'Imperial Reason', National Honour and New Patriarchal Compacts in early twentieth-century India

Abstract

During the interwar period, when the Indian masses came under the influence of Gandhian nationalism, some decisions of the colonial government in the international arena revealed that imperial concerns would willingly be subordinated to the demands of a nationalist leadership. The confidence which colonial military authorities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century had brought to plans for the control and containment of venereal disease among British subalterns in India gave way to compromise claiming a more assertive national honour. If military authorities in India (and elsewhere) were earlier concerned with the medical threat posed to white subalterns by diseased ‘native’ women, by the interwar period the focus of colonial anxiety was on the moral threat to racial order, posed by the appearance (and representation) of the sexualized white woman in the colonies before an indiscriminate ‘native’ eye. This inversion can only be understood by relating imperial concerns to nationalist political initiatives. The article discusses four separate moments in a period of transition in the Princely State of Mysore from the late nineteenth century to the 1930s, when crucial questions of masculinity and national honour came to be resolved by both colonial authorities and Indian elites in the quest to recast or preserve family honour and racial purity. Throughout the late nineteenth century colonial anxieties about the sexual health of the British subalterns in India gave rise to a series of measures which promoted and regulated Indian prostitutes. In the late nineteenth century, Mysore bureaucrats set about limiting and finally prohibiting the practice of dance in Hindu temples in the name of protecting family and religious honour. In the interwar period, there was an ironic reversal of these positions, as British colonial authorities, hard-pressed to preserve racial honour through the prohibition of white slavery in India, were compelled to defend the ‘trafficking’ of women in India, even as the nationalist elite attempted to cleanse national honour and save the victims of prostitution.