Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Sex Work in Colonial India

Episode Date: May 1, 2026

When the British Empire colonised India, how did it treat their different ideas about sex? How did they treat sex workers like the Devadasi, meaning 'slave of God'? And did the Victorians fetishise Indian sexuality?Joining Kate today is the magnificent Anjali Arondekar, Professor of Feminist Studies at the University of California, and author of For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India.This episode was edited by Hannah Feodorov. The producer was Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Freddy Chick.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, my lovely betwixters. It's me, Kate Lister, welcome back once again to Betwigs the Sheets, the show where we get purvey with history for your entertainment and your education. Before we can go any further together, I do have to let you know. It's an adult podcast. It's spoken by adults to other adults about adult things and adult your way.

Can you arrange adult subjects and you've been adult too. Right, you feel safer? Well, I certainly do. Let's crack on. As you know, one of my first. favourite and certainly reoccurring themes of the show is how the Victorians fucked everything up. And they really did. And today's episode is a prime candidate for exploring this theme. Britain's involvement in South Asia, what is now known as India, far predates the Victorians.

But there's a particular Victorian morality that they love to impose on anyone and everyone that they came into contact with. And of course that meant the British Raj in India as well. Not only did they get themselves all het up about what the natives were getting up to, but sex work became a real focus for them. Of course it did. They were panicking about sex work at home, so why would they worry about it any less in India? But what happened when these two very different cultures collided?

How did the British attitude to sex play its part in colonising and subjugating India? Well, listen on to find out more. Welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, The History of Sex Scandal in Society with me, Kate Lister. Today's episode is a fascinating one. If I do say so myself, I mean, they're all fascinating, but this is a really, really fascinating one

because we are looking at the ways the Victorian Britons tried and failed, quite spectacularly, to come to terms with Indian ideas of sex and sexuality after they forced control of the country in 1757. But what were Indian views on sexuality and indeed sex work like before the British Raj established itself. How did the Indian class system play a part in shaping these viewpoints?

And what has been the lasting legacy of colonial occupation in India today? Joining me today is the wonderful Angeli Arondaker, Professor of Feminist Studies at the University of California, whose own family history of sex workers plays a fascinating role in this conversation. And whilst I'm here, I want to let you know once again about the two Betwixt the Sheets live shows that are happening in May. They're almost sold out. They really are.

We're at 90% gone now, but maybe you wanted to sit in the aisles or something. But we've got one in Edinburgh and another one in London, and tickets are available at feign.co.ukho. UK. Just search for Betwixt the Sheets, and I'd love to see you there. Right, without further ado, everyone, let's just crack on. Hello, and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Professor Anjali Arndaker.

How are you doing? I am doing as well as possible in this global dystopia, but I await love, life and liberation. Now, there's an answer. That's the answer that we're all clinging to, is there? It's just how are you doing? Well, we're doing as well as we possibly can be right now, I suppose. Quite, quite. You are a professor of feminist studies at the University of California, and you are the author of many papers and books, but in particular, for the record, on sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India and Abundance Sexuality's History. So as a start a question, what brought you to studying India colonialism and sexuality?

Well, that's a great question. And it allows me to say something about my own biography, which is always, I always tell my students, biographies are epistemologies, which is basically a fancy way of saying it provokes the questions that you want to pursue. So I come from a sex worker family. In India, that community is called Deva Dasi, which is a Sanskrit word, which means slave of God, also interchangeable with cortisand, prostitute, etc. In fact, my second book is a history of that community and its refusal to be erased.

So when we talk about sex work, which is why I was so intrigued and delighted that you asked me to come on over and share the couch with you, as it were, was because, Because people assume that histories of sex work have been disappeared, erased, and I want to insist on the opposite. I mean, I come from a family community that I exist because of the works that my grandmothers did, my mother and father were the first to be legally married. So there is a robust counter-hist history that exists right alongside us, which, you know, we often don't look for, which is why my first book was called For the Record, which is to say, snap, there is material in the archive that tells us about the existence of a robust, capacious,

messy history of sexuality. And the second book is called abundance because that history is not only there, but it is efflorescent and everywhere. And the book that I'm working on right now, which is about the British Indian Oceanic Territory of Mauritius, is called Oceanic Sex. and it's about the continuation of this conversation within histories of indenture, which is that nasty little period kind of switched in between slavery and colonialism. So I'll pause there, but it is both personal, political, and intellectual. Is that a family history you grew up knowing? Was that just quite an open?

Oh, yeah, quite, absolutely. In fact, that's the kind of opening proviso of my book, which is to say, we assume that his story. of sexuality begin with origin stories of loss, right? Meaning something's erased, something's disappeared, and we've got to do a search and rescue mission. We've got to go look for it. We've got to recuperate it. We've got to give it value. And then we have to look for reparation. And the community that I grew up in, which is why the provocation of colonial India is also complex, because the 19th century and the early 20th century, India is multiply colonized. So my community comes from

Goa, which I know you Brits love to holiday and ruin. We're so sorry about that. You should be sorry about it. We should be. We need to have another conversation about the raves in Goa led by your people. But Goa, for example, was a Portuguese colony that existed alongside British India. And the Portuguese were in India for 450 years. They didn't leave to 1961.

Wow. So most people, most South Asians don't recognize its history. We also had little pockets of India that were colonized by the French, like Pondicherry. So the community I grew up in is from Goa and has always been open. And the most important part about them is that they kept their own records from the late 19th century. So the kind of fantasy that sex worker communities just recently have begun to get unionized and have representation is incorrect. So the book is about that story. And it's a story about how do we find a way to give visibility to a history of sexuality that is not just about pay force and objection and disappearance, but rather is about joy, intervention, invention, and at the same time, loss and disenfranchisement and caste, which is something I don't think we'll have time to talk about.

But when we talk about colonial India, the kind of ravages around histories of sexuality are not. just because of the colonial state, which of course I would love to blame for everything. But the kind of messiness of sexuality is also because of the ravages of religion and caste, C-A-S-T-E, which for some of your listeners may be an unfamiliar term, but is a term which is a division of labor, which is predestined. You are born into a caste, unlike class, which is mobile, and it is a division of laborers, as Dr. Bidker says. So I think because of the division of the laborers, as Dr. Bidker says. So I think because of this messy, you know, and I think sexuality is always the perfect case to think about these questions because it is where everything goes wrong and where everything goes right. There will be people listening that aren't familiar with any of this history at all.

So I suppose for them, let's start with a real basic question of what was the British Raj in India. How did we end up there and what were we doing? Well, let me begin with the story that I always tell my own. undergraduates to explain to them the kind of immensity of the British colonial empire. So Joseph Conrad in his very famous book, Heart of Darkness, which I'm sure some of your readers are familiar with, begins the story, his central protagonist with a map, right? And he sort of looks at a map of the globe and he says, here are some dark spaces and here are some blank spaces. And then he talks about the fact that Britain used to be a dark place, meaning a place worthy

of civilization. And then we move on. to the 19th century and it becomes the civilizing force. But one of the things about that map, and if you sort of draw up a map of the 19th century, late 19th century, Britain, which is the size of my armpit in terms of geographies, right? It's not a very big geopolitic, but it colonized almost one quarter of the globe, right? So I think your listeners need to understand the scale of colonial extraction, exploitation that we're talking about. I mean, in terms of dates, again, a reminder For your listeners, dates are our kind of historical hangers, things that we like to hang things on, but things don't always begin and end when we say they do.

So the beginning of the East India Company, which I would argue is one of the first transnational corporations, begins in 1757 with the famous Battle of Plessy, when Robert Clive, thanks to a conniving collaborator who is an Indian, overthrows a major ruler in India, the East India Company arrive, they take over, fast forward 100 years. They're not doing so well because militarization doesn't work without seduction of some other sort. And just like we see with any empire, today's U.S. Empire is about oil, about power, but there's all this nonsense about we want to help people, we want to civilize people. So where do you think they learned that from, right?

So 1857, there's a massive, what we in South Asian history would call a war of independent, Colonial historians would call a war of rebellion, which is the major 1857 battle, which of course rocks the kind of grounds of the East India Company. The British state, the British people at the top say, well, you know, militarization isn't working. We need a bureaucracy. We need to set up machinery, infrastructure. We need more people on the ground who are managing rather than just using ruler force. So 1857 is seen as the official installation of the British Empire, the Order of the Queen, and then of course independence in 1947. But 1947 is also where Indian Pakistan emerge as divided nations across a genocide of over a million people. So India and Pakistan are liberated.

So that's sort of the very checkered history. But again, these are origin stories that we need just to remind us that time exists. But of course, the British were there and as early as the 16th century, as travelers, as, you know, as voyagers, as traders. But I think the official installation is what helps us mark these bookends of the British Raj. And of course, the afterlife of the British Raj,

the fact that you and I can have a conversation and the fact that I have a colonial accent is not because I'm English, It's because post-colonialism ensured that people like me who were educated continued on the legacy of the British colonial Raj. So it ends and doesn't end, right? So I would say that the afterlives of the British colonial Raj are seen in London as well. I mean, I've spent a lot of time in London.

I went to university as well in Oxford, is that London is a post-colonial city. Every second person looks like me. And that's a good thing, right? And that's the afterlife of British colonialism. So British colonialism is not just over there. It's also right here at your shores, right? The Windrush generation when a lot of our kin from the Caribbean came over and so on and so forth. We think of it very neatly, don't we?

Is that, you know, the British arrived and then all of a sudden it was British colonial India and then we sort of tapped out and then that was it. It was all done. And everybody's neatly back in their boxes. But it doesn't work like that and it never has. It doesn't. But I think, you know, most of us like binary. before and after.

You know, it's like sex. If you don't have a good time, it's not, it's like those, I tell my students, it's like those adverts for erectile dysfunction that we see all the time is that you take the spill and magically everything's going to be okay. But you know it's not going to be okay, right? So the before and after is a seduction. It pulls us in. We want to believe, you know, that we can make up for things that go wrong.

and we can, and I think that's, and sexuality interrupts that binary, right? People have children, people have desires, people write books. So all of these kind of binaries between black and white, between men and women, between whatever genders you pick, those binaries start to collapse under the weight and the kind of pleasures of sexuality. And I think therein lies the rub, I think, which is why we can have this conversation with so much pleasure as well. The British, when they arrived in India,

actually they did it wherever they went, where they were colonialising all around the world, is they were fascinated with the sexuality of India and what they saw as the sensuality of it and what scholars like Edward Said have called the eroticisation of the Orient. Why do you think that was? And do you think that, I mean, I suppose what I'm asking is,

like, how did Indian sexuality present before the British turned up? Were they right to be fascinated? Was it so markedly different? Well, firstly, we are infinitely more interesting, so I will take that. That's so true. I will take that. But in all seriousness, I mean, first, just to remind your listeners, Edward Sahed, when he talks about the Orient, he's talking about what we now understand as North Africa and the Middle East. He's not talking about South Asia, right? And I think that's an important distinction, that the idea of the Orient has also means something very different in the 19th century. Now, in terms of the, you know, why India, what's the kind of fetish around

sexuality, I would say two things. One is, you know, one could bring up the red herring of things like the Kama Sutra, you know, all of these sort of colonial, pre-colonial texts which contain lots of discussions of sexuality. But I have many, many colleagues and comrades who work in Judaism, in Islam, and Christianity, and they'll say there's sex everywhere, right? It's about how you appropriate, extract and think about it. So again, like what I said about before and after, it is also organized around this idea of what those of us in the business would call colonial difference, right? So in order for me to travel somewhere else and extract, exploit, fetishize, I need to have a sense

and what is different about you from me that allows me to rape, ravage, seduce, right? Think about that trilogy is because I have to rhetorically stage a difference. So one of the primary differences of the colonial difference was not just race, was also sexuality. So if you read, you know, what I call ethnoponographers, meaning all of these travelogs that are written from the 17th century on about people who travel to India, to Egypt, Remember, there was no India before independence. What was then Hindustan, which is the broader congeneries of states, all of these ethnographic texts basically hone in on the differences of practice, rituals, etc., which I don't tell the whole story, but they tell a story that's different from what they've experienced,

say, on the shores of England, right? So this fetishization, this fantasy of Indian sexuality being free and rampant and more flexible, all puns intended, right, is also an imaginative form. It doesn't mean it's not there. But remember, in the 19th century, when our British friends are traversing across oceans, dying of diarrhea, only about one-fourth of people make it, right? England is also the largest producer of pornography. I wrote a chapter about this called The Story of the India Rubber Dilder, right?

Which is about the fact that in the 19th century, England is produced. using more pornographic texts in England than the Bible. That sounds like us. So this idea of, you know, as Victorians, as Brits, we are, you know, a little bit, is we know it's complete rubbish, but the question is how do you historically shore up this fantasy, right? How do you use it to make colonialism work, right? So if I say, mission civilizatry, civilizing mission, I'm going to go to India, either through religion or through education, not just because I want their resources,

because those barbarians need our help. They have too much sex. They're polygamous. They marry younger women, all kinds of things. It authorizes my ability to colonize, right? And remember, you've got to think about, I always give my students this stupid example. Whenever you watch a terrible action thriller, why do they first say, get the women and children out? I could take anybody as could you, right?

We are certainly not frail, vulnerable people. Yes, good point. Yes. But think about that. You don't even think about it because it's so ordinary, right? So sexuality, saving people from depraved sex, etc. So, for example, there's a wonderful book that was written by a British, I guess, anthropologist in the mid-19th century, which was called The Seventh Sense, which is about the fact that people in North Africa had a genital sense, meaning besides a sense of smell, et cetera. And these were all fantasies made up and corroborated by.

very, very dodgy statistics. Yeah. But it's like fake news, right? We know it's rubbish, but it's still everywhere. So I think these kind of histories of sexuality, and the more you probe into the archives, you see that these questions percolate as we go along. I'll be back with Angelie after this short break.

A sort of a narrative that the British turned up in India and then we exported Victorian views to India and we sort of wrecked everything. That's a sort of very clumsily put, but an idea that we exported. I mean, you mentioned there, your family come from the Devadesi and the British RAS went, no, we don't think so very much. You want to stop doing that immediately. And we closed down a lot of practices. Is that just too clumsy to look at it? The idea that sexuality was completely liberated and lovely before the Brits ever turned up? No, I think that is. I would say less than clumsy.

I think it's too easy, right? It lets everyone off the hook. It lets me blame Brits. It lets the Brits feel bad about what they did. And it lets South Asians and Indians forget that we had lots of other forms of hierarchicalization, like the caste system, like religion, right, that already created divides that the British use. That's why it was called divide and rule.

They use the differences that were already there. to amplify the differences that they wanted to exploit. So I would say, yes, there is obviously the British exploited and brought in education, infrastructure, all kinds of things, but they also used what was already there. I mean, I think that's why the empire lasted for as long as it did, right? They weren't a very hearty people, right? That's why, I mean, you know, all of the kinds of foods that were eaten, they were dying, they were sickly.

what's remarkable is how did a small group of sickly white people colonize so much of the globe because they mobilize what was already there. And I think that's a lesson to be learned in terms of exploitation and collaboration, right? We know that from histories of slavery as well, but slavery would not have been possible without local collaborators. If you look at Ghana, any of the major slave trading points. So I think it's at this stage in history, I think, you know, that is still a little bit of the past and now that, you know, we can have these conversations freely and in a spirit of solidarity. I think it's important for us to think about the messy entanglements and how blame doesn't get us anywhere, right? We need to make sure we

don't repeat those same mistakes. Yeah, absolutely. So thinking specifically about, so I'm not even sure what word to use, like I would say like sexual labor or sex work, but these are very modern terminologies. And I'm not even, I certainly know that the Brits turned up and they exported their Victorian understanding of the great social evil, quote, unquote, and that what they saw as prostitution and being morally reprehensible, something that needs to be managed and basically stamped out at all costs. But before that came in, how was sexual labor understood in India? That's a great question. And let me give very concrete example. But before I, I go to how the arrival of the British altered the landscape, I would say previous to the arrival

of the British, sexual labor was distributed across different vocation. So, for example, the community I come from, which is spread out all over India, where I grew up and my mother was born, is Portuguese India, was that it was often attached to temples and religion, right? So the idea of Davidasi, so for a long, so, for example, the Portuguese took a lot of, long time to ban the practice of Davidasi's because they said it was a religious practice. So if you look across India, a lot of these communities of sex workers who would probably call themselves other things emerged and their sexual practices were not frowned upon or not pathologized because they were either attached to kings, courtesans, to religious

forms or to traditional hereditary practices like dance and performance, right? So that's one end of the story. So which doesn't mean that the sexual labor was perhaps also exploitative, but it was folded in to systems that made it ordinary, right? So there are many scholars who've written about Avaad, for example, this princely state in North India where it was very ordinary for courtesans to have places of power, as it was, to talk about my favorite subject, sodomy, right, as it was common for there to be men who had sex with young boys and vice versa, right? So the emergence of same sex is, again, also part of the

sexual labor. I think we understandably focus on women, and we'll use that word as a placeholder given the period. But there was also all kinds of other sex going on, which is something I've written about, right? So there is this kind of past, and of course there is on the ground exploitation, which whenever you have capital, there always is. But when the British arrive, something shifts. And it shifts not because of the depravity of the native, but because of the depravity of the English. Let me explain how.

In 1864 is a very important period, which is, of course, the passing of the Contagious Disease Act, which is an act that regulates surveys women's bodies and decides who is respectable and non-respectable. But the Contagious Disease Act, now we've got to think about any law that's passed in the metropole. Metropole is a fancy word for saying London and then travels to the colonies. It is not the same law because the law that is built in the metropole is designed for white people. So when you carry it over to the colonies, you have to figure out how do I use the same law and translate it to brown bodies that work in different ways.

So the Contagious Disease Act, which was, of course, an act to protect bodies and the spread of venereal diseases was used by the British to also set up these lock hospitals, Lal Bazaar, which is basically Red Bazaar, the biggest of which was in Calcutta, which was the capital of the British Empire at the time in India, which were basically places that surveyed women's bodies, made sure that they were clean so that they could service British soldiers. It was checking for venereal disease, wasn't it? Forcibly, if necessary. It was a ruse because it was a way to just to ensure that they weren't worried about Indian women. They were worried about the British soldiers. But what's even more interesting is this is an open exception or not accept an open agreement that British soldiers were using sex workers. Yes.

Right? So, I mean, this is an open secret. You can't have so many women in a hospital being checked. out, even it's for dodgy reasons, if there aren't so many men who are coming into contact with them, right? So 1864 is a super important moment. It's because it's an acknowledgement of the fact that the soldiers are crossing racial lines. Right? And like any practical colonial power, the Brits decide, well, you know, they've got to do it anyway. Let's make sure they're safe. But we don't care about the women. So, and it's no coincidence that the biggest red bazaar is also the police

headquarters in Calcutta, right? And many people have written about this. The second most important point is, and this is something I wrote about in my first book, is the fact that throughout this period, there's a constant kind of shadow hanging of sodomy. So there are lots and lots of reports filed about the spread of sodomy, about the threat of sodomy. And I wrote about this very famous Karachi report that was commissioned by Charles Napier in the late 1840s. And Sir Richard Burton, the famous, not the actor, the famous anthropologist, was commissioned to do the Karachi report. Now, what's the Karachi report? The Karachi report was about all these male brothels that were spreading across the northwest frontier province,

the place between India and Pakistan. And Napier was worried that too many soldiers were visiting male prostitutes, right? Now, this report was never found, I don't even think it exists. But the fact that something like that kept coming up meant that sex work was, or prostitution, or whatever you call it, was not just restricted to women. It was proliferating and the fear of it had to be contained by sort of, you know, it's like creating a dyke and moving men along into visiting women rather than. And, you know, when you look at the archival records, there are so many cases of sodomy, right?

And I wrote, and not sodomy of the depraved native, sodomy of British soldiers who are sent back, chaplains who are sent back because of inappropriate behavior. So this is, you know, and this is the messy landscape which should exist. I mean, you know, it shouldn't surprise us, but it does. The Contagious Diseases Act were laws that were passed in Britain where women could be forcibly detained and made to submit to a venereal examination if they were suspected of selling sex, and then they could be detained in a lock hospital or jailed unless they agreed to it. That's what they're doing for the women. Were there any kind of mechanisms in place for dealing with these men that were selling sex in India?

No, I mean, that's why it's, to me, it's a delicious story because it's a story that circulates, but we don't really have much material evidence. So when I wrote about this Karachi report, I wrote about the fact that it was a story that refused to go away. Even though there was no evidence, it kept coming up over and over again. And Richard Burton also translated the Arabian Nights and wrote a very famous terminal essay, which is the last part where he talks about the rampant homosexuality in the region. So there is, in both in Middle East, North Africa and in South Asia. So it's kind of like a story that tells itself. Now, to go back, you know, to the idea of the Contagious Disease Act, when you asked me before, you know, can we blame the Brits for everything, right? Here's another way in which the Contagious Disease Act also helps the colonial native elites, right?

So there are like any structure of society. are different classes of people who are colonized, right? There are people who are workers. There are people who are trade owners, they're landowners, and their relationship to the colonial state is very different. So the Contagious Disease Act, and there's a wonderful scholar named Durba Mitra who's written about it, is also used by people who want to incarcerate troubling women, women who don't follow the rules, who want to run away from home. And they are forced into this category of prostitute by invoking the Contagious Disease Act. So if you look at the records, you'll see a lot of women who are who are picked up because their families complain

about their unruly behavior. So it's a way not just of containing sex work becomes this model for respectability, but what is respectability becomes something that whoever's in power decides, right? So I think that the contagious is the act of, that's why I said the translation across the ocean means that something else happens to it. But it also opens up this fantastic new era. And I would say any of your listeners, even if you're not historians, this material is available for free online at the British Library.

What it opens up is this field of medical jurisprudence, which is basically a fancy way of saying you can forensically examine bodies for whatever. So when I was doing my archive of work, you have this prosecution and containment of sexuality on the one hand. And when you're reading these cases, you have, as I write, in my chapter on sodomy, you have extended discussions of subtended anuses and onanism, which is basically another word for masturbation, because the language of medical jurisprudence allows you to say all those things.

Yeah. Right? So the two more important things in this period are pornography, right? In pornography, you can say what you like because it's pornography. But as I write in my book, if you read colonial pornography, it keeps the colonial racial logics in place, right? So you have black men who are rapists in this colonial pornography, but Indian men are not allowed to have sexual contact with white women. So even in this fantasy of, you know, racial transgression, Indian men are still kept as factotums. They are never seen as predators,

because that would materialize a fantasy and a desire and a fear that nobody wanted to calculate. And medical jurisprudence was another place, right? So if you're a doctor, so there are lots and lots of records and you're reading this and going, what the hell is going on, right? How are they giving us such explicit semen samples, all of this, right? At the same time as when they're saying we can't talk about sex. That's the Victorians, isn't it? They absolutely mad as a box of frogs. They were obsessed with sex. Quite. But I think the question is that we know that, but the challenge is what do we do with that knowledge? How does that help us think about how we study, think, organized, right? Because I think

the organization of sex workers is also important here, right? They learned from all of these strategies of erasure and manipulation. And all of the wonderful unions of sex, the biggest union of sex workers, as you know, is in India, is, you know, learned from these mistakes. And they

have used those to further their rights and responsibilities. Who are the Deva Dasi? So the Deva Dasi is a Sanskrit word. Deva means God. Dasi mean slave, and it would, as I said, mean literally in Sanskrit, the slave of God. But it is used interchangeably as courtesan, prostitute, sex worker, depending on your

orientation. The Gadasis are all over India, South India, Northern India, Western India, but they're very different. And so, for example, well, you live in the UK, so you may have heard of the death of Ashabhosselie recently, or Lata Mengeshka, who are the two most famous singers who have collaborated with. They are members of the Deva Dasi community. So David Dashi is also very known for their talents in performance in dancing and singing. So a lot of members of my community are very, very famous classical singers in the Indian musical tradition. So they are both vineyard for their

performance and their talent, but their history of sexuality is often disappeared. And part of what I wanted to do was kind of insist that the history of sexuality is part of the story. Davidasi still exist in some parts of India and davidassies are always attached to goddesses, right? As I said before, the profession of a courtesan or a devadasi is allowed, is made permissible because it is attached to a goddess. Devadassies are also always lower caste. As I said before, the caste system is hierarchical.

So I am from a caste oppressed community. We use the word Bahujan, which means many or dhazis. instead of the word untouchable, which is a word that degrades us rather than empowers us. So, David Asis exist from all, but they are lower caste and they are, you know, different, depending on which part of India you come from. And there was many efforts in the 1930s to disestablish this tradition. And it has had some success, but not entirely. So that would be one way of, a very shorthand way of describing that tradition.

I'll be back with Anjali after this short break. So these are women and girls that they are dedicated to a temple and then they sell sex and give the money to the temple. Is that how it works? That is one way worth. The phrase that we would use is called, given to the goddess. It's always a goddess, right?

And there's a wonderful book by Lucinda Ramberg about this. So the idea is you give your labor to the goddess, right? And your labor can be anything that has to do with the temple. You could be sweeping. You could be picking flowers. And the priests, the Jajman, the Mahajans, who are the Brahmins, who are the, we love to call them the white people of the caste system, right, are the ones who extract your labor for their own benefit.

You don't get anything in exchange except shelter. But you don't get prosecuted because tradition, right? So remember, colonial states like to stay away from religion. They want to use religion to build divides, right? The division of India and Pakistan, where so many people died because of religion, was a manufactured feud that was, you know, lubricated by the British colonial state, right? So the David Asi tradition was left alone for a long time by the Brits, because they were like, this has to do with religion.

And it allows us to do different things and allows us to continue sex work in a different practice because we can say, look, it's already here. You guys are already doing it. And there's been a lot of work about this. But I think it's worth thinking about it. It goes back to a question of you asked me before. Was it different before the Brits arrived?

Yes, it was a bit different, but it was also hierarchicalize. It was also exploitative. even as, you know, like you look at the Greek text, any other texts, they have fantastic efflorescence of sexual practices. Do they do them now? No, they don't. Why don't they go colonize Greece? It's a balancing act between those stories. So I think that's how I would address your question.

So it sounds like the Deravadasi, it's not a simple case of transactional sex, as in you give me money, I give you sex. It's more like they're in a world where their labor is given to the goddess and sex can be one form of the labour. Like, sex is part of their world, but it's not the point of their world. Quite. But what's an interesting kind of wrinkle in that story is that once in 1920s come along

or 1900s, once we have more modernization, people are migrating more. So, for example, my community, which originated in Portuguese India, a lot of people like my mother and father's mothers, I don't have any grandmas fathers because we don't know who the biological fathers were, migrated to Bombay, which was now called Mumbai, during the 1920s and 30s. So my grandmothers, for example, were not attached to a temple anymore because they moved into urban areas, but they continued the practice of serial monogamy with their patrons, right? So my grandmothers had multiple patrons, which means that my mother and father have multiple siblings. with different fathers.

But they were not considered prostitutes, in quotation marks, because they were monogamous. They were monogamous with whoever their patron was, who was normally a rich Brahman businessman, who would pay them. It was like having a mistress. So the practice gets codified, right?

So it's still sex work. I mean, when I wrote my second book, a lot of people in my community were not happy with the fact that I was focusing, not because they had ever erased the history of sexuality. I was always taught to be very proud of it, but they wanted to tell a story of rags to riches, right? They wanted to tell a story of, look where we are now,

look where we used to be. And part of what I was saying is that you could tell that history, but you need to tell the history of these women who labored and continued to labor like my grandmothers. They were ordinary women, you know, who built homes and houses because they transact, they got apartments. So there's an entire street in Bombay where I grew up,

which 90% of the apartments were owned by Davidassis, because they were really smart. They were like, we don't want money, give us property. And a lot of these Davidassis would have androgynous names because according to law, women couldn't inherit. So they were super smart. So when you say transaction, that's why I think sex workers, you know, understand the power of sex as a form of transaction, right?

And I think that's why the unions are so successful now. They understand. And there was no push to respectability. I mean, I wrote about this in my book, which is the first thing you want is, you know, when you have sex workers, the kind of liberal conservative model is, if we reform them, we give them education. Yes, and we marry them, they'll be great. But one of the big debates in our community in the 1920s in the archives is,

why should we advocate for marriage? My father wrote about this. He was a student organizer, and it might, you know, he was more queer than I was. My father wrote this beautiful piece when he was 17 years old, which is in Marathi, which is my first language, which basically says, why are you telling ours to get married? The men who come to visit our mothers are all married. So clearly marriage is not the solution, right? Wow. But it is, but, you know, that's the kind of practicality.

But it's also pleasure. I mean, these archives, one of the reasons why I love talking about this and you can see in my excitement, is it's also full of joy. They are calavans. is a word that means art, right? They think about sexuality as a form of intervention. Surely as a form of exploitation, there is plenty of that. And I could tell you so many stories of caste humiliation, but those are familiar stories.

We do not hear stories of sexuality as a place of possibility, as a place of empowerment, as a place of organizing. And I think that's the story I want to keep reminding. That's why abundance. There is always abundance. Angela, I'm going to come to your family home. I need to hear more about your family history. This just sounds absolutely incredible.

It's all in the book. You could read it over the toilet, as we say in India. That's the best place to read. What about the Hidra? They were a community that the British colonialists had to encounter and also disapproved as they disapproved of the Devadafi. Again, that's also a wonderful question and a question that should be asked again and again,

especially as we live in such transphobic. times, not just in the United States, but in India, in the UK, everywhere. So the story of the Hidra is like the story of sexuality. It is not about one version of transness. It's about multiple versions. The term Hidra becomes an umbrella term that the British mobilize to fold in many different kinds of non-normative bodies, right? So if you go to southern India, they're called courtes.

If you come to Western India, they're called Jokhthis. So the word Hidra normally is associated with a certain kind of trans female figure, right? Someone who sings and dances and extorts money, claps in a certain way. But if you look at the long history of Hiduras, and again, there are wonderful scholars who have written about this, Hidrars also like courtesans, emerge from courtly sort of kings and other Darbar's, etc. and we're seen as a very important placeholder for respect, right? So, Hidra's live in communities. So the figure of the Hidra is, again, become this figure like the figure of the prostitute, right?

Which is both damned and restored, right? We want to bring them back. We want to make them big and bad. But Hidrhas tell only one small part of the story of non-binary people, right, in the past. And Hidreras were attached to families. And if you talk to any Hidra community, they do not define themselves by their embodied form. They define themselves by their attachment to a community, to a God, to respect, right? So I think that's one of the biggest, I think, damages that the colonial sort of divide and rule thing did,

is that they made Hidras these kind of figures of evil and disruption in a way that they were not. And I think that has continued today, right? But also, higras don't describe all of the trans. Most people in India who are trans are not hiras. It's different, isn't it? It's quite. Hidras, they don't, if I'm right, probably not, but they don't identify as being transgender. They identify as being a third gender, a sort of beyond gender.

Quite. And in Pakistan, they are called the Khwaja Sera. So I think when you say colonial India, it's important for us to include Pakistan because there was no India before 1915. 47, right? So if you use the word colonial, one must talk about Pakistan. So in Pakistan, a country that I have been to and I have enormous respect for, in fact, the first queer conference was held in South Asia was held in Pakistan in Lahore. And I was the only Indian there and I gave the keynote. So when people say there's no queer studies in Pakistan, they are wrong.

So the Qajasira in Pakistan, in a country where homosexuality is criminalized, are held with enormous respect. They hold government positions. They have one of the most famous talk shows is run by a Quadro-Syra. Kajasira is basically saying Hidra in Pakistan. They have very different histories. They have very different genealogies, but their attachment to ritual, tradition, et cetera, is the same. So I think, again, our job as educators, as people who talk,

you have an amazing platform that a lot of people listen to. And I think the beauty of these conversations is to remind people that there is so much more to what you know. And not knowing is a good thing. means that there are so many of us. What's the plight of the Hidra today? I mean, they have a very, very rich history, but what conditions do they live in today?

Are they respected? Are they outcast? What's going on? I think it's a little bit of boat. So, for example, let's take the example of the Aravani's, A-A-V-A-N-I, which is a community of Hidras that is in Maharasha, the state I live in, also in other parts of India. So they are at once revered. So if you have weddings or births, etc., they come and bless the child.

I mean, so you see them, you know, it's very normal. But at the same time, because of the increasing conservatism that is rampant in India now because it is an authoritarian state, it is very anti-Muslim, it is very anti-anything that doesn't work for Hindutva. They are becoming demonized. There are like here, there are many more deaths of trans people and of hidra communities. But they are also ascending. I mean, it's like any community that's exploited. They are organizing and the recent trans laws that the government is trying to pass,

and India is a good example for us to think about your question. So even if Hidras don't identify as trans, they are folded into the trans demographic in India. So a few years ago, there was a wonderful ruling past in India called Nalsa, which recognized third gender people, more so than, say, in the UK or in the United States, where I live, where they extended them workplace discrimination, rights and responsibilities. But now the current government has said that we will only give you these rights and responsibilities if you can prove you

are trans, which goes back to medical jurisprudence. They want people to be subject to medical examinations in order to be given the right to call themselves third gen. So you see what mean about the colonial state reentering. So on the one hand, they would say, well, why are you fussing? We're giving you rights. We just want you to prove your trans, but in the language we understand. And most trans people and most even Hidras do not have surgery, right? As you know, it's not the only form of recognition.

So again, it's always a mixed bag, right? I can tell you so many amazing stories about this Arravani project where they go around the country, do beautiful murals, do protests. do art activism, but on the other hand, they also do sex work, their women are beaten. You know, so it's always a mixed bag. I mean, and I think that's the story of the world right now. And India is no different. And as a final question then, although honestly, I could talk to you for forever.

What is the state of play of sex work in India today, of sexual labor? Is it criminalized? Is it decriminalized? Is it partially criminalized? Where are we up to? I think it's partially criminalized. I mean, India is like any good bureaucracy. If you know how to beat it, you can get away with anything. And we thank the British for that.

But if you get caught in it, then you are, you know, so if you go to any part of India, for example, there are open red light districts, right? Kamatipura in Bombay, and Lal Bazaar, the place that I was telling you about that was established in the 19th century, there are different versions of it that extend. So all across India, and there are wonderful films that have been. made, right, about these sex workers who openly talk. And anytime you have a union, it can't be criminalized, right? Think about it. If I say, you know, you got to respect my labor, but they're always police hovering around, right? So it's sort of in between. The state is

not interested in enforcing or saying they are not for or against. But on the other hand, incarcerated, you know, carcler logics, as we like to say, the logic of policing is always hovering around. But sex worker unions are everywhere. And one of the most beautiful things about sex worker unions is that they are committed to prophylactics, they are committed to education, they are out and about, they are intergenerational, and there is a lot of focus on age. Because there is a lot of sex trafficking, right? As a sex positive person, I would say sex work. But I also know, and there are many people who do this work, that a lot of women and young girls are sex trafficked, especially from places like Nepal and Bangladesh,

because families who have too many children give over, you know. So again, it's not about demonizing anyone, but it's also thinking about as those of us who are advocates for sex work, we have to be generous enough to understand that coercion and exploitation can also be part of that story, but it's not the whole story. Angela, you have been incredible. Thank you so much for going to talk to. date. Let's do it again. If people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you?

Well, as I said, my name is Anjali Aarindeker and I have all my materials are open access. I believe in everyone having a chance to read. So if you just Google my name, don't AI because they'll tell you rubbish about what I do. You can buy my books. You can Google it. You can read anything. I've done a lot of public interviews. Just educate, as we say in India, educate, agitate, organize. That's the motto. And as a castor press person, I invite you to do that. Amazing. Thank you so much. You've been spectacular. This is my pleasure. Thank you for listening. And thank you so much to Anjali for joining us.

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