Performing Caste, Performing Respectability: Naikins and the Contagious Diseases Act in the Bombay Presidency (1868–1888)

This article examines the legal petitions of the Naikins, a prominent group of Indian women performers in nineteenth-century western India, arguing that colonial law surrounding venereal disease functioned not only as an instrument of sexual surveillance but also as a mechanism for the production of caste difference. Passed in 1868, the Indian Contagious Diseases Act institutionalized classifying any Indian woman outside heterosexual domestic conjugality, including women performers, as “common prostitutes.” A close reading of the Naikins’ petitions shows how these women resisted inclusion under the Act by grounding claims to respectability in caste-based notions of purity and pollution, actively shaping the very legislation that sought to discipline them. It further demonstrates how the category of the “common prostitute” became caste-coded, rendering caste-marginalized women performers especially vulnerable to colonial medical surveillance and criminalization. Naikins’ petitions thus reveal subaltern agency as an internally differentiated formation, produced and constrained in the very act of its assertion.