This talk argues that prostitution in colonial India was governed not through a stable definition of sexual commerce but through fluctuating demands about women’s presence and knowability. Taking as its analytic point of departure a reformist anxiety about “disguised prostitutes” in 1961, it reads this concern retrospectively to illuminate a longer colonial genealogy in which governance depended on rendering prostitution legible while never fully securing it. Through close readings of three archival encounters—Ameer Baksh in 1875, Munni in 1893, and Moti Jan in 1926—the talk shows how women actively shaped the terms under which they could be seen and governed. By claiming exemption or respectability, refusing bodily discipline, or calibrating narratives of intimacy and residence, women worked upon the classificatory logics of law and policing, producing an archive marked by faintness, excess, and distortion. Methodologically, the article holds recuperative and nonrecuperative approaches in tension to treat these uneven traces not as archival failures but as historically meaningful effects of struggle over visibility and presence.

Bio
Zoya Sameen is an Assistant Professor of History at Aga Khan University whose work focuses on gender, law, and empire in nineteenth- and twentieth-century South Asia; her current book project examines women subjected to colonial prostitution laws to explore the uncertainties of empire. She is committed to developing students’ historical and critical thinking, serves on the organizing committee of the Pakistan History Workshop, and has contributed to Pakistan’s national history curriculum review. She previously taught at University of Chicago, where she earned her PhD in History.