Good riddance?
“In Bombay, European prostitutes were concentrated at Cursetji Sukhlaji Street in the Kamathipura area. Here, the missionaries who formed themselves into a vigilante midnight mission to stamp out the nefarious practice found themselves, whilst patrolling the street, showered with water and oil and other unpleasant fluids by prostitutes occupying the upper loots of the street’s buildings,” Coralie Younger writes in her provocatively titled book Wicked Women of the Raj.
“In response, the midnight missionaries changed their attack and decided to man each end of the thoroughfare in order to harass the men who attempted to enter and patronise Cursetji Street’s brothels.”
The missionaries complained that the verbal abuse and discomfort of drenching fluids and the assault by enraged clients was nothing compared to women missionaries’ having to suffer the indignity of being mistaken for the `unfortunates’.”
But, “equally distressing was the fact that many of the prostitutes did not consider themselves ill used at all and did not want to be rescued”.
One Malcolm Moss had a tricycle on which he “follows home the carriages of some of the aristocratic official frequenters of the great European vice market of Bombay, finds their names and addresses, then sends them through the post letter of religious advice, tracts and purity literature”.
But it was not just the missionaries who were upset with this violation of morality. In a note to the deputy governor, the council of the East India Company wrote:
“Whereas some of these women have grown scandalous to our nation, religion and government interest, we require you to give them fair warning that they do apply themselves to a more sober and Christian conversation.”
Although prostitution had been seen as disturbing the English society and detrimental to the empire for long, so were drunkenness or blasphemy. Prostitution and other sexually immoral acts were not elevated to the special status of a great social evil until the 19th century.
This change was a byproduct of the Enlightenment approach. Michel Foucault speaks of a “need to take sex ‘into account’, to pronounce a discourse on sex that would not derive from morality alone but from rationality as well.” In his History of Sexuality, he said, “It was sufficiently new that at first it wondered at itself and sought apologies for its own existence.”
But it did continue. Science continued to theorise sex, and had soon taxonomised those who did not fit into the reproductive norm: the homosexual, the prostitute, the pervert, and so on.
Pakistan’s own recent “Enlightenment”, associated with former military leader Pervez Musharraf, has been a subject of controversy. As Musharraf opened up Pakistani media and society, the channels through which the society talks to itself increased. Like the objective ‘observation’ of Victorian science, the penetrating gaze of the Pakistani TV camera now intends to bring into discourse everything that it sees, including sex and dating. But it is apologetic.
In my previous column, I had implied that Maya Khan – the TV host who was fired after public anger over her date–busting – is neither a soldier of Islam nor a hypocrite going after ratings. Her morality, like that of the rest of Pakistan bourgeoisie, is Victorian.
“Do your parents know you are here?” she asks couples hanging out in a park. “Do your parents know you are here?” a popular website asked her as it published pictures of Maya Khan partying with men. And then there was some public anger at the website publishing ‘private’ photos.
The Victorian bourgeoisie built the family and its sexuality around the demarcation of the public and the private spheres. And those who violated the distinction were seen as threats to the social order – the prostitutes, those who watch pornography on the Internet, and those who date in parks.
At the time when the British Raj was dealing sternly with prostitution, Younger writes, “extramarital relations as a practice were not scorned by a society that saw its women take flight every hot season into the cooler climes of the morally relaxed hill stations. In Simla, Mussoorie and Ooty, it was taken for granted that married women and men on leave were free to indulge their passions as long as they were relatively discreet. For example, at the lavish balls, dinner parties and receptions held at the maharajah of Kapurthalas residence in Mussoorie, the best wines and champagne flowed freely…The maharajah’s military secretary wrote that evenings concluded with men and women taking advantage of the privacy afforded by the Chateau de Kapurthalas large and densely planted gardens.”
The private lives of the Pakistani bourgeoisie are no different. But in the public life, we expect protestant work ethics from a nation that does not want to work but lay down and philosophise, and we expect propriety from women who wear wrap–around skirts, smoke Hookah and fornicate in Sugarcane fields.
Maya Khan – like you and I – is among the last remnants of the British Raj in Pakistan. And while some are wary we have no social structure to replace it as it erodes, others are ready to say ‘good riddance’.
The writer is a media and culture critic and works at The Friday Times. He tweets @paagalinsaan and gets email at harris@nyu.edu