| The period between 1888 and 1912 in colonial India constitutes an era of unprecedented public and domestic transformations as Indians and Britons collided over the meaning of tradition. Indian women in particular were seen as strategic anchors to help define modern bourgeois constructions of chastity, morality, family, and ethnic and religious identity. I argue that, as a result, the very meaning of colonial modernity was conceived through the careful prescription of Indian women's sexuality through the reorganization of the domestic sphere. Analyzing a wide range of literary texts, including novels, social reform tracts, Christian missionary pamphlets, short stories, and historiography, I illustrate how literature performs and contains ideological crises around racialized sexuality. Some of the literary texts I analyze are as follows: Rudyard Kipling's "City of Dreadful Night" and "On the City Wall"; Mirza Mohammad Ruswa's Umrao Jan Ada; Binodini Dasi's autobiography My Story; Indian reformer K. Veeresalingam's novel Fortune's Wheel. In addition I read a number of reform speeches, newspaper and epistolary debates, and pamphlets associated with the social reform movement called the Anti-Nautch Campaign, which sought to ban the courtesan institution in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Sex workers in the late-nineteenth century, including Indian courtesans, nautch girls, dancing women, and devadasis, all emerge as paradoxical figures in the colonial, national, and Oriental imagination. Just as courtesans were regulated by the instruments of colonial modernity such as law, knowledge production, information gathering, and moral hierarchies, my analysis reveals that they simultaneously challenged bourgeois hegemony. From this perspective, the texts illustrate the nuanced and duplicitous project of modernity as it offered Indian women spaces of access and political articulation in some instances, while conscripting others to increased regulation and surveillance. Whereas previous studies have focused on the "ideal" of Indian domesticity (for example, the Hindu widow or sati), my project investigates the "anti-ideal" subject of Indian domesticity, the courtesan and prostitute, as a site through which to study colonial modernity. This interdisciplinary project thereby contributes to colonial and postcolonial studies, feminist studies, and cultural studies by revealing how literary texts figure women's sexuality as fundamental to the imagination of the colonial and national state. |
