Codes of Misconduct: Regulating Prostitution in Late Colonial Bombay by Ashwini Tambe (review)

The advent of modernity, hand in hand with the rapacious materialist forces of capitalism, connected global economic and political systems in the form of colonialism and imperialism. Imperialism also produced and reinforced multiple exploitative systems and oppressive ideologies, including hierarchical racism, caste discrimination, and gender subordination and exploitation. Wearing the masks of progress and liberalism, European imperialism initiated and encouraged multiple forms of exploitation and dehumanizing social relationships to accelerate the accumulation of capital and to perpetuate the hegemony of the European white male.

The scholarship on British imperialism in the Indian subcontinent/South Asia for a long time remained centered on the political struggles and ideological articulations against colonialism and its manifestations. In recent decades the studies on alternative struggles and articulations against colonialism as well as against the nationalist elite, especially anticaste studies and gender studies, have illuminated the convergent and often complex relationships between caste, gender, nation, and colonialism. In this context, Ashwini Tambe’s book on prostitution in Bombay city during the colonial period explores the history of the emergence of Bombay as an industrial hub and its development in terms of the rise of new social groups on the cityscape such as the industrial worker, the middle class, the political and business elite, and the prostitute. Tambe shows that even though the prostitute remained “invisible,” anomalous, and unacceptable in the social and political spheres, she functioned as an essential part of the city’s social and economic arteries by providing sexual services to the migrant industrial worker, colonial soldier, and sailor alike.

The book traces the historical antecedents of prostitution in Bombay to its emergence as a port city that acted as a nodal point in the movement of troops and goods, as well as men and women embarking on and disembarking from the ships sailing across the oceans of the empire. The book unfolds multiple perspectives in the making of prostitution by meticulously examining the colonial archives, especially medical and legal records, legislative debates, police and prison records, and administrative and census reports. It brings to light the role of the colonial state and its policies in the stigmatization of prostitution and the general social degeneration of the status of women who did not fit into the Victorian and Brahmanical notions of patriarchy and sexual modesty. While not valorizing the positive and elevated social status of devadasis, courtesans and entertaining women during precolonial times, Tambe powerfully indicts the English educated middle class and the nationalist political elite in colluding with the colonial perception, thus further endangering the vulnerable social status of prostitutes. As an apt example, Tambe points out Gandhi’s refusal to admit the 350 prostitutes who came forward to join the Congress Party in 1921 by paying fourteen annas as membership fees and the derogatory remarks he made against the prostitutes as “more dangerous than thieves because they steal virtue” (106). Thus, not only were prostitutes unwanted in the nationalist mainstream, but they symbolized social dishonor and were perceived with a lot of repulsion.

Though the prostitute engendered the cause of colonialism by providing sexual recreation to the soldier, sailor, mill worker, and other apparatuses of the state, she was essentially seen as an anomaly and a serious problem in multiple ways. On the one hand, she threatened Victorian family norms by practicing nonmarital sex; on the other, she was viewed as a source of venereal diseases and thus a serious threat to public health. Most importantly, she had to work under the strict colonial gaze because of a constant racial anxiety of maintaining purity and avoiding miscegenation. Using the legislative and newspaper debates, Tambe aptly demonstrates how the prostitute remained a perpetual anxiety for the colonial state and the nationalist elite.

A highlight of the book is the chapter on Akootai’s death. Akootai was a prostitute brutally murdered by brothel keepers in 1917. As it would be impossible to narrate her story from her own perspective or in...