Anthropometry and Lock Hospitals in Nineteenth-Century Madras

Abstract

Throughout the nineteenth century, women suspected of practising prostitution in India were registered under a local lock hospital and given a registration ticket. Paying careful attention to these documents discloses unprecedented details of the lock hospital system in Madras. At first glance, the ticket’s purpose seems to be record-keeping and surveillance. Yet, this article will argue, firstly, that registration tickets in lock hospitals functioned not just as tools of surveillance but also as a medium to study Indian women’s bodies. Thus, they evidence the anthropometric undertones of lock hospital registration systems. Secondly, the article will emphasise how the use of the speculum vaginae within these lock hospitals contributed to defining the ideas around ‘deviant bodies’. I argue that by pointing out the physical difference between Indian and European bodies, the colonial government tried to mark Indian women’s bodies as deviant and, hence, justified surveillance over them. However, this physical categorisation to define someone’s character was not introduced by colonialism but was already prevalent within Indian society as a way of categorising caste hierarchies. This physiognomic categorisation intensified in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries under colonialism, where the physiognomic categorisation of lower-caste women or men by upper-caste elite men had a ‘scientific’ validation in the form of anthropometry.