Between Escape and Freedom: Women, Venereal Disease, and Refusal in Indian Cantonments, 1888–1910

In 1888, measures for the mandatory registration and examination of Indian women to detect venereal diseases were repealed by the British Parliament, which overturned key parts of cantonment legislation and the entirety of the infamous Contagious Diseases Act. Whereas legislation that criminalized women at the statewide scale of the CDA had the ability to provoke significant information ‘panics,’ the rewriting of legislation in ways that decriminalized certain acts curiously traveled more gradually. This paper tells the history of this period of flux when legal systems of controlling women engaged in prostitution were rapidly changing and laws were becoming less transparent. I contend with the key question of how Indian women from Quetta to Barrackpur came to know of and act upon their right to refuse examinations when stealth and illegal systems of medical regulation actively concealed and stymied women’s access to this information. Reading official correspondence, registers, and committee minutes along with newspaper reports, I cite various cases of walkouts, collective non-attendance, and individual acts of resistance of women at station hospitals to argue that women were able to both acquire and act on knowledge of a ‘right to refusal’ that made them freer subjects. By placing women’s disruption from below in the lead of understanding governing approaches to venereal diseases between the periods of regulation and segregation, this paper shows how the overarching career of the colonial project of regulating sexuality was only ever one step from the disruption of its intended targets—subaltern Indian women.