See the link to the digital book The Queen’s Daughters by Elizabeth W. Andrew and Katherine C. Bushnell. Once in the link, scroll down to read the whole book.
Note 1 from Jitu Savani: The asylums founded by Lawrence churned out pupils who joined various British Regiments, and most of them would have served in India. These pupils would most certainly have made use of the sex slaves that this post is about.
Note 2 from Jitu Savani: Please see link to Lawrence School Sanawar where a House was named after Field Marshall Roberts, the character who had a major role in sustaining the Military Sex Trade in the Raj.
I am appending a brief extract here to show just how despicable Roberts was; he even lied to the House of Commons enquiry and blamed a subordinate but the evidence against him was overwhelming and he had to send a grovelling letter of apology.
On June 17, 1886, a military order, known among the opponents of State regulation as the “Infamous Circular Memorandum,” was sent to all the Cantonments of India by Quartermaster-General Chapman, in the name of the Commander-in-Chief of the army in India (Lord Roberts). But during the course of the enquiry of the Departmental Committee of 1893, its real author was discovered to be Lord Roberts himself, not his Quartermaster-General.
This Memorandum (Parliamentary Paper No. 197, of 1888) is a lengthy document, every part of which has painful interest; but we can only give a faint outline. It specified certain measures to be instituted as means for looking more carefully after the health of British soldiers, and the observations therein were to be heeded by the “military and medical authorities in every command” throughout India.
This order said (and military orders are well-nigh inexorable): “In the regimental bazaars it is necessary to have a sufficient number of women, to take care that they are sufficiently attractive, to provide them with proper houses, and, above all, to insist upon means of ablution being always available.” It proceeds: “If young soldiers are carefully advised in regard to the advantage of ablution, and recognise that convenient arrangements exist in the regimental bazaar [that is, in the chakla], they may be expected to avoid the risks involved in association with women who are not recognised [that is, licensed] by the regimental authorities.” In other words, young soldiers are not expected to be moral, but only to be instructed as to the safest way of practising immorality. This remarkable document goes on to suggest that young soldiers should be taught to consider it a “point of honour” to save each other from contagion by pointing out to their officers women with whom there was risk of disease. The document calls attention to the need of more women, and the necessity of making the free quarters “houses that will meet the wishes of the women”—in order, it is implied, that they may be the more easily lured to live in them.
This character went on to serve in the British Army for decades but in later life, he was involved in some grubby plot relating to Ulster. In 1914 he was on a visit to Indian troops fighting in France when he died. His body was returned to UK and he was given a State Funeral.
British soldiers carried out horrific physical assaults and robbery against these anyway downtrodden, physically weak and poverty-stricken ‘Native’ women. Numerous obviously British children were given birth by these women and formed a chunk of the Anglo-Indian community. Lawrence’s asylums/schools would emphatically have rejected orphans fathered by British soldiers with such women but in the immediate post- Independence years many of their descendants were both, heavily subsidised pupils and unqualified teachers!
The Queen’s Daughters is about how the British used Indian Sex Slaves for the benefit of White British Colonial Soldiers and these are just some of the highlights from the book for which I have started which is linked at the commencement of the Page:
In 1895 an average of 45 men per thousand, or 3,200 in a force of 71,031 British soldiers in India, were constantly in hospital for venereal diseases.”
“thirteen per cent.” of the British soldiers are “annually invalided home hopelessly incurable for military purposes.”
‘But it is proposed now in certain quarters to examine men as well as women. Two wrongs do not make a right. Equality of degradation is not the sort of equality for Christians to desire. Bring the test home. Could the reader, without committing sin, go to a physician to be examined in order to discover whether he or she is “fit” to practise fornication? Then the State that requires such an act becomes guilty in the sight of God of committing the act’
There is almost a nation of Eurasians who curse the day they were given an unwelcome existence. And their mothers, in large numbers, were honestly married, to their best belief and intention. Here are the real wives and the real children in the sight of a just God, and to them should England’s attention be first turned. The chaklas (brothels) hold many such unwilling prisoners, left there by treacherous husbands and fathers. Some day this wife of the officer or soldier will be turned out to perish of the disease her system could no longer throw off, and the children will either be retained as soldiers’ prostitutes or sent out to share the fate of the diseased mother.
They are as artful as a waggon-load of monkeys,” said one Anglo-Indian to us; the “most vicious and degraded of the population,” says another. And yet they are, many of them, the offspring of British men. (Note: Anglo-Indian at that time was a term used for Britishers without any Indian blood settled in India.)
It is roughly estimated that 50 per cent [of the girls of the chakla] are of the age of fourteen to sixteen or so;” and in reply to our evidence as to some of the girls being as young as “from fifteen to sixteen years of age,” Major General Sir W. Elles, K.C.B., replies, “The probability is that prostitution is practised at even younger ages than this.” In reply to our further statement that many girls are kept at the point of starvation, are always in debt, and cannot escape on this account, even if otherwise the way might be open, Colonel T. G. Crawley, commanding Allahabad District, makes the following calculation (page 360, Departmental Committee Report of 1893):
“It stands to reason that the women could not be in debt, for if a woman only received six men daily for twenty-three days in a month, at the rate of only four annas [about fourpence] per visit, that would represent thirty-four rupees eight annas, and even allowing one-fourth of this to go to the mahaldarni, rent two rupees, and food at the rate of four annas daily for thirty days, a woman would have fully seventeen rupees [a little more than one pound] a month clear.”
Observation of Jitu Savani: 70 % of the pupils in Lawrence School Lovedale in 1950 were Anglo-Indians. Most could trace ancestry to the various Railway Colonies. The progeny of the Eurasians mentioned above may also have formed part of the 70%.