Brothels as families: Reflections on the history of Bombay's1

1. Although the city has been renamed Mumbai, I use the name ‘Bombay’ in historical references.

kothas

Abstract

Feminist theory typically locates prostitution outside the ambit of familial institutions. In particular, sex radical feminists and some feminist historians cast prostitution as an alternative to heteronormative domesticity. This article stresses the continuities between families and brothels in their structures of affection, obligation and domination. Given that brothels have often been sites of residence in South Asia, the question I address is, to what extent have brothel relations mirrored conventional family roles? In doing so, I offer a caution against universalizing work as a category for framing and understanding commercial sex. I begin the article by explaining the need for greater specificity in transnational feminist conversations about prostitution, and pointing out absences in sex radical and feminist historical accounts. I then analyze brothel life in 1920s Bombay drawing on annual reports of social work organizations, testimonies from high court cases, police files, census figures and anecdotal accounts. I demonstrate how families facilitated the entry of women and girls into prostitution, and how kinship – both actual and fictive – legitimized participation in the sex trade. Within brothels, familial roles provided a ready-made hierarchy that secured the loyalty and obedience of subordinates. I close by showing how brothels functioned as alternate, rather than alternative, residences, especially for those sent there by their families.

Keywords:

• Bombay
• brothels
• domesticity
• family
• kinship
• sex radical theory
• trafficking
• transnational feminism

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my deep gratitude to Megan Sweeney and Dana Collins for their intellectual support and engagement with various versions of this piece. Shankar Vedantam, Pensri Ho, Timothy Pilbrow, Joe Palacios and Aparna Devare were valued readers of the finished version. Thanks also to participants in the ‘Alternate Histories of the Family in South Asia’ conference at the University of Michigan for their comments. Finally, my thanks to the anonymous reviewers and editors at IFjP.

Notes

1. Although the city has been renamed Mumbai, I use the name ‘Bombay’ in historical references.

2. I intentionally use the term ‘prostitute’ because of its historical relevance; I do however agree with contemporary activists and theorists that the terms ‘sex worker’ and ‘commercial sex’ connote greater dignity than ‘prostitute’ and ‘prostitution’ respectively.

3. Socialist feminism emerged as a distinct paradigm in the 1970s, offering a critique of feminism for its inadequate attention to class and race, and of socialism for its neglect of gender and sexuality (Philipson and Hansen 1990). In their analysis of marriage and housework, socialist feminists strongly analogized the wife to the prostitute; see, for example, Gayle Rubin's (1976) elaboration of the ‘exchange of women’. At the same time, socialist feminists offered a bleak analysis of contractual relations in prostitution. For Alison Jaggar (1985), the prostitute functions as the symbol of the ultimate alienated worker; in political theorist Carole Pateman's (1988: 209) assessment:

• A civil slave and wives (in principle) receive lifelong protection … But where is the protection in the prostitution contract? The pimp stands outside the contract between the client and the prostitute, just as the state stands outside, but regulates and enforces, the marriage and employment contracts. The short-term prostitution contract cannot include the protection available in long-term relations.

4. ‘Sex radical’ feminists emphasize the potential of commercial sex to destabilize gender roles, enhance sexual exploration and subvert the heteronormative sexual order. For examples of sex radical writing, see Vance (1984); Califia (1988); Bell (1994); Chapkis (1997); Queen (1997). Sex radicals are the strongest proponents of the view that sex work can be a source of agency and resistance for some women, and hence are among the most vocal of the ‘sex work advocates’ demarcated by Sullivan (2003).

5. I focus on brothels as they are a dominant organizational form of prostitution; I acknowledge that other kinds of prostitution such as individual streetwalking can be more precarious.

6. The argument that prostitutes exercise far greater agency in sexual exchanges than do housewives is not exclusive to Euro-American contexts; a well-known example from Egypt is found in El Saadawi's (1983) Woman at Point Zero.

7. Gail Pheterson (1996) offers an excellent critique of the dichotomous pitting of prostitutes against respectable women. For reviews of feminist debates on prostitution, see Overall (1992, 1994); McClintock (1993); Zatz (1997); Sunder Rajan (2003).

8. I refer here to liberal and sex radical discourses on commercial sex, which view commercial sex solely through the lens of work. Authors such as Kempadoo and Doezema (1998), whose influential volume Global Sex Workers offers useful criticisms of how Third World prostitutes are approached by First World scholars, none the less univocally frame advocacy movements around the globe through the lens of work. For another example, see the Network of Sex Workers' Projects (http://www.nswp.org/), a transnational alliance promoting sex workers' human rights around the globe; it only features Calcutta's Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee, an organization framing commercial sex as work, as a representative Indian organization.

9. See Tambe (2000) for details on responses to brothels within Bombay's nationalist public sphere.

10. The 1910 Convention specified that anyone who ‘procured, enticed, or led away, even with her consent, a woman or girl under age, for immoral purposes, (would) be punished, notwithstanding that the various acts constituting the offense may have been committed in different countries’ (Home Department 1922a: 35).

11. The police commissioner from 1924 to 1927, and from 1932 to 1933 was P. A. Kelly. From 1927 to 1930, D. Healy held the position, followed by G. S. Wilson. From 1932 to 1939, with one break, the police commissioner was W. R. G. Smith (Kapse 1987). These changes in police commissioners are reflected broadly in the emphasis placed on anti-trafficking enforcement: between 1927 and 1930, a high number of cases are reported, whereas the records for the early and mid-1930s are scantier.

12. The Bombay Vigilance Association was set up to help enforce the 1923 Bombay Prostitution Act. Its managing committee consisted of prominent Indian reformist men such as Kanji Dwarkadas and Chunilal Mehta (Home Department 1927). The League of Mercy, headed by the Bishop of Bombay, exclusively sought out and repatriated European women who worked in brothels; the group hired a ‘rescue worker’ trained in England (Indian Social Reformer 1922: 5).

13. See Chatterjee (1999) and Ghosh (2004) on the legal status of slaves, servants and concubines as family members, in eighteenth-century India.

14. I thank Megan Sweeney for clarifying this compound of nurturing and disciplining in family life.

15. The classification of prostitutes' children as prostitutes in effect rendered the profession a hereditary caste. Banerjee (1998), writing about Calcutta, also argues that the notion that brothel work was a hereditary caste for Indians was a colonial invention. More generally, Cohn (1996), Dirks (2002) and Ballantyne (2003) explore the role of colonial governmentality in creating caste classifications that hailed colonized subjects in powerful new ways.

16. Only four cases are offenses against boys in the police records in this period (Home Department 1927: 55, 56, 1928: 70, 71). The offenses are described as imitating the patterns of ‘enticing’ and ‘kidnapping’ girls ‘for immoral purposes’.

17. Oldenburg (1990) is at pains to point out that Lucknowi kothas did not feature pimps, and that male children such as her informant Chhote Miyan turned to entertainment. However, this may be a specific to the entertainment-based stratum she examines.

18. Moti, Akootai's co-worker, describes her with great sympathy as ‘struggling for breath’ in her final hours. ‘She wanted to lay down but accused no. 1 would not let her lay down’ (Home Department 1917: witness statement 4). Phooli, another co-worker, also describes her as ‘exhausted and not able to sit properly’ (Home Department 1917: witness statement 3).

19. See Chakravarti's (1998) remarkable analysis of the status of widows in brahminical patriarchal codes.

20. For cases involving widows, see serial no. 5 in the 1927 table of offenses (Home Department 1927: Statement A); see serial no. 5 and 12 in the 1928 table of offenses (Home Department 1928: Statement A).

21. For a heavily publicized example, see the recent failed rescue effort by New York Times columnist Kristof (2004).