During the past two decades, postcolonial feminist scholarship has brought considerable attention to the centrality of colonial families in the forging of modern empires. Durba Ghosh's Sex and the Family in Colonial India offers a significant addition to this scholarship, focusing on intimate relationships between European men and indigenous women in early colonial India. Meticulously researched and written in unencumbered prose, Ghosh's book not only brings new visibility to the women in these relationships, but also shows how their relationships with European men pushed imperial formations of race, class, and respectability and also impelled new delineations of the colonial state in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British India.

Ghosh's work begins by unsettling long-held scholarly assumptions about what these relationships suggest about contemporary British attitudes toward Indian society. The standard narrative has suggested that in the eighteenth century, the British broadly accepted such relationships between Indian women and East India Company men (soldiers, traders, officers), but that these relationships began to be discouraged and marginalized by the end of the century with the expansion of British imperial power and the rise of a universalizing liberal ideology. In contrast to this depiction, Ghosh emphasizes that although such relationships were common and broadly tolerated in the early period, elite and upwardly mobile British men from the beginning demonstrated considerable anxiety about the respectability of these unions and especially of the children that they produced. As Ghosh argues, British “national affiliations and imperial priorities were being actively worked out from the earliest moments of the Anglo-Indian encounter, particularly on the bodies of native women” (p. 10).

Ghosh's expansive grasp and creative use of sources forms one of the most impressive aspects of this work. Ghosh discovers evidence of these relationships—and the agency of the women within them—in colonial records ranging from wills to baptism records to civil and criminal court records to pension administration to personal correspondence. Finding the traces of these women within the archive poses some difficulty, particularly after the early nineteenth century. Underscoring the significant implications for feminist methodology, Ghosh shows how it is often the absence of a name, or at times a renaming (with a British Christian name) that marks the presence of an Indian woman companion within the colonial archive. Throughout the book, Ghosh emphasizes “the ways in which indigenous women were made into subjects by the colonial social and legal order and made themselves into subjects” (p. 15). Alongside the attentive reading of the colonial archive this requires, one of the strengths of the work is how it places these relationships along multiple axes, locating them within the histories of early colonial state formation, of the East India Company and British militaries in India, and of related patterns of colonial sexual and familial relations in the Americas, Africa, and Southeast Asia. As such, this work effectively traces key elements of what Mrinalini Sinha has described as an “imperial social formation,” linking British activities across imperial contact zones (Specters of Mother India: The Global Restructuring of an Empire, [Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006]).

The chapters of the book examine both renowned and unknown examples of such relationships, the vicissitudes and uncertainties of these women's lives, and the ways in which the colonial state became involved in regulating these relationships—particularly in the context of domestic violence and of women's claims to inherit property or pensions from their husbands or paramours. Ghosh argues that, ironically, the claims of indigenous women pushed the colonial state toward more rigid definition of race and race-based entitlements. Some of the most intriguing portions of the book highlight the divergences between elite relationships of high-ranking British officers with high-born Indian women on the one hand, and those of rank-and-file soldiers with lower status Indian women on the other—divergences that raise a host of questions concerning precolonial elite and nonelite forms of sexual patronage and alliance and their connections to colonial forms. The book also devotes considerable attention to showing how both individual British patriarchs and eventually formal state institutions sought to produce the children of such unions as respectable and loyal British subjects by permanently separating them from their mothers. Again and again, Ghosh shows how the colonial state, like the contemporary British metropolitan state, reinforced patriarchal rights and denied women's claims, although in uneven and at times unpredictable ways. In its attentiveness to these uneven and historically shifting actions of the colonial state, Ghosh's analysis also lends itself to a consideration of the colonial state's simultaneous elaboration of pastoral as well as exclusionary forms of patriarchal power.

Ghosh's book will be immensely valuable to scholars of gender, race, and empire, both in showing the range, extent, and everyday character of these alternately exoticized and invisible relationships, and in demonstrating their material centrality to early imperial formations.