Carceral and colonial domesticities: Subaltern case geographies of a Delhi rescue home

Abstract

This article explores a relatively rare archival account of female subjectivity, experience, mobility, and voice within a carceral institution in late-colonial Delhi. The capital’s “Rescue Home” was created to house women and girls removed from the city’s brothels under new legislation. While no brothels were closed in the first year of the laws functioning, the home accepted 18 women and girls and detailed their circumstances and experiences in its 1940 report. It was able to forcibly detain girls and was run upon disciplinary and racial lines, like other colonial institutions. But its inhabitants were not subject to detailed surveillance. Rather, their lives were ones usually beyond recording or whose stories were actively silenced. The 1940 Rescue Home report provides us with rich details of the commonplace, quotidian struggles which women and girls faced in colonial Delhi. The 18 case geographies of the Home’s inhabitants help us understand how sexuality and motherhood, education and character, and race all shaped routes into the home and destinations when people left. The accounts tell us of a carceral governmentality with influence beyond the disciplinary institution’s walls, but also of female subjects who resisted, spoke back, and absconded. This relationship between forced immobility and willed mobility suggests that brothels and rescue homes were not just connected, through the intended transfer of inhabitants, but can be directly compared as carceral domesticities.

Introduction

This article forms part of much broader efforts to push, test, and exceed the archive in an attempt to explore marginal, excluded, and silenced lives and spaces (Duncan, 1999; for geographical interventions see Driver et al., 2009; Moore, 2010). In particular, it draws upon debates emerging from the Subaltern Studies Collective concerning silencing, violence, and mobility and applies them to rethinking homes and institutions in late-colonial India. The analysis invokes Gyanendra Pandey’s (2013) injunction that we move beyond false dichotomies of recorded/non-recorded, self/other, or speech/silence and explore a third realm of “un-archived” but still traceable subaltern experiences.

In so doing, this article sets up both a connection and a comparison between spaces traditionally considered to be antipathetic to the ‘home’. This approach draws on Jennifer Robinson’s (2016) Deleuzian methodological distinction between “genetic” connections, specificities, and repetitions between cities and the “generative” comparisons which we can forge between less obviously connected spaces. Rather than thinking comparatively between cities, this article connects and compares the home to two spaces within the urban. The first such space is the brothel, regularly posed as the spatial other and antagonist to the home, just as the prostitute was figured as the other to and destroyer of the wife (conveniently bypassing the husband as vector of disease and disruption), the up-turner of social order, and the corrupter of psychic forms (Howell, 2009; Stallybrass and White, 1986).

The second space, moving towards the specific case study below, is the ashram (traditional Indian religious spaces of sanctuary and repair). A scandal in 1930s Delhi showed that some ashrams which claimed to be rescue homes for widows and deserted girls were actually trafficking them into the sex trade (Legg, 2016b). A police report into these homes provided a very rare detailing of their spaces, their functions, and of the resilient agency of women who found themselves trapped in the minority of Delhi’s ashrams associated with the trade. Many women and girls kicked, screamed, schemed, and negotiated their way out of the ashrams and into the archive. Yet other women used their agency to profit from, run, and manage the ashrams and trafficking systems, evidencing the non-equivalence of agency and resistance (as explored below through the women who worked the Rescue Home system to their advantage. For a thorough exploration of the subjectivity–agency relationship see Mahmood, 2012). Many girls and women did not feature in the archive, either as resistant or as complicit subjects. The silence and absence of these female subjects cannot be read as evidence of victimhood or lack of agency, but of the point at which empirically traceable subaltern subjects give way to the analytically silent subaltern (Legg, 2016b).

This article explores another sort of rescue home. It was established through a 1930s compact between the local colonial state and Delhi’s civil society, spanning Indian and British-run international institutions. The home’s purpose was to rehouse girls and women removed from brothels as new laws were used to crack down on central ‘red light districts’ in the old city, neighbouring the capital of British India to the south. The Asra Ghar (Rescue Home) is explored here as an example of “carceral domesticity” (Antona and Krishnan, forthcoming).

My work on brothels, ashrams, and rescue homes is the result of long-standing research into the campaigns to end the toleration of red-light districts in interwar India. This research combined materials from state archives in the UK and India with non-governmental institutional collections, newspaper, and journal publications. Traces of subaltern experience often get filed away or reported in unexpected places: a Glaswegian socialist newspaper reporting on carceral brothels in colonial Bombay; a League of Nations collection of Indian questionnaire responses stored in Geneva; or, as detailed below, an inventory of Rescue Home occupants for one year, submitted to the Delhi authorities in the hope of securing another year’s worth of funding.

Interpreting the Home as an example of carceral domesticity draws upon recent calls to attend to unsettled forms of domesticity as fundamentally networked assemblages, inseparable from the domains of the household, family, state, nation, empire, and the international (Burton, 2019). This article also draws upon broader research into the governmentalities of carceral geographies, which explore the role of mobility and discipline. In particular, the Home’s “case geographies” (Beckingham, 2019) will be explored, tracking the mobility of women and girls through this institutional space. In paying specific attention to the violence and silencing to which the traces of this mobility attest, however, the carceral rescue home will be shown not just to be spatially connected to brothels and corrupted ashrams but to be comparable to them in terms of its negotiations of gender and sexuality. This article therefore also charts the analytical line between governmentality studies and subaltern studies (Chakrabarty, 2002; Chatterjee, 2018; Jazeel and Legg, 2019; Wickramasinghe, 2011). Skirting this divide, two different bodies of work addressing “madness” and colonialism are appealed to below. The first exposes the racialism of colonial psychiatry but also suggests that colonialism is a form of social madness itself. The second deconstructs the binary of colonial reason and native unreason to suggest that we search out archives of colonised commonplace spaces between the two. Before detailing the case geographies of the rescue home from 1940, existing literatures informing this analysis will be explored regarding carcerality, the colonial archive, sexuality, and the home.

Carceral mobility, madness, and un-archived colonial homes

Moran et al. (2018) have charted the emergence of carceral studies within and beyond geography. They chart the attempts to explain the social control of vulnerable groups within and beyond prisons in terms of circuits of capital, the confinement of mobility, the relational co-construction of separate spaces, and various perspectives on the study of the carceral, including those of animals, children, historical, and legal subjects. The intellectual broadening out of the carceral beyond the prison is traced back to the last chapter of Foucault’s (1977[1991]) iconic text Discipline and Punish. Here, the panoptic forms of social and spatial organisation he had traced in prisons were expanded to include the models of the family, army, workshops, schools, and the judiciary, as played out in diverse spaces including colonies for the poor, almshouses, factories, and institutions for abandoned children (rescue homes, of a sort). As such, this work contributed to Foucault’s (1977–78 [2007]) emergent interests in biopolitics which circulated through all of the population. This new concern, however, raised the question of when the carceral ripples from the prison ended and biopolitics took over (Moran et al., 2018: 671, also see Hannah, 1997)? Viewed retrospectively from his later works, carceral governmentalities represent networks which conduct conduct in the broader population but which more readily utilise spaces of forced confinement for those who refuse to self-normalise or who are viewed to transgress (in this article’s case gendered and sexual) norms.

Much has been done to extend and amend Foucault’s approach to carceral spaces. Moran et al. (2018: 677) suggested the study of both compact and diffuse carceral geographies, identified by degrees of “detriment, intention, and spatiality”. Philo (2014) has argued that Foucault’s emphasis on circulation and mobility (of, for instance, capital, disease, ideas, and norms) in his governmentality work was anticipated in his work on disciplinary institutions, where mobility was acknowledged as something that was encouraged and used as much as suppressed. Moran et al. (2016) have further suggested that the study of carceral spaces (where humans are held without consent in spaces of confinement) does not imply the end of mobility. Rather, discipline can infer forms of movement, while freedom does not imply mobility either (also see Peters and Turner, 2017).

Beckingham (2019) has provided an exemplary reading of historical forms of mobility associated with a late-19th century Scottish disciplinary experiment that punished problem drinking. The 1898 Scottish Inebriates Act punished drunken figures whose staggering public mobility offended Victorian notions of sobriety and citizenship. Researching the operation of the Act exposes the forced mobility of such problematic subjects, between jails, hospitals, asylums, and under-funded reformatory homes. Women made up the vast majority of cases, because of fears that removing male “bread-winners” would unduly punish families. Tracking the “case geographies” of women admitted to reformatories under the Act attests the use of mobility both as a tool of discipline but also of the shirking of responsibility. But the cases also attest to the determination of women to reclaim their mobility, refusing to be still or to placidly accept their fate.

There are numerous examples of forced or carceral mobility in colonial contexts, with most studies focusing on larger-scale mobility (see Legg, 2020). Even these large-scale movements, however, depended upon disciplinary and possibly carceral spaces, such as the emigration camps that were used to vet the health of Indian labourers both transiting to South-East Asia and within their destination plantations (Amrith, 2013). These camps were part of the extensive though still relatively elitist and under-funded archipelago of disciplinary institutions in colonial India, including sanitaria, hospitals, prisons, and asylums (Arnold, 1993).

The case of the Asra Ghar will show how Indians with mental health needs found themselves in institutions far removed from asylums, but which formed part of a historical discourse regarding race, health, and civilisation. Ernst (2010), for instance, has shown that colonial mental asylums were deeply racialised, in the sense of privileging white subjects but also acting as markers of European civilisation, irrespective of their success in caring for patients. Colonial psychiatry, rather than aiming for a “great confinement” (Vaughan, 2007: 2) of colonial subjects within a carceral archipelago, sought a new language for colonial administration, explaining and categorising the presumed abnormalities of native minds and cultures. For Frantz Fanon, as Vaughan (2007) noted, madness (alienation from one’s self) was one of many ways to lose freedom. To be a subject of colonialism was to be alienated from both oneself and one’s environment; as such, to experience colonialism was to experience a form of social madness.

The Subaltern Studies Collective founding member and contributor Gyanendra Pandey (2013) has used the ways in which we think about colonialism and madness, to help us reapproach questions of subaltern experience and record. This helps us go beyond classic Subaltern Studies propositions regarding the need to read colonial archives against their grain to extract evidence of subaltern consciousness or the impossibility or recovering subaltern voice (Guha and Spivak, 1988; Jazeel and Legg, 2019). Pandey (2013) suggests that we consider “unarchived histories”, which are not histories without archives but histories that were un-archived or disenfranchised in the process of archiving, being deemed beyond the register of “reason”. These are forms of life and types of space deemed unworthy of remembering and recording, or those whose memories and records are suppressed. This maintains the fiction of societal respectability and order which is the bedrock of governmentalities, especially gendered and sexed normativities. What is excluded is then branded the incidental, chaotic, trivial, or trifling. The cases below will show how this was also conveyed not through silencing but through conveying subaltern voice as merely noise. These sounds recorded an everyday, ordinary world which is usually presumed to be known or cast beyond knowledge and is thus barely recorded at all. Pandey suggests that we consider it as a third realm which confuses the un/reason binary.

The first realm is that of “reason”, recorded by the archives of the state and narrated through discourses of progress, capitalism, liberalism, and modernity. The second realm is positioned as the obverse, that of exile from reason or “madness” more broadly. While this realm includes that of psychiatric madness, it was also presumed to cover much broader realms of “out-of-synch” experience (Pandey, 2013: 6), including the colonised, primitive, or native more broadly. These groups and spaces have been archived by others, producing subjects of knowledge extraction and disciplining. The third of Pandey’s realms is rarely recorded or archived. Pandey names this realm in various ways, settling especially on “trifling” (defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as of little value, paltry, insignificant, or petty) but also as “commonplace” (suggesting the ordinary, common, usual but also that not usually considered interesting), the term used below. This raises the question “When and how do we archive the body as a register of events; of gestures, pauses, gut-reactions; of deep-rooted feelings of ecstasy, humiliation, pain?” (Pandey, 2013: 7) In terms of the latter, while the violence of reason might be that of war, law, and order and that of madness the violence of the asylum, jail or compound, commonplace violence has been normalised as forced labour, domestic violence or rape, and goes largely un-investigated and un-archived.

What hope, then, of investigating this commonplace realm? Pandey suggests that in addition to un-archiving being a decision by the archiver, subjects can also un-archive themselves, refusing or confounding the archive. But he also gives examples of memoirs and diaries by which African-American and Dalit experience has been self-represented through reminiscences and life-writing. Similarly, Charu Gupta (2011) has shown how the official/popular archive binary is unsustainable, especially when considering questions of sex and sexuality. She has mined what she calls “indigenous” archives to de-centre the repositories of the colonial state. It is certainly the case that state archives rarely record sexuality as “… covertly and subtly ubiquitous in the everyday, mundane world of home and family” (Gupta, 2011: 13). However, as the boundary between state and civil society blurred in late-colonial experiments with welfarism, diverse traces of material and lives increasingly enter the archive that are neither registers of reason nor merely investigations of un-reason.

The latter can include details of what we can think of as the “empirical subaltern” (Legg, 2016b), being those members of the non-elite which can enter the colonial archive. These traces might also include traces of commonplace life, before it exits the archive and leaves us with the disappearing, silent, confounding “analytical subaltern”. The Delhi Asra Ghar, explored below, presents us with a space to consider the intersection of a colonial realm of un-reason and of commonplace, subaltern experience, but also with a space through which to re-visit colonial Indian compounds of gender, sexuality, and the home.

The Indian woman was a key site for discursive, legal, political, and corporeal interventions by colonial and nationalist governmentalities (see Gupta, 2020). The nature of these interventions changed as the English and then British role in India developed from that of a trading company, to a proto-state, to the Raj, to the tentatively and reluctantly welfarist state of the interwar years. Conterminously, dominant forms of nationalism developed from that of constitutional reformism, to mass agitation, to proto-state, to independent developmental state. Taken as a marker of Indian un-civilisation in colonial and imperial discourse, the “women’s question” further connected the female body to the home, the city, the nation, empire, and the international (Sinha, 2006). For women supposedly lacking the scientific understandings of home science and hygiene, the domestic became a space for limited reform efforts by colonial and Indian civil society organisations (Hancock, 2001; Legg, 2013).

Other studies have expanded the scope of how and where we might think about Indian homes (see Banerjee, 2010; Hinchy, 2014: 251). Some women rejected Indian National Congress’s Gandhian non-violence and used their homes to support revolutionary internationalism, socialist nationalism or Congress-affiliated but non-Gandhian forms of more radical protest, including armed raids, arson and sabotage during the Quit India movement (Raghavan, 1999). Other women, notably those of Anglo-Indian mixed parentage, found their often modern, educated, and public gendered identities positioned as a home-less diaspora from an unpopular imperial homeland (Blunt, 2005). While usually positioned as the obverse to a home, brothels can be considered domestic spaces of sex work and fraternity (Tambe, 2006). This must also, however, be held in balance with the need to recognise the systemic violence which Indian women, especially lower-caste women, have faced within and beyond the sexual economy of prostitution (Legg, 2016a; Tambe, 2009).

A final and especially pertinent example has been explored by Jessica Hinchy as part of her broader research into India’s hijra communities (defined as born-male “emasculates” who assumed feminine identities, Hinchy, 2014: 248). Concerns that the community was abducting boys, introducing them to sodomy, and raising them in effective brothels led to powers being passed in 1871 to remove children from hijra households. They would be adopted by Indian families or else placed into rescue homes, disciplining one form of domesticity by moving children into either more respectable or more carceral domesticities. This missionary aspiration of the colonial state faltered in practice, however, in the face of administrative and social apathy. These frustrated desires to control women and remove children from abnormal households were, in part, reproduced in Delhi nearly 70 years later.

Late-colonial Delhi and the Asra Ghar

In the late 19th century, an Indian crack down on “prostitutes” (on the power politics behind this labelling, see Wald, 2009) dwelling in military bazars forced them to leave these regulated spaces and live on military peripheries, where they could also service civilian populations (Legg, 2009). The centrality of Delhi’s brothel districts increasingly came to be condemned by civil society campaigning organisations, both Indian and British. With the increasing support of the state, two geographies of “civil abandonment” (Legg, 2014) were adopted in Delhi. The first excluded brothels and public prostitution from prominent bazars in the old city, the second incorporated prostitutes through civil society institutions, often bankrolled by the local state, which aimed to rescue and rehabilitate them.

Both of these geographies came together with the passing of the Delhi Suppression of Immoral Traffic Act (SITA) in 1940. This was one of the last such acts to be passed in colonial India, the first having been enacted in Calcutta in 1923 (Legg, 2014: 95–168). The acts provided powers to punish pimps, procurers, and traffickers but also to close brothels down. The powers were granted to Delhi in 1939 but the act could not be instigated until the provision of a rescue home for women and children removed from brothels. This was felt to be a matter for local charities, who found themselves charged with establishing and running a rescue home that would enable the operation of the law they had been demanding (for a detailed report of comparable homes in Bombay, see Banerjee, 1946; for the emotional economies of comparable girls hostels, see Krishnan, n.d.).

In the mid-1930s, Indian and British women’s organisations in Delhi had been united in their demands for action regarding prostitution and trafficking. The local branch of the All-India Women’s Congress, the Delhi Women’s League, was avowedly non-political, but was served by many leading female nationalists, including Aruna Asaf Ali, the left-wing Congress campaigner (Raghavan, 1999). The Delhi Women’s League had collaborated with Meliscent Shephard over the last decade, as representative of the Association of Moral and Social Hygiene (AMSH, see Legg, 2010). This organisation was based in London but had been represented by Shepard in India since 1928. The AMSH had secured government funding, in part to help secure support for the SITAs and their implementation. Shephard oversaw the establishment of the Delhi Asra Ghar, on Rajpur Road in the spacious and green Civil Lines to the north of the old city in the summer of 1939. This coincided with the expulsion of prostitutes from the centre of the city and enabled the coming into force of the Delhi SITA in March 1940.

Delhi’s Rescue Home was part funded by the Chief Commissioner and the powers of the home were also stipulated by local legislation. When the SITA was being debated in 1939, Shephard had written to the Chief Commissioner advising against compulsorily confining girls and women to the homes against their consent, informed by the AMSH’s liberal campaign for women’s rights alongside social hygiene (Legg, 2014: 88; for a recent reading of feminist and queer governmentalities, see Roy, 2022). The advice was ignored, however, and the Punjab SITA (1935) was rejected as a model for Delhi because it did not allow for the compulsory detention of girls under the age of 18 who were removed from brothels (on the nationalist, colonialist, and internationalist negotiation of the boundary between “girlhood” and adulthood in colonial India, see Tambe, 2019. Cases are noted below where unruly females aged in their 20s are labelled as girls).¹ The desire for child removal fitted into an alternate liberal tradition of rescuing children from abnormal homes and saving them from a life on the streets, and presumed prostitution, when brothels were forcibly closed. As such, a modified version of the Bengal SITA (1933) was extended to Delhi on 28 December 1939 which explicitly allowed girls to be taken into custody. Section 19 of the Act stipulated that:

Any person to whose custody a girl is committed, while the order is in force, has the like control over the girl as if he were her parent and shall be responsible for her maintenance and protection and the girl shall continue in his custody not-withstanding that she is claimed by her parent or any other person.²

The Asra Ghar was the only approved institution for the custody of girls under the Delhi SITA. As an institution which spatially confined subjects without their consent, the Asra Ghar was undoubtedly a “carceral space” (Moran et al., 2016). It was a domestic space, in the sense of both being a home and in being administered by a figure legally endowed with the controlling powers of a parent. But it also overlapped with other disciplinary functions and drew upon much older and international institutional genealogies, including lock hospitals (Hodges, 2005; Legg, 2009; Levine, 2003). As with a lock hospital the inmates were to be tested and treated for venereal disease if necessary. As with a school or worker training college they would be well fed and educated in skills that would be used in future employment. And, as with a prison, visitors and letters would be vetted.

Though founded to allow the Delhi SITA to be operationalised, the police failed to arrest and pass on anyone from brothels in the first year. Rather than “rescuing” people from prostitution, the Asra Ghar became part of a broader disciplinary apparatus, taking in girls and women who were passed to it from various sources. This was hoped to be a temporary measure to secure its funding in the hope of future rescue work.

In 1940, the Home submitted a report to the Deputy Commissioner of Delhi, a condition of the ongoing financial support of the Delhi Administration.³ The report was composed by Miss Campbell Fergusson, the Superintendent of the Home and the person with the controlling powers of a parent over the Home’s occupants. She had been in India for 35 years and was described by Shephard as being “…well able to hold her own in argument”.⁴ The report gave short descriptions of 18 women and girls who had passed through the home that year. While the report is filled with evidence of female voice and movement, only one letter by a girl herself was included (described below). None had been connected to prostitution and only some of the cases related to sexuality more broadly. These “case geographies” allow us rare glimpses into relatively quotidian female experiences of sex, gender, and mobility in late-colonial India.

Fergusson’s report was produced under the codifying logic of Pandey’s reason (no matter how ill qualified) and quite openly diagnosed the un-reason of many of the inhabitants, including several cases who were deemed mad. But beyond these more extreme cases, the file details an empirical subaltern cast of women struggling on the fringes of colonial society and economy. These are Pandey’s commonplace and quotidian lives. They suggest by no means uncommon experiences, but ones whose stories, no matter if violent or threatened, are not usually archived in official repositories like the one used here, being matters for society not the colonial state, or its records. As such, the empirically traced cases here hint at the analytically subaltern women beyond this archive whose lives may have been similar but unrecorded. What this brief file reminds us, however, is that those analytically subaltern and unreachable figures would also have been marked by the resilience, resistance, and voice demonstrated below.

The remainder of this article works with Fergusson’s file in two stages. First it re-organises the cases, which were numbered I to XVIII presumably via date of entry, by cause of entry into the home. Very broadly these relate to sexuality, matrimony, and motherhood; education and character, including several cases relating to mental health; and a final very detailed case relating to two Anglo-Indian girls abandoned by their mother which combined elements of all of these causes. The second stage, in conclusion, reads across these cases to see what evidence the Asra Ghar lives give us for thinking about subaltern and commonplace carceral spaces, gender roles, voice, mobility, and power.

Case geographies

Sexuality, matrimony and motherhood

Five of the cases did result from circumstances related to sex or sexual relations. The carcerality of the Home’s domesticity was used here for cases of perceived excess sexuality, but there was also a sense of protecting vulnerable females from a threatening outside space. One 16-year-old girl (case III) was brought to the Home in the hope that a good marriage would be found for her. It later transpired that she had misled the Home regarding her caste, and when she found out that she was not to be married, she refused to cooperate with the Home staff. The report continued:

Her history is a lurid one for so young a girl. She had just been for six months in jail for being a party to an attempted sale of herself. She was married before that and she had been married under false pretences as to caste and had left her husband who is still living. She was not a prostitute in name but her ‘alliances’ had been many. She refused all education, all authority and it became evident that all she wanted was her former made [mode] of life so on her own accord she left us. She was with us for three months and gave us an unhappy time.⁵

Another case (number VII) of a problematically sexually independent girl concerned a 14-year-old Anglo-Indian who had been involved in an “abduction case, a Moslem the culprit”. The girl’s father requested the Home’s help. With the assistance of Denys Kilburn, Delhi’s Senior Superintendent of Police, she was got out of her “retreat”. Efforts were made to get her into a school outside of Delhi, but to no avail. She spent two weeks in the home, during which time Ferguson “…soon found out that not only was [she] entirely out of [her] father’s control but that he was the hindrance, being entirely under her control. Nothing would induce him to let her leave Delhi. He took her back home.” A “real Rescue Case” (XVIII) was also described regarding an unmarried 16-year-old girl with some education, the cause of whose downfall was a tutor in her father’s house. She had been brought to the Home pregnant and then admitted to hospital for “her confinement”; it was hoped that the tutor would agree to marry her. In both cases it was noted that the girls were motherless.

Other cases simply involved women who had been deserted by their husbands and demonstrate how the Home could tilt itself towards “new” Indian women who accepted western models of education, and of progress (Hancock, 2001). A 35-year-old Anglo-Indian “lady” (case XV) was sent to the Home by the New Delhi Chaplain after her husband left her. She was Christian and had also passed the Senior Cambridge Examination with distinction in English and mathematics and had been applying for jobs. She was described as fitting in perfectly with the Home, “as did the other Anglo-Indian girls”, and that they would be sorry to see her go. Another 28-year-old woman (case XVII), described as an orphan in possession of a difficult temperament, had been left by her husband for another woman. She had junior teacher training so had helped with the home, while “learning some lessons” of her own, and had been accepted for midwife training in Lucknow. Three other cases focused on female ‘character’, meaning here a marker of their normalisation, charting the extent to which they were willing to perform their social proscribed gender role, rather than a marker of their sexual lives.

Case VIII regarded a woman who had converted to Islam, seven years earlier in order to marry. After “jealousy intervened” the woman came to the Home, having put her children in boarding school, necessitating several conversations with lawyers on the legal aspects of the case, while Fergusson tried to make her “listen to reason.” When her husband returned to Delhi, he came to the home and angrily demanded the return of his wife. Despite her accusations of cruelty by her husband, it seemed to the home staff that she really wanted to go back to him so she went home. Later, however, she “… began her moan all round the town” and begged the home to retake her: “On acquaintance the husband has gained in our respect and has now much of our sympathy.” She eventually ran away with all three children and could not be traced.

A second case (I) concerned a 16-year-old and her baby, sent from St Stephen’s hospital, who had been thrown out by her husband. Shortly after arriving at the Home the baby died in hospital: “This is not as surprising as it seems considering the make up of the girl.” Two hospitals where she had been previously “could not tolerate her” and at the home she’d “sulk” for 24 hours or weep till she worked herself in a “demi-semi-hysterical faint” should she be rebuked for anything. The carceral domestic regime seemed to have its desired effect, however, and the girl took well to reading and was employed by Fergusson as her “maid-servant”. This close surveillance reduced her faints and “relapses into naughtiness”; repentance and endeavour being reportedly more common and sincere.

Education and character

The Home was clearly seen not just as a place of carceral discipline but as a relatively rare site of female domestic education in the city. What is evident again, however, was that female confinement in the home was the result of discussions between the Home authorities and men outside, usually relatives. Two sisters, aged 12 and 14 (XIII and XIV), were sent to the home by their well-educated mother who was usually out working and could not protect or educate the girls. They had fallen behind in class but, after two months at the Home, were ready to be placed in a good boarding school. Education at the Home could create difficulties, however. One 40-year-old teacher (V), who was “quite down and out”, had lost her post due to ill health and could not find suitable employment. She helped teach at the Home which, though unable to pay her, covered the necessary materials and postage for her to apply for jobs. She refused any help regarding her letters of application and soon refused to help the Home at all, outside of her teaching hours, saying: “I am not appointed so I cannot do hostel duties”, namely, keeping the other girls quiet. “She became rude to a degree and her teaching was miserable. She would receive no rebuke… Finally we had to send her away to her relatives.”

There were also limits to what the Home could do for its resident pupils. A South Indian Brahmin married woman, aged 28 (II), had been passed on by Delhi Women’s League representative Aruna Asaf Ali in the hope that she could be reunited with her husband, who had left her for a more educated woman two years previously. Fergusson felt such cases to be “All the victims of a system. He trained in England for five years, she educated to class V.” She progressed well in lessons and the Home had hoped to secure her a place at a good school, but her brothers came to the home and refused, the younger of whom saying his family was too orthodox: “In front of him she said she did not wish to return; but there was no alternative.”

Beyond being poorly educated, seven other cases relate to women variedly portrayed as having ‘bad character’. While also gendered diagnoses, here bad character indicated struggles with mental health, for which the Home was ill equipped to cope. Case IV was described thus: “This is an old woman over seventy and 99.5% mad (I speak as a layman).” The Irwin Hospital had kept “this entirely indigent” (destitute) woman for nine months to save her from the winter cold and then passed her on. She was incapable of work but seemed to be happy and conscious of being cared for. But this masked the more coercive aspects of her disciplining:

At times she is still excessively noisy and at all times she is under “dope”, doctors’ orders or she’d be impossible … From her wild talk she seemed to have been the victim of injustice, a drama of murder and Courts rolls from her lips and nothing stops it when the spate is in flood.

Another such case (XII) related to an unmarried Brahmin female who, though aged 28, was referred to as a girl. She had also been sent by Aruna Asaf Ali, who had noticed that she “seemed queer”. She was homeless and her clothes were “ready for the ash bin”, yet she spoke good and fluent English. She said she had been an orphan since infancy, had failed her Matric exams but had done lots of private teaching. On account of her “high toned character” she was given the opportunity to teach in the Home but burst into tears in front of the children. This seemed to trigger a breakdown:

She became difficult and then became full of hallucinations. She was treated for a few days at St. Stephen’s Hospital for anaemia which was rather pronounced and there was certified as the hallucinations became worse. For 36 hours she threw away food, for as an ‘angelic being’ she did not need any. They could not of course keep a mental case and we took her back and did all we could for her, but her symptoms grew worse till she became a menace, when I was out she struck one girl and reduced the household to a state of terror.

Demonstrating the links between Delhi’s carceral archipelago, a Magistrate at “Kashmir Gate” (the “Cutcherry” law courts) detained the woman for observation, with the possibility of sending her to Lahore for treatment: “I have heard that the Jail Doctor has certified her.” In a similar case (VI), a 30-year-old educated widow who was fluent in English was sent to the Home by St Stephen’s Hospital where she had been found begging. She claimed to have been raised by a Lady Doctor and could talk well of nurses’ work but had no qualifications. She was exposed as an “adventurer” who claimed to be new to Delhi but had been begging for two weeks. She refused offers of training and, in the 24 hours she was at the home, had a bad influence, largely through her language and comments. From an overheard remark, however, it was suspected that she was epileptic, which could have been the “…solution of her mystery.”

Another case (XI) concerned a married woman of 35 who was admitted with her two-year-old child. She was recommended by Society for the Propagation of the Gospel⁶ Missionaries and her husband; “… the excuse being that she wanted to learn Roman Urdu, the reason being that she made her home intolerably unhappy and they hoped we could help her.” Without evidence (or training, having previously proclaimed herself a ‘layman’), Fergusson declared of the woman (“whose voice was only a whine”) that she was eaten up with jealousy regarding the child, and that was the source of her disposition. She would not let the child out of her arms, nor let it pay attention to anyone else. She was taken the next day to hospital but, making some excuse to leave the room, “walked away home!” After some months, she left her husband and was taken to St Mary’s Home, but was brought back to the Asra Ghar. She was taken back to the hospital but seemed better this time around “… and the second or third day at rest time walked cooly out of the gate and back to her husband!” In this case, we see the unqualified psycho-analysis of Miss Fergusson of a woman sent to a Home on the pretext of being a pain at home, being over-attached to her child, and of having a whiney voice, but who negotiated an exit from the home and reunion with her husband, and child.

A further 20-year-old trainee teacher (XVI) had behaved so badly that no one wanted to host her:

She appears to want complete independence at other people’s expense of money and anxiety. We had her for nine days and managed to keep her by endless compromise and exceptions not bargained for, till she went to hospital for a slight operation.

It was apparent that she wanted to be on her own so, after she had absented herself for a whole day without permission, she was refused entry to the Home and sent away.

Fergusson also passed on details of an extra case concerning political, rather than bad, character. It sheds a little light on the emerging gender politics of nationalism in which the Home took on the characteristics of a space of refuge, not rescue. Fergusson wrote to HC Evans, the Deputy Commissioner, on 8 July 1940, that she had found a 20-year-old woman on his doorstep (the Deputy Commissioner lived near the Asra Ghar on Rajpur Road in the Civil Lines). The girl, named Savetri Devi, had requested admission to the home, though Fergusson felt her to be in two minds about it. She included a handwritten letter by Savetri herself, addressed to the District Magistrate, in which she confirmed that she had only stayed with her husband for one month and was looking for work in Delhi to support herself. She had been married for a year but had returned to her father and quarrelled with him so he turned her out so she had come to Delhi to stay with a friend. She had visited Gandhi during one of his visits to Delhi but he had told her that her duty was to return to her husband. Fergusson summarised Savetri’s, and her own, situation:

She wants to be assured of her position. If she is here and either husband or father demand her return, she can refuse? And I needn’t give her up? Gandhi has told her to go back to her husband. If she will not listen to him, what chance me! She is only twenty and lives for Congress and a life of liberty.

Fergusson had doubts about their ability to harbour or educate the girl, or to be able to find a school placement somewhere, “But I don’t think she should be with her young friend and the young husband and his people.” The nature of this concern was not voiced: whether Fergusson feared that Savetri might be abused; whether her concerns were over the political persuasions of her friends and husband; or whether the location of Model Basti worried her, being new housing designed to alleviate overcrowding and slum dwelling in the west of the city.

Anglo-Indian mobility

Pandey (2013: 7) asked how the body gets archived as a repository of events, gestures, gut-reactions, or deep-rooted feelings of ecstasy. He suggested that the amorphous, fleeting, and intangible are largely un-archivable, but that they may leave traces in the fragmentary consciousness of dreams, visions, and ghost stories (on the post-colonial afterlives of the latter in a Chennai girl's hostel, see Krishnan, 2019). He further suggested that such fragments only enter the archive when they pose a threat to state and society and thus transition from the realm of the unarchived everyday to the surveilled realm of un-reason and societal madness. Few of the women and girls detailed here threatened state or society (except perhaps by begging or public nuisance) but Fergusson’s case geographies do contain fragments of consciousnesses between the realms of the everyday and of un-reason. The cases above included instances of delirious angelic beings, wild talk, and whining, jealous rage.

The final case geography is unique. Unlike those above, it allows us to leave the carceral domestic and tour Delhi and beyond. This is because the case file also included several documents that track its protagonists through the city. But these documents also serve as a form of what Pandey termed life-writing, which sketch out a subaltern account of the city, but also of a landscape experienced by someone presumed to be on the edge of reason (see Chandavarkar, 2018: 383 for how another fragmentary record of the everyday in the archive, the police informant’s report, were “… marked by fantasy and rumour, gossip and gullibility, deception and delusion”).

Cases IX and X concerned that of two girls, Dawn (aged 13) and Gloria (aged 17) who had been taken into care by the Home. Their deceased father was listed as Dan Dockerall, previously of the Gloucester Regiment but who had retired and joined the Railway. The mother was listed as an Anglo-Indian widow, whose occupation was needlework, and whose address was a flat over the Bata shoe store in Lahore. The girls had been due back at Sanaur [Sanawar] Lawrence School, 200 miles north of Delhi, on 27 March 1940 but their mother had used their rail fare for other purposes. Other relatives included an elder brother, also called Dan Dockerall, who was aged 29 and worked for Bengal Timber Trading Company in Orissa.

The case geography was then laid out. On 7 May, Reverend HJ Jenkin called the Home regarding Gloria and Dawn who had been found at the Hardinge Sarai, having been abandoned by their mother.⁷ Meliscent Shephard was informed and phoned Deputy Commissioner Evans to ask for his support, given that the girls were minors (and culturally associated more with a European lifestyle than an Indian one. On the problematic nature for the colonial state of Anglo-Indian pauperism, see Blunt, 2005: 34–39). Shephard interviewed Gloria and summarised the conversation on file. Gloria explained that her mother had drawn a cheque for a bill at the Ambala Hotel but that it had been “dishonoured” and the police had instituted enquiries. Mrs Dockerall was given a four-day bail to raise the necessary funds. She took the girls to the Sarai where they befriended a Mr Miller who lived there and whose friend, a 29 year-old named Mr Cantopher, agreed to take the girls and their mother to the military Cantonment. Mrs Dockerall then went to Agra to collect some money, leaving the girls behind with Mr Miller who sought the advice of Reverand Jenkin. He suggested leaving the girls with a Mrs George. Her details were not given but her address, 2 Queensway Lane in New Delhi, suggests the wife of a senior civil servant. Mrs George reported to Shephard that Mr Cantopher and Miller had taken good care of the girls, but that they needed the care of the Asra Ghar.

This was supplemented by a letter that Shephard received from Mrs George. It was supposedly written by Gloria to her brother Dan, although Deputy Commissioner Evans noted in the margin that it obviously was not written by Gloria. The letter recounted “Mum’s” desperate efforts to raise some money; she had only returned from Agra with Rs. 60. She had then taken the girls into Old Delhi and “All morning we trudged from Pillar to Post because every time she saw a Policeman she thought he had been sent to arrest her.” The letter then seems to confirm that her mother had had a breakdown; her condition had “… got 50% worse. She was suggesting the most ridiculous things with the hope of their coming to pass. Dawn and I managed to make her see sense but were not wholly successful.” She abandoned their luggage at the cantonment (fearing a plainclothes policeman would arrest her) and boarded a train, but at Rewari (a town 50 miles south west of Delhi) could not open the carriage door and became convinced that the police had locked them in. The train terminated at Hissar and while planning her next move, Mrs Dockrell was said to have seen a man with a “stiff turban” like a policeman, and thought he was holding a telegram for her arrest, so she fled. When they last saw her, she was boarding a train for Ludhiana. Gloria signed off with a request for some money, sending “all my hearts warmest love and millions of kisses.”

Shephard discounted the letter, presumably as a ruse by Mrs Dockerall to secure money from her son, so wrote to the girls’ brother herself, bluntly telling him that his sisters had been left stranded in Delhi, their mother had not been traced, and that he should write to her should he want news of them. Ultimately, the girls were admitted to first rate schools in Calcutta for which brother Dan, listed as a highly respected citizen, was full of gratitude.

This case geography, complete with supplementary letters and documents, is unique in much of its detailing. It tracks the mobility of its subjects out of the carceral space of the Home and into, and beyond, the city. Schools, hotels, a Sarai and a Cantonment, train compartments, distant cities, and the tracking from pillar to post in the old city, then south to Mrs George in New Delhi and, finally, north of the walled city to the Civil Lines and the Asra Ghar all feature. The case is also unique in the level of care it attracted. Being children of an Anglo-Indian woman and a British man, the children may have been considered more European than Indian, resulting in the Deputy Commissioner’s involvement and in Gloria and Dawn finally exiting the Home into a good education in Calcutta, saving the Delhi Administration worrying about the fate of two impoverished seemingly white girls on the streets of the capital.

But the case also has much in common with the other 16 cases that passed through the Home in 1940. Men and women played varying roles, not always conforming to stereotype: the caring Mr Cantopher and Mr Miller; the absentee mother. There is also the tantalising mirage of subaltern voice, the letter from Gloria, dismissed by Evans and Shephard as a fake. And there is the sense of the archiving of the usually un-archived realm of the everyday, teetering on the edge of un-reason, where it was the job of a 17-year-old girl to make the adults “see sense”. It is to these commonalities across the case geographies which we turn in conclusion.

Conclusion

While the travails of Gloria and Dawn detailed the widest ranging mobility en route to the carceral domestic space of the Asra Ghar, the other cases evidenced wide reaching connections across Delhi. Some of these existed with a broader institutional archipelago, including the St Stephen’s and Irwin Hospital, Kashmeri Gate Courts, the Jail, various schools, and St. Mary’s Home. But the most recurring space which the residents came from, and to which they often returned, was the commonplace home. The Asra Ghar mediated familial and marital relations and heteronormativised its subjects, serving as a Home between homes, and provides us with a disturbing geography of “unsettled domesticity” (Burton, 2019: 1333). But the broader picture of the home life of Delhi's women and girls is equally unsettling. They were ejected from home spaces in which they made their families unhappy; they were seduced by their tutors at home; they were left at home by deserting husbands; and they could be forcibly returned to homes by their brothers, husbands, and families.

The treatment received in the Home clearly varied relating to the resident’s character, but also to their race, religion, class, and caste. Anglo-Indian residents were often well educated and aligned with the mindset of the institution and received extra attentiveness as part of a broader colonial nervousness about pauper whites. Men feature mostly off stage here, as father’s requesting help, deserting husbands, friends passing on needy cases, husbands demanding the return of wives or, entering the stage, brothers coming to the home and demanding the return of their sister.

In terms of power and discipline the Asra Ghar could be a node through which residents progressed to another institution, and possibly to a better life, at a school or a midwifery college. Disobedient residents might find themselves passed around the institutional archipelago described above. Between these two options was the work the Home did itself in disciplining its residents. Schooling was provided, often by un-paid residents who had come to the Home themselves for help. Some proved so helpful in this task that it secured them a further education; for others, education was itself a means of disciplining girls out of bad character, and even madness, into servitude and possibly into becoming the Home Superintendent’s maid-servant.

What is equally clear, in terms of power-relations, is how much the residents rebelled against the regime. Many ended up there because of their refusal to accept the norms of an often misogynist and patriarchal society. Cooperation was refused, unexpected levels of influence over husbands were noted, unpaid for work was refused, and quarrels were had. This refusal was often expressed not through speaking but through moving: leaving the Home without permission; absconding from hospital; or touring the city, seeking support.

Voice was a recurrent feature in the reports. While this archive is a repository of archival silencing, it is also one in which subaltern voice was transcribed as merely noise. The older woman, presumed to be mad, flooded the reports with her wild talk, so was doped to keep her quiet. One girl’s high-toned nature marked out her queerness but also her potential for reform. Speaking in hallucinations about one’s angelic nature could get you certified, while poor language and remarks could have you ejected from the home. Other forms of speech were un-archived: if your complaints were not sympathised with you were felt to be moaning; if your affective attachments were not appreciated, you were felt to be sulking or hysterically fainting, your voice “only a whine”. If the house supported you, it might record and support your voice, even when powerless to help, as with the woman from an orthodox Hindu family who wanted education, not a return to the family household: “In front of him she said she did not wish to return; but there was no alternative.”

What the 18 case geographies above present to us is a record of subaltern spaces and subaltern experiences within a carceral governmentality. Despite occasional attempts at amateur psychology or sociology, these are not documents from Pandey’s realms of reason, nor are they diagnostic accounts of the broader realm of un-reason, forensic takes on general native madness. Rather, they are rare and rich accounts of the third realm, that of the commonplace. Here we are able to present evidence of an empirical subaltern, women from the non-elite who leave a record of their suffering and their mobility via acts which seem both resistant to and complicit with the rescue home institution. But these records also provide traces of analytical subaltern geographies beyond view. These are the spaces from which the girls and women came, and to which they returned. But they are also the very different home spaces with which this article opened.

The Asra Ghar was socially connected to brothels and corrupted ashrams in the city, intended as their opposite and a shelter from them. But it also bares analytical comparison to them. It was a carceral home in which girls and women could be held without consent. Access to and exit from this space was determined by men, although the spaces were usually run by women. Some inmates could profit from the space and move through it to a new career, many did not and either remained or exited the space, and the archive. It was a commonplace space of exploitation that usually went unrecorded, but which entered the archive almost by accident. This accident provides further evidence of women’s mobility and voice, and the efforts to discipline and conduct both. In the broader gendered landscape of Delhi, the brothel, the corrupted ashram, and the Asra Ghar stand as staging posts in weakly connected but strongly comparable case geographies of sexuality, gender, and late-colonial domestic carcerality.