Codes of Misconduct: The Regulation of Prostitution in Colonial Bombay (review)

This book is a timely reminder that rarely are laws on prostitution simply about prostitution and also a reminder that the way in which these laws work in actual application seldom mirrors their intent. In investigating how laws on prostitution played out in Colonial Bombay, Ashwini Tambe seeks to provide a warning to those who would put too much weight on the reformist capabilities of the state and law. Tambe traces the "reception" of imperial laws, such as the Contagious Diseases Acts and anti-trafficking laws, and the nationalist abolitionist response in Bombay - a prominent sex-trade centre - between the "high colonialism" of the late 1800s and the "late" period of more concessionary rule between World War I and independence in 1947. In examining these two periods, Tambe is able to see how, even as approaches change from regulation to abolitionism, the conditions for sex workers and their experience of "state violence" change little. This leads her to draw the conclusion that one must be highly sceptical of the possibilities of state-led reform. The book is a rich and detailed history that is important to read in the context of today's debates over prostitution law.

Tambe gives us both insight into the rhetorical function of law and a detailed "micro-history" of how the law is used and misused, or resisted and reinterpreted, on the ground. The Contagious Diseases Acts (CDA) in Bombay, for example, failed to achieve their purported aims of establishing state control over prostitution via medical checks and thereby eradicating sexually transmitted diseases. But they were successfully used to create a racially stratified and demarcated sex trade that served colonial purposes. Here Tambe makes an important contribution to Foucauldian analysis in drawing attention to how the colonial context is both far more juridical and coercive than Foucault's liberal governmentality approach would allow, and more contingent, as the application of law is caught up in the politics of imperialist rule and anti-imperialist resistance. The CDA in Bombay allowed for more coercive collection of scientific knowledge of women's sexuality for example than would be possible in the imperial motherland (and was therefore key to the functioning of "scientific knowledge" in the imperial centre). Despite this juridical power, increasingly independent municipalities like Bombay resisted the law's application, recognizing the CDA as one more imperialist intervention. Sex workers also stubbornly and often successfully resisted being tested and tried, and police, magistrates, and medical officers fought over resources and responsibilities, dooming the CDA to failure in its stated mission.

Similarly, the anti-trafficking acts that followed the CDA, while ostensibly aimed at reducing exploitation of sex workers, were used by colonial officials on the ground to intensify the control over, and exploitation of, European brothel workers while simultaneously ignoring the exploitation within the Indian trade. Indeed, Tambe gives us a detailed account of the murder of one brothel worker, Akoothai, through careful handling of the accounts with their ulterior motives, as an exemplar of exploitative conditions in Indian brothels at the time. Thus, Tambe nicely illustrates how "the colonial state only presented the appearance of universal surveillance" (78) by presenting us with the complexities of how laws played out in reality. This is a lesson even analysts of modern-day law stand to be reminded of - the disjuncture between law's authoritative rhetorical voice and the vagaries of the everyday application of law.

Tambe moves forward in time to bring home her other main point: that none of these laws worked in favour of sex workers themselves. In her penultimate chapter she examines the nationalist response to prostitution, the terrain of which was, as she points out, already shaped by imperial discourse that presented Indian prostitution as a product of the "backwardness" of Indian culture. The nationalists, therefore, strove to present Indian womanhood in ways that defied the imperialist stereotypes and fought against the toleration of native prostitution by pressing for abolitionist laws. Once again, while abolitionist law was ostensibly...