QUESTION Based on Ch. 3, Q- explain why regulating sex work in India was importa

Do you need this or any other assignment done for you from scratch?

We have qualified writers to help you.

We assure you a quality paper that is 100% free from plagiarism and AI.

You can choose either format of your choice ( Apa, Mla, Havard, Chicago, or any other)

NB: We do not resell your papers. Upon ordering, we do an original paper exclusively for you.

NB: All your data is kept safe from the public.

Click Here To Order Now!

QUESTION
Based on Ch. 3,
Q- explain why regulating sex work in India was importa

QUESTION
Based on Ch. 3,
Q- explain why regulating sex work in India was important to the British colonial project ?
INSTRUCTION
SINGLE SPACED
MAKE IT RELEVANT AND WRITE 4-5 QUOTES FROM THE CHAPTER THAT ARE CONNECTED TO THE TOPIC AND INCLUDE THE AUTHORS NAME AND PAGE NUMBER
CHAPTER 3
Sex in the Contact Zone
They couldn’t associate on deck with that touch of the tar-brush, but it was a very different business down here, or soon would be.
E. M. Forster, ‘The Other Boat’
E. M. Forster’s short story ‘The Other Boat’ is set at the turn of the twentieth century, the apex of British colonial power around the world.1 Lionel is trying to return to India to continue his successful career in the British Army and to reunite with Isobel, whom he intends to marry. On board the SS Normannia, he finds himself sharing a berth with Cocoanut, a ‘Eurasian’ youth, so named for his ‘peculiar shaped head’2 (though perhaps also for his unstable racial position), whom he met on the ship from India to England when they were both children. Lionel had spent his early childhood in India, until his father’s sexual indiscretions provoked a split in the family, sending the children and mother back to the metropole. In the intervening decade between these two journeys, Lionel has become a decorated soldier. Cocoanut has had a rather more informal, though nonetheless effective, education in the nefarious workings of the shipping world, through which “he is able to secure Lionel’s passage and ensure, contra the usual scrupulous segregation of British officers from ‘dagoes’, that they are bunked together. As the ship travels east, the strict sexual and racial expectations of Lionel’s mother, and the England she represents, recede. When the ship enters the Mediterranean, Cocoanut’s attempts to seduce Lionel finally meet success and by the time they are sailing the Red Sea, ‘they slept together as a matter of course’.
At first, Lionel appears to be the embodiment of colonial masculinity: he is ‘clean cut, athletic, good-looking without being conspicuous’.4 Like his father (who, he informs his lover, was ‘a hundred per cent Aryan’), his ‘thick fairish hair, blue eyes, glowing cheeks and strong white teeth’ are the very picture of the manly European. His physical appearance is “matched by his temperament – ‘His voice was quiet, his demeanour assured, his temper equable’5 – and his success on the battlefield: ‘he had got into one of the little desert wars that were becoming too rare, had displayed dash and decision, been wounded, and had been mentioned in despatches and got his captaincy early’.6 He is quickly recognised as an insider by those aboard the ship who share his class position. This contingent of colonial elites ‘make up two Bridge tables every night besides hanging together at other times, and get called the Big Eight which [he supposes] must be regarded as a compliment’.7 He appears to embody the promise of sexual modernity, abounding in the qualities, of both appearance and character, essential to white bourgeois masculinity. Yet, he is shadowed by scandal. His father tarnished the family’s good name by ‘going native’, taking off with his Burmese mistress and leaving his wife with five children to raise alone. Despite his horror at his father’s dishonourable desires – and at the suggestion that he may have some unknown ‘half-caste’ siblings – his affair with Cocoanut is the source of deep pleasure, albeit crosshatched with shame and anxiety. Lionel’s fear that he might have inherited his father’s dubious proclivities precipitates the story’s violent conclusion – to which we will return at the end of this chapter.
“The two boats of the title – from India to England, England to India – are a metonym for the colonial project, a project that circumnavigated the world, creating and enforcing racial boundaries while also constantly producing the conditions for those boundaries to be crossed, fractured, or revealed as a fiction. In this chapter, I’ll consider the ways in which colonial authorities attempted to manage forms of cross-racial contact and cross-class contact, particularly sexual contact. I use the term ‘racial hygiene’ as a means to understand these processes. While this term has largely been associated with Nazi eugenics, here I use it in a broader sense to encompass the varied attempts to maintain the superiority of the ‘ruling race’, whether through state-regulated sex work, prohibitions on marriage for private soldiers, or various other means. Racial distinctions were fragile and needed to be consistently shored up by policies and practices premised on the assumption that sustained contact with the ‘lower races’ could contaminate British stock. As some contact was necessary and inevitable, practices of racial hygiene sought to choreograph and assign meaning to cross-racial intimacy, to ensure hierarchies could be carefully maintained.
“Ships are what Mary Louise Pratt refers to as a ‘contact zone’, a space of asymmetrical power relations in which different people and cultures ‘meet, clash and grapple with each other’.9 As Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh’s research into the revolutionary cultures of the Atlantic reveals, maritime life was ‘a multicultural, multiracial, multinational’ affair.10 Ships are both scrupulously hierarchical and threateningly anarchic; they are spaces in which manifold sumptuary codes attempt to prevent inevitable cross-class, cross-racial contact. As such, these two boats are an apt theatre for this drama of inheritance, in which institutions of racial hygiene (family, army, and patriarchy) are threatened by figures such as Cocoanut, one of the wayward children of the British Empire, and the product of precisely the kind of cross-racial union that preoccupied colonial administrations. While white bourgeois masculinity may be at the top of the hierarchy, Forster suggests this position might be more precarious than it seems – and that for those at the top of any hierarchy, there’s a long way to fall.
“Fit to Rule
The sun was a mighty power in those far-off days and hostile to the Ruling Race. Officers staggered at the touch of it, Tommies collapsed.
E. M. Forster, ‘The Other Boat’
In the nineteenth century, as McClintock notes, ‘the English middle-class male was placed at the pinnacle of evolutionary hierarchy’.11 Indeed, his persistence as the paradigmatic figure of the human continues into the contemporary era, albeit subject to increasing scepticism. It is common these days to hear the ‘straight white man’ marked out as a problem. Yet, despite this apparent scrutiny, many fail to engage with the uncanny doubleness of this figure. As the paradigm for the human, he is dependent on all kinds of non-human or infrahuman others; as a norm, he is always on guard against deviance from within or without. His power is precarious precisely because it is dependent on the exclusion of those wayward or discarded figures of modernity – figures such as Cocoanut in ‘The Other Boat’. Colonial governance went to great lengths to conserve racial hygiene – to choreograph the ways in which people interacted across the boundaries of gender, race, and class. As Lisa Lowe puts it, “The colonial management of sexuality, affect, marriage and family among the colonised formed a central part of the microphysics of colonial rule’.12 I would add, however, that this kind of state intervention was not only addressed to the colonised, but to the colonial elite. Said observes:
When it became common practice during the nineteenth century for Britain to retire its administrators from India and elsewhere once they had reached the age of fifty-five, then a further refinement in Orientalism had been achieved; no Oriental was ever allowed to see a Westerner as he aged and degenerated, just as no Westerner needed ever to see himself, mirrored in the eyes of the subject race, as anything but a vigorous, rational, ever-alert young Raj.
The fate of both ruler and ruled, then, is hopelessly intertwined.
Of course, the Hegelian account of subject formation is suggestive of this dialectical constitution. According to Hegel, the autonomy at the heart of the subject comes from its sublation of the Other, a kind of internalisation through which the contradiction of Self and Other, Master and Slave, is resolved through synthesis. In this process, all that is dangerous and threatening about the Other is neutralised by its role in the constitution of the Self. The Hegelian model, however, doesn’t account for the perpetual instability that shadows the subject – the way in which this process is always incomplete. In other words, Hegel’s is an ideal-type, not a historical account. As Lowe observes, the Hegelian dialectic ‘established intimacy as a property of the individual man within his family’:14 through the subordination of women and children to his will, they become constitutive of his autonomy. Yet, as Lowe’s work explores, in the colonies the patriarchal intimacy of the nuclear family, which turns on privacy, domesticity, and respectability, was intertwined with other, disavowed, spaces of intimacy. In colonial India, we might identify these disavowed intimacies as residing in the army barracks, the brothel, and the relationships between colonial elites and their concubines. These disavowed intimacies – those that constitute the underbelly of sexual modernity – threaten to undermine the stern boundaries of racial difference on which the imperial regime was staked.
The historical coordinates of the white, bourgeois, heterosexual man show the ways he is constituted through a particular vision of sexuality. This constitution, however, is highly unstable, as it both depends on and produces forms of sexuality it deems deviant or dangerous. According to Foucault, ‘the bourgeoisie’s “blood” was its sex’.15 The aristocracy believed that its claims to superiority lay in the purity of its blood, a metaphor for inheritance. But from the mid-eighteenth century onwards, the bourgeoisie sought to assert its own fitness to rule. Its special character was assumed to reside in sexual restraint, marriage, and heterosexuality. These features measured its distinction from the unruly masses in both metropole and periphery, as well as from the decadent aristocracy. For Foucault, the emergence of this bourgeois self, whose fitness to rule was evidenced by the practice of a restrained heterosexuality, stemmed from a largely European process rooted in confession to a priest through which sexuality developed a clear narrative structure. As we saw in chapter 1, the kind of subjectivity produced by confession was developed and institutionalised through medicine, education, the nuclear family, and the wider organisation of life in Europe as it became increasingly industrialised.
As scholars of postcoloniality observe, however, the emergence of this self was intimately linked to racial science and colonial governance. Stoler, for example, observes the ‘categorical effacement of colonialism’ from Foucault’s History of Sexuality, which turns empire into ‘a backdrop of Victorian ideology, and contemporary stories about it, easily dismissed and not further discussed’.16 Foucault’s approach obscures the coproduction of the categories of race, gender, class, and sexuality. The search for what Foucault calls ‘the truth about sex’ was intimately tied to the search for ‘the truth about race’, as we saw in the previous chapter. The hallmarks of sexual modernity’s initial promise (restraint, heterosexuality, choice, and marriage) must be read as forms of racial hygiene as well as sexual respectability. Sexual respectability is dependent, however, on sexual violence. While British elites emphasised that it was their restraint, heterosexuality and marriage that differentiated them from the reckless lower classes in Europe and deviant racial Others in the colonies, the conduct of British soldiers, merchants, and bureaucrats tells a rather different story. Though there are many cases of individual sexual violence (such as the rape of native women by British soldiers) carried out with impunity, these acts were not the full extent of colonial sexual violence. Sexual violence and racial hierarchy were institutionalised together. The light side of sexual modernity – the ways in which it promised bourgeois men a life of respectability at the top of the racial hierarchy – depended upon a vast and complex underbelly which included a system of racially ordered and state-regulated sex work. In other words, respectability was an important fiction but rarely a reality: marriage took place alongside concubinage, romantic love never displaced its ‘mercenary’ counterpart, and while sexual restraint was lauded, rape was commonplace.
“The Management of Men
Here was the worst thing in the world, the thing for which Tommies got given the maximum, and here he was bottled up with it for a fortnight.
E. M. Forster, ‘The Other Boat’
British colonial control over India offers a particularly acute angle from which to observe the development of sexual modernity through the management of populations. While Portuguese, Dutch, French, and Danish-Norwegian powers competed for control over parts of the region, by the mid-eighteenth century, through what Mytheli Sreenivas describes as ‘a combination of military victories, political negotiations with local rulers, and alliances with merchant groups’,17 the East India Company was established as the dominant force in the region. As the company expanded its mechanisms to extract resources, exploit labour, and subdue competitors to its authority (whether through building alliances, brokering deals, or dominating militarily), it began to function as a state. As such, it was the company that attempted to determine how soldiers, merchants, and missionaries would engage with natives according to gender, caste, class, and age. Attempts to choreograph these relationships were essential to responding to ‘the native question’ which, as Mamdani observes, described ‘the problem of stabilising alien rule … a dilemma that confronted every colonial power and a riddle that preoccupied the best of its minds’.
“In 1773, the company was brought under parliamentary surveillance, with further regulation enacted by Pitt’s India Act in 1784. These interventions laid the groundwork for India to be brought under the direct rule of the British Crown in 1858, following the first cross-country armed rebellion against British rule the previous year, referred to by the British as the ‘Mutiny’. In the shift from Company to Crown rule, new methods of statecraft – new ways to manage populations – were finessed, with a renewed emphasis on culture and consent. In this shift to Crown rule, the ethnographic state came into its own, as it was assumed that the uprising had been the result of slights to sensitive native cultural sensibilities. In particular, the story took hold that the uprising had been the result of bullets smeared with either cow or pig fat given to native soldiers to be used in the newly issued Enfield rifle, which required one to literally ‘bite the bullet’ before firing. As pigs are viewed as unclean by Muslims and cows as sacred by Hindus, it was assumed that this had offended native sensibilities. A more sober analysis points to the uprising as the inevitable political opposition to being ruled by an extractive foreign power. Though there were significant changes to the methods of statecraft employed in the different stages of colonial rule, they all met the problems of racial hygiene, sexual desire, and the messy and unpredictable ways in which people navigate the intervention of new power structures into their lives. “Colonial administrators – whether under the auspices of Company or Crown – sat in London (like their counterparts in Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, and Lisbon) trying to determine who, many thousands of miles away, should have sex with whom and under what conditions. European men in India were there as company employees, soldiers, private mercenaries, missionaries, and independent traders looking to make their fortune. Though much of the everyday administration of colonial India was done by natives, the presence of European men was essential to the colonial project. They were needed to secure the extraction of resources – of tea, cotton, rice, minerals, and labour. While European domination was secured by force where necessary, for the relatively small numbers of European men to rule over the huge native population, the fiction of racial superiority was paramount. As such, the health, wellbeing, and appearance of European men was freighted with significance. In the colonial imaginary, women were needed to perform the work of managing the needs of these men, to reproduce the colonial workforce. Prior to the 1857 uprising, native women seemed to be the obvious choice. They were already there, after all. In a guide for East India Company soldiers published in 1810 Thomas Williamson explained that “whether married or not, each soldier is generally provided with a companion, who takes care of his linen, aids in cleaning his accoutrements, dresses his hair … These doxies do, certainly, now and then kick up a famous row in the barracks; but on the whole, may be considered highly serviceable; especially during illness, at which time their attendance is invaluable.”
In addition to providing sexual and emotional relief, native women could offer forms of reproductive labour tailored to the challenges of life in the colonies; that is to say, they could cook, keep a clean house, and launder clothes in a context that would have been unfamiliar, even threatening, to European women. In other words, they could do the work – sexual, domestic, emotional – of wives. Thus, British men in India were encouraged to take concubines. Unsurprisingly, however, while solving the initial problem of the sexual, emotional, and reproductive lives of British men, this arrangement created a new problem: children. The children that issued from relationships with concubines had claims to British as well as native status. ‘Eurasian’ children – such as Cocoanut in Forster’s short story – threatened the fiction of racial superiority, all the more when they issued from longstanding, quasi-marital relationships rather than from fleeting affairs or visits to sex workers. Emotional and social issues also sprung from these long-term unions – men became emotionally attached to their concubines, and some sought to include them in their inheritance, send their children to school or university in England, or to remain in India after the end of their contracts. The initial stabilising function of concubinage produced the seeds of its own unravelling. As such, in the transition to Crown rule, when racial divisions needed to be fortified, concubinage was phased out as official policy and bourgeois white women were increasingly relied upon to do the work of maintaining colonial elites.
After the uprising of 1857, short-service army contracts were brought in, with personnel drawn from among working-class populations in England – the ‘Tommies’ of this section’s epigraph. These soldiers were an expensive resource in and of themselves, so their health and wellbeing were of financial and geopolitical importance. Marriage would have been the obvious solution to meeting the sexual and emotional ‘needs’ of these young men, as the ideal of gender complementarity discussed in the previous chapter gained moral traction. But marriage for soldiers, rather than only bourgeois colonials, was deemed too costly, both financially and in terms of the risk to racial hierarchy. European wives, even drawn from among the working classes, would need to be able to afford lifestyles that reflected the strict hierarchies of the colonial order. As Stoler notes regarding the Dutch East Indies, ‘Company authorities argued that new employees with families in tow would be a financial burden, risking the emergence of a “European proletariat” and thus a major threat to white prestige’.
“Similarly, administrators viewed British soldiers as uniquely vulnerable – to the heat of the sun, to the deceptive wiles of the natives, to the sexual possibilities denied to them in Europe but endlessly available in the imperial peripheries. Working-class men were viewed as a distinct group – lacking in the qualities of manliness and restraint assumed to reside in bourgeois masculinity. As the acting district magistrate of Ahmadabad put it:
Private soldiers are young men taken from the classes least habituated to exercise self-control – classes who in their natural state marry very early in life. You take such men, you do not allow them to marry, you feed them well – better in most cases than they have been accustomed to be fed, and you give them a sufficient amount of physical work to put them into good condition and no more. It is asking too much to expect that a large majority of such men will exhibit the continence of the cloister.
“It was feared that, in the absence of women, soldiers would turn to each other to meet their sexual needs. As homosexuality was also associated with racial degeneration – with the dangerous sexual excess and feminisation of the licentious East – it was vital to mitigate this threat. As Chitty observes, ‘cultures of sex between men were politicized amid much wider forms of dispossession during periods of geopolitical instability and political-economic transition’.22 Though Chitty’s research does not consider colonial India, the concern with sex between British soldiers is illuminated by his framing. Concerns over sex between men viewed it as a key means by which venereal disease, already high among soldiers and assumed to originate with sex workers, could be further spread among the troops. This possibility threatened both the fiction of racial superiority and the viability of this ‘costly import’. Concerns over homosexuality then, were also concerns over the economic efficiency of the empire. Hyam notes that ‘Britain spread venereal diseases around the globe along with its race-courses and botanical gardens, steam engines and law-books’.23 To stave off the threat of homosexuality and its attendant implications of degeneracy, women had to be found to meet men’s sexual needs.
“The Registered Prostitute
Sex had entirely receded – only to come charging back like a bull.
E. M. Forster, ‘The Other Boat’
The registered prostitute system in India was borne of the articulation of two propositions: the first, that men need sex; the second, that both the ‘white race’ and its claims to dominance must be protected. The sexual urges of young, unmarried, working-class men were thought to be uncontrollable in the licentious East. While interracial relationships threatened the fiction of racial superiority, prostitution – or ‘mercenary love’ – came to be regarded as a ‘necessary evil’. Though the risk of creating a class of children with claims to British parentage were mitigated if they issued from paid sex, it entailed other risks that needed to be managed, such as venereal disease, which was a tremendous problem throughout the empire.
Scrupulous statistics regarding the rates of disease among the soldiers were kept, and discussions of venereal disease were a regular feature of parliamentary discussion in Britain.24 Sex workers were deemed to be the origin of venereal disease, so it was them, not the men they serviced, that colonial authorities sought to control by means of regulation. While it may have been more expedient to inspect and treat the men themselves, as had been the case earlier in the nineteenth century, this practice was deemed bad for the morale and self-respect of the troops. It is notable here that though these men were drawn from the working class, in the colonial context they too could become bearers of racial “superiority. While they were not required to enact the manners of bourgeois masculinity – class differences underpinned military hierarchy and were to be preserved, not dissolved, in the colonies – they were also not allowed to stray too far from their orbit.
Following the Cantonment Act of 1864, which organised sex work in military cantonments, the Contagious Diseases Act (CDA) of 1868 mandated, in major Indian cities and seaports, the registration of brothels and prostitutes, periodic medical examination of registered prostitutes, and detention (‘treatment’) in lock hospitals of those prostitutes found to be infected. A woman who resisted these measures was vulnerable to a fine or even imprisonment. Moreover, even though the CDA did not formally mandate residential segregation, in practice the registered prostitute system was an attempt to segregate brothels from the areas surrounding them and to ensure European-serving brothels were kept separate from native-serving ones. The law created two classes of sex workers – those reserved for Europeans and those who had sex with native men, of which only the former were subjected to forced inspection and registration. Political authorities even sought to mandate the attractiveness of the sex workers: in 1886, the quartermaster general of the British Army issued a memorandum calling for prettier sex workers for British soldiers serving in colonial India. Crucially, the registered prostitute system did not only impact sex workers, but all native women. Philippa Levine notes that in 1905, Lord Kitchener pronounced ‘that all indigenous women likely to come into contact with British troops carry disease and that native women, as a group, are potential prostitutes’.26 In collapsing the categories of ‘Indian woman’ and ‘prostitute’, the surveillance and violation of all Indian women became legally sanctioned to protect the health of the English soldier. Here we can see an earlier iteration of the logic that underpinned ‘virginity testing’ in Britain’s immigration regime, with the British state’s view of Indian women as deceptive and diseased institutionalising sexual abuse.
“If we examine the Contagious Diseases Act in Britain as well as its imperial counterpart, some interesting dynamics come to the surface. While the CDA enacted in Britain limited registration to women whom the police suspected of prostitution (thus retaining the notion of sex work as something to be disrupted by the state), in India, prostitutes (albeit only those servicing Europeans) were required to register themselves. Colonial authorities considered the self-registration requirement harmless, contending that, in Hindu society, prostitution was a hereditary caste profession that did not attract shame the way it did in Britain. In a classic example of the tendentious colonial use of ethnographic knowledge, this assessment draws exclusively on the experience of upper-class courtesans, who occupied an auspicious, even if marginalised position, in India. This logic was used to preserve the ‘government principle’ of non-interference in religious and social custom in India.27 By claiming that prostitution was, in all cases, a respectable, caste-based profession, the British authorities were able to manipulate native custom to serve their own ends, while also maintaining the appearance of non-interference. As Stoler observes, ‘culture’ was used ‘to rationalize the hierarchies of privilege and profit, to consolidate the labor regimes of expanding capitalism [and] to provide the psychological scaffolding for the exploitative structures of colonial rule’.28 As such, the sexual and the cultural intertwine to alloy a shield against the objections of both native and British reformers who saw British regulation of sex work on the subcontinent as a profound moral violation.
While the figure of the courtesan was used as an alibi for the registered prostitute system, actual courtesans fell victim to its invasive surveillance and violation. Tawaifs, women belonging to the highest class of courtesans, led a privileged existence during the Mughal era, which came to an end with British rule; in Lucknow, for example, not only were tawaifs listed in civic tax ledgers – a rare occurrence for women – but they were also included in the highest tax bracket. When the Mughal Empire ended, the status of tawaifs underwent significant changes. Since they had provided assistance to the ‘rebels’ in the 1857 uprising, they were punished by the British, who imposed heavy fines and penalties, including the confiscation of their property. It also became official policy to relocate the healthiest and most beautiful among them to cantonments for the enjoyment of European soldiers. As Talwar Oldenburg puts it, ‘Women, who had once consorted with kings and courtiers, enjoyed a fabulously opulent living, manipulated men and means for their own social and political ends, been the custodians of culture and the setters of fashion trends, were left in an extremely dubious and vulnerable position under the British’. “In this manner, we can see that the principle of ‘non-interference’ was, in fact, only a more elaborate and insidious kind of intervention through which colonial practices produced the realities they claimed were inherent to Indian culture. We should note, however, that the state’s disruption of sex work in the metropole and its regulation of sex work in the colonies both served to marginalise sex workers, as well as to extend the carceral state’s reach into the lives of all women. As we’ll see in chapter 7, the premise that one can be saved is not always better than the assumption that one is beyond redemption.”“It is worth pausing on the regulation of sex work, as it reveals a series of contradictions within colonial rule. In particular, the CDA and the management of venereal disease reveal the ways in which the fiction of race was fragile and bound up in ideas of health and hygiene, need and desire, cultural difference, and sexual hierarchy. Racial difference was not self-evident; racial regimes needed constant reproduction through the management of distinctions between Europeans and natives. As such, the growth of a ‘Eurasian’ population needed to be carefully contained to prevent further disturbances to racial hierarchy. The classed divisions among English men were also particularly threatening, precisely because the maintenance of white masculinity as an ideal was crucial to the justification of imperial dominance. Private soldiers, then, needed to be accorded some racial privileges without being given the financial means to maintain a conjugal family. According to Levine, ‘The only means whereby soldiers could establish a place in the hierarchy of the colony was in relation to the natives, from whom they received a bewildering variety of specialized services, including sex’.30 This instability – in which class position is tempered by racial hierarchy and racial hierarchy is maintained through the management of sex, including state-mandated sexual violation – helps us to understand the continued imbrication of sex, class, and race. “In British rule over the Indian subcontinent, first by the East India Company and then by the Crown, we can see the ways in which the promise of sexual modernity and its violent underbelly work together to maintain the fiction of racial superiority while always producing a kind of threatening excess – whether in the form of illegitimate desires, attachments, acts, or children – that could undermine the legitimacy of colonial rule. In this process, we can see evidence of Robinson’s claim that ‘the production of race is chaotic. It is an alchemy of the intentional and the unintended, of known and imagined fractures of cultural forms, and relations of power and the power of social and cultural relations’.31 Examining the various ways in which men’s sexual and emotional needs are understood and catered to as a biopolitical imperative begins to reveal the diffuse nature of state interventions. We can see that these interventions have an improvisatory quality, with contradictory needs clashing as well as sometimes finding a point of fragile balance. So far, from our account, however, we have only considered the ways racialised women were deployed to maintain the status of the white man. In the next section we’ll consider the fraught and ambiguous position of white women in British India.
The Fallen Woman and the Memsahib
Marriage or virginity or concubinage for Isabel?
E. M. Forster, ‘The Other Boat’
White women went to the colonies in fewer numbers and for more varied reasons than their male counterparts. They went as missionaries, governesses, wives, and barmaids; they went in search of marriage, of experience, and of adventure not available in Europe. Like working-class soldiers, they were in a complex in-between position. White women were members of the racial elite but without many of the opportunities for autonomy, domination, and pleasure afforded to men of the same social standing. As Stoler observes, ‘European women in these colonies experienced the cleavages of racial dominance and internal social distinctions very differently than men precisely because of their ambiguous positions, as both subordinates in colonial hierarchies and as active agents of imperial culture in their own right’.32 As we see with the figure of the Eurasian, the in-between is crucial to our understanding of imperial governance; it is where the work of upholding racial regimes becomes visible. It is also in these in-between characters – those who shore up white bourgeois masculinity while also, always, threatening to undermine it – that we can catch colonial race-making in the act. Across the board, whether they came as missionaries or sex workers, white women were viewed by colonial authorities as the bearers of the white race. There’s also some evidence they saw themselves in this way. Mary Procida’s work on colonial biographies suggests that in autobiographical narratives of the English in India, bourgeois writers regularly present their personal narratives as fundamentally intertwined with – and as justification for – the colonial project. She notes that memsahibs (the wives of the colonial bourgeoisie) tend to present themselves as ‘die-hard imperialists’ and suggests that this is because their ‘lives in the Raj offered them a unique opportunity to construct existences of public interest and political significance’,33 an opportunity in short supply back in the metropole. Despite this sense of political importance, for the English women who came to the colonies as wives (whether to officers, civil servants, or other men involved in the colonial project), life revolved around the domestic sphere and exclusively European social clubs. This confinement reflected their role – they were there to uphold the white race. Victorian whiteness ‘was an extraordinarily ambitious social project’, as Alastair Bonnett observes. He reminds us that ‘it made enormous demands upon its progenitors’. The demands on white women were particularly acute. As such, the contact between memsahibs and natives had to be scrupulously limited and carefully choreographed in comparison to European men, who were afforded a little more freedom. As Vron Ware puts it, ‘[white women] not only symbolised the guardians of the race in their reproductive capacity, but they also provided – as long as they were of the right class and breeding – a guarantee that British morals and principles were adhered to in the settler community, as well as being transmitted to the next generation’.34 For bourgeois white women in the colonies, respectability and domesticity, then, were just as crucial as performing sexual labour. “The central role of the memsahib is underscored in Forster’s short story, in which Lionel’s fear that his mother – the memsahib par excellence in her devotion to racial hygiene – might find out about his relationship with Cocoanut is the most potent iteration of his anxiety: ‘behind Isabel, behind the Army, was another power, whom he could not consider calmly: his mother … There was no reasoning with her or about her, she understood nothing and controlled everything’.35 The responsibility borne by the memsahib was counter-posed by an omnipresent sense of threat to her body and dignity and, by extension, to the racial regime she was understood to represent. Graphic and debased stories of white women’s violation by native men channelled the contradictions of colonial rule and the perpetual risks of ‘the native problem’ into a sexual script. As Ware observes, ‘Whether as Mothers of the Empire or Britannia’s daughters, women were able to symbolise the idea of moral strength that held the great imperial family together. In their name, men could defend that family in the same spirit as they would defend their own wives, daughters or sisters if they were under attack’.36 This symbolic value was undergirded by everyday life among the colonial bourgeoisie, in which the myth of native men as sexual aggressors was used to control the mobility and social freedom of white women, determining where they could go, with whom, and for what purpose. As such, control ran in two directions: white women were subject to control and used to limit contact between white men and native women. The racial weight of gender complementarity, calcified by natural science, was essential to the management of the colonial elite. In her writing on European women in colonial Nigeria, Helen Callaway observes that ‘the question of European women’s “sexual fear” appears to arise in special circumstances of unequal power structures at times of particular political pressure, when the dominant group perceives itself as threatened and vulnerable’.37 Her analysis tracks with the British response to the 1857 uprising, in which violent and debased stories of white women’s violation at the hands of native men circulated – in the metropole as well as among Europeans in India – as evidence of Indian depravity. Ware recalls a story that circulated in the Englishwoman’s Review and Home newspaper: ‘On finding the remains of one of General Wheeler’s daughters, the men divided up every hair of her head between them and took a solemn oath to kill as many “natives” as each strand of hair in revenge for her unspeakable fate’. As Ware goes on to summarise, ‘The colonized people were to be made to punish and pay for their revolt against colonial rule, but the severity of the punishment was given the appearance of legality by being carried out in the name of avenging the womenfolk’.38 The apparent depravity of Indian men served to justify the imposition of direct rule on the subcontinent, shifting power from the East India Company to the Crown. These stories continued to circulate in popular narratives in Britain well into the twentieth century, with even the Runnymede Trust, whose remit is ‘racial equality’, quoting a paper in 1974 claiming ‘Pakistanis are disproportionately involved in sexual offences’.39 Stories of Asian men raping white women have tremendous purchase in contemporary periods of political crisis too, as we’ll see later in relation to the moral panic surrounding ‘grooming gangs’. In the context of 1857, however, we might also observe that the focus on white women as victims of native male sexual aggression were partly to deflect from the violence experienced by white men – their humiliation at the hands of native rebels – as well as the violence they enacted.
The trope of respectable white women – mothers and wives and governesses and missionaries – as potential victims of native sexual depravity was shadowed by a figure more disturbing to the colonial administration and who haunted British rule in India: the white prostitute. As Levine explains, ‘The European prostitute, by her very presence, challenged white supremacy in distinctive and critical ways, which reveal dramatically and vividly the importance of sexual politics in colonial rule’.40 Just as the native prostitute could figure as a stand-in for the sexual availability of all racialised women, sex workers of European extraction threatened the notion of white womanhood as uniquely vulnerable and in need of protection. Colonial authorities dealt with the challenge of European sex workers in British India in two ways. First, they subjected European prostitutes to greater surveillance than their Indian counterparts, including, crucially, through segregation along racial lines. Increased control of white women in the colonies was enabled by emergent twentieth-century ideas of ‘white slave’ traffic that, despite evidence to the contrary, constructed white sex workers as helpless victims. Meanwhile, the internal trafficking and overall condition of Indian sex workers, who were economically worse off than Europeans, went largely unnoticed. At the same time, it has been argued that the presence of white sex workers played a key role in imperial feminists’ fight against the CDA in India. Second, while exercising control over European prostitutes and brothels, British officials symbolically distanced themselves from them. They did so by reporting that most of the European prostitutes in India were either Roman Catholics or Jews from Central or Eastern Europe – and that even the few that were British were of Jewish heritage.41 As such, European sex workers were racialised within the colonial project, given a distinct and denigrated racial position, through which the colonial elite could attempt to maintain the moral function of white womanhood as the elevated symbol of racial hygiene.
Intimate Threats
[Lionel] March has been a monster in human form, of whom the earth was well rid.
E. M. Forster, ‘The Other Boat’
Even in this relatively brief sketch of racial hygiene in colonial India, it is clear that the demands of sexual modernity acted upon a wide variety of political subjects, operating in distinct but connected ways on those deemed worthy of sexual freedom and those viewed as in need of excessive control. In this schema, the white bourgeois man is the paradigmatic figure of the human – the apex of modernity, of rationality, and of freedom. Freedom is particularly crucial, as it is in the tension between freedom and restraint that sexuality is harnessed as the foundation of being and, as such, as the privileged marker of racial difference. Sexual freedom – the freedom to choose one’s partner and to resist forms of sexual deviance (such as sustained cross-racial intimacy, homosexuality and masturbation) therefore acts as a guarantee of freedom tout court. As such, we can trace the gradations of freedom – and therefore the complexities of racial hierarchy – in the kinds of freedom granted to the vast cast of characters (divided by race, gender, class, caste, and other markers of status) that found themselves in British India. Of course, even the kind of sexual freedom granted to those at the top of the hierarchy is highly limited, operating based on a constrained and utilitarian vision of intimacy and desire.
I suggest that the putative autonomy of the white bourgeois man – his modernity, his freedom, his status as a subject – is entirely dependent on his Others. This dependence is not only rhetorical, in that the self is always constituted by exclusion. Rather, white men in the colonies were literally dependent on natives and white women for their very survival, and this dependency was often negotiated through sexuality. White wives were required to maintain their husbands as respectable, bourgeois subjects. As George Webb Hardy put it, ‘a man remains a man so long as he is under the gaze of a woman of his race’.42 For white men of a lower status, native sex workers were sought as a lesser evil than homosexuality. For all, native men were a form of sexual threat and unmanly deviance against which colonial rule had to be secured. Sexual modernity comes with its own ironic undertow: its dependence on sexual violence and exploitation threatens to undermine the racial regime it is intended to secure. In this instability, we can see that racial regimes are complex social fictions rather than inherent realities; like all systems of power, they take tremendous work to make and maintain, and they are never totally secure, always producing new contradictions, new gaps and fissures, which cast doubt on their legitimacy.
At the end of ‘The Other Boat’, as the ship nears the port in Bombay, the full force of his own threatening desires – the gravity of the risk to his class, his future, his reputation – begins to overwhelm Lionel. The manifold tensions between being ‘disturbed and disturbing’, powerful and powerless, respectable and abject become unmanageable as the story hurtles to its tragic conclusion. First, he realises that he has left the door to their shared cabin unlocked – and that rather than share his sense of terror, Cocoanut is relaxed, knowing that there is little scandal that cannot be smoothed over with a bribe. He then goes up to the deck for some air and finds himself among his own ‘caste’, among Europeans whose presence is crucial to his sense of self: ‘How decent and reliable they looked, the folks to whom he belonged!’ It dawns on him that if his relationship with Cocoanut was to be revealed, ‘he would become nothing and nobody’.43 The racial regime from which he derives his sense of self is more precarious than it first appears – following the wrong desires is enough to undermine it. Just as he renews his commitment to marry Isobel and thus have his position among his own fortified by the presence of a memsahib, he finds himself in conversation with Colonel Arbuthnot, who reveals that Cocoanut had secured his own passage through ‘a fat bribe’ in order to seduce him. When he returns to the cabin with this information, he tries to end things with Cocoanut. Unable to resist, they have sex, and at the climax, Lionel strangles his lover and throws himself into the sea. Though in this final act, Lionel reasserts his power over the ‘subtle, supple boy who belonged to no race’,44 but doing so becomes the ultimate symbol of his lack of restraint. In his unbridled desire and subsequent suicide, he becomes ‘a monster in human form’ of whom his mother never speaks again.
“Examining the governance of British India has shown the ways in which the making of race depends on the management of sexual practices – on deciding not only who has sex with whom, but also attempting to determine where sex takes place, whether it is mediated by money, what significance it is assigned, and what status any children that issue from it will be granted. The management of sexuality was intertwined with the notion of ‘culture’ as a unique, distinct, and ahistorical force. Through the strategic use of the principle of ‘non-interference’ in native custom, sexual practices were transformed into the key metric of cultural difference. The European bourgeois norms of marriage, family, and sexual restraint were celebrated as the ultimate sign of civilization – that which distinguished Europeans from natives, respectable from rough. Yet, these norms – the light side of sexual modernity – were only one half of the story. The treatment of native women – their subjection to invasive gynaecological assessment, their detention in locked hospitals – was as crucial to the maintenance of racial hygiene as the myth of the sexually pure and vulnerable memsahib. Following these dynamics from the colonies to the metropole, we can track the shifts in sexual modernity from the empire to the nation-state. We’ll explore the ways in which colonial interventions into native kinship calcified ‘culture’ and ‘tradition’ and turned marriage into a metric of civilisation. We’ll then turn to the indistinct end of the British empire and its attempts to maintain imperial power in a postcolonial world. The arrival of ‘immigrants’ from South Asia transported old colonial anxieties about miscegenation, racial superiority, and imperial idealism to the border. In particular, we’ll consider how the family is used to mediate this transition and fortify the racial regime of postcolonial Britain. Exclusion from the institution of the family – with its connotations of obligation, loyalty, and care – becomes a highly effective tool for both the immigration regime and the welfare state.

Do you need this or any other assignment done for you from scratch?

We have qualified writers to help you.

We assure you a quality paper that is 100% free from plagiarism and AI.

You can choose either format of your choice ( Apa, Mla, Havard, Chicago, or any other)

NB: We do not resell your papers. Upon ordering, we do an original paper exclusively for you.

NB: All your data is kept safe from the public.

Click Here To Order Now!