Ashwini Tambe’s nuanced, insightful, and theoretically precise study of the intricate relationship between law making, law enforcement, and the sex industry in colonial Bombay is one of the best examples of feminist postcolonial studies that I have read. This book raises new and provocative questions for feminist and postcolonial scholars working on genealogies of State violence and prostitution. An engagingly written study that illuminates theoretical and methodological questions that reach well beyond the time/space boundaries of colonial Bombay.