Having spent ten years working on “anti-vice” campaigns in colonial India, looking back on this research I am often struck by the busyness of the archives, and the diversity of the people one meets there. Beyond the staff and colleagues in particular archives, the most recurrent person one meets in the archives is oneself; constantly refiguring both the archive and the researcher by the questions one asks of the indexes, cartons, and stacks. But in the diverse archive I have constructed regarding the regulation of prostitution in interwar India, two very different sets of people emerge: the campaigners; and the campaigned against/for. Neither set is stable nor homogenous. Campaigners included disciplinarians, libertarians, internationalists, Indian nationalists, and social reformers. Depending on their approach, the prostitute was campaigned against, or with, and for. The opinion of prostitutes regarding the latter distinction is rarely archived. However, at often random and unpredictable points in this decade of research, documents have emerged which suggest a glimmer of insight into the lives of women who worked with sex. These women emerge as victims and agents, entrepreneurs and commodities, as defiant but also, as will be shown below, often violently debased.

But as surprising as the variety of individuals in the documents were the scalar worlds they offered insights into. The brothel was often a local, regional, national, imperial, and international space, all at once. As the League of Nations found out during its 1931 traveling commission of enquiry into traffic in women and children in the East, there was very little evidence of international trafficking in India. But the imperial government and its official and non-official populations, as well as Indian entrepreneurs and laborers, were internationally mobile, thus making diseased prostitutes in India a transnational problem.