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© The Society for the Social History of Medicine 2005, all rights reserved
‘Looting’ the Lock Hospital in Colonial Madras during the Famine Years of the 1870s
History Department, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK. E-mail: s.hodges{at}warwick.ac.uk
The history of the Madras government's lock hospitals in the famine years of the 1870s demonstrates that, although the operation of colonial lock hospitals was primarily coercive and punitive, their inmates regularly interrupted and reconfigured the hospitals' functioning in unexpected ways. While shrewd and successful prostitutes incorporated the Indian Contagious Diseases Acts' (1864 and 1868) compulsory registration and regular incarceration into their business practices, destitute women incorporated lock hospitals into their strategies for survival and transformed these institutions into (albeit grim) asylums of relief. In short, women enrolled lock hospitals into their own distinct regimes of governance just as they were caught up within others.
Keywords: colonial medicine; Contagious Diseases Acts; famine; governmentality; India; lock hospitals; Madras
1 W. Anderson, ‘Where is the Postcolonial History of Medicine?’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 72 (1998), 522–30.
2 This includes Anderson's own work. See W. Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health and Racial Destiny in Australia (New York, 2003). Work on the history of tropical medicine certainly addresses questions of the relationships among race, colonialism, and medicine. However, in general it does so more as a straightforward analysis of medicine as a ‘tool of empire’ rather than engaging with the set of postcolonial problematics of power and knowledge that Anderson invokes in his review essay. The shortcomings of the ‘tool of empire’ argument is also addressed in W. Ernst and B. Harris (eds), Race, Science and Medicine, 1700–1960 (London, 1999).
3 For example, J. and J. Comaroff, ‘Medicine, Colonialism and the Black Body’, in idem, Ethnography and the Historical Imagination (Boulder, 1992), 215–16.
4 P. Chatterjee, ‘The Colonial State’, in idem, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, 1993), 14–34. For statements on the relationship between race, colonialism, and power that draw upon the work of Michel Foucault, see A. Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, NC, 1995); R. Young, ‘Foucault in Race and Colonialism’, New Formations, 25 (1995), 57–65; E. Said, Orientalism (New York, 1995).
5 Particularly for the case of colonial India, see D. Arnold, ‘Race, Place and Bodily Difference in early Nineteenth-Century India’, Historical Research, 77 (2004), 254–73; idem, ‘"An Ancient Race Outworn": Malaria and Race in Colonial India’, in Ernst and Harris (eds), Race, Science and Medicine, 123–43; P. Levine, Prostitution, Race and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire (New York, 2003); idem, ‘Venereal Disease, Prostitution and the Politics of Empire: The Case of British India’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 4 (1994), 579–602; M. Harrison, ‘The Tender Frame of Man: Disease, Climate and Racial Difference in India and the West Indies, 1760–1860’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 70 (1996), 68–93; idem, Climates and Constitutions: Health, Race, Environment and British Imperialism in India (Delhi, 1999).
6 On the history of the Indian Contagious Diseases Acts, see K. Ballhatchet, Race, Sex and Class Under the Raj: Imperial Attitudes and Policies and their Critics, 1793–1905 (London, 1980); P. Levine, ‘Venereal Disease, Prostitution and the Politics of Empire’; idem, ‘Re-reading the 1890s: Venereal Disease as "Constitutional Crisis" in Britain and British India’, Journal of Asian Studies, 55 (1996), 585–612; idem, Prostitution, Race and Politics; D. Peers, ‘Soldiers, Surgeons and the Campaigns to Combat Sexually Transmitted Diseases in Colonial India, 1805–1860’, Medical History, XLII (1998), 137–60; M. Ramanna, ‘Control and Resistance: The Working of the Contagious Diseases Acts in Bombay City’, Economic and Political Weekly (22 April 2000), 1470–6; M. Sundara Raj, Prostitution in Madras: A Study in Historical Perspective (Delhi, 1993); J. Whitehead, ‘Bodies Clean and Unclean: Prostitution, Sanitary Legislation and Respectable Femininity in Colonial North India’, Gender and History, 7 (1995), 41–63; D. Arnold, ‘Sexually Transmitted Diseases in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century India’, Genitourinary Medicine, 69 (February 1993), 3–8. For primarily comparative scholarship about the Acts in India and Britain, see A. Burton, ‘The White Woman's Burden: British Feminists and the "Indian Woman", 1865–1915’, in N. Chaudhury and M. Stroebel (eds), Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance (Bloomington, 1992), 137–57; E. Andrew and K. Bushnell, The Queen's Daughters in India (London, 1898).
7 M. Harrison, Public Health in British India: Anglo-Indian Preventative Medicine, 1859–1914 (Cambridge, 1994), p. 72.
8 Contagious Diseases Bill. Abstract of the Proceedings of the Council of the Governor-General of India, Assembled for the Purpose of Making Laws and Regulations, 1868, vol. 27 (Calcutta, 1869).
9 Contagious Diseases Acts were introduced first in 1864 in key garrison towns in Britain, followed by similar acts in nearly all of Britain's overseas possessions. Levine, Prostitution, Race and Politics, pp. 15, 40–1. On Britain, see J. Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class and the State (Cambridge, 1980).
10 This is one of the general arguments in Levine, Prostitution, Race and Empire. See also idem, ‘Venereal Disease, Prostitution and the Politics of Empire’, pp. 585–7.
11 See, for example, M. Dean, Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society (London, 2001); P. Joyce, The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City (London, 2003); J. Bratich, J. Packer, and C. McCarthy (eds), Foucault, Cultural Studies and Governmentality (Albany, NY, 2003). Unlike the scholarly career of Foucaultian ‘discipline’, ‘governmentality’ is less rooted in a particular set of Foucault's original texts, and more as a set of analytic strategies employed by scholars. Nevertheless, highly noteworthy is Foucault's article, ‘Governmentality’, in G. Burchell, C. Gordon, and P. Miller (eds), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Chicago, 1991), 87–104.
12 Harrison, Public Health in British India, p. 73.
13 While the Acts were in force over much of India at various points over the course of the nineteenth century, attention is paid here to other areas of the Contagious Diseases Acts, only to demonstrate that many aspects of Madras Presidency's experience of the Acts can be said of the Indian experience in general.
14 M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, trans. R. Hurley (New York, 1980), pp. 140–4.
15 Dean suggests that an alternative governmentality—alternative, that is, to that of liberal or neo-liberal regimes about which the vast majority of the governmentality literature has been written—can be observed in colonial and/or authoritarian regimes. In Dean's account, ‘authoritarian governmentality’ seeks to operate through obedient rather than free subjects. Dean, Governmentality, p. 131.
16 Compare, for example, with the historiography of the Contagious Diseases Acts in Britain in Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society.
17 Here I hope to qualify somewhat the argument in Uday Singh Mehta, ‘Liberal Strategies of Exclusion’, in F. Cooper and A. Stoler (eds), Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 1997), 59–62.
18 D. Scott, ‘Colonial Governmentality’, Social Text, 43 (Autumn, 1995), 203–4; J. Packer, ‘Mapping the Intersections of Foucault and Cultural Studies: An Interview with Lawrence Grossberg and Toby Miller, October 2000’, in Bratich, Packer, and McCarthy (eds), Foucault, Cultural Studies and Governmentality, p. 31.
19 These ten included three in Madras Presidency-administered British Burma: Seetabuldee, Thayetmyo, and Tonghoo. Except to make the odd comparative point, this article focuses principally on the lock hospitals of Madras Presidency's south Indian territories: Madras city, St Thomas Mount, Trichinopoly, Wellington, Cannanore, Bangalore, and Bellary.
20 For example, at the St Thomas Mount lock hospital. See Madras Military Department Annual Report on Lock Hospitals of the Madras Presidency (hereafter ARLH), 1974 (Madras, 1975), p. 39.
21 Despite their ad hoc and converted nature, these were the salient features of lock hospitals across India during the period that the Contagious Diseases Acts were in force.
22 For example, at the lock hospital in Kamptee. See ARLH, 1878, p. 22, Oriental and India Office Collection (hereafter OIOC), V/24/2287. ‘Dhai’ is also the word used to refer to Indian or ‘indigenous’ midwives, and denotes a much lower status than ‘Matron’.
23 Ballhatchet, Race, Sex and Class, pp. 44–5.
24 Conditions in the southern Indian stations of Madras Presidency were relatively well-provided for in comparison to Madras Presidency government-administered lock hospitals elsewhere. ARLH, 1878, p. 1, OIOC, V/24/2278.
25 ARLH, 1874 (Madras, 1875), pp. 23–4; Selections from the Records of the Madras Government (hereafter Selections), no. XLVI.
26 ARLH, 1876 (Madras, 1877), p. 30, Selections, no. LXI.
27 When no cantonment committee existed (as it often did not), then the cantonment's superintendent of police shouldered this responsibility.
28 ARLH, 1884, Bellary report, p. 10, OIOC, V/24/2287.
29 ARLH, 1875 (Madras, 1876), p. 33, Selections, no. LIV.
30 ARLH, 1874 (Madras, 1875), p. 8, Selections, no. XLVI.
33 Ibid., p. 26. The category of ‘first class prostitutes’ was often described in overlapping terms of ‘respectable’ and/or earmarked for serving Europeans.
34 Levine, Prostitution, Race and Politics, p. 302.
35 Mountains and Marine Sanitaria, Medical and Statistical Observations on Civil Stations and Military Cantonments, Jails-Dispensaries-Regiments-Barracks within the Presidency of Madras, the Straits of Malacca, the Andaman Islands and British Burmah. From January 1858–January 1862 (Madras, 1863), p. 387. Selections from the Records, Series XI.
39 Ibid., p. 388. Similar tales of escape from medical confinement, and the blasé attitude with which it was dealt with by medical authorities, can be found in J. Buckingham, Leprosy in Colonial South India: Medicine and Confinement (New York, 2002), p. 57.
40 ARLH, 1880, Bellary report, p. 10, OIOC, V/24/2287.
41 See, for example, ARLH, 1875 (Madras, 1876), p. v.
42 ARLH, 1885, Secunderabad report, p. 11, OIOC, V/24/2278.
43 For a discussion of the discursive formation ‘woman-native-prostitute’, see Levine, Prostitution, Race and Politics, pp. 182–4.
44 ARLH, 1874 (Madras, 1875), p. 27, Selections, no. XLVI.
45 Ibid., p. 9, Selections, no. XLVI.
47 ARLH, 1875 (Madras, 1876), p. 8, Selections, no. LIV.
48 ARLH, 1876 (Madras, 1877), p. iv, Selections, no. LXI. See also Levine, Prostitution, Race and Politics, p. 300. The theme of ‘clandestine prostitution’ is shot through the discussion of the campaign to extend the series of three English Contagious Disease Acts of the 1860s as well. See Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society, p. 81.
49 Even the largest ratio of prostitutes to soldiers that medical officers confronted does not compare unrealistically with an example of documented prostitute work-rates. At British army brothels near the frontline in France during the First World War, fifteen prostitutes were reportedly visited by 360 soldiers per day. The Shield: A Review of Moral and Social Hygiene, 3 (1916–17), p. 396. My thanks to Lesley Hall for bringing this reference to my attention.
50 These stereotypes were driven in part by a set of practices like devadasis and nautch girls. Levine, Prostitution, Race and Politics, pp. 191–3. Yet in Madras Presidency, devadasis were expressly exempted from regulation under the Contagious Diseases Act of 1868. Sundara Raj, Prostitution in Madras, p. 49.
51 ARLH, 1874 (Madras, 1875), p. 4, Selections, no. XLVI.
52 ARLH, 1875 (Madras, 1876), p. 21, Selections, no. LXI.
53 ARLH, 1874 (Madras, 1875), p. 33, Selections, no. LIV.
54 A similar argument is to be found in Buckingham, Leprosy in Colonial South India, in which she claims leper hospitals were not ‘totalising institutions’, p. 60.
55 Dean, Governmentality, p. 71.
56 See, for example, tabular reports throughout ARLH, 1874 (Madras, 1875), ARLH, 1875 (Madras, 1876), ARLH, 1876 (Madras, 1877).
57 See, for example, medical officers' prose reports throughout ARLH, 1874 (Madras, 1875), ARLH, 1875 (Madras, 1876), ARLH, 1876 (Madras, 1877).
58 On ‘Mother Victoria’, see I. Chowdhury-Sengupta, ‘Mother India and Mother Victoria: Motherhood and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Bengal’, South Asia Research, 12 (1992), 20–37.
59 On the Madras famine, see D. Arnold, ‘Famine in Peasant Consciousness and Peasant Action: Madras 1876–8’, in Ranajit Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies III: Writings on South Asian History and Society (Delhi, 1984); idem, ‘Social Crisis and Epidemic Disease in the Famines of Nineteenth-Century India’, Social History of Medicine, 6 (1993), 385–404; B. M. Bhatia, Famines in India: A Study in Some Aspects of the Economic History of India, 1860–1945 (New York, 1963); M. Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World (New York, 2001), pp. 23–116; K. Currie, ‘British Colonial Policy and Famines: Some Effects and Implications of "Free Trade" in the Bombay, Bengal and Madras Presidencies, 1860–1900’, South Asia, 14 (1991), 23–56; W. Digby, The Famine Campaign in Southern India, 1876–1878, vol. 1 (London, 1878); A. Porter, The Diseases of the Madras Famine, 1877–8 (Madras, 1889).
60 Bhatia, Famines in India, p. 93.
61 Arnold, ‘Famine in Peasant Consciousness and Peasant Action’, pp. 87, 93, 97, 104.
62 W. Cornish, ‘Sanitary and Medical Aspects of the Famine of 1876–77’, Annual Report of the Sanitary Commissioner, Madras, 1877 (Madras, 1878), p. xxvi. Cited in Arnold, ‘Social Crisis and Epidemic Disease’, p. 393.
63 Bhatia, Famines in India, p. 89.
64 ARLH, 1874 (Madras, 1875), p. 8 (Bellary report), 17 (Bangalore report). Selections, no. LIV; ARLH, 1875 (Madras, 1876), p. xi (Trichy report). Selections, no. LIV; ARLH, 1878, St Thomas Mount report, p. 22, OIOC, V/24/2278.
65 ARLH, 1876 (Madras, 1877), p. 5, Selections, no. LXI.
66 For the comparative Irish case, see M. Finnane, ‘Asylums, Families and the State’, History Workshop Journal, 20 (1985), 134–48.
67 ARLH, 1882, p, 7, OIOC, V/24/2287.
68 ARLH, 1878, Cannanore report, p. 19, OIOC, V/24/2287.
69 ARLH, 1879, Bangalore report, p. 8, OIOC, V/24/2287.
70 ARLH, 1878, Bellary report, pp. 7–8, OIOC, V/24/2278.
71 See, for example, India Office Records (hereafter IOR) IOR/V/24/2287; ARLH, 1877–89, pp. 4–6.
72 ARLH, 1874 (Madras, 1875), p. 15, Selections, no. LIV. Grammar and syntax as in text.
73 ARLH, 1878, Bellary report, p. 18, OIOC, V/24/2287.
74 ARLH, 1884, p. 6, OIOC, V/24/2287.
75 See, for example, IOR/V/24/2297 Burma, Medical Department, Report on Lock Hospitals in British Burma, 1876–88, and OIOC, V/24/2291 Punjab Medical Department, Report on the Lock Hospitals in the Punjab, 1878–1890.
76 Punjab Medical Department, Report on the Lock Hospitals in the Punjab, 1878–1890, Lahore 1878 Report, p. 1, OIOC, V/24/2291.
77 Just as lock hospital numbers were up, the Madras Government Lying-in Hospital reported the highest ever number of recorded deliveries in its history in 1876–77, but also reported a very high rate of mortality (over 28%). The hospital's Surgeon-Major accounted for these figures as effects of famine conditions. Annual Medical Report of the Madras Government Lying-in Hospital for the Year 1876–7 (Madras, 1877), p. 6.
78 Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts, p. 40.
79 Bhatia, Famine in India, p. 94.
80 Digby, The Famine Campaign in Southern India, p. 283.
81 A similar dynamic of misreading colonial medical institutions can be observed from annual reports of Madras Presidency's civil dispensaries soon after the system was instituted in the early 1840s. It was reported that indigent women came with their children seeking food and with no interest in medicine. Tamil Nadu Archives, Public Volume 799, 28 July 1846, 11–12, p. 2.
82 Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society, p. 72.
83 D. Arnold, Famine: Social Crisis and Historical Change (London, 1988), pp. ix, 6–11.
84 Mehta, Liberalism and Empire.
85 This point has been forcefully put in the majority of scholarship on the operation of Contagious Diseases Acts in colonial settings as listed in footnote 6.
86 On the centrality of famine to the history of the government of the population in India, see S. Hodges, ‘Governmentality, Population and the Reproductive Family in Modern India’, Economic and Political Weekly, 39 (13 March 2004), 1157–63. U. Kalpagam makes similar observations about the Famine Codes as a key site of colonial governmentality in India in her ‘Colonial Governmentality and the "Economy"’, Economy and Society, 29 (August 2000), 433.
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