When the British Empire arrived in South Asia, it did not just bring railways, courts, and clerks. It brought sex laws. And many of those laws—written by Victorian men obsessed with order, property, and female chastity—still sit stubbornly inside South Asian legal systems today, long after the Union Jack was lowered. Nowhere is this colonial legacy more intimate, or more invasive, than in how women’s bodies, sexual behaviour, marriage choices, and livelihoods were regulated under imperial rule.
The cornerstone was legal codification. In 1860, British administrators in India introduced the Indian Penal Code, a sweeping attempt to rationalise crime and punishment across an impossibly diverse population. In reality, it imposed a narrow Victorian moral universe onto millions of people. Sex was to be marital, heterosexual, and reproductive; anything else became suspicious, criminal, or both. Adultery was treated as a crime against a husband’s proprietary rights rather than a woman’s autonomy. “Unnatural offences,” a vague category borrowed directly from English moral panic, criminalised non-normative sexual acts and later became a blunt tool against queer intimacy across the subcontinent.
These provisions were not cultural misunderstandings. They were deliberate. British lawmakers openly distrusted what they saw as South Asia’s “excessive” sexual cultures—temple erotica, non-binary gender roles, flexible household arrangements—and replaced them with laws designed to discipline desire. When independence came, many new states kept these codes intact, not because they reflected local values, but because dismantling them was politically inconvenient.
Marriage was another obsession. Colonial authorities treated it less as a personal relationship and more as a system of social management. British rule froze religious and caste identities into “personal laws,” governing who could marry, inherit, divorce, or remarry. Interfaith and intercaste unions were viewed with suspicion, as threats to social order. The Special Marriage Act of 1872 offered a civil marriage option, but only at a price: couples often had to renounce religious affiliation entirely, a clear signal that crossing boundaries would not be easy or neutral.
Women bore the brunt of this system. Reform was framed as protection, but always with limits. When the Age of Consent Act was passed in 1891, raising the legal age for girls from ten to twelve—even within marriage—it triggered outrage among conservative elites who accused the British of interfering with “tradition.” The reform itself was modest, even by nineteenth-century standards, yet it revealed how deeply colonial authorities believed they had the right to regulate sex inside Indian households, while still refusing to recognise women as independent sexual subjects.
Widows were another battleground. The abolition of sati in 1829 is often cited as a moral triumph of empire, and while it undoubtedly saved lives, it also served British self-image. Ending widow burning allowed colonial rulers to portray themselves as civilisers, even as they left intact the broader structures that rendered widows economically dependent and socially marginal. The Hindu Widows’ Remarriage Act of 1856 legalised remarriage but often stripped widows of inheritance rights, effectively forcing them to choose between companionship and property. Reform, yes—but on terms set by men.
Nowhere was colonial hypocrisy more visible than in the regulation of prostitution. British troops in India were seen as vital assets of empire, and their sexual health became a logistical concern. From the 1860s onward, colonial authorities introduced a system of registration, surveillance, and forced medical examinations for women suspected of selling sex near military cantonments. These women—many poor, displaced, or widowed—were confined, inspected for venereal disease, and punished if they resisted. Soldiers, meanwhile, faced little scrutiny. The logic was simple and brutal: women’s bodies were expendable instruments for imperial hygiene.
These regimes were justified as public health measures, but they relied on coercion and stigma. Indian feminists and reformers eventually joined British abolitionists in condemning the system, pointing out its gendered cruelty and racialised assumptions. Still, echoes of these policies linger today in South Asia’s policing of sex work, where women are criminalised or “rescued” in ways that deny them agency while leaving male clients largely invisible.
Property rights offered another narrow corridor of reform. Acts allowing married women to retain earnings or initiate certain legal proceedings were introduced in the late nineteenth century, mirroring changes in Britain itself. Yet these reforms remained partial and uneven, often applied differently depending on religion or community. Women were recognised as legal persons just enough to stabilise households, not enough to challenge patriarchal control.
Perhaps the most enduring legacy of British colonial law is not any single statute, but the mindset it entrenched: that sexuality must be governed, classified, and punished in the name of order. After independence, many South Asian governments retained colonial laws on adultery, “unnatural sex,” and moral conduct, reframing them as national tradition rather than imperial inheritance. It took decades of activism for courts in India, Sri Lanka, and elsewhere to acknowledge what feminists and queer activists had long argued—that these laws were never indigenous, never neutral, and never harmless.
For women, the consequences have been generational. Colonial law reshaped intimacy into something monitored by the state, negotiated through male guardians, and constrained by rigid categories of respectability. It narrowed the space for sexual freedom while claiming to protect morality. It disciplined mixed marriages while professing tolerance. It punished sex workers while relying on their labour. Today, when politicians across South Asia defend restrictive gender laws as “cultural,” it is worth remembering whose culture they are really protecting. The empire may be gone, but its bedroom rules are still very much alive—and they have been policing women’s bodies for far too long.
I’ve spent enough time in courtrooms, NGO workshops, and whispered late-night conversations with women across South Asia to recognise a familiar ghost. He usually wears a robe, carries a law book, and insists—very calmly—that he is only protecting morality. Spoiler: he’s British, dead, and still running the show.
What makes me grind my teeth is not just that colonial sex laws were cruel. It’s that they were intimate. They crawled straight into bedrooms, wombs, and kitchens. They decided which kinds of love were respectable, which marriages were suspicious, and which women were disposable. And then—here’s the trick—they dressed all of this up as civilisation.
I’ve sat with Indian women who were told adultery was a crime but only if they were the ones who strayed. I’ve met Sri Lankan queer friends who grew up believing their desire was “against nature,” not realising the phrase came straight from a Victorian bureaucrat who probably fainted at the sight of an ankle. I’ve listened to sex workers in Bangladesh describe police raids that feel eerily similar to nineteenth-century “health inspections,” except now the uniforms have changed and the shame hasn’t.
Colonial law loved women only as symbols: pure wives, tragic widows, fallen prostitutes. Never as decision-makers. Never as adults with appetites, contradictions, or inconvenient choices. Reform was allowed—but only if it didn’t threaten male control of property, lineage, or reputation. Widow remarriage? Fine, but don’t touch inheritance. Raise the age of consent? Fine, but keep girls inside marriage. Civil marriage? Fine, but renounce who you are first.
And here’s the part that really annoys Auntie: decades after independence, our politicians still defend these laws as “Asian values.” Darling, if a rule was drafted in the 1860s by a colonial committee obsessed with order and empire, it is not ancestral wisdom. It is imported repression with a tan.
What gives me hope is that women, queer people, and sex workers across the region are finally calling this bluff. They’re naming colonial laws as colonial, refusing to confuse control with culture. They’re saying—loudly—that intimacy does not belong to the state, marriage is not a moral police station, and women’s bodies are not heritage sites to be guarded by dead men’s rules.
Empire may have left the room, but Auntie is here to make sure it doesn’t get the last word.