Vibhuti Ramachandran, UCI assistant professor of global and international studies, has received the Joseph W. Elder Prize in the Indian Social Sciences for her forthcoming book, “Immoral Traffic”: An Ethnography of Law, NGOs, and the Governance of Prostitution (Cambridge University Press). The honor, bestowed by the American Institute of Indian Studies, is one of two the institute awards annually to recognize the best unpublished book manuscripts on an Indian subject.

Ramachandran’s work takes its readers to the complex intersections of U.S.-funded anti-trafficking campaigns and postcolonial Indian law. It foregrounds the significant role NGOs and legal actors play in suturing and implementing these interventions, examines their impact on sex workers, and centers how sex workers navigate them. The book is rooted in encounters Ramachandran observed between the NGOs and Indian legal actors implementing these interventions, and the women experiencing them. While some of these women (from India and Bangladesh) were trafficked, others did sex work along a complex spectrum of choices and survival strategies.

The book is based on multi-sited ethnographic research across legal processes, state institutions, and NGOs in New Delhi and Mumbai. It demonstrates how Indian law and global anti-trafficking campaigns combine humanitarianism, paternalism, punitive care, bureaucratic practices, moralistic projects of reform, and anti-immigrant panics as they come together to govern prostitution. At the same time, it provides rich insights on how women removed from the sex trade navigate these overlapping interventions that are ostensibly aimed at helping them, but often deeply punitive and moralistic, and rarely in line with the outcomes they seek.

The title, “Immoral Traffic,” comes from India’s anti-prostitution law, which donor-driven NGOs draw upon to implement a U.S.-funded anti-trafficking agenda. This law’s provisions and procedures to “manage” prostitution, and NGOs’ efforts to deploy and extend them, feature centrally throughout the book. Immoral Traffic follows the sequence of interventions this law prescribes and sex workers experience, from rescues to courts to carceral shelters.

The award committee selected Ramachandran’s book manuscript for its impressive “ethnographic study of the sites and processes involved in the contemporary Indian state’s governance of prostitution, particularly as those related to its enforcement of anti-prostitution and anti-trafficking laws and its interactions with state and nonstate actors. This account of the complex roles played by these different actors ranging from state and legal entities to donor driven NGOs to the women targeted for rescue and reform is especially compelling.” The committee also liked the choice to do a multi-sited investigation and to concentrate on Delhi and Mumbai.

Ramachandran joined the UCI faculty in fall 2018. She pursues research on the anthropology of law and gender, with a particular focus on South Asia. She specializes in research on sex trafficking, state policies and discourses on women, gender and sexuality in postcolonial contexts, and critical perspectives on human rights, humanitarianism, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). She has been featured on Anthropology TV for her research on sex workers and the legal system in India and has frequently contributed to the blog Open Democracy as well as other online publications. Her work has been published in interdisciplinary academic journals including Humanity, Law and Social Inquiry, Social Sciences, and Contemporary South Asia. She holds a Ph.D. in anthropology from New York University, a master’s in social sciences from the University of Chicago, a master’s in sociology from the Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi, India, and a bachelor’s in journalism from Lady Shri Ram College, also at the University of Delhi, India.