The Scattered Ground of Empire: Reading ‘Traffic’ in Interwar India from below

Zoya Sameen, University of Chicago

Between 1927 and 1931, the Frenchwoman Angele Coves managed to alight at the ports of Bombay and Madras on three separate occasions despite official requests to ban her entry on account of reports of ‘trafficking.’ In the outpost of Quetta in 1923, Musammat Tajo was expelled from her hometown after being deemed a troublemaking prostitute, only for her to repeatedly petition to return across fourteen years of exile, and succeed in 1937. In Delhi in 1939, a group of women engaged in prostitution marched to the Chief Commissioner’s residence in an attempt to reverse the order of their removal from their homes that had become sites of ‘immoral traffic.’ As disparate as these anecdotes may seem, what connects these Indian and European women across time and space in colonial India is that they all spoke back to authority at a moment when international borders and local limits were hardened as a solution to the interwar problem of ‘traffic.’ During this period, categories of prostitution, trafficking, and brothels collapsed into one, and a wider range of mobile women engaged in sex work became vulnerable to newer forms of coercive control. But where scholars have attended to this history in relation to municipal politics, racialized governance, and international norms, the underside of how ordinary women strategized their survival and contested their criminality remains unaccounted for. This paper, then, examines regimes of segregating brothels, policing borders, and expelling prostitutes in interwar India in terms of disruptions to their order, and shows how Indian and European women exploited uneven communications, municipal confusion, and weak borders in order to thwart efforts to remove and deport them. It ultimately argues that policies and laws to exercise control over women engaged in sex work from above were routinely appropriated on the scattered ground of empire from below.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 174. Transnationality and Gender I