1935 "Calcutta Police Survey of Prostitutes"

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ex-l

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1935 "Calcutta Police Survey of Prostitutes"

Post10 Oct 2012

Calcutta was, of course, where Lekhraj Kirpalani had his business and live away from his family. Given that, second only to domestic servants, nearly 25 percent of working women in Calcutta were prostitutes and courtesans and some very wealthy and no doubt needing or being bought jewellery ...
Indrani Chatterjee’s analysis, 'Refracted Reality: The 1935 Calcutta Police Survey of Prostitutes', shows that police data does not tally either with the contemporary assumption that prostitutes had been lured, abducted or raped into the trade by madams or pimps or that they are necessarily women of low-caste and loose morals.

Like Manoda Devi and her colleagues, the majority of women interviewed by the police came from good homes; they became prostitutes after their lovers or husbands abandoned them, or when they were widowed. What the Survey revealed, above all, was the difficulties faced by woman who transgressed the social norm; for high-caste women were not supposed to either experience lust or fall in love.

I am starting to wondering whether all the accusation of the loose morals of Sindiwork men were based on more personal experience?

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