Locating the Erased History of the Women in Lot 54: the “Waste” in Wasteland.

Amrita DasGupta, SOAS

The sex workers of Lot 59, Sundarbans India which is now known as the Canning Town has been made invisible in History, such that the British colonizers who created the category and are noted for their record keeping caliber has deleted them from the archives. These present-day sex workers have an ancestry where the women in their families functioned as in-betweens, chaste housewives and consensual erotic partners to the Magh dacoits from the Arakan. With the coming of the British in the region who built a port in the area, against advice of the experts, the land adjoining the port, especially Lot 59 was envisioned to have a town. But the foretelling of the meteorologists came true, and the port was swept over by a cyclone within four years of its initiation rendering it dysfunctional. The colonial government to make profit from whatever was left of the project pushed the in-between women to take up prostitution and pay taxes from their income for being able to live in their own land that was now within the ownership of the British. However, these women and their families had been indigenous owners of the land before the coming of the British. The never written history of these women on research reveals the association of the “drain of wealth” to the creation of this category and how their creation has in present time birthed questions of land ownership and fights against land grabs, river stealing in Sundarbans, an area marked as the wastelands under the British Land category. Thus, the paper aims to interrogate how the women of the wasteland of Sundarbans were reduced to being “waste” and were abandoned in an ostracized occupation, highlighting the community’s recent cries for justice at the intersection of climate change, land grabs and river stealing.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 72. Intimate Rule: Gender, Marriage, and the Colonial State