Translation as techné: female sexuality and the science of social progress in colonial India

Abstract

In this article, I analyze processes of translation that shaped the science of sex in eastern India between the 1880s and the 1930s. I trace the impact of translation – the rendering of words between the language of English and Bengali as well as the travel and transformation of concepts – through close textual analysis of influential Bengali-language medical and scientific textbooks on nymphomania, female sexual excesses, and the evolution of Indian society. The translation of sexual categories was a techné by which Bengali intellectuals produced categories of social behavior and identity as equivalent and homogenous. Through claims of equivalence in translation, Bengali scientists argued for the commensurability of Indian social practices with universalist schemes of social evolution and civilizational progress. This process of exchange pivoted on the figure of the sexually deviant woman, who became a key site of translation and categorical equivalence. In thinking translation through techné, I foreground how a semiotics of female sexuality produced ‘the social’ as an object of inquiry in colonial India.

Keywords:

• Sexuality
• translation
• India
• science
• technology
• colonialism

Acknowledgements

I thank Asif Siddiqi and Martin Collins for their detailed and clarifying comments on several drafts of this essay. Thanks to Manan Ahmed for his close reading and suggestive feedback. Thank you to Premesh Lalu and the Center for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape for the invitation to participate in the 2015 Winter School, ‘Technically Speaking’ where I discussed these materials and received valuable comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Funding

This research was supported in part by a Fulbright-Nehru research award to India.

Notes

1. By ‘man’ here I mean to denote the archetypal subject of sociological, political, scientific, and philosophical thought deployed throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as found in a range of texts like Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871).

2. Foucault, The History of Sexuality v. I, 58. For a broad discussion of the categorization of sexual identities and practices in Britain, see Porter and Hall, The Facts of Life.

3. There is a diverse literature on Victorian and Euro-American ideas about homosexuality and the regulation of same sex desire in nineteenth century Britain. See, for example, Brady, Masculinity and Male Homosexuality in Britain; Chauncey, “From Sexual Inversion to Homosexuality”; Cocks, Nameless Offences; Cook, London and the Culture of Homosexuality; Dellamora, Masculine Desire; Robb, Strangers; Rosario, ed. Science and Homosexualities. From my survey of Bengali materials, it appears that extended discussions of homosexuality, and more broadly, the marginalization of homosexual ‘types’ and practices, only occur from around the early 1950s in Bengali scientific publications, and even then, remained rare in comparison to scientific writings on the control of female sexuality.

4. For scholarly engagements with the history of prostitution and women and the sexual sciences in European history, see for example, Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society; Russett, Sexual Science; Moscucci, The Science of Woman and Spongberg, Feminizing Venereal Disease.

5. Liu, Tokens of Exchange, 1–12. On the politics of translation in the colonial and post-colonial world, see also Niranjana, Siting Translation and Spivak, “The Politics of Translation,” 179–200.

6. For thoughtful engagements with the question of translation and circulation in relation to ‘problematizing global knowledge,’ see the special issue on global knowledge, volume 23 of Theory, Culture, and Society from 2006, including Sakai, “Translation”; Tagore, “The possibility of translation” and Venn, “Translation: politics and ethics.” I thank Professor Indrani Chatterjee for these references.

7. See Martin Heidegger’s engagement with techné in his seminal essay “The Question Concerning Technology,” 99–113. As he describes in this seminal critique of modern technology, the Greek concept techné highlights how technology must be treated beyond instrumentalist terms that see technology as a means to an end. Instead, technology in the modern world required a broader interpretation of techné that made visible the processes that constitute man’s understanding and knowledge of the world. He proposes that the question of man’s relationship to technology in the modern world requires an engagement with techné, a mode of revealing those forms and techniques that shape man’s often destructive relationship to the world. No longer simply a prosthesis supplemental to man, the ‘question’ of technology becomes imperative to understanding the poetic techniques that shape human interpretations of the modern world.

8. The question of translation has been important in historical investigations of science in colonial India, most often as a question of institutions and individuals engaged in acts of translation. My hope is to contribute to these conversations with a detailed reading of how translation plays out in text, with particular interest in the selective terminology that becomes subject to translation. For a broad discussion of translation in scientific texts in colonial India, Gyan Prakash addresses of the politics of translation in institutions of science in colonial India in Prakash, Another Reason, 49–84.

9. Michel Foucault utilizes a reading of the ambiguities of techné to shift instrumentalist understandings of technique and technology from material machines and tools to the function of knowledge in modern formations of power. He does so throughout his work, explicitly in Foucault, The History of Sexuality v. 1. See also a thoughtful discussion of Foucault’s flexible uses of technology as a conceptual analytic in Behrent, “Foucault and Technology.”

10. Here I am influenced by Friedrich Kittler, philosopher of technology and media studies, in his influential Discourse Networks 1800/1900. For Kittler, the philosophical significance of literature was not simply about interpretation, but about tracing the processes that built networks linking humans to institutions and human knowledge formation. He describes in categorical significance of ‘woman’ as a metaphor in shaping literary signs in the written word in 1800. For Kittler, the mechanical marks on the page in the late nineteenth century shaped the experience of discourse itself. While I disagree with Kittler that these technologies produce a dramatic break in knowledge formation from earlier stages, his insights reveal the way print technologies shaped the appearance and ontology of knowledge through printed text at the turn of the century.

11. Key histories of gendered power in colonial India include Gupta, Sexuality, Obscenity, Community; Nair, Women and Law in Colonial India; Sarkar, Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation; Sinha, Colonial Masculinity; Mani, Contentious Traditions; Sangari and Vaid, eds. Recasting Women.

12. See Afsaneh Najmabadi, Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards, on foregrounding questions of sexuality in historical investigations that go beyond gender to address the historical making of sexuality and sexual difference. See also Anjali Arondekar’s treatment of sexuality in her book, For the Record, on the politics of archival desire in histories of sexuality. In my research into the semiotics of sex in Bengal, I seek to develop an analytical framework for thinking about sexual categories in Indian languages, historicizing conceptions of sex acts, sexual behavior, and sexual desire. I shift focus from imperial histories of gender and sexuality, which have largely focused on sexuality in the European colonial imagination (exemplified by the influential work of Ann Laura Stoler), towards a history of sexual norms in the social and political discourses of colonized peoples.

13. Historians have demonstrated that the sexual sciences played a significant role in shaping the human sciences and forms of social scientific inquiry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, particularly for Europe and the United States. There are histories of sexuality for the modern West that address the role of the sexual sciences in relation to broader histories of the human sciences. Key books include Bland and Doan, Sexology in Culture; Irvine, Disorders of Desire; Hall and Porter, The Facts of Life; Irvine, Disorders of Desire; Lacquer, Making Sex; Mort, Dangerous Sexualities; Oosterhuis, Stepchildren of Nature and Russett, Sexual Science; On the transnational and non-western significance of circulating sexual sciences in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see Fruhstuck, Colonizing Sex and Bauer’s edited collection, Sexology and Translation. An ongoing project edited by Veronika Fuechtner and Douglas Haynes will also examine the global history of sexology.

14. Sinha, Colonial Masculinity, 2–5.

15. Ghosh, “An Uncertain ‘Coming of the Book,’ 23–55.

16. Mukharji, Nationalizing the Body, 77–83.

17. Ibid., 81–3.

18. Mukharji provides a useful analysis of histories of ‘vernacular’ and ‘vernacularization’ in Indian languages. See ibid., 30–1.

19. Chatterjee, Texts of Power, 17. Bruno Latour has argued that scientific ideas have no ‘core’ or ‘essence,’ and necessarily mutate and transform in the process of interpretation. Latour describes a process where scientific investigations transform and cohere, where scientific knowledge is always subject to processes of ‘translation.’ The final form of a scientific idea is only given a ‘core’ or central identity in the claim of absolute scientific authority, and the processes that constituted that knowledge are subsequently hidden from view. Thus, claims of an authoritative science in print, as Heidegger postulates in thinking the question of technology, intentionally obscures techné, the processes of revealing and meaning-making that shaped the translation of ideas to claims of authoritative knowledge.

20. Ibid., 17–8.

21. Anonymous, Sukh Sambhog Ratnakar. See also Bidisha Ray’s discussion of this text in the context of ‘bhadralok’ cultures of propriety in relation to colonial modernity in Ray, “Contesting Respectability,” 62–3.

22. Ibid., 195.

23. Groneman, Nymphomania.

24. Bandyopadhyay, Stri Shiksha, 37.

25. The anonymity of the author, and his claim to being a medical doctor, may reflect a growing conjugal ‘advice’ literature appearing in the pulp publications of Calcutta in the late nineteenth century. Pradip Kumar Bose describes how there were a wide array of manuals on conjugal satisfaction and sex according to compiled bibliographies of the nineteenth century. See the introduction and chapter 3 of Bose, Health and Society in Bengal.

26. Anonymous, Sukh Sambhog Ratnakar, 197.

27. Ibid., 197.

28. Ibid., 197–8.

29. Ibid., 198–9.

30. Ibid., 199.

31. Ibid., 199.

32. Bandyopadhyay, Arya Griha-Chikitsa, 43.

33. Bhattacharya, Strirog Chikitsa.

34. Moscucci, The Science of Woman.

35. Sanyala, Strirog; Majumdar, Stri Chikitsa; Simha, Sophala Strirog Chikitsa and Mukhopadhyay, Yuvati-Jiban.

36. Forbes, Women in India, 157–88.

37. Bhattacharya, Strirog Chikitsa, 10.

38. See for example, discussions in Bengali medical literature on menstrual disorders from the nineteenth century, which suggested menstruation was proof of the vulnerable nature of women’s reproductive functions. This idea of that the reproductive woman was more susceptible to sexual perversion and the resultant disrepute because of her body was central to debates about menstruation and the age of consent for marriage. ‘The Nature of woman’; Pande, Medicine, Race and Liberalism in British Bengal, 151–76.

39. On the history of medical ideas of nymphomania in the west, see Groneman, Nymphomania; Terry and Urla, Deviant Bodies.

40. Bhattacharya, Strirog Chikitsa, 38.

41. There is a growing literature on the history of ‘hysteria’ in the context of modern Europe and America. See Evans, Fits and starts; Gilman, Hysteria Beyond Freud; Arnaud, On Hysteria. On ‘hysteria’ in relation to the development of new technologies, see, Maines, The Technology of the Orgasm.

42. Guha, “The Nature of woman”; Bandyopadhyay, Arya Griha-chikitsa.

43. Bhattacharya, Strirog Chikitsa, 38.

44. Ibid., 38.

45. Ibid., 39.

46. Ibid., 39.

47. Ibid., 39.

48. Ibid., 41.

49. Ibid., 41.

50. Bose, Food, 93–4, quoted in Sengupta, “Nation on a Platter.”

51. Basu, Se Kal ar e Kal, 30–40.

52. Sengupta, “Nation on a Platter.” Sengupta’s discussion of nationalist dietary politics emphasizes the specific importance of meat in questions of Bengali effeminancy and eventual self-governance.

53. Chundra was Professor of Medicine and Clinical Medicine at National Medical College, Calcutta, Emeritus Professor of Clinical Medicine, College of Physicians and Surgeons of Calcutta and India, Consulting Physician to Calcutta Free Hospital, and Victoria Refuge Hospital, and president of the medical conference on the reorganization of private medical colleges of Bengal. He was also Associate Editor of the Indian Medical Record, Fellow of the Indian Academy of Science, a Fellow of the Indian Academy of Science, and a Member of the Royal Institute of Public Health, London. According to a review of Laws of Sexual Philosophy, he authored medical textbooks in the early twentieth century, including A Treatise in Treatment, The Art of Life, and A Manual of Medicine. See Hillman, ed. Post-Graduate, 690.

54. Chundra, Laws of Sexual Philosophy.

55. Ibid., 8.

56. Ibid., 8.

57. Ibid., iv.

58. Ibid., 95.

59. Ibid., 96.

60. Hillman, Post-Graduate, 690.

61. Ibid., 691.

62. Hare and Martin, eds. Therapeutic Gazette, 833.

63. Mukhopadhyay, “Evolution of Historiography in Bengali (1800–1947).”

64. Wood, Clinical Gynaecology.

65. Maitra, Rati Yantradira Pida, 57. “biological facts” appears in English.

66. Ibid., 63.

67. Ibid., 58.

68. Ibid., 58.

69. Ibid, 58.

70. Meyer Fortes, in a series of lectures delivered in 1963, argued that Lewis Henry Morgan was the ‘founding father’ of structural studies of kinship and social organization. His influence in Indian social and political thought was profound, influencing everything from studies of kinship and social order, hierarchies of caste, to sexual practices and social evolution. See Fortes, Kinship and the Social Order and Thomas Trautmann’s definitive study, Lewis Henry Morgan and the Invention of Kinship.

71. Morgan, Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family, 493.

72. Mantena, Alibis of Empire.

73. Maitra, Rati Yantradira Pida, 60.

74. Ibid., 60–1.

75. Ibid., 63.

76. Ibid., 63.

77. Ibid., 66.

78. Ibid., 66.

79. Mukherji published his lectures in a volume entitled Shrishti, bhagabana, o sadhana (Calcutta, 1969). Mukherji incorporated analyses of the significance of Hinduism in most scientific textbooks and social tracts. His pro-Hindu, anti-Muslim sentiments were most clearly expressed in a social tract on the Partition of Bengal, Boundary Problem in Bengal (1943) which he suggests is a travesty for Hindus in Bengal and the result of Muslim agitation and greed. These views can also be found in his attempts to define a language for the Hindus of Bengal in his textbook Mukherji, Hindur Bangla (1938).

80. Mukherji, Indian Sex Life and Prostitution.

Joardar, “Preface,” in Mukherji, Prostitution in India, iv.

81. Joardar, “Preface,” in Mukherji, Prostitution in India, iv.

82. Mukherji, Prostitution in India, 3–5.

83. Ibid., 5.

84. Ibid., 19.

85. Ibid., 25.

86. Ibid., 72.

87. Ibid., 103.

88. Ibid., 89.

89. Ibid., 38.

90. Ibid., 112.

91. Ibid., 155.