Durham; London: Duke University Press, 2014. xi, 281 pp. (Figures, maps, tables.) US$25.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-8223-5773-5.
Stephen Legg’s book, Prostitution and the Ends of Empire: Scale, Governmentalities, and Interwar India, is a smart and original contribution to the expansive literature on colonialism and prostitution. Focused on Delhi, Legg seeks to explain why the regulation of prostitution shifted from segregation to suppression between the two world wars. The innovation of his book lies in its methodological orientations, particularly his emphasis on scale. Centering scale allows Legg to foreground the inter-spatial politics of prostitution as it unfolded at the local, national, imperial, and global levels and through the struggles of state/non-state actors and international organizations. Placing scale at the “heart of its methodology,” the book reveals “how the most intimate spaces of desire and intercourse were forever enframed in broader scales of politics, terminology, and movement” (3).
As a geographer interested in scale, Legg is concerned with near and distant geographies and their concatenation. “Rather than taking a body or event and moving back through time” he begins with “a place (Delhi) and moves out through space” (7). In so doing, he considers the effects of forces outside of the city on the governance of prostitution within it. The regulation of prostitution in Delhi, he argues, was shaped by developments in India and elsewhere. The enactment of the Suppression of Moral Traffic Acts (SITAs) in Rangoon, Bombay, and Bengal were especially important, as were the activities of imperial feminists, including Meliscent Shephard.
It is in his discussion of SITAs that Legg’s aptitude to read across scales—the local and the national, the specificities of India and the weight of the global—becomes apparent. “Swathed in the patriarchal language of protection and guardianship,” the SITAs “reinforced the state’s powers over women who chose to satisfy the sexual desires of men and to craft their own space within a masculine, political economy” (95). At the surface, this seems no different than what was occurring in other cities in the British Empire. While the SITAs were directly influenced by efforts to regulate prostitution internationally, Legg shows that in India they drew additional potency through Hindu mythology, most notably the Ramayana. The “acronym ‘SITA’ also presented a gift to legislators and campaigners,” Legg argues. “Sita is one of the most revered Hindu goddesses, abducted by the demon King Ravan, and rescued by Ram, an incarnation of Vishnu. Her rescue thus represents the ideal of the anti-traffickers: the passive and victimized woman, returned to the safety of male trusteeship” (96). Legg reads Sita’s exile in the forest as mirroring “the civil abandonment of prostitutes to an urban existence beyond the center of towns, beyond medical care, and beyond social understanding on the basis of a normative judgment regarding their sexuality” (96). Though SITAs were part of a longer global history of legislative interventions aimed at suppressing the trafficking of women and girls and restricting the sexual desires of women, Legg shows how they gained local and national traction through dominant religious and gendered meanings of sexual chastity and purity.
Legg’s book draws effectively on scale as methodology. He also uses scale to organize the book and to introduce its theoretical stakes and engagements. First, each of the three chapters focuses on the brothel, demonstrating how it became a site of intervention that centered on the body, the city, and the empire. Second, Legg draws from an array of archival sources from Delhi, London and Cambridge, producing a detailed and nuanced account of the politics of prostitution. Finally, the book presents a lively theoretical engagement with Michel Foucault on governmentality and Giorgio Agamben on abandonment. But it is here that his archival and historical narrative begins to separate from the intellectual discussion he introduces at the outset.
Building from his previous book and aware of the critiques made by postcolonial scholars, Legg’s interest is in evaluating “the applicability of Foucault’s concepts and observations to the colonial world” (5). He seeks to expand the governmentality literature in two ways: by focusing on scale and the social and by fusing apparatus and assemblage. For Legg, apparatuses are “those governing networks with a strategic function and ordering intent.” Assemblages are “their gatherings, heterogeneous groupings, and emergences” (6). He combines the two skillfully, revealing how the shift from segregation to abolition was influenced by the ongoing political dynamics in the city, the Raj, and the empire. A reevaluation of governmentality, Legg argues, continues “the critical dialogue with Foucault and his Eurocentric blind spots” (4).
Legg’s efforts to interweave archival and theoretical insights—to write across scales—makes Prostitution and the Ends of Empire a bold, exciting and ambitious project. But as I read his book, I wanted to hear more on the significance of Foucault and Agamben for the work at hand. I was left wondering how a study such as this—on the colonial state and the suppression of prostitution in interwar India—might encourage a rethinking and reworking of Foucault and Agamben, not forcolonial contexts but through colonial contexts. In other words, how might we revise and extend their respective insights on governmentality and abandonment through the specific dynamics of the Indian colonial rule in India, including the governance of prostitution? As I approached the end of the book, I anticipated a return to these larger theoretical questions. Instead, Legg concludes with the methodological promise of scale, the “new ways of thinking” it generates in the study of “late colonialism, early internationalism, and the persistent civil abandonment of women who work with sex” (246). These are important considerations. Foucault and Agamben will just have to wait.
Renisa Mawani
The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada