Sexuality

Indian Literature (Sahitya Akademi), 2018

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.

This paper explores how unconventional love was written about and expressed in late colonial north India, with special emphasis on Uttar Pradesh (then known as the United Provinces, hereafter UP), in literary genres, print media and in actual practices. It focuses on malemale sexual bondings in an urban climate, relationships between the younger brother-in-law and elder sister-in-law and inter-religious love. Historians of colonial India have emphasized the moral and sexual worries of the British and the aspiring indigenous middle classes, coupled with a coercive and symbolic regulation of women, which helped in replenishing colonial authority, updating indigenous patriarchy, and proclaiming a collective identity 1 In UP too, endeavours were made particularly by the Hindu publicists to redefine literature, entertainment and the domestic arena, especially pertaining to women, and to forge a respectable, civilized and distinct Hindu cultural and political identity. Less, however, has been said on how a rich variety of literary practices and complexities of cultural imagination were at the same time placing limits upon projections of respectability and homogeneity. As a result, I will argue, there was no single code of Hindu middle-class morality and no final triumph of sexual conservatism in this period. The efficacy of disciplinary power was considerably diluted. 2 Feminists have also pointed out that though women are often victims of violent crimes and aggressive patriarchal displays, the persistent fore-grounding of pain and political correctness marginalizes women's sexual pleasures and desires. 3 1 Influential here has been Michel Foucault's work, which argues that there was a propagation of disciplinary regimes, an intensification in the management and policing of sexuality in the modern period, leading to distinctions of bourgeois iden-

Journal of the History of Sexuality, 2001

Social Change, 2004

A woman has always been socially constructed as an object of lust and desire. Not only she is deemed universally with a subordinate status of 'second sex' but also at times get symbolically associated with nature; perhaps for her inherent emotional stability and ability to reproduce and socialise children. This roleidentity of a 'nurturer' often strategically ignores the 'sexual being' within her; more so often with rigid norms and prescribed behaviours. In this article an attempt will be made on to how female sexuality get repressed/constructed in public as well as private spheres over years yet at the same time are also popularly resisted by deconstructing those myths. One such bold voices was Ismat Chughtai (1915-1991) through her penning of 'Lihaaf', which quintessentially talked about sexual fluidity & bodily desires; perhaps an act of revolution itself in a pre-Independent India.