Durba Ghosh's Sex and the Family in Colonial India explores the history of the early period of British India, 1760–1840, and provides a strong corrective to the conventional narrative that assumes significantly less racial hierarchy and more cross-cultural harmony during this era. Through careful and creative archival work, Ghosh traces the ways in which interracial families and familial relationships were a significant object of anxiety and debate, both for the immediate people involved and for the colonial administrative apparatus. Defining what properly constituted a “family” was a key concern for purposes of governance, because who counted as a British subject and who did not was determined, in large part, through familial ties such as long-term cohabitation, marriage, and parentage. As Ghosh demonstrates, imperial authorities such as the courts interpreted a broad range of conjugal relationships to be families in a legal sense, following British common-law tradition: “In return for defining ‘family’ in a broad way, through its governing institutions, the company state was able to extend and legitimize its political authority over some of the most marginal members of colonial society—native women and mixed-race children—by protecting the interests of European men within their families and households” (13). Finding these marginal figures in the archives is no easy task, and the methods Ghosh uses to uncover them provide an important model for others who work with similar historical materials. Investigating where native women appear in documents such as wills, birth registers, court proceedings, petitions to charitable organizations—and noting where they are unnamed and/or vanish from these records—Ghosh manages to illuminate much that has been hidden from history. In so doing, she elucidates the workings of governmentality in this time and place, tracing the complex negotiations of individual agency and subjectivity vis-à-vis bureaucratic categories of identity.

Chapter 1 provides a discursive framework of representations of native female “companions” in British popular imagination in the eighteenth century. In it, Ghosh complicates the exotic interracial romance narrative that often serves as a touchstone of the early imperial era, before the advent of scientific racism and post-1857 racial distance. She does this by reading guidebooks, novels, personal writings, and painted portraits to tease out the anxieties about social and cultural contamination, and the disruption of the body politic, raised by native companions. The five chapters that follow empirically trace the shifts in these discourses over her time period.

Chapter 2 explores the lives of two high-ranking company officials—William Palmer (1742–1816) and James Achilles Kirkpatrick (1762–1805), both residents at princely courts—and their intimate relationships with native women. On the one hand, these relationships gave Palmer and Kirkpatrick favored access in the courts and forged important political alliances, enabling trade agreements in regions that the company did not then have to secure with its own manpower. At the same time, however, these men negotiated social anxieties about respectability, both mindful of undermining British status through taints of political corruption and social impropriety and worried about the future prospects of their mixed-race children.

Chapter 3 moves to a wider scope, delving into a range of wills left by European men in India to analyze the ways in which they made provisions for their families. Wills here are particularly evocative documents; as Ghosh notes: “In negotiating between a sexual past that was often private and creating a respectable future for their families, European men demonstrated some of the complexity and ambivalence that shaped their sense of self, their privileged locations in a colonial society that prized the gendered and racial aspects of household and community order” (110). An interesting class dynamic that she uncovers is that established middle-class men were more likely to bequeath the bulk of their estates to their children, especially sons, with lesser provisions for their native companions; by contrast, lower-class and lower-middle-class men with lesser estates more typically gave their female companions all or most of their assets. Ghosh also notes that dramatically unequal relationships—for example, between a man and his servant or slave—undermined a man's masculinity, and thus men in such relationships emphasized romantic love in their wills, as if to make up for the inequality by constructing themselves as worthy patriarchs. Chapter 4 continues the exploration of wills, those left by native women. In finding traces of these women's lives in the archives, Ghosh argues that we should see them as self-fashioning actors with agency, whose identities were shaped by the particular bureaucratic demands of the colonial state apparatus. She explores the ways in which women took on new names, strategically locating themselves with respect to their various communities and to the state. Two specific examples—Begum Samru/Farzana/Joanna Zeb-un-nissa and Halima/Helene Bennett—go into some detail about these women's life stories, their relative achievements and failures, showing their lives to be full of hybridity through the ways in which they recorded their subjectivities in the archives. While admittedly only a partial picture of their subjectivities, this chapter adds a great deal to our understanding of native women's agency and the possibilities for and limits of it.

Chapter 5 examines the court system, specifically family cases involving inheritance disputes and domestic violence. Overall, legal decisions in such cases show that the colonial state held men accountable for their crimes of domestic violence while reinforcing their power and responsibility over the bodies of those in their households, in parallel with British power over its colonies. Although fundamentally about the rights of individuals, legal decisions as a body created definitions of family and reified colonial social hierarchies while also constructing the political legitimacy of the state. Chapter 6 turns to the military, tracing its reliance on native women's labor and demonstrating how central these women were to daily life in the barracks. Further, this chapter investigates the claims that native women made on two military charitable funds—Lord Clive's Fund, which supported soldiers’ widows, and the Military Orphan Society, which provided schooling and support for military orphans—again demonstrating the creative agency of women who pushed the state to count them and their children as deserving beneficiaries.

Ghosh's archival methodologies are perhaps the largest contribution of her book, serving as a model of how to read against the grain to uncover what is far from obvious. In doing so, Ghosh is able to provide new evidence of native women's agency. She also deserves praise for adding to the body of scholarship on the centrality of gender to empire by showing that many concerns of the colonial state were worked out on the terrain of native women's bodies and families. This work begs for further elaboration, though, to gain a sense of the representativeness of Ghosh's examples. The weaker points of this book are the leaps made between the micro- and macrolevels of history; thus, it would be an improvement to see the links between these levels more strongly tied. Grappling more thoroughly with Foucault's concept of governmentality would also benefit Ghosh, because her empirical findings can add much to our understanding of the everyday workings of that concept. This is a compelling and rewarding book that should be of interest to a range of scholars of empire and gender.