Codes of Misconduct: Regulating Prostitution in Late Colonial Bombay

This remarkable study focuses on the relationship between forms of prostitution, discourses on law making, and law enforcement practices.

Across the 19th and early 20th centuries, the colonial government in Bombay city formulated laws on prostitution that were enormously repetitive. Activities such as soliciting men, pimping and procuring women and girls for prostitution were banned in identical ways in multiple eras. Across the same hundred years, commercial sex grew vast in scale, and Bombay became a node in a transnational sex trade circuit.

This book argues that while the expansion of Bombay’s sex trade over the past century might suggest that laws were simply ineffectual, law making was instead a productive process that sustained particular forms of prostitution. In examining this dimension of colonial governance, Tambe evaluates the uses and limits of Foucault’s approach to law and sexuality.