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Abstract
This paper examines the recent controversies surrounding the decision to introduce sex education in secondary schools in India to combat the rapid spread of HIV and AIDS in the country. While 11 Indian states have banned it, the Left-ruled state of West Bengal has designed a teachers' manual to impart sex education. However, a close analysis of this material shows that it suffers from the same anxieties about ‘western licentiousness’ that will affect ‘pure’ Indian youth and delivers the same message of sexual abstinence that characterizes the arguments deployed against the teaching of sex education. Both the proponents and opponents of sex education see sex education as a part of a larger programme of globalization that is threatening Indian culture and needs to be resisted either by rejecting the programme or by using it to construct a sexually abstinent nationalist youth force.
Acknowledgements
This article uses some findings of a study I had conducted on textbooks in West Bengal in a four-state research project coordinated by Nirantar Delhi.
Notes
1. For an analysis of these views, see Anandhi (Citation2007).
2. See Foucault (Citation1976, 57–8).
3. Bengali is the anglicized word used to designate both the language and the people now living in the state of West Bengal.
4. A nationwide uprising of Indian soldiers against the British. Historians' opinion on this rebellion is divided. While the British tended to see it as a ‘mutiny’, many Indian historians regard it as the first struggle of independence.
5. See Omissi (Citation1994).
6. For colonial ideals of masculinity, see Sinha (Citation1997), Chowdhury (Citation2001), Banerjee (Citation1997/98), and Bannerje (Citation2005).
7. See Nirantar Trust (Citation2008, 29–32).
8. All translations from Life Style (Citation2005) are done by the author.
9. Yet it is the fundamentalist Hindu right-wing party, the RSS, which had publicly declared that its greatest enemies are the three Ms: Macaulay, Marxists and Madrasawalis. Macaulay represents colonial education and, in the present context, the forces of ‘westernization’; and between Marxists and Madrasawalis (referring to those who run traditional Islamic schools or madrasas), they prefer the latter for being at least believers of some sort.
10. A phenomenon of boys harassing a girl(s) in a public space, usually on the street.
11. This could have serious implications in a country where child sexual abuse rates are high. In a study conducted by the Ministry of Women and Child Development (Citation2007), 53% of the children surveyed reported having faced abuse.