Chaste Wives and Prostitute Sisters

Patriarchy and Prostitution among the Bedias of India

Anuja Agrawal

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000084122
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book is an anthropological study of the unusual coincidence of prostitution and patriarchy among an extremely marginalized group in north India, the Bedias, who are also a de-notified community.

It is the first detailed account of the implications of a systematic practice of familial prostitution on the kinship structures and marriage practices of a community. This starkly manifests among the Bedias in the clear separation between sisters and daughters who engage in prostitution and wives and daughters-in-law who do not. The Bedias exemplify a situation in which prostitution of young unmarried women is the mainstay of the familial economy of an entire social group. Tracing the recent origins of the practice in the community, the author goes on to explore the manner in which this familial economy manifests itself in the lives of individual women and the kind of family groupings it produces. She then examines the repercussion this economy has on the lives of Bedia men, how the problem of their marriage is resolved, and how the Bedia wives become repositories of female purity which otherwise stands jeopardized by Bedia sisters engaged in prostitution.

1 Prostitution as "Tradition"

The most significant feature of the Bedia’s social and economic practices is the engagement of unmarried Bedia women in prostitution. But in trying to make sense of conditions that ensure that young Bedia women adopt this mode of livelihood, we immediately encounter a methodological problem. While the complicity of the Bedia community and the family in the engagement of their women in prostitution might be treated as obvious, given its centrality to their survival, the members of the community by no means readily accept this to be the case. It is very hard to come by Bedia men and women who admit to their wholehearted support for the practices of their unmarried women even in conditions where there is no doubt regarding this occupational feature of the community. I thus begin my exegesis on the prostitution of Bedia women with a discussion of how members of this community represent their practice to outsiders and perhaps also to themselves.

Prostitution: An Immemorial Tradition or "Choice" of an Individual?

It is interesting that members of the Bedia community resort to starkly contradictory representations of the prostitution of their women. They vacillate between two extremes in their attempts at pinning the responsibility for the prostitution of Bedia women. The weight of tradition on the one hand, and the “choice” of individual women on the other, constitute these two extremes. This was apparent to me in many conversations that I had with the members of the community. A middle-aged wife said to me, seemingly unambiguously, “this is going on for many generations. We don’t even know. It has been going on from the times of our ancestors.” But she added a little later that “earlier no one knew this occupation” (pehle ye pesha koi nahin janta tha). On another occasion, she explained to me,

Earlier we used to do like this. Sometimes we would camp in one village sometimes in another. We used to beg and survive. Then one ancestor of ours (hamara bada-boodha)—I do not know in which time— he started this tradition. He put his daughter into this dhanda.¹ This started then. He even set out all the rules of the trade. And ever since then, this has been going on in the community.²

1 Literally, dhanda means occupation or vocation. But in the north Indian context, when used with respect to a woman without any qualifier, it generally refers pejoratively to prostitution. Thus, if it is said of a woman that “she does dhanda,” it implies that she is a prostitute. Among the Bedias, this is the usual connotation of the term and the qualifier “koi aur” (any other, some other) is added to refer to occupations other than prostitution.

2 In several other conversations, the past was construed differently: as pastoral, peripatetic, and criminal. But the end result was more or less conceived in a similar manner.

In yet another conversation the same woman said: “Our ancestors started it” (Ye bade-boodho ne chalaya). But her sister-in-law quipped in: “No, it was not really the old people/ancestors. Sisters and daughters started this of their own will” (Bade-boodho ne kya behan betiyon ne hi chala diya, apni marji se).

I found this contradiction recurring in most conversations on the topic. Echoing this contradiction in yet another version, Ram Singh said, “this has been going on forever, for the last seven generations. Our great grandfather and grandfather who are dead now—this is going on since their days.” He added, however:

Now these girls have sat down to be seen by the world. Otherwise we would have only engaged in agriculture. Earlier lot of paddy used to grow. Now the world is like this. Earlier, they used to sing and dance for kings and landowners (raja aur zamindar). They used to get three hundred rupees for one night, six hundred for two nights. Now those women are all old. They used to live with one man.

These brief snippets reveal that sometimes the Bedias attribute their practice to immemorial traditions, at other times its more acceptable aspects are attached to tradition while the disreputable dimensions are attributed to individual women’s “mischief.” Thus, if singing and dancing or being concubines for the royalty are acceptable “traditions” the transition to crass prostitution is conveniently attributed to the sisters who “spoilt” everything.

What I would like to argue here is that these representations are neither historically tenable nor sociologically precise. The evidence regarding the historical depth of prostitution among the Bedias of Nagla and other segments of the community is very thin and full of ambiguities. On the other hand, sociological analysis forces us to be very skeptical of the Bedias’ claim that their women “choose” prostitution voluntarily. These then constitute the subject matter of this and the following two chapters. In the rest of this chapter, I will examine the view that prostitution is the traditional occupation of Bedias. The idea that Bedia women choose to engage in prostitution is discussed in the following chapters.

Prostitution and Tradition

The currently popular perception of the Bedia community is indeed that it is an “ex-criminal tribe” whose “traditional” occupation is prostitution. For instance, in the People of India series, it is suggested that Bedia women are “traditionally concubines to some high caste men” and that “according to traditional accounts (sic), a large part of the Bedia earnings come from prostitution and dancing” (Singh 1993: 213). Maitra (1997: 3) suggests that “for centuries, the Baria girls have been preoccupied in this profession of prostitution.” Mukherjee (1989: 3, 14, 53) describes the Bedias, among others, as descendants of the dancing women of the Mughal courts and refers to them as “castes/communities traditionally accepting flesh trade/trafficking” (also see Gathia 1999: 12). Scores of depictions to this effect can be given from the journalistic sources as well (see Kurup 2006, for instance).³

3 However, it must also be noted that some observers have pointed out the contrary to be the case. For instance, the Jabali Yojana authored by Harsh Mander dates the beginning of prostitution in these communities to the colonial period as does the district collector of Riasen, Madhya Pradesh (see Joshi 1997: 74)

If a traditional practice is meant to be one which has been pursued by a people since time immemorial and/or has been their primary means of subsistence for a considerable time period, then the evidence that I have been able to gather does not support the view that prostitution is the Bedias’ traditional occupation. This is notwithstanding the undeniable fact that a certain segment of the community does subsist on the prostitution of its women and has been doing so for several generations. In what follows, I shall consider some evidence that warns us against treating prostitution as the “traditional occupation” of the Bedias.

Absence of a Female Line of Descent

The genealogical evidence regarding Nagla residents is one strong indicator that prostitution has not been practised by Bedias, particularly by the residents of this hamlet, for too long. As shall be discussed in detail at various points in this book, retention of unmarried female members within the natal household is a peculiarity of the Bedia economy. Those Bedia daughters and sisters who engage in prostitution neither marry nor move away from their natal residence. Thus it is not far fetched to treat genealogical data and memories indicating absence of such a pattern in an earlier generation as an indicator of the relatively recent origins of the community’s engagement in sex trade, at least in its contemporary form.

As mentioned in the Introduction, the settlement of Nagla has at its origin three brothers who migrated from the neighboring district of Dholpur to Bharatpur over a period of time around the second quarter of the twentieth century. Now, there is no evidence suggesting that any of the sisters or descendants of sisters of this generation of men ever resided along with their brothers. The sons and daughters of these settlers who constitute the oldest living generation of inhabitants in Nagla have only vague memories pertaining to the father’s sisters although they not only have a clear memory of a fourth brother of their father who settled in the neighboring district, but also maintain active relations with his descendants. On a few occasions, Bedia men and women of the oldest generation claimed that their father had several sisters who had all been married off. It was also pointed out that the sex trade continued among the descendants of the sisters elsewhere, implying that they were married into segments of the community dependent upon this trade. But I came across no evidence of any special recognition of, or relationship with, any of the descendants of the sisters from the first generation.

As shall also be discussed in subsequent chapters, unmarried Bedia women sometimes, even if rarely, take up residence with their patrons. It is possible that the sisters of the settlers’ generation may have established residence with men elsewhere. This appears to have been more common in earlier times. Such a possibility can account for the fact that surviving members of the oldest generation have hardly any memories of such women and that no resident of Nagla can trace back descent from any women of the settlers’ generation to them. But if at all the sisters of the first generation of Bedia men engaged in any activity akin to prostitution, it did not amount to their permanent residence with the kin group of their brother. It appears evident that the men of the first generation did not depend on the earnings of their sisters to an extent or in a manner that amounts to the endurance of the brother-sister unit within the local community beyond one generation. This is what we find to have happened in subsequent generations of Nagla settlers. The significance of the absence of any line of descent coming down from women of the first generation inhabiting Nagla arises from this.⁴

4 The difficulties of collecting such data have not allowed me to do so but detailed genealogies of this kind, if collected for a number of habitats known for such occupational leanings, may be an extremely useful way of giving some objective insights into the past of the community. Of course beyond a certain point in the past they may cease to be of value. In my own data, I was unable to determine the character of relations beyond the first generation. Thus, it is not clear whether the father of the three brothers who settled Nagla was a Bedia man or the brothers were the sons born out of a Bedia woman’s cohabitation with a non-Bedia man. The descendants’ memory of their grandfather is vague if not totally obscure. They oscillate between affirming that he was a Bedia and claiming that he was a Thakur. In light of their general claim that “Bedias are Thakurs,” or were so at least at one point of time, this construction of their ancestor is not very illuminating except in further reinforcing the claim of high-caste ancestry. See Agrawal (2004).

Yet this discussion need not imply that the members of the first generation of settlers of Nagla had no dependence on the prostitution of their women. There is clear evidence that the women of the second generation, that is, daughters of the Bedia men of the first generation, engaged in this trade. As will be obvious from the discussion in later chapters, dependence upon a sister and a daughter are generally two stages which occur within the life cycle of a patrifocal Bedia family subsisting upon the prostitution of women. These also represent the different stages of the development of the Bedia family unit. There may be additional phases such as dependence upon the mother in case of a matrifocal domestic group or dependence upon the daughter’s daughter, etc., but they are somewhat less significant in terms of their actual occurrence. Thus, there is evidence that some of the daughters of the men of the settlers’ generation engaged in activities akin to prostitution and, most importantly, did not take up residence elsewhere on a permanent basis. At the time of my fieldwork, Sitara, daughter of Baiju, the middle brother, was still running a dinghy brothel in the heart of Bharatpur city away from the habitat of Nagla. This was only a strategic dislocation as her only son along with his family continued to be a significant resident of Nagla and Sitara made almost daily trips to his residence. Shanno, daughter of Baiju who was the youngest of the three brothers, had died a few years ago but had also run a similar setup in the city prior to her death. Presently, her “adopted” daughter (Shanno’s brother’s daughter) Champa looked after this establishment. The latter also continued her residence in Nagla along with her daughters. The descendants of Kamla, daughter of Bara, and Shyama, sister of Sitara, also continued to be residents of Nagla although these two did not have any setup comparable to Sita...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Tables
• List of Plates
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Prostitution as "Tradition"
• 2. The Making of a Bedia Prostitute
• 3. Bedia Women and "Love Marriage"
• 4. Prostitution as Family Economy
• 5. Prostitution and the Indolence of Bedia Men
• 6. Prostitution and the Marriage Economy
• 7. The Morality of the Bedia Economy
• Conclusion: Patriarchy and Prostitution
• Appendices
• References
• Index