Code of Misconduct: Regulating Prostitution in Late Colonial Bombay

"This book actually covers three distinctive periods in relation to prostitution policy in Bombay. Firstly, Tambe looks at the ‘regulation phase’ (1860s-1890s), when prostitution was regulated under the Contagious Diseases Acts, which were implemented in Britain and British colonies during this period. Then she focuses on the ‘anti-trafficking phase’ (from around 1900 to the 1920s) which was when public and official consideration of prostitution shifted away from supporting regulation into pushing for its abolition because of perceived connections between the regulation of prostitution and what we would call sex trafficking in contemporary language. Finally, she moves on to look at the ‘abolitionist phase’ (1917-1947), when anti-trafficking discourse became connected with nationalist discourse. “Across vastly different political and legal systems, women engaged in prostitution continue to be regarded as sources of disease and threats to the social order.” Very interestingly, Tambe’s book also explores continuities. She opens with a conversation that she had with a doctor in the early 2000s and reflects on how he repeated the same discourses that she found in historical documents from the 1910s, 1920s and 1930s. This illustrates the pervasiveness of ideas about medical checks for sex workers, residential segregation, the need for red light districts, and the need to police prostitution in order to combat disease, although concerns in the early 21st century are connected to the AIDS pandemic rather than syphilis and gonorrhea. Across vastly different political and legal systems, women engaged in prostitution continue to be regarded as sources of disease and threats to the social order. Tambe is also interested in exploring how discrepancies between the language of the law—protecting women and girls—and how it works in practice, in her case, in Bombay in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Tambe calls the Contagious Diseases Acts [the CDAs] ‘part of a more ambitious imperial agenda’. In Bombay, the CDAs prioritise the oversight of European women engaged in prostitution and attempted to enforce a racial segregation of prostitution in the city through the formation of a European red light district. Tambe illustrates how the CDAs were entwined with broader colonial policies in this period. To answer your question about the nationalist drive to eradicate prostitution, Tambe demonstrates how women who sold sex were perceived as a threat both by the colonial state and the nationalist elite. They were excluded from the nationalist mainstream and continued to be heavily stigmatised and condemned as threats to public health and morality. Of course."