Book Review: Sexual States: Governance & the Struggle over Antisodomy Law

Jyoti Puri’s Sexual States: Governance and the Struggle over the Antisodomy Law in India is an ambitious study of sexuality, law, and state power in contemporary India. Its central achievement is to establish a larger account of how sexuality helps constitute the state itself. 

If you’re interested in these topics, I highly recommend it. Here’s why.

Puri’s strongest claim is not that the Indian state regulates sexuality, but that sexual regulation helps produce the state as coherent, necessary, rational, and indispensable. Sexuality is not merely an object of governance; it is a field through which the state performs and renews authority.

The book is organised around the struggle against Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, the colonial-era antisodomy law introduced in 1860 and retained in postcolonial India. Puri follows the campaign initiated by the Naz Foundation, while placing it within a wider landscape of sexual governance: the National Crime Records Bureau, Delhi policing, constitutional litigation, and the 2009 Delhi High Court and 2013 Supreme Court judgments.

Puri examines the ordinary life of governance: police records, case law, institutional files, crime statistics, and the practices through which sexuality is classified or made administratively visible. This method dismantles the fantasy of “the state” as a unified actor. Instead, the state appears fragmented, contradictory, and subjective. The book is persuasive when it shows how state irrationalities are actually productive mechanisms. Through them, sexuality becomes disorder, danger, moral contamination, or social excess, thereby justifying further governance.

One major strength is Puri’s refusal to reduce Section 377 to homosexual victimhood. Section 377 was not necessarily the primary legal instrument through which same-sex sexualities were governed. Her reading of case law and policing suggests that the law was used in relation to child sexual assault, while lower-order laws, police practices, vagrancy provisions, and public-nuisance frameworks could be more consequential.

The Maharashtra dance bar ban demonstrates the portability of Puri’s concept beyond homosexuality. The ban appears not as moral conservatism alone, but as a strategy through which the “postliberal” regional state reasserts authority amid liberalisation, privatisation, and changing urban economies. Here Puri’s argument is sharpest: Even when the state appears to retreat from life, it can intensify its presence through morality, rescue, protection, and public order.

The treatment of the 2009 Delhi High Court judgment and the 2013 Supreme Court decision is important. The Supreme Court judgment reaffirms state authority by preserving legislative control over sexuality. This keeps the book a critical study of governance rather than an activist chronicle.

Methodologically, the book is rich. Puri combines fieldwork, interviews, legal analysis, archives, and theory. Her fieldwork across five Indian cities gives the study empirical depth, while visits to state offices let her study state power. Rather than treating bureaucracy as background, she turns it into evidence.

There are, however, limits. Its theoretical density sometimes weakens argumentative clarity. The prose can become overburdened by abstraction. 

A second limitation is that the book is stronger as a critique of state governance than as an account of alternative institutions. Puri rightly warns that struggles often require marginalised groups to pivot towards the state that regulates them. Yet the book is less clear on how sexual freedom might be secured beyond state-centred legal reform. 

Puri’s critique of “neoliberalism” is least convincing where she treats privacy, individual rights, markets, and reduced state reach as suspect because they appear within a postliberalised order. Her evidence often points in the opposite direction: The real agent of coercion is not the market but the state — colonial criminal law, police discretion, bureaucracy, moral regulation, public-health governance, and judicial paternalism. Section 377 was not a product of neoliberal capitalism; it was a colonial penal provision. Likewise, the dance bar ban was not market liberalism, but a prohibitionist state destroying voluntary labour under the language of morality, rescue, and public order. A libertarian reading would therefore accept her strongest insight, that sexuality is used to reproduce state power, while rejecting her tendency to fold market society into the problem. 

A third issue concerns historical timing. Published in 2016, the book ends before the Indian Supreme Court’s 2018 judgment in Navtej Singh Johar v. Union of India, which decriminalised consensual same-sex relations. 

Despite these limitations, Sexual States is a major contribution to queer studies, South Asian studies, and socio-legal scholarship. Puri shows that the state is not merely a legal machine that intervenes in sexual life; rather, its authority is staged through anxieties about sexual disorder, protection, morality, violence, health, and nation. 

Sexual States is not only a study of India’s antisodomy law; it is a sophisticated account of how sexuality makes the state appear necessary. The result is a demanding but important book for anyone concerned with law, state power, and the institutional conditions of queer freedom in modern India and beyond, especially for liberal readers today.

This book review was originally published in LearnLiberty.