Mainstream historical narratives across Indian academia and popular discourse have often celebrated the architectural, administrative, and military feats of colonial and medieval Muslim rulers. However, buried beneath this dominant narrative lies a brutal, rarely addressed truth: the systemic sexual exploitation of lower-caste, tribal, and marginalized women across centuries of foreign and elite rule. These acts were not isolated events but were institutionalized, sanctioned, and repeated under multiple regimes—from the Delhi Sultanate and Mughal courts to British cantonments and European trading posts. The intergenerational legacy of such exploitation—visible in skin tone variations, caste subjugation, and cultural memory—remains both a physical and psychological marker of historical trauma.
Colonial Sexual Governance: Brothels, Disease Control, and Dalit Women
The British colonial administration institutionalized the sexual commodification of native women, particularly those from Dalit, tribal, and economically vulnerable communities. Under the Contagious Diseases Acts (1864–1869) and accompanying Cantonment Regulations, British authorities established state-regulated brothels within military zones. Widows, outcastes, and destitute women—already excluded from Brahmanical social protections—were coerced into serving British soldiers as a matter of public health policy.
Classified by default as "prostitutes" if they operated outside caste-sanctioned marriages, these women were forcibly subjected to internal medical examinations and confined to "lock hospitals" under suspicion of venereal infection. These hospitals functioned less as medical spaces and more as prisons, removing women’s autonomy under the pretext of disease prevention. Lock hospitals operated with the full legal backing of the British crown, effectively criminalizing the sexuality of poor Indian women.
Over time, these cantonment-based systems gave rise to enduring red-light districts—such as Sonagachi (Kolkata) and Kamathipura (Mumbai)—where many sex workers hailed from marginalized communities with historical links to forced sexual labor during the colonial period. This normalized the association of Dalit and tribal women with prostitution—a legacy that persists in both stigma and structure.
Medieval Muslim Rule: Sexual Slavery, Harems, and Caste Erasure
The arrival of Turkic, Afghan, and Mughal dynasties introduced new layers of elite violence and concubinage into South Asia's caste-oppressed social matrix. Islamic jurisprudence and wartime practice permitted the enslavement of non-Muslim captives, with women and children disproportionately affected. Chroniclers of the Delhi Sultanate recount how thousands of non-Muslim women were seized during raids and campaigns, enslaved, and distributed among the military and nobility.
The Mughals institutionalized sexual servitude through the imperial harem system, where royal concubines—often slaves—were kept in lavish captivity. Though harem narratives typically focus on noble or foreign-born women, many concubines were sourced from subjugated Indian regions and caste-oppressed groups. Historical accounts, such as Emperor Jahangir’s memoirs, cite instances of mass captures intended to increase the Muslim population—a form of demographic warfare that intersected with sexual control.
Cases such as that of Caliph Walid I, who distributed enslaved women as rewards to his soldiers, show how earlier Islamic precedents shaped such practices. These acts were not merely personal or cultural but geopolitical: the sexual subjugation of conquered women was a tool of empire, reinforcing dominance through bodily conquest and reproductive assimilation.
Southern Margins: Exploitation under Portuguese and Dutch Rule
In Kerala and Tamil Nadu, the penetration of early European colonial powers—particularly the Portuguese (1498–1663) and Dutch (1605–1795)—produced distinct patterns of gendered and racial exploitation. These European powers, while primarily focused on maritime trade and territorial control, developed intimate and exploitative social relationships with local populations, especially women from coastal, fishing, Dalit, and tribal communities.
Portuguese colonial administration actively promoted miscegenation policies, encouraging Portuguese men to take local women as concubines or wives to cement alliances and propagate Euro-Indian offspring. The Estado da Índia, headquartered in Goa, legalized and normalized these liaisons, especially in trading posts like Cochin, Quilon, and Calicut. These unions were rarely based on consent or equality—rather, they were facilitated through economic coercion, military power, and caste-based vulnerabilities.
Many women were absorbed into Portuguese or Dutch households as domestic slaves or concubines. Their sexual availability was presumed. Church records detail baptisms of "half-caste" children, while simultaneously labeling the mothers with derogatory terms. The Dutch East India Company, though more commercially focused, maintained similar exploitative practices, using caste-oppressed women as bonded labor and domestic servants.
These coerced unions produced generations of mixed-race offspring, many of whom formed distinct communities in coastal Kerala bearing European surnames and lighter skin. Folklore within Dalit and fisher communities includes references to "Portuguese fathers" or Dutch ancestry, often remembered with a blend of pride and pain. These social memories, far from fictional, underscore the intimate link between colonial power, sexual violence, and community identity.
The church and missionary presence, while professing moral upliftment, often facilitated these relationships, especially when framed as part of religious conversion efforts. Lower-caste women converted to Christianity were still placed at the bottom of colonial ecclesiastical hierarchies. The legacy of these encounters survives in the caste divisions that persist within Christian communities of South India today.
Skin, Memory, and Bloodlines: A Legacy of Coercion
The cumulative result of centuries of sexual violence is not only psychological trauma but also physiological markers within oppressed communities. In many Dalit and tribal groups—especially in regions with intense colonial or Mughal presence—lighter skin tones are viewed with ambiguity: sometimes as a marker of upward assimilation, at other times as a reminder of historical violation.
In coastal Kerala, families narrate stories of "Portuguese fathers" or Dutch ancestry, even when formal genealogies are absent. Genetic studies have yet to fully explore these lineages, but social memory and anecdotal continuity suggest a link between systematic rape, forced concubinage, and contemporary phenotypic diversity among India’s oppressed.
Structural Violence and Historical Silence
Sexual violence under colonial and medieval rule operated at the intersection of caste, gender, race, and class. Dalit and tribal women were triply marginalized: economically exploited, sexually violated, and denied institutional redress. Legal systems—both Sharia-based and British colonial—rarely offered protection, often criminalizing victims rather than perpetrators.
Official statistics like those from India’s National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) report multiple rapes daily. However, countless more go unreported due to fear, dependency, and societal stigma—a pattern rooted in centuries of silence and impunity.
This absence in historical records is not accidental. Most nationalist, colonial, and Marxist historiographies prioritized male-centric narratives of power, often downplaying or omitting the gendered caste violence foundational to empire-building. As a result, the voices of those most harmed—Dalit women, tribal survivors, exploited laborers—remain marginal even in memory.
Decolonizing History: A Call for Justice
To reckon with the past is to recognize the role of sexual violence in shaping India’s caste system, social stratification, and demographic diversity. Rewriting history demands more than inclusion—it requires amplification of oral histories, survivor testimony, caste-feminist research, and community records. Scholars such as Ruchira Gupta and organizations like Equality Now have begun this process, yet mainstream Indian academia and media continue to resist.
It is time to hold to account the glorified legacies of Mughals, British administrators, and colonial traders—not only for what they built, but for whom they broke. Only by centering the silenced can we begin to understand the full scope of India’s historical trauma and the structures that perpetuate it today.
Selected Sources :
Gupta, Ruchira. Understanding Colonial Legacies of Sexual Violence in India. SAGE Publications, 2017.
Indian Currents Reports & Equality Now: Reports on caste-based gender violence and underreporting in India.
Ballhatchet, Kenneth. Race, Sex, and Class under the Raj: Imperial Attitudes and Policies and Their Critics, 1793–1905.
Kolsky, Elizabeth. Colonial Justice in British India: White Violence and the Rule of Law. Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Oral archives and community testimonials from Dalit women’s collectives in Tamil Nadu and Kerala.
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