The Scattered Ground of Empire: Reading “Traffic” in Interwar India from Below

Between 1927 and 1931, the Frenchwoman Angele Coves managed to alight at the ports of Bombay and Madras on three separate occasions despite official requests to ban her entry due to reports of ‘trafficking.’ In the outpost of Quetta in 1923, Musammat Tajo was expelled from her hometown after being considered a troublemaking prostitute, only for her to repeatedly petition to return across fourteen years of exile, and succeed in 1937. In Delhi in 1939, a group of women marched to the Commissioner’s residence in an attempt to reverse the order of removal from their homes that had been deemed sites of ‘immoral traffic.’ As distinct as their stories may seem, what connects these women across time and space in colonial India is that they all spoke back to authority at a moment when the categories of prostitution and ‘trafficking’ had collapsed into one, prompting waves of stricter bordering policing and harsher local limits. Historians have addressed these interwar interventions into prostitution in terms of the forms of control they exercised: racialized sexual orders, municipal relocations, and international oversight. However, the underside of control—that is, how ordinary women caused trouble by strategizing their survival at sites of borders, cities, and neighborhoods—has eluded the eye of this scholarship. This paper moves to examine regimes of policing borders, segregating brothels, and expelling prostitutes in interwar India in terms of the disruptions to their order. Reading international and colonial records against the grain, it shows how Indian and European women exploited irregular communications, municipal confusion, and porous borders, while also petitioning to thwart efforts to deport, remove, and expel them. Pushing against a view of governance from above, this paper argues that forms of control over women engaged in sex work were routinely appropriated on the scattered ground of empire below.