The sexual deviance of diverse women, brought into view through the practice of the survey, was not only an object of knowledge but also a potential site for state intervention. The widow was, in the view of Wavell, an inevitable prostitute.
This form of reasoning placed ancient texts as the primary origin of the Indian prostitute. With a similar inventory of women, Alexander Abercrombie, the commissioner of Dacca Dhaka , differentiated Hindu prostitutes who fell into prostitution as a result of religious stricture from Muslim prostitutes in his response to the query.
According to Abercrombie, Muslim women prostitutes hid their sexual deviance in false marriages. He understood this difference in sociological terms. According to Abercrombie, women who turned to prostitution had fallen permanently out of society. If Muslim, women could find menial jobs like housekeeping because of the relative tolerance of sexual promiscuity among Muslims.
As a result, they had a more stopgap or casual relationship to the act, and often were at once prostitutes and workers. In these taxonomies, Muslim women were characterized as more sexually brazen than their Hindu counterparts, with insatiable sexual appetites and a dangerous promiscuity unleashed by the system of temporary marriages. That said, administrators stressed that women of all religious communities were potential prostitutes.
Across these letters, the same categories and social behaviors are linked to prostitution. Babu Taraknath Mullick, deputy magistrate of Madaripur, insisted that the marriage customs of Hindus led to widowhood and the polygamy of Muslims led to prostitution. For Mullick, Muslims were always leading lives of disrepute. Similarly, explaining how Muslim women were prostitutes as often as Hindus but hid under the guise of marriage, D.
