Anjali Arondekar

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496 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 1 May

Anjali Arondekar’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.

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Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society · Sex Work in Colonial India · 1 May 2026 podcast

Right.

And like any practical colonial power, the Brits decide, well, you know, they got to do it anyway.

Let's make sure they're safe.

But we don't care about the women.

So and it's no coincidence that the biggest red bazaar is also the police headquarters in Calcutta.

Right.

And many people have written about this.

The second most important point is, and this is something I wrote about in my first book, is the fact that throughout this period, there's a constant kind of shadow hanging of sodomy.

So there are lots and lots of reports filed about the spread of sodomy, about the threat of sodomy.

And I wrote about this very famous Karachi report that was commissioned by Charles Napier in the late 1840s.

And Sir Richard Burton, the famous, not the actor, the famous anthropologist,

was commissioned to do the Karachi Report.

Now, what's the Karachi Report?

The Karachi Report was about all these male brothels that were spreading across the Northwest Frontier Province, the place between India and Pakistan.

And Napier was worried that too many soldiers were visiting male prostitutes.

Now, this report was never found.

I don't even think it exists.

But the fact that something like that kept coming up meant that sex work was, or prostitution or whatever you call it, was not just restricted to women.

It was proliferating and the fear of it had to be contained by sort of, you know, it's like creating a dike and moving men along into visiting women rather than.

And, you know, when you look at the archival records, there are so many cases of sodomy.

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