It is rare to come across such a delightfully written and insightful book in the rather arid arena of law. Intriguingly, the cover of a book about prostitution in Bombay shows what appear to be two leggy, somewhat scantily clad Caucasian women, greeting gentlemen in tuxedos with bouquets. The introduction tells us that, with the rise of Bombay as a commercial seaport, the city became a key destination in a transnational sex-trade circuit, particularly after the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, and had a sizable section of European prostitutes. European sailors, resident soldiers and British administrators comprised the client base.
Codes of Misconduct: Regulating prostitution in late colonial Bombay; Zubaan, 2010
By Ashwini Tambe
Thereafter, the book moves back and forth through space and time. Ashwini Tambe, a scholar of women's studies, relates the trend of East European women settling in Bombay's brothels at the turn of the 20th century due to upheavals in the Russian ghetto, alongside tales of women from former Soviet republics working as call girls in posh hotels at the start of the 21st. The passing of this century seems to have made little difference in the perspective of the medico-legal establishment with regards to compulsory health checks, residential segregation of sex workers and, to use the author's words, 'resigned acceptance of men's putative sexual needs'.
Tambe shows how the combination of fears over preserving 'racial purity' and preventing miscegenation in the colonies, alongside imperatives of providing sexual recreation to British soldiers, led to the acceptance of non-British European prostitutes. The colonial administrators preferred white prostitutes, and thus allowed white women from France, Germany, Italy and, particularly, Poland, Romania and Russia to stay in Bombay. At the same time, they deported British prostitutes over worries of impacting on British 'national prestige'. Of course, the linking of national prestige with the chastity of women is not confined to the British. In this, Tambe sharply brings out the conservatism of the Indian Independence movement, which linked the nation's honour with the notion of the chaste, desexualised woman. She also highlights how missionaries, social reformers and nationalists alike shared the construct of the chaste woman.