But to return to the Lock Hospital mentioned. The nurse produced the records for our examination. In the correspondence book was the copy of a letter from the military surgeon, informing the Cantonment magistrate of six girls suspected of disease, and asking that they be apprehended and sent to the hospital for examination. That looked simple enough, and why not?
Imagine yourself the one apprehended, and the case assumes a different aspect. A policeman comes to your door and reads a warrant for your arrest as a common prostitute; you ask on what authority; you are informed that the name of the informant is not made public, because if a man can be induced to help trace out diseases—it being regarded as a “point of honour” to inform other men where danger lurks—his confession must not be made known, it would injure his reputation. (We are now describing the exact conditions always existent where there is compulsory examination of women.)
You contend that you have a right to your good name, and that it is a principle of justice that no one can be punished on secret and unproved evidence, and that it is punishment of the worst sort to be taken by a policeman through the streets to a hospital used exclusively for the treatment of a certain class of disorders. You are then informed that unless you will go at once without any trouble, you will be taken out of the town in which you live, set down as a common vagrant by the roadside, and if ever again found within the limits of the city in which your parents, brothers, and sisters live, you will be arrested and put in jail. What will you do? Yet these were exactly the laws under which these poor women, among whom we were spending the day, lived.
By such a system of delivering over the bodies of women as public property, any woman of humble circumstances upon whom any man of lecherous design casts his eyes, could be made to come to his terms of existence by the aid of the police force, if necessary, and magistrates of evil design could condemn any woman to a life of prostitution. And in this hospital all this wicked compulsion was set down in a book, every page of which was headed, “Prostitutes attending Voluntary Inspections.”
From the Lock Hospital we drove to a large chakla, and talked with a group of about twenty girls, among them a little girl of twelve, and another of four. Everywhere we went among the degraded women of India, we found children in the chaklas, these Government-regulated brothels, with their ever-present guards, so that Englishmen knew perfectly that children were being trained under Government regulation for prostitution. The advocates of licensed prostitution for India are fond of insisting as an excuse for licensing the evil, that it does no great harm because the recruits come from “the prostitute caste.” Repeatedly we made enquiries of Englishmen, native physicians, and in one case applied to the census office for some information concerning this special class. Its existence was practically denied, excepting those cases which can be found in every land, in which women of all classes may fall into shame and train their daughters after their own evil ways. It is scarcely necessary in this connection to mention the temple and nautch girls of India, who are found in civil lines. They are a wholly distinct class from the enslaved women who are set apart to minister to the vices of the British soldiers. Among the latter we found Hindus of all castes, from high-caste Brahmins down; and we also found Mohammedans, Arabs, Egyptians, Afghans, Kashmiris, Jewesses,—recruits, in fact, from those among whom “caste” does not prevail. If it were true that all these chakla women constitute one caste, for what object did the Government of India, in times past, provide invariably (so far as our observation extends) for a record of the “caste” of the women to whom registration tickets were given? The ticket which we purchased of a woman at Meean Meer in 1892 (a fac-simile of which is given in this volume, [Appendix B]) recorded her “name,” “caste,” “registered number,” “place of residence,” “date of registry,” and “personal appearance.”[5]
But there is a class in India being trained to prostitution, though not a “caste,” properly speaking, and they are getting their training in the brothels established and managed by Englishmen, and many of the candidates in this class are the children of Englishmen, who have been deliberately placed there, or allowed to go there, by their inhuman fathers. This is, properly speaking, the prostitute class of India, those born to their fate; the reader may judge whether the existence of the class justifies licensing it for the purpose.
In the chakla we sang, “Where He leads me I will follow,” and its interpretation constituted our Gospel message. With tears in their eyes the girls assured us, with characteristic gesture, that we were “on their eyes and on their hearts”; in other words, had won their affections; and spoke feelingly of the honour it was to them that Englishwomen should come to see them, saying that usually Englishmen forbade their wives to even look at them. One girl said that when at Cawnpore missionaries used to come to them, and that for days after their visits her heart was so sore that it seemed as if it would burst. The girls stood in the doorway, many of them with streaming eyes, and waved good-bye as we departed, begging us to come again soon.
We hastened to the railway station for the three o’clock train. When we alighted, we spoke a few kind words to our cabman, for he had served us most faithfully, all these hours under the mid-day glare of the sun, after so unpromising a beginning. We wished to pay him well, and asked him to set his own price on his services. The simple, rough native man hesitated a moment, stammered something unintelligible, burst into tears, and averting his face with noble shame, said, “I don’t want anything at all. I never saw anything like this before; I would like to help, too.” Thrusting a coin into his unwilling hand, ample for both fee and present, we hastened to our seats in the car, and were soon rolling away to our next destination. We wrote up our notes of the day’s doings on the way, and arrived at our next field of operations the following morning at two o’clock, stealing into another Cantonment unobserved, excepting by the Heavenly Father, without whom not even a sparrow can fall. We give this history of one day as a sample; the work was heavy and painful; but we encouraged each other often with the words, “Even if we fall by the way, we could not die in better work.”
We visited a Rest Camp at Meerut. As usual, we had no difficulty in passing the sentinels; God took care of that. We learnt from official records that the regiment had only been in India two weeks; yet the complete paraphernalia of vice was at hand. There were fourteen little tents for women, and near their quarters a huge tent pitched for those who wished to smoke opium. Think of it, fathers and mothers, boys of the age of from eighteen years upwards, supplied by their superior officers, before they could have made a demand for the same, with every convenience for giving themselves over to debauchery! The sight of their fresh young faces touched us deeply.
At another place, away up on the northern frontier, we found only five girls; the others had somehow escaped their cruel bondage. As we entered the gateway of the mud wall that surrounded their quarters, a native man standing near threw up his hands in great astonishment, exclaiming, “O God! (‘Allah’), how wonderful that ladies should come to such a place!” It was a dreary, weird scene. The evening was piercingly cold, and we were well wrapped. The old mahaldarni and her girls were trying to warm themselves by a wretched little pot of charcoal, stretching their thin fingers by turns over the coals.