Intimate City: Governing the 'Traffic in Women' in New Delhi (1947-1956)

This paper examines the governance of trafficking in early postcolonial India. While new imperial historians and historical geographers have analyzed the uneven interventions of the colonial state through the League of Nations era and while legal sociologists have analyzed contemporary anti-trafficking politics, limited attention has been paid to the intervening period.

Drawing on these literatures, this paper considers how post-1947 interventions into the traffic in women shaped norms of mobility and intimacy within the city of New Delhi. The essay specifically tracks these multi-scalar processes through the story of the formation of the Nari Niketan Rescue Home. Established by Rameshwari Nehru after independence but before the passage of central legislation addressing trafficking (the Suppression of Immoral Traffic Act of 1956), the Nari Niketan began its operations in a period of legal indeterminacy. Disaggregating the state’s increasing interest and role in managing the home over this period provides insight into the governmentalization of anti-trafficking.

This paper shows how the governmentalization of the home contributed to the consolidation of norms of respectable mobility in the new Indian nation. As a spatial site that brought together the illicitly mobile subjects referred to by the ‘traffic’ and the respectably mobile female social workers who sought to rehabilitate them through their affective labor, the home enables examination of how the governance of licit and illicit mobility are entwined. By drawing together the histories of trafficking and social work, the paper seeks to explore the role of the state in configuring and governing the affective.