ABSTRACT
On a February night in 1917, a woman named Akootai was murdered after she tried to escape the brothel where she worked, on Duncan Road in Bombay. Her brothel keeper Syed Mirza and his two accomplices tortured her before they killed her, as a warning to other brothel inmates. They beat her in front of the other inmates with fists, a curry stone and a metal yard measure, and branded her with lit matches; they forced her to drink her supervisor’s urine, and bathe in scalding water.1 The specifics of this case – the grisly forms of torture, the brothel keeper’s Pathan identity, and his victim’s valiant attempted escape – generated a great deal of press coverage. Yet when the police force was criticized for its failure to detect and prevent such cases, Bombay’s Police Commissioner F.A. M. Vincent pleaded that it could not be expected to control this ‘class with its low state of evolution’.2
