
the lock hospital. The author here treats her with a degree of
sympathy. Her descriptions of shame at being examined by a white
male, laughed at by young unsympathetic doctors, being used by clerks
just when she was getting cured, are invested with a certain degree of
poignancy. The physical pain transforms her body, once an abode of
pleasure, into a cage which perpetuates her torture. This vivid
description of the lock hospital serves as a sign invested with layers of
meaning. At a more factual level it gives a realistic depiction of the
fate of por women who had been dragged there against their wi
another it corresponds to the Hindu mythical version of hell.
Katayani enters the third phase of her life not as a victim but as a
fortunate person, different from those who are pushed into prostitution
for economic reasons. She now has the opportunity to learn classical
music and dance and makes her name as a famous baiji-so that she is
able tin her words 'to discard that heinous life'. But she starts on her
career once again driven by her innate sexual desires. It is as a
musician-now known as Swama Bai-that she meets her first lover.
He does not recognise her. She now uses every trick she knows to lure

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 PROSTITUTION IN NINETEENTH CENTURY BENGAL 169

him into a life of degradation and vice. Ultimately realising his

mistake he escapes, while as a woman scorned Swarna turns her full
vengeance on all men, particularly her lover's friends, whom she brings
to the brink of social and financial ruin.
The narrative now steadily moves downwards-the heroine is
shown addicted to alcohol, unable to live on her own and thus
exploited by young male servants. Finally, once again, contracting
venereal disease, she tries to become a procuress. In her own words: 'I
had ruined many a young man in my life, now it was my turn to ruin
young and innocent girls.' So she not only sins herself but spreads sin,
even as she spreads disease. In her nightmare she sees herself as a
criminal and murderer. Her retribution is therefore complete as she
becomes diseased in both mind and body. This physical deterioration
construes for the readers the end to which a woman's sexual impulses
lead her. It also fixes the stereotyped images finally within this
broken body, from which even death would come as a release.
But the narrative does not end here. The author offers his solution
through the resurrection of the prostitute into an ascetic being. She is
now saved by a white missionary woman who she calls 'my new
mother'. The author here tries to hammer home the point of the
prostitute's new birth. Like the criminal who has served a jail
sentence, the repentant sinner is given a new lease of life. She is
transformed into a good and industrious person.
She now takes the job of a maid servant in her former lover's house.
Here seeing his chaste and good wife, surrounded by their 'lovely
children' she is mentally reformed. Love now takes a metaphysical
turn and she resolves to renounce earthly pleasures altogether. She
lives like an ascetic widow in Benares looking after her former lover's
household, here she is accorded an honourable position and is finally
allowed to die. The Hindu reader would recognises the significance of
this death in Benares-where if immersed in the holy Ganges one is
freed of all sins so as to be born to a better life.
This narrative herds together a number of moral codes necessary to
construct the myth of the prostitute. It also clearly indicates how at
this point the dominant Hindu ideology merges with the colonisers'
perceptions.39
Though this passage of the Brahmin widow to a courtesan, the
woman is depicted as one who steadily and wilfully commits sin, and
tries to harm her innocent victims but finally pays for her deviancy
through great sufferings of the body. It was the awareness of her
body-'I realised at the age of sixteen that I was beautiful', which is
her first declared sin. So it was not only the deviation from the strict
life of Hindu widow, but the affirmation of her physical self that
needed to be punished.
This theme of the body is again taken up in her emergence as
Swarna Bai. Music and dance are now looked upon as those aspects of

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170 SOCIAL SCIENTIST

knowledge which allows a woman to give vent to her sexuality. The

performances of the singer and dancer are inducted into a social code of
physical display. Here the moral censorship of the author takes on a
universalising attitude and the prostitute is transformed from a
particular to a universal symbol of sin.
The metaphor of the disease in particular acts as a part of the
dominant discourse, as both coloniser and subjects agree to its ab
represent the prostitute. Lynda Nead writing in the context of
nineteenth century Britain points out:

The metaphor of disease was a central component in the

representation of the prostitute both as an agent of chaos and as a
social victim. Ill health and physical decline were a significant
stage in the narrative of the downward progress. Within the
mythology disease was constructed not as a social threat or a sign of
the prostitute's power but as her punishment and an index of the
depths to which she had fallen.40

The indigenous perception grafted the metaphor of disease to that of

'performance'. Singing and dancing as cultural activities which had
once elevated the prostitute to the status of the creative artist, were
now transformed into an expression of overt sexuality. Once a sign of
class, signifying the courtesan, it was now construed as abusive
epithets used against the common prostitute.
These images of deviancy as the representation of the prostitute
mainly reflected indigenous male perception. By coalescing the
imagined and the actual instances into the myth of woman's sexuality,
they were able to construct a symbol of universal sin. At the same time
they tried to push these Bengali women out of their history. But they
were not totally silenced and occasionally their voices could be heard
offering a challenge.

NOTES AND REFERENCES

1. Johanna Brenner and Marie Ramas, 'Rethinking Women's Oppression' New

Review, No. 144, (March-April 1984), pp. 36-37.
2. Sukumar Sen, Women's Dialect in Bengali, (Calcutta: Jijnasa, 1979), p. 81.
3. Ronald B. Inden, Marriage and Rank in Bengali Culture, (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1976), pp. 11-12.
4. Tapan Raychaudhuri, Bengal under Akbar and Jahangir, An Introductory Stu
in Social History (2nd ed.), (Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1969), p. 7.
5. Sumita Sen, Women workers in the Bengal lute Industries, 1890-1940: Migrat
Motherhood and Militancy, unpublished D. Phil Thesis, Cambridge University
(February 1992). In her introduction Samita has argued that women's
participation in the industrial workforce influenced and was in turn influenced
by the perception of their gendered role in the family.
6. W.W. Hunter, A Statistical Account of Bengal 24-Parganas, Vol. I (London,
1876), p. 108.

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 PROSTITUTION IN NINETEENTH CENTURY BENGAL 171

7. Meredith Borthwick, The Changing Role of Women in Bengal 1849-1905,

(Princeton, N.J,: Princeton University Press, 1984); ch. 1, pp. 5-6; and Samita Sen,
Women Workers, p. 60.
8. Anonymous, Stridiger Prati Upadesh, 1974 (Bengali). This is one among a
number of moral tracts which constructs a binary distinction between the good
wife and the prostitute.
9. Home Judicial, July 1873: An Abstract of Replies of Divisional Commissioners
Consulted in 1873.
10. 'Indian Factories Act 1881: Employment of Women and Children',
Parliamentary Papers 23rd October, (1884-1885), Vol. LX.
11. Samita Sen, Women Workers, p. 89.
12. 'Often these women labourers were given only manual jobs and according to an
earlier source they were called jharoonis and also regarded as part time
prostitutes,' Usha Chakravarty, Condition of Bengali Women around the second
half of the nineteenth century, (Calcutta: Garcha Road, 1963), p. 28; see also
Nirmala Banerjee, 'Working Women in Colonial Bengal' in Recasting Women,
eds., Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid, (New Delhi: Kali, 1989), p. 278.
13. In a poignant letter headed-'The application of a spinner from Shantipur
Nadia', a brahmin widow from Shantipur describes her plight after weavers
stopped coming to her house to collect the products of her spinning. She claims
that before yarns began to be imported from England, she had after the death of
her husband, who left her very little money, not only supported her family,
married off her three daughter and even met the expenses of her father-in-law's
funeral, so that the honour of her vamsa was maintained. But now with the
yarns brought from England which country she had till now known to have been
that of a prosperous nation, she finds herself ousted from her only means of
livelihood. So she prays to the spinners of England to take pity on her and
consider her case. (Samachar Darpan, 5th January 1828, quoted fully in Nadia
Unish Satak, ed. Mohit Ray, (Calcutta: Amar Bharati 1988; Bengali). Nirmala
Banerjee, points out that between 1812-13, 3,30,000 spinners were from Patna and
Gaya alone, as compared to the 1881 census figures of 2,00,000 spinners from the
whole of Bengal' ('Working Women', p. 253).
14. H. Beverly, Report of the Census of the Towns & Suburbs of Calcutta, (Calcutta:
1881).
15. From A. Mackenzy to H.L. Dampier Official Secretary to the Government of
India, Home Judicial Proceedings No. 5829 dated Calcutta, 17th October, 1872.
16. Sumit Sarkar, 'The Women's question in Nineteenth Century Bengal' in A
Critique of Colonial India, (Calcutta: Papyrus, 1983), pp. 71-72.
17. Tanika Sarkar, 'Nationalist Iconography: Images of Women in 19th Century
Bengali Literature,' Economic and Political Weekly, (November 21), 1987.
18. Partha Chatterjee, 'The Nationalist Resolution of the Women's Question' in
Recasting Women p. 243.
19. A number of rich men had died but the houses of their rarhs (mistress) stand as
monuments to their memory'. The word rarh is used for both widows and
prostitutes in the text. Kaliprasanna Sinha, Hutum Pachar Naksha, (Bengali),
ed., Arun Nag, (Calcutta: Suparnarekhazl991), p. 199.
20. Moti Chandra, The World of Courtesans, (New Delhi: Vikas, 1973), pp. 57-100.
21. Sukumari Bhattacharya, 'Prostitution in Ancient India', Social Scientist,
No. 165. (February 1987), pp. 35-36. The author mentions kumbhadasi and
paricharika indicating maid servants who could be enjoyed at will.
22. Nikhil Nath Ray, Murshidabad Kahini, (Calcutta: Puthipatra, 1983),
(Bengali) also H.D. Sandeman, Selections from Calcutta, Gazettes of the Years
1806-15, Vol. IV, pp. 120-121.
23. Veena Talwar Oldenberg, The Making of Colonial Lucknow, 1856-1877, (New
Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 134-135.

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172 SOCIAL SCIENTIST

24. Ibid.
25. Ibid.
26. 'The town started to live up as Wajid Ali Shah released from custody returned
to his old haunts.' Kaliprasanna Sinha, Hutum Pachar, p. 143.
27. Brajendranath Bandopadhyay, Sambad Patre Sekaler Katha, Vol. II
(Calcutta: Bangiye Sahitya Parishad, B.S. 1339), p. 121. (Translation from
Bengali by Ratnabali Chatterjee).
28. Baltzard F. Solyyns, Les Hindous. Vol. 1 (Paris 1810); S.C. Belnos, Tuenty four
plates illustrative of Hindu and European manners in Bengal Drawn on Stone by
A Colin from sketches by Mrs. Belnos. (London: 1832)
29. Sumanta Banerjee, 'Marginalisation of Women's Popular Culture in Bengal' in
Recasting Women, pp. 135-136.
30. WBSA (West Bengal State Archives) Jud. Oct.1872.. From Babu Tara Prasad
Chatterjee, Deputy Magistrate Jungipur, to the Commissioner, Rajsahi Division,
dated 22nd May 1872.
31. Sumanta Banerjee, 'Marginalisation', pp. 134-135.
32. WBSA Judicial letter No. 149/27. To the Magistrate of Murshidabad from Baboo
Bankim Chandra Chatterjee Dy. Magistrate. The reporter is none other than
the celebrated author Bankim who here reveals little sympathy for vaisnavis.
33. Sumit Sarkar, 'Kalki Avatar of Bikrampur': A village scandal in Early 20th
century Bengal' in Subaltern Studies IV, ed. Ranjit Guha, (Delhi: Oxford Univ.
Press), also 'Kali Yugar Kalpana 0 Aupanibeshik Samaj, in Itihas Anusandhan
4, (Bengali), ed. G. Chattopadhyay (Calcutta: K.P. Bagchi, 1989); Ratnabali
Chatterjee, From Karkhana to the Studio, (New Delhi: Books and Books, 1990),
pp. 68-69.
34. Sumit Sarkar, 'Kalki Avatar'.
35. In a number of Bengali Satires 'Beshya Britti Nibritte,' 'Briddha Beshya
Tapaswini,'-the woman's passage from virtue to vice is worked into a formula.
36. Anonymous, Stridiger Prati Upadesh 1874 (Bengali), translations done by
Ratnabali Chatterjee.
37. Nabakumar Datta, Swarnabai (a novel in Bengali), (Calcutta, 1888.)
38. Ibid.
39. Ratnabali Chatterjee, 'The Indian Prostitute as a Colonial Subject Bengal, 1864-
1883', in Canadian Woman Studies, Vol. 13, Nov. 1992, No. 1, p. 51.
40. Lynda Nead, Myths of Sexuality: Representations of Women in Victorian
Britain, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), p. 172.

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