Abstract

The social stigma attached to prostitutes has a long history, state-backed violence against Indian prostitutes is tied to the increasing involvement of the police, public health officials, and military administrators in controlling prostitution in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century. The very goals that drove state regulation- preserving public health and public order- led to the criminalization of women who did not work in state-sanctioned forms of commercial sex. By the early nineteenth century, literature made full use of this simultaneity of exotic temptation and horrifying debasement. It was in the nineteenth century, though, that prostitution came to be most intensely scrutinized and debased, pathologies as a significant and growing problem of social and scientific concern. Alongside the literary allusions to chastity, slavery, and desire, an excess of sociological and medical literature delineated the prostitute. Her (prostitutes) medical history was explored for signs of unusual physiology, her life history for clues to her motives, and her habits for patterns suggestive of danger. The changing landscape of both colonial and urban expansion alongside larger and more mobile populations increased the scope both of the sex trade and of investigations into it. The growth of cities, their physical layout, and the changing structure of entertainment in them offered new avenues for solicitation as well as greater obscurity for hawker and client alike.