Sexuality and the History of Disciplinary Transgression

Abstract

In this afterword, I critically reflect on the contributions to the special section, ‘Translating Sex: Locating Sexology in Indian History, 1880–1960’. Through an engagement with the six articles in the collection, my essay explores the uses and limits of the concept of ‘social reform’ and the analytical import and potential drawbacks to the concept of the ‘vernacular’. Finally, thinking through sexology in modern India across questions of caste, religious polarisation and sexual difference, I argue that the history of sexual science is foundational to the history of modern social theory in and about India.

Keywords:

• Colonialism
• epistemology
• gender
• sexuality
• sexual science
• social reform
• social theory
• vernacular

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Durba Mitra, Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020).

2. Douglas E. Haynes, ‘Gandhi, Brahmacharya and Global Sexual Science, 1919–38’, in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol. 43, no. 6 (Dec. 2020), DOI: 10.1080/00856401.2020.182664.

3. Bernard Cohn, ‘The Command of Language and the Language of Command’, in Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 16–56.

4. Bernard Cohn, ‘The Census, Social Structure and Objectification in South Asia’, in Bernard Cohn, An Anthropologist among the Historians and Other Essays (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 224–54.

5. John Forbes Watson and John William Kaye, The People of India: A Series of Photographic Illustrations, with Descriptive Letterpress, of the Races and Tribes of Hindustan (London: Indian Museum, 1868).

6. Herbert Hope Risley, The People of India (Calcutta: Thacker, Spink, and Co., 1908).

7. Mitra, Indian Sex Life, pp. 1–22.

8. Shefali Chandra, ‘Decolonising the Orgasm: Caste, Whiteness and Knowledge Production at the “End of Empire”’, in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol. 43, no. 6 (Dec. 2020), DOI: 10.1080/00856401.2020.1846283.

9. Mitra, Indian Sex Life, pp. 23–61.

10. Ishita Pande, ‘Time for Sex: The Education of Desire and the Conduct of Childhood in Global/Hindu Sexology’, in Veronika Fuechtner et al. (eds), A Global History of Sexual Science 1880–1960 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017), pp. 279–302.

11. Sabrina Datoo, ‘Advertising Medical Technologies in Urdu Print c. 1930: Prosthesis and Possibility’, in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol. 43, no. 6 (Dec. 2020), DOI: 10.1080/00856401.2020.1842967.

12. Tanika Sarkar and Sumit Sarkar, Women and Social Reform in Modern India (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2006).

13. Ibid., p. 5.

14. Lata Mani, ‘Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India’, in Cultural Critique, no. 7 (Autumn 1987), pp. 119–56; and Uma Chakravarti, ‘Whatever Happened to the Vedic Dasi? Orientalism, Nationalism and a Script for the Past’, in Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (eds), Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History (Delhi: Kali for Women, 1989), pp. 27–87.

15. Building on South Asian feminist interventions on gender and power, Anjali Arondekar and Geeta Patel argue that sexuality in the colonial and post-colonial worlds must be treated as epistemology rather than simply as an exemplar of difference from the universal claims of queer studies; see Anjali Arondekar and Geeta Patel, ‘Area Impossible: Notes toward an Introduction’, in GLQ, Vol. 22, no. 2 (April 2016), pp. 151–71.

16. Charu Gupta, ‘Vernacular Sexology from the Margins: A Woman and a Shudra’, in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol. 43, no. 6 (Dec. 2020), DOI: 10.1080/00856401.2020.1824426.

17. Durba Mitra, ‘Translation as Techné: Female Sexuality and the Science of Social Progress in Colonial India’, in History and Technology, Vol. 31, no. 4 (2015), pp. 350–75.

18. Rachel Berger, ‘The Gastropoetics of Sex: Gluttony, Lust and Excess in Late Nationalist India’, in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol. 43, no. 6 (Dec. 2020), DOI: 10.1080/00856401.2020.1828765.

19. Sheldon Pollock, ‘The Cosmopolitan Vernacular’, in Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 57, no. 1 (1998), pp. 6–37.

20. Raziuddin Aquil and Partha Chatterjee (eds), History in the Vernacular (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2008).

21. J.C. Marshman before the Select Committee of the House of Commons on Indian Territories, 21 July 1853, as quoted in Raziuddin Aquil and Partha Chatterjee, History in the Vernacular (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2008), p. 10.

22. Projit Bihari Mukharji, ‘Search for “Context”: Commodities, Consumption and Abul Hasanat’s Material Sexscape’, in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol. 43, no. 6 (Dec. 2020), DOI: 10.1080/00856401.2020.1834678.

23. Mitra, Indian Sex Life, pp. 12–4.

24. Projit Bihari Mukharji, Doctoring Traditions: Ayurveda, Small Technologies, and Braided Sciences (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2016).