‘Looting’ the Lock Hospital in Colonial Madras during the Famine Years of the 1870s

The history of the Madras government's lock hospitals in the famine years of the 1870s demonstrates that, although the operation of colonial lock hospitals was primarily coercive and punitive, their inmates regularly interrupted and reconfigured the hospitals' functioning in unexpected ways. While shrewd and successful prostitutes incorporated the Indian Contagious Diseases Acts' (1864 and 1868) compulsory registration and regular incarceration into their business practices, destitute women incorporated lock hospitals into their strategies for survival and transformed these institutions into (albeit grim) asylums of relief. In short, women enrolled lock hospitals into their own distinct regimes of governance just as they were caught up within others.