Part 2

It was so recognised and pronounced upon by the newspapers of India, which favoured licensed vice. Commenting on the new Cantonments Act one newspaper said: "The religious fanatics who howled until a weak Government gave way to their clamour ... will probably howl again now at the way the old order of things will be enforced under another name, but with very little difference in manner." Another said: "Their phraseology is the work of a master in the art of making a thing look as unlike itself as it well can be." Many others spoke in the same strain. Immediately the advocates of the abolition of licensed prostitution took alarm, and began a vigorous remonstrance; for they saw great danger in any law which put large discretionary power into the hands of officials. The late Rt. Hon. Sir James Stansfeld, M.P., and Professor Stuart, M.P., addressed a letter to the Secretary of State for India concerning this new Act, in which they said, among other things: "If our interpretation of the new proposed regulations is correct, they may be used to set up again a system of compulsory examination of prostitutes, and to regulate and license, within the Cantonment, the calling of those prostitutes who submit to periodical examination, and to certify and license those who are pronounced physically fit."

The official reply from the Secretary of State for India was to the effect that the Home Government was unwilling to believe, without positive proof, that this new Cantonments Act would be used to foster licensed prostitution.

It should be explained here that Abolitionists have always recognised that to establish the periodical examination is, in and of itself, to license prostitution; for there can be no possible excuse for the reiterated examination of healthy women, in anticipation of possible contagion, without recognising a certain right to practise prostitution, if the women be pronounced medically "fit" for such a calling. The periodical examination of women, then, constitutes the living heart of all those forms of legislation generally comprised under the term, "The Contagious Diseases Acts," by whatever local name such regulations may be known.

We came to England in the winter of 1890-91, it being the first country visited by us on a round-the-world journey for the World's W.C.T.U., with which we were, at that time, officially connected.[2] During this visit we frequently met and talked with Mrs. Josephine Butler, known and revered by lovers of purity throughout the world for her heroic service in the cause of the Abolition of State Regulation of Vice. She expressed a strong desire that while in India in the course of our journey we should make a careful investigation into the conditions prevailing there, and learn, if possible, whether the resolution of the House of Commons of June 5, 1888, was being obeyed. As already noted, this resolution demanded the repeal of all measures that enjoined, authorized, or permitted the compulsory examination of women and the licensing and regulation of prostitution. It was desired also that we should secure for the use of Parliamentary members of the British Committee of the Federation for the Abolition of State Regulation of Vice actual proof that the resolution was being disobeyed, such as would meet the official demand for proof from the Secretary of State, before he would be willing to believe that the new Cantonments Act was being used to foster licensed prostitution. The mission was pronounced by Mrs. Butler "one of the most difficult and even perilous missions ever undertaken in the course of our great crusade." After due consideration and prayer for guidance, we consented to undertake the task.

The British Committee of the Federation furnished us with all necessary official documents with which to make ourselves thoroughly conversant with the history of the C. D. Acts throughout the British dependencies in the Orient, and supplied us with a letter of introduction to a staunch friend of the cause in India, with whom we were expected to hold frequent consultations.

We took our departure from England in the month of July, 1891, going first of all to South Africa and labouring in the interests of our work there until the cold season set in and we could proceed to India. Reaching India at the end of December, 1891, we conveyed our letter of introduction to this confidential friend, who advised us to proceed northward and consult with a friend of the cause who understood thoroughly the interior life of the people, and, it was believed, would give great aid to our mission. Travelling northward we arrived at the station designated, and sought an interview with this gentleman.

We intimated to him what we hoped to accomplish in India, with a view to obtaining an expression from him of his willingness to aid us. With consternation and embarrassment he protested against our undertaking anything so foolish and impracticable, declaring from his long experience that it was utterly impossible for women to get at the truth, and entreating us to abandon so wild a project. When he saw that we did not yield the matter, he questioned us as to what we were planning to do, how we should proceed to get information in a country whose customs and language were so utterly unknown to us, and concerning a military system with which, as Americans, we were quite unacquainted. We withheld further confidence, simply saying with earnestness, "Whether this is practicable or impracticable, women have a right to this knowledge; and we do not think it foolish or impracticable to trust God to give us all the information we need, without human aid."

He felt the most kindly interest in us personally, and manifested this by several practical expressions; but doubtless he reasoned that he could not encourage us in what he believed to be an impossible undertaking.

This experience drove us to God, our only helper. We were strangers in a strange land, carrying the burden of a sacred secret which weighed us to the earth. After much prayer and deliberation we called on the chief military surgeon in charge of the station hospital of ---- Cantonment. This official began almost immediately when we called upon him, and entirely without suggestion from us, to deplore "the repeal of the C. D. Acts," and, as he claimed, the consequent increase of specific diseases. He showed us his daily report, which illustrated what he said on this subject. These diseases, he said, were for the most part contracted on the march or in the hills, especially at Ranikhet. This interview took place on January 4, 1892.

The surgeon said he wondered that people did not, from the moral and religious point of view, see the injury that the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts was doing, not only to the soldiers but to the whole country; "and," he added, "we can do nothing." We asked, "Is there, then, no form of regulation now?" He answered emphatically, "_None whatever._" He said, "We can do nothing about the women outside the Cantonment, and there is the trouble." He added, "Those inside go on as they used to, and go to the hospital for treatment when diseased. But," he continued in an aggrieved tone, "this is absolutely voluntary; we have no control."

He said there was a European physician in charge of the hospital, to whom he had just been talking regarding the matter when we came in. We said, "There is a European physician in charge, then, is there?" He answered, "Yes; but the hospital is not for these diseases only, but also for fevers, dysentery, cholera, and all diseases"; and that there were men there as well as women. We asked, "Is the Lock Hospital, then, entirely disused?" He replied, "Why, there is _no_ Lock Hospital." He added that many good people were getting their eyes opened now as to the condition of things, and that even some clergymen had the courage of their moral convictions, and had come out in favour of the Contagious Diseases Acts.

Previous to leaving England we had received information concerning this Cantonment and its Lock Hospital. Our information, compared with this official's inconsistent statements, convinced us that he was endeavouring to mislead us. After other and many futile efforts to reach the truth, we gave ourselves up wholly to prayer, remembering the promise, "They shall come with weeping, and with supplications will I lead them. I will cause them to walk by the rivers of waters in a straight way, wherein they shall not stumble." We felt sure that any mistake at the outset of our work, such as giving confidence to the wrong person, or any indiscreet action that might betray our object in visiting India, would be fatal to our purpose; therefore we cried to God to preserve us from impatience and to keep our feet from stumbling.

We went next to Agra and remained there several days, wandering about the old fort and other places of interest. But surely never was sadder sight-seeing! The way seemed utterly closed against us. The work stretched, vast and difficult, before us, and those towering thick walls that surround the fort, with a deep moat at their foot, represented to our thoughts the pride, strength, and secrecy of the system which we sought to penetrate, and at other times the barriers that separated us from the enslaved women whom we had come to India in the hope of helping.

Nearly five weeks had gone by; the winter season was rapidly passing, and we were yet without a single clue to guide us in our investigations.

One Sunday we set apart for fasting and prayer--in the morning instructing the native servants at the Rest House where we were staying to leave us uninterrupted until the evening, as it was a sacred day with us, and we wished to be alone. We locked our doors and waited on the Father of spirits for guidance. Never shall we forget the hours of that day. At the beginning our hearts seemed completely crushed under a sense of our absolute helplessness and ignorance; but we know now that we were in the very place of power--that it was only there that God could reveal Himself to our waiting spirits. It was at the first, however, inexpressibly dark. Still we held on, in faith that light would come; and before night, light was fully given to us both, as to our next step, which was that we were to go to a friend in a neighbouring city and lay the whole case before her. We obeyed the guidance; and although our friend was exceedingly hopeless as to our undertaking, yet she was willing to give us the assistance of her quick intelligence and long acquaintance with India. She proved of invaluable service to us in teaching us many simple colloquial phrases, and inducting us into a knowledge of the customs of the country, thus making us much more independent in our work and travels.

At this time it became clear to us that we must approach the whole question from the native side. We had gained nothing in seeking information from European officials. Our hope now lay in interviewing the native physicians and the women themselves. We did not at first venture to ask the way to the Lock Hospital, taking it for granted that this term had long before fallen into disuse, as the existence of this hospital was officially denied. But after visiting various hospitals within a Cantonment, and failing to find the "Cantonment Hospital" so called, which term we were told was now applied to the place for which we were searching, we asked for the Lock Hospital, and to our surprise found that in common parlance it was still so named. Our cab-drivers always understood instantly what we meant when we used either this term or the native term, which means a hospital for degraded women. Our first actual interview was held with the dhai, or nurse, and inmates of a Lock Hospital. Besides much valuable information gained from them, we learned the native name used to designate the quarters within the military Cantonments for degraded women, viz., "The Chakla."

From this time forward, our way became much more plain, as in the ten Cantonments visited[3] we found that we needed only to give directions to our cabmen and they would take us without hesitation both to the Lock Hospital and to the chakla, these places being perfectly well known to the natives residing within the Cantonment.

These Cantonments are all under military rule. As our work lay only within the Cantonments the military regulations, of course, applied to us. One of these rules made it possible at any time for us to be excluded, for it refers to "persons whom the Commanding Officer deems it expedient to exclude from the Cantonment, with or without assigning any reason for excluding them therefrom" (Cantonments Act, chap. 5, sec. 26, clause 23). It was necessary, therefore, that we should not attract attention to the fact that we were making investigations as to whether the resolution of the House of Commons was being obeyed or not by the military authorities. Had our errand been suspected, we could have been sent out of the Cantonment at once, with no explanation and no opportunity for redress. We therefore proceeded as quietly as possible.

Towards the last our enquiries proceeded very rapidly, for we had learned to accomplish as much in one day as would formerly have occupied a week. The winter season was over, and we were now in the month of March, with the heat of the advancing Indian summer daily increasing in terrible force, and becoming oppressive to our unaccustomed Anglo-Saxon constitutions. We travelled by night and worked by day, hastening on to the completion of our task. At times, arriving at our destination in the middle of the night, we rested, exhausted, in the ladies' waiting-room at the railway station, where there were cane-seated settees, on which we spread our travelling rugs and remained until the morning. A native woman was always in charge, and good refreshment-rooms were at hand, so that we saved much time and avoided publicity in this way. We often travelled in what were known as "intermediate compartments," knowing that we should attract less attention than as first or second-class passengers. We simply asked for guidance at every step of the way through these months of anxiety and toil; and we knew that our prayers were answered.

We had various interpreters. One of these was a specially gifted woman. She had a sweet, plaintive voice, and sang the native songs with touching effect on the poor women whom we visited; one we always recall as having been a wonderful instrument through God of moving their hearts. It was a pilgrim hymn with a recurring strain of warning against the love of the world, dress, jewellery, and sinful pleasures; and reminding us all that this life is swiftly passing, and that death may soon overtake us. Often before the refrain was finished the poor women would be seen sobbing as they listened, joining in the sorrowful strain that recurred again and again; and as soon as the song was ended pouring out their pitiful histories and their protests against the degradation into which they had been thrust by the infamous system of legalised vice under which they were slaves.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Trading-posts for the supply of necessaries to the soldiers; but the author means, in explicit terms, the chakla or brothel.

[2] We resigned June 15, 1896.

[3] The Cantonments we visited were Bareilly, Lucknow, Meerut, Lahore (Cantonment Station, Meean Meer), Rawal Pindi, Peshawar, Amritzar, Umballa, Sitapur, and Benares. Five of these we visited a second time.

II.

Seeking the Outcast.

A VIVID scene comes before us: We are sitting on a mortar bench, built in a circular form around the trunk of an old tree, in the open court of a Government chakla in one of the Cantonments of India. Some thirty or forty girls come trooping around us, either sitting down on the ground, native style, or bringing their cot-beds with them for seats.

Our sweet-voiced interpreter sings a plaintive song--native words and native tune--and when she has finished there is scarcely a dry eye to be seen. Then follows a simple Gospel message to which all give respectful heed, and at its close we ask, "Why are you in such a place as this?" Several answer in brief monosyllables, accompanied by a gesture as though drawing a line transversely across the brow. "It is our fate! It is our fate!" are the words used in reply; and our interpreter explains to us that these believe, in accordance with their religious instructions, that while they were yet babes, in an unfortunate moment, when left alone by the mother, the messenger of fate entered the room and wrote the word "prostitute" in invisible characters across the brow, and that from that moment to struggle against the lot that awaited them would have been useless.

No wonder that such poor slaves, when once taken and placed with the British soldiers by some wicked mahaldarni, never dream of trying to get away; and small wonder if others who had hoped that a better fate might await them, and who make one ignorant, feeble attempt to escape (and the women of a people whose customs keep them in perpetual seclusion are extremely ignorant of the outside world) and are recaptured by the police, will never be induced to try again, but quickly become convinced that their fate has been also inexorably fixed from the cradle.

"But," we say, "God is too good; He would not have it so." And they reply hopelessly, "But what can we do? We cannot starve; we cannot cut our own throats. Oh, that we might die!"

Then they begin to clamour for a chance to tell their individual stories. One is a girl who was left an orphan at the age of six years. At the tender age of eleven she says she was taken by an Englishman and kept three years as his mistress. When he deserted her, there was no door open to receive her but the chakla. One pretty girl said she had been deceived by a bad woman, under promise of employment.

Another, with face partly covered by her hands for very shame, said her husband had sold her to the mahaldarni for money. By graphic gesture and with the help of the few English words she knew, another told of the agonies of slow starvation until at last her courage gave way, and she came to the British soldiers, who were willing to feed her starving body for the sake of its worth as an instrument of self-indulgence. This is the only right to existence accorded to many women, even in so-called Christian countries, where labour is hard to obtain.

A little girl of ten, gaudily arrayed in the style of the others, thus publishing her candidature for a life of vice before she knew its meaning in the least, played about among the older ones. A little boy of two, with beautiful forehead, and other features that betrayed his English blood, had been forsaken by his father, who had, the girls said, "gone home to England." We recall having seen other children of Saxon type at Lucknow, Meerut, and at Peshawar, left in the same way by fathers who were officers of the British army in India. While the attempt is being made to create sentiment in favour of protecting the "innocent wives and children" of British soldiers, it might be well to inquire which wives and which children--those that already exist in India, or those that have not yet materialised in England. God knows which are the real wives and the real children of soldiers who have, in many cases in the past, entered into a contract with unsophisticated native women who never dreamed that it was anything less than lawful marriage!

"These bad women promise us everything and then betray us into this life," said several of the girls, referring to the treachery of the mahaldarnis. They told us of a girl who had recently been set on fire by an angry soldier, and had been burned to death, and related the story of cruelties practised upon them by drunken soldiers. A native guard in uniform drew near to listen. These military guards were there all the time, and were changed every few hours, the girls told us. As the mahaldarnis who own the girls are always at hand to watch against the escape of the discontented, the work of the guard seems to be chiefly to keep order and to prevent the entrance of native men, as the latter are strictly forbidden to associate with women kept for the English soldiers.

Two women of mature years now approached, and we were informed that they were the mahaldarnis. One lived there all the time, and the other was there with her girls for the time being. They said they had each a salary of ten rupees a month from the Government. They also took a share of the girls' earnings. Another time we went to the hut, close to the chakla, where one of them lived, and she proudly displayed to us some of the recommendations she held from British officers. They were grim and horrid reading; we will give but a single illustration:--

"Ameer has supplied the 2nd Derby Regiment with prostitutes for the past three years, and I recommend her to any other regiment requiring her for a similar capacity.

"S. G. M----,

_"Quartermaster 2nd Derby Regiment."_

As to the methods to which these mahaldarnis resort to procure girls, it has been touched upon in the personal stories of girls already given, and will be emphasized necessarily more and more as our story continues. Mahaldarni Rahiman, met in another Cantonment, told us a story closely resembling the methods described in a former chapter (page 20), by a Government official. She said in substance: "If a girl is not sufficiently attractive to earn a living, I send her away and get another in her place. I get the women from the bazaar when more are needed. I go to the Cantonment magistrate, and he gives me five, ten, twenty, or fifty rupees, as the case may demand. To buy a very young, attractive girl I will be furnished with fifty rupees. There is always plenty of money to get them with."

When opportunity afforded, we called upon the other mahaldarni, and she likewise showed us her recommendations in the handwriting of British military officials, and other interesting papers which she had carefully preserved. There was an original copy of her appointment as mahaldarni to a certain regiment, closing with permission for her to go to Ferozepore to attend to "certain business of her bazaar." This was signed by the Colonel of the regiment. There was a letter written to her by the Staff-Surgeon of the same regiment, a few days later, saying:--

"Mahaldarni, Seventh Lancers,--You have not brought your women from Meerut and Ferozepore. You will have to do it or the Colonel will think you have broken faith, as it is now fifteen days since you received your appointment."

The Staff-Surgeon evidently thought it an easy task to buy or entrap twelve or fifteen girls in as many days. Then there was a copy of a letter addressed by herself to the Cantonment magistrate, which she had employed some one to write in English for her. This letter stated that she had brought four new girls with her who had several thousand rupees' worth of jewelry with them (probably a lie by way of excuse), but their brothers had accompanied them (to effect their rescue?) and she asked the magistrate to require the girls to remain in the chakla, and then their brothers could not get near them. Native men not being allowed about the chakla, brothers and husbands who might be bent upon the rescue of female members of their families, who had been enticed away or stolen by the mahaldarnis, could be kept at a safe distance.