Speaking of ethnographies on anti-trafficking and anti-prostitution interventions in India—which are scarce, this book by Vibhuti Ramachandran offers critical insights into what transpires on the ground, without losing sight of the socio-legal framework. The book is replete with great field insights. Ramachandran engages with a wide pool of feminist literature while trying to make sense of texts from the field, whereby she contributes immensely toward ontologizing prostitution and sex trafficking in the subcontinent—a subject that is intensely multifaceted and could best be understood by addressing its varied layers and complexities.
Ramachandran captures encounters in Delhi and Mumbai between sex workers and state agents, legal actors, and NGO workers, during 2009 and 2010, at sites and processes where anti-prostitution and anti-trafficking interventions meet. She pins her contextual framework in the US-led anti-trafficking regime. The Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act (ITPA) 1956 is central to her book as well as the influence of the US State Department’s annual Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Report in India’s socio-legal context. She documents how contemporary NGOs’ work is shaped both by their participation in the US-funded global anti-trafficking regime, and how Indian law has carved out a role and legitimacy for them.
Ramachandran writes that since the early 2000s, the US State Department has been funding NGOs in India and other Global South countries to train legal actors to treat prostitution as sex trafficking, rescue sex workers from brothels, prosecute traffickers, encourage sex workers to testify against them, and urge them to pursue alternative livelihoods. She highlights that these sites and processes are not only shaped by relatively recent, trans-nationally funded anti-trafficking interventions, but also by long-standing Indian anti-prostitution interventions that focus on gendered victimization.
India’s colonial history of Western intervention constructed ‘vulnerable female subjects’ who had to be saved. Ramachandran brings this together with the idea of the abducted woman, a figure that emerged with the displacement and sexual violation of women during the Partition, rendering her a victim in need of legal remedies and welfare from the state. India’s anti-prostitution interventions have been shaped by this complex legacy which, Ramachandran argues, partly incorporated later anti-trafficking efforts into a broader paternalism and protectionism toward marginalized women. Ramachandran echoes cultural anthropologist Kimberly Walters by stating that such paternalism is now reinforced and intensified by NGO-mediated humanitarianism.
Ramachandran analyses the ‘NGOization’ of Indian law through a ‘governmentalized legal complex’ framework, simultaneously acknowledging that critical NGO scholars have debated whether there is an ‘NGOization’ of feminism and development in the Global South. By ‘NGOization’ she means situations where NGOs, specifically in the neoliberal context, have greater power and influence than whichever agency—usually the state—or set of actors who previously occupied that realm, or where NGOs have taken the place of other civil actors such as social movements.
This she links to the way postcolonial Indian law legitimizes only those which it sees as ‘respectable social welfare’ NGOs. Her fieldwork shows how both state actors and anti-trafficking NGOs have found ways to draw upon the ITPA’s specific provision for ‘respectable’ and ‘experienced’ women social workers ‘in the field of suppression of immoral traffic in persons’—as specified in Section 17(5) of the ITPA—to assist state agencies in governing prostitution.
This, Ramachandra underlines, is why only anti-trafficking NGOs and not sex worker rights groups are asked by the state to assist with inquiries. This is also influenced by other factors such as anti-trafficking NGOs providing rehabilitation programmes for rescued women—which is much approved by funding agencies.
Ramachandran connects the ask for ‘respectable’ women social workers with anthropologist Heather Dell’s concept of hierarchies of femininity—which points to an assumption, as corroborated by anthropologist Julia Kowalski’s study of domestic violence in north India, that educated women can best address the needs of vulnerable women within institutional settings.
Here, she brings into the discussion Shilpa Phadke’s insights into how women are expected to manufacture and demonstrate both purpose (education, employment, or consumption) and respectability (defined through clothing, symbolic markers of ‘good womanhood’ and temporality) to legitimize their presence in public space. Ramachandran argues that efforts by female social workers from privileged backgrounds to ‘save’ and reform women sex workers also mark their own assertions of gendered respectability—something that they consciously cultivate and perform, rather than something which merely exists because of their social status.
Borrowing from Beverley Skeggs’s explanation of respectability—as an ‘amalgam of signs, economics and practices’ that embodies moral authority and as central to the development of class categorizations, Tejaswini Ganti’s emphasis on the ‘middle class’ as bound up with this concept, and Leela Fernandes’s theory that the ‘middle class’ is not a measurable description of an income category, but is symbolic of the acquisition of forms of capital—such as education, credentials, skills, and cultural resources, with historical roots in colonial education and employment policies. Ramachandran refers to historian Radha Kumar’s analysis that this respectability is framed along the axes of caste, class, and gender—as it corroborates her own field experiences.
Ramachandran frankly admits that her presence as a researcher gave her a legitimate reason to be in these stigmatized spaces, where the presence of ‘respectable women’ as against the ‘other’ women (rescued sex workers) was considered incongruous. However, she admits, this ‘respectable’ positionality made it challenging for her to build rapport with the rescued women, who presented their accounts to her as they would to the authority figures.
Ramachandran notes that NGO representatives at the sites were valuable as witnesses because of the ‘respectability’ that they held as middle-class professionals, compared with non-NGO witnesses who were mostly men from lower income backgrounds and sometimes accused in other cases and/or residents of red-light areas. In this context, she argues that India’s colonial legal history, which specified a need for ‘respectable’ and ‘independent’ witnesses, provided the opening for anti-trafficking NGOs to inhabit this role.
This discussion is important because in Indian law, both the Criminal Procedure Code (CrPC) and the ITPA require the presence of ‘respectable’ witnesses, without defining what ‘respectable’ means.
Ramachandran further documents that the authorities conducting inquiries did not merely question the rescued women, but also ‘counselled’ and censured them to lead a ‘dignified life’ and tried to extract the ‘truth’ from them by emphasizing their identities as wives, mothers, sisters and daughters.
This, Ramachandran says, resonates with familial ideology—a term that feminist legal scholars Ratna Kapur and Brenda Crossman have used to talk about a set of norms, values and assumptions about how family life is and should be organized, that has, in turn, shaped the way law regulates women’s roles in the postcolonial state, mostly by understanding women as being in need of protection.
Ramachandran saw that women who came for inquiries understood the relevance of this familial ideology in inquiries. For instance, they often used ‘motherhood’ as a strategy to explain why they did sex work—as has been pointed out by other feminist ethnographers such as Elena Shih and Gowri Vijayakumar.
In this light, Ramachandran makes an important classification—the state agencies and legal institutions she observed were sites of anti-prostitution intervention; whereas NGOs, backed by external funding, pursued an anti-trafficking agenda. For a detailed analysis, one must read this book.
Juanita Kakoty is a writer and researcher interested in epistemological and ontological queries related to gender, violence and social constructionism.