A question of silence: Sexual economies of modern India

Studies in People's History, 2018

Indian Literature (Sahitya Akademi), 2018

IESHR, 2021

The prostitute has been central to umpteen sophisticated feminist academic works on sexuality in colonial India. Covering the devadasis (temple dancers) of Tanjore, the erudite tawai'fs (courtesans) of Lucknow, the kalavants (artists) of Maharashtra, the monogamous concubines, the nautch girls, the bazaar and cantonment sex workers, and ranging from venereal disease to soldiers, legal criminality to literary victimhood, Victorian prudery to urban Indian reformism, these studies have highlighted that the regulation of deviant female sexuality in pre-colonial times was ambiguous, while colonialism signalled increasing surveillance and disciplining. One would have thus thought that the subject and the figure of prostitute was pretty much exhausted. It goes to the credit of Durba Mitra that she not only holds her ground, but brings new insights and depth to sexuality studies by looking at the prostitute not just as a figure and a category, but a concept, which according to her is the primary grid to foundationally think and write about modern Indian society and the making of disciplinary knowledge. It is this layered and wider meaning that gives Indian Sex Life its freshness, intensity and academic depth. The book derives its title 'from a popular genre of social scientific texts produced in early twentieth century' that linked control of women's sexuality 'to the evolutionary progress of Indian society' (p. 2). Based largely on Bengal, and spanning the century from mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century, the book is an intellectual and social history of sexuality in colonial India, and the shame and stigma associated with women's sexual desires. It analyses how European scholars, British officials and elite Indian male intellectuals, with their transregional networks, utilised new fields of knowledge of society to make normative and 'scientific' claims about deviant female sexuality.

Review of development and change, 1997

Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities (ISSN 0975-2935), 2021

With the emergence of the thriving literary public sphere around the close of the 19 th century across colonial India, the issue of birth control was being debated in various magazines by economists, sexologists, doctors and members of women's organizations. The discussions on reproductive rights of women and dissemination of contraceptive information published in various vernacular periodicals can be situated within a network of other contemporary discourses on "economizing reproduction" that were gaining visibility around this time. The present paper would like to explore the perceptions of women's reproductive body at the beginning of the 20 th century that were being forged through coalescing narratives on bourgeois norms of obscenity (aslilata̅), biopolitical concerns of an emerging nation state in the last throes of anti-colonial struggle, and various takes on (heteronormative) interpersonal relationships between future citizens. It is within this specific context that I would like to examine articles on birth control published during the early 1930s in the 'self-styled' Bengali women's magazine Jayasree̅ launched by revolutionary leader Leela Nag. By situating the opinions voiced by the men and women writing in the pages of this literary periodical vis-à-vis contemporary intellectual trends of birth control movement in India, this paper seeks to study the interactive textual ecosystem within which the writers and readers (the implied future authors) of Jayasree̅ were functioning.

Negotiation Vol-6 Journal of the Department of English, University of North Bengal, 2023

Sexology- the scientific study of sex which emerged between1837 and 1905 soon came to circumscribe the act of sex in the world and in India. An example of the involvement of scientific studies with sex, sexuality and sexual culture is noted by Ishita Pande in Ramnath Lal Suman’s 1927 essay. Suman’s essay, entitled ‘Aprakritik Vyabhichar ka Vaigyanik Vivechan (A Scientific Investigation of Unnatural Licentiousness)’ accompanied “Chocolate”, a short story by Pandey Bechan Sharma ‘Ugra’. The disease portrayed by Ugra through the metaphor of love for chocolate is translated by Sharma as sodomy (Pande 6). This paper seeks to delineate the discourses surrounding homosexuality in the sexological studies in twentieth century Bengal. To this end, the paper takes the sexologist Abul Hasanat’s "All About Sex, Love and Happy Marriage" and "Sachitra Jouna-Bigyan" (Illustrated Sexological Science), and Bipradas Mukhopadhyay’s Jubok-Juboti (Young Men and Women) as the points of departure and compares them. The paper reads these texts from the point of view of power mechanisms in a heteronormative society within the critical lens of “biopower” and “normalizing power” as given by Michel Foucault. Thence, thepaper seeks to present the place occupied by the function of procreation and its contribution to the portrayal of homosexuality in adults as unnatural and deviant, and the denial of identity to homosexuality by the infantilization of it. Thus placing sexological science in Bengal in the late nineteenth and the long twentieth century discursively, the paper then uses the concept of “material sexscape” as defined by Projit Bihari Mukharji to find the material context through the commodities of sexuality that are described in heteronormative terms. The paper concludes by finally discussing the act of the translation of the moral discourses of the colonial forces to create a hybrid discursive realm on sexuality in Indian Sexological Sciences.

2015

A fear of female sexuality and therefore, the need to control it have been felt in many societies and civilizations. This control has assumed different forms in different societies. In colonial Haryana, the custom of widow remarriage emerged as one of the most effective and socially valid forms of this control. The custom did not merely control the limited inheritance rights of the widow, an aspect which we have investigated extensively elsewhere, [1] it also controlled her sexuality, fertility and labour. In this chapter, the question of inheritance is explored in relation to these other aspects. This refocusing affords a wider dimension to the analysis by shifting the spotlight from the landowning class/caste to hitherto unexplored but significantly crucial aspects of the peasant economy which were being manipulated and controlled through the use of customs and 'traditions'. Not only were these traditions being constantly shaped, challenged and reshaped by patriarchy to ...

Signs, 2002