South Asian Studies/Gender and Sexuality

“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.” —Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Syracuse University

Across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, legislators in Bombay passed a series of repetitive laws seeking to control prostitution. During the same time, Bombay’s sex industry grew vast in scale. Ashwini Tambe explores why these remarkably similar laws failed to achieve their goal and questions the actual purpose of such lawmaking.

Against the backdrop of the industrial growth of Bombay, Codes of Misconduct examines the relationship between lawmaking, law enforcement, and sexual commerce. Tambe challenges linear readings of how laws create effects and demonstrates that the regulation and criminalization of prostitution were not contrasting approaches to prostitution but different modes of state coercion. By analyzing legal prohibitions as productive forces, she also probes the pornographic imagination of the colonial state, showing how regulations made sexual commerce more visible but rendered the prostitute silent. Codes of Misconduct not only adds to our understanding of empire, sexuality, and the law, it also sheds new light on the long history of Bombay’s transnational links and the social worlds of its underclasses.

Ashwini Tambe is assistant professor of women’s studies and history at the University of Toronto.

University of Minnesota Press
Printed in U.S.A.
Cover design by Salamander Hill Design
Cover image: Colin Murray, Scotland 1840–India 1884, Borah Bazaar, Bombay 1870–71, albumen silver photograph, 18.7 x 31.4 cm, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.