Prostitution in colonial Punjab

Abstract

Managing sex was an important part of Britain s imperial project in the colonies. This thesis examines the colonial military enterprise of regulating sexual recreation for British troops and the configuring of the sexualised native woman as a product of the colonial encounter between Empire and Punjabi urban middle-classes. Using a wide range of archival materials and examining the political debates and medical discourse from the nineteenth century, this study explores how the Prostitute was cast as a new colonial category in the nineteenth century and different groups of women came to be viewed at once as a necessary evil and a vector of disease, both moral and physical. newline