The Contagious Diseases Act (CDA) was enacted across the British empire in 1864 in order to regulate venereal disease (VD) in the British army. The act unleashed an unprecedented level of sexual surveillance of colonized and working-class women who were interned in “lock hospitals” if found suffering from VD. India played a unique role in the enactment of the CDA. A prototype of the act was already enforced in several military cantonments in British India and this model was eventually exported to Britain and applied throughout the empire. Existing historiography has effectively demonstrated how the CDA exacerbated the gulf between the colonizer and the colonized while simultaneously stigmatizing native sexual practices and female sexuality, in particular. This panel aims to nuance our understanding of the all-pervading nature of imperial sexual surveillance by showing how ordinary Indian women resisted illegal attempts of medical and sexual regulation of their bodies while elite Indians either actively augmented the surveillance efforts of the British or created new and competing regimes of biopolitics. The three papers in the panel represent three key moments during the enactment and aftermath of the CDA. The first paper set in the first decade of the institution of the CDA shows how an elite family of native physicians in Delhi practicing Greco-Islamic healing collaborated with the British government in combatting VD as well as in its efforts of sexual surveillance. The second paper examines the period immediately following the repeal of the CDA between the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. It reveals the networks through which native women across South Asia acquired information about the repeal of the act and refused stealthy attempts of illegal medical regulation, thereby becoming freer subjects. The third paper in the panel focuses on the inter-war period and argues that the multiple and overlapping discourses of sexology, eugenics, and social hygiene deployed by Indian sexologists as well as global institutions like the British Social Hygiene Council and the League of Nations created a new regime of sexual hygiene which transformed VD into a wider-public health issue. Resisting a simplified and binary account of the sexual policing of the colonized by the colonizer, the granular historical accounts presented in the three papers reveal that imperial sexual regulation was conditioned by acts of collaboration, competition, as well as resistance across multiple registers of power. Besides, by focusing on the evolving histories of VD and prostitution regulation across a century, the panel also provides a window into the evolving social and political realities of colonial rule in India. The three papers cover a diverse array of sources in Persian, Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, and English and represent the intersection of in-depth archival research together with the examination of an eclectic collection of sources such as sexology manuals and Greco-Islamic texts on healing. The panel brings together diverse methodological perspectives from histories of gender and sexuality, science and medicine, and law while proposing to initiate a fresh approach to the historical study of prostitution and VD in South Asia.