Chapter 1 provides the contextual and conceptual frameworks shaping the book. It explains the sociolegal context in which the book is situated – in particular, India’s Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act (ITPA) of 1956, the US-led anti-trafficking regime, and the role of anti-trafficking NGOs. Conceptually, Chapter 1 lays out how the book places postcolonial law in a broader field of neoliberal government including state agencies and foreign-funded NGOs acting upon prostitution. It explains how the book pursues new directions in legal anthropology with an attentiveness to multiple scales of governance and law’s implementation by state and nonstate actors, while remaining deeply rooted in the minutiae of legal practices and spaces. Finally, Chapter 1 shows how the book is in dialogue with interdisciplinary feminist scholars who have critiqued anti-trafficking campaigns and provided nuanced ethnographic insights on the complexities of sex workers’ lives. It explains how, unlike these studies, this book is not an ethnography of sex work, sex trafficking, or even of anti-trafficking interventions alone. Instead, it explores how India’s anti-prostitution law and global anti-trafficking campaigns converge and act upon sex workers, and how sex workers navigate and resist them.

The introduction explains the setting of the ethnography at the intersections of law, NGOs, the Indian state, and the global anti-trafficking regime. It explains the sequence of interventions the book will follow, from rescues to courts to shelters, prescribed by Indian law and implemented by legal actors and NGOs. It lays out the sites and processes the book will explore through encounters between those implementing these interventions, and those experiencing them. It outlines the book’s central aims: how it uses the intersections of anti-trafficking and anti-prostitution interventions as points of entry to foreground how sex workers navigate them, critique the prevalent assumptions and preferred solutions of the global anti-trafficking regime, and explore the complex relationship between law and NGOs in India. It discusses the broader concerns and approaches these interventions bring to the governance of prostitution – global humanitarianism, policing and criminal justice, the paternalism of the Indian state and NGOs, neoliberal women’s empowerment programs, and an anti-immigrant sociopolitical climate. The introduction also explains the author’s methods, research design, and positionality, and the organization of the book.

The author reflects on some significant legal and policy developments – on the newly expanded scope of anti-trafficking, on the rehabilitation of sex workers, and on the escalated targeting of Bangladeshi migrants – that have emerged since her ethnographic research. Through these updates, she revisits some of the key themes outlined in the Introduction and tracked through the book: the excess of legality around the governance of prostitution and trafficking in India, the central role played by NGOs in these forms of governance, and the impact of these forms of governance on the women they target. It is argued that even as the legal framework of anti-trafficking now exceeds that of anti-prostitution, they continue to remain deeply connected, through the work of anti-trafficking NGOs, and through existing models of intervention established under India’s anti-prostitution law (the ITPA). The author also discusses how the anti-immigrant sentiments against Bangladeshi women that shaped the implementation of anti-prostitution and anti-trafficking imperatives during her research have been greatly magnified and exacerbated by India’s Hindu right wing-led government in the decade since.