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

And not sodomy of the depraved native, sodomy of British soldiers who are sent back, chaplains who are sent back because of inappropriate behavior.

So this is the messy landscape which should exist.

I mean, it shouldn't surprise us, but it does.

No, I mean, that's why to me it's a delicious story because it's a story that circulates, but we don't really have much material evidence.

So when I wrote about this Karachi report, I wrote about the fact that it was a story that refused to go away, even though there was no evidence.

It kept coming up over and over again.

And Richard Burton also translated The Arabian Nights and wrote a very famous terminal essay, which is the last part, where he talks about the rampant homosexuality in the region, both in Middle East, North Africa, and in South Asia.

So it's kind of

like a story that tells itself, right?

Now, to go back to the idea of the Contagious Disease Act, when you asked me before, can we blame the Brits for everything, right?

Here's another way in which the Contagious Disease Act also helps the colonial community

Native elites, right?

So there are, like any structure of society, there are different classes of people who are colonized, right?

There are people who are workers, there are people who are trade owners, there are landowners, and their relationship to the colonial state is very different.

Right.

So the Contagious Disease Act, and there's a wonderful scholar named Durba Mitra who's written about it, is also used by people who want to incarcerate troubling women, women who don't follow the rules, who want to run away from home.

And they are forced into this category of prostitute by invoking the Contagious Disease Act.

So if you look at the records, you'll see a lot of women who are picked up because their families complain about their unruly behavior.

Yeah.

So it's a way not just of containing, sex work becomes this model for respectability.

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