Introduction to ‘Translating Sex: Locating Sexology in Indian History’

Abstract

This introduction to ‘Translating Sex’ places the six essays included in this special section in the context of the history of sexuality in the Indian subcontinent, and argues for a need to write more comprehensive histories of sexology—the field of inquiry which promoted the understanding of sex as a ‘scientific object’ around the globe at the turn of the twentieth century. It identifies the divergent materials covered in, and the common grounds occupied by, the six essays that deal with sex as a translated object of knowledge; considers the history of vernacular sexology; and showcases the ubiquity of sexology in socio-cultural, political and literary debates in the Indian subcontinent in the first half of the twentieth century. It argues that by locating sexology in Indian history, we can render ‘sexuality’ a more useful category of analysis for this context as well as comprehend what might be termed the sexuality of Indian history.

Keywords:

• Sexology
• ‘sexuality of history’
• translation
• vernacular science

The essays in this special issue constitute responses to an invitation to think about translating sex in Indian history. Together, the papers contribute to the growing field of sexuality studies in India through a hitherto unprecedented focus on a single genre—sexological texts and artefacts—that circulated in the first half of the twentieth century.¹ They testify to the widespread popularity of sexology in India, evidenced by the use of sexology to authorise movements of political and legal reform on the one hand, and the ubiquity of references to it in popular culture on the other. The collection queries the un/translatability of certain acts, concepts and phenomena to ask whether sex is something inherently comprehensible regardless of language, or if ideas about sex and sexual practices are created and recreated through processes of translation. Echoing recent reflections on the portability of gender as a category of analysis, these essays variously ask what it means ‘to extend a parochial, albeit familiar, understanding’ of sexuality ‘to times and places other than those that gave rise to it in the first place?²

What is sex? A Hindi dictionary might give you a few options: ling, kama, jati, stri purush bheda, youna, along with the transliterated English word itself, sex, as though it signifies something in excess of the other terms. The word kama, as Charu Gupta suggests, means ‘sex’, ‘pleasure’, ‘desire’ and ‘erotic love’. And the word sex, in English, conveys varying nuances as well. The articles here reflect upon what ‘made it possible to group together, in an artificial unity, anatomical elements, biological functions, conducts, sensations, and pleasures, and enabled one to make use of this fictitious unity as a causal principle, an omnipresent meaning, a secret to be discovered everywhere’, as a term that was ‘thus able to function as a unique signifier and as a universal signified’.³ In carrying Michel Foucault’s foundational inquiry in the History of Sexuality to a new area—South Asia—are we simply involved in recalling ‘a known history, something which already happened elsewhere, and which is to be reproduced…with a local content’?⁴ Is this conversation about ‘translating sex’ a reflection of the limits of our critical imagination, and evidence of how ‘Europe’ remains our subject even as we write histories of sexuality for the subcontinent? Are we simply concerned with rendering words, deeds, utterances, performances, desires and body parts into the theoretical formulations, critical concepts and modes of classification of ‘European thought’? In unpacking (and also querying) the emergence of sex as ‘a unique signifier and universal signified’ in the history of twentieth-century India, whether in the direct transfer of the lexical term (indicated by the retention of sex in, say, Hindi or Bangla), or through the quest for equivalents in existing terminology,⁵ the articles gathered here offer us much more than a mere copy of the history of sexuality as it played out in a ‘Europe of the mind’—they provide the opportunity to rethink the translatability of ‘sex’ as a concept, its universalisation under the sign of science, and its place in the writing of South Asian history.

This introduction proceeds in three parts. In the first part, I argue that these articles showcase how ‘sex’ came to be circumscribed by sexology—the scientific study of sex that is variously understood to have emerged between 1837 and 1905⁶ and which gathered importance around the globe in the early decades of the twentieth century—while also highlighting how sexology itself is best understood as a science produced in translation. I consider the ‘inadequacy and indispensability’ of categories of European thought for comprehending Indian pasts,⁷ and suggest that by locating sexology in Indian history, we can produce an understanding of ‘sexuality’ as a category of analysis that is better suited to the subcontinent.⁸ The second part suggests that these articles offer us a history of vernacular sexology, simultaneously showcasing how scientific sexology circumscribed the concept of ‘sex’ in colonial India, while also revealing how the concept of ‘sex’ became ubiquitous outside scientific circles. The final part notes that this special section captures the ubiquity of ‘sexology’ in the political and social history of India in the twentieth century and argues that this history of sexuality ‘might be read as a story of [Indian] modernity tout court’.⁹

The indispensability and inadequacy of ‘sexuality’ in Indian history

In a court case heard in the Allahabad High Court in 1938, Jagannath Prasad accused one Gopal Das, author of Asli Sachitra Kok Shastra (1930), of having copied hundreds of pages from his earlier work, Sachitra Bara Kok Shastra (1928). Each defendant attributed all similarities in the two books to their use of ancient wisdom, common knowledge and older sources from which both had drawn.¹⁰ Such disputes over which was the original, which the copy, were common in the field of sexological publication, where translations, extractions, adaptations and ‘unruly appropriations’ of ideas and even published works abounded worldwide.¹¹ Studying the translation into English of the work of German sexologists, Heike Bauer states that ‘sexological theories themselves were products of translation, shaped by cultural circumstance’, and argues that in using translation as a heuristic we can understand ‘how different cultural backgrounds influence the production, dissemination, and the understanding of sexological theories’.¹² Elsewhere, Bauer presents translation, understood in the broadest sense as ‘the dynamic process by which ideas are produced and transmitted’, as a way to lay to rest ‘the pervasive idea that sexuality is a “western” construct that was transmitted around the world’.¹³ She suggests that in foregrounding translation, we can move beyond Foucault’s foundational contentions that: (1) the late nineteenth century emergence of a scientia sexualis brought about a new vocabulary of sex and hence a new way of organising power in modernity (and that this process can be generalised to modernity elsewhere); and (2) that scientia sexualis was entirely distinct from the ars erotica that characterised societies such as ‘China, Japan, India, Rome, the Arabo-Moslem societies’.¹⁴ The Orientalism/Eurocentrism of this binary has been commented on extensively; the historian of China, Howard Chiang, reading this binary as evidence of the ‘implicit, if foundational interaction between Europe and its other’, suggests that scientia sexualis, in its very inception, must be placed in ‘an adequate translational economy and global circulation’.¹⁵ A recent volume on the global history of sexual sciences, co-edited by one of the contributors here, Douglas E. Haynes, likewise seizes upon ‘translation’ as a heuristic to comprehend sexology as an epistemic framework based on transnational flows of ideas, texts and goods, as well as to emphasise how ‘sexual science helped both to enable and to contest (bio)power regimes across interlinked local and global scales’.¹⁶ The essays gathered here build on these analyses but change the emphasis to interrogate the portability of sexuality as a global category of analysis and to inquire into its appropriateness for understanding South Asian pasts.

After all, as Indrani Chatterjee asks, is our very understanding of ‘sexuality’ bound up with the violence of colonialism? What Foucault described in The History of Sexuality as ‘the process of naming something as “sexual”—was fundamentally the process of European colonialism in non-European worlds from the sixteenth century itself’, she writes.¹⁷ The encounter between Spanish Catholics and Andean ritual specialists (tinkuy) remade the latter into ‘sodomites’, just as in India, the Sufi Muslim stewards of treasures (khwajaserais) were reduced to being ‘eunuchs’ in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The point Chatterjee makes is not that a diversity of ‘acts’ were reduced to a static identity—that of the sodomite or eunuch—but that ‘epistemologies, grammars, poetics, and practices specific to many of the defeated Tantric Buddhist, Bo-po, Jaina, Vaishnava, Saiva-Sakta, and Islamic monastic lineages were transformed from political codes of their own to sites of “sexuality”’.¹⁸ Assertions and arrangements concerned with securing political or economic identity and agency came to be perceived as matters concerned with sexuality. As monogamous heterosexuality was given legal permanence and legitimacy by the colonial state in India, other forms of ‘attachment, embodiment and livelihood’ not only became criminalised as deviant, they also came to be regarded in the narrower domain of the sexual. Driving this point home, Daud Ali reminds us that what we know as Kama literature, far from being concerned strictly with erotic love alone, had ‘linked sexual pleasure with diverse issues, from domestic life, friendship and gender to material culture, cosmetics, and gardens’.¹⁹ Post-nineteenth-century readings of the Kama Shastras that celebrate them as precursors to sexual science, or as evidence of Oriental debauchery, reduce their content to ‘sex’ and ‘sexuality’, and erase a world ‘in which sensual pleasure is understood as being deeply enmeshed with aesthetic, ethical and cosmopolitan cultures’.²⁰ But do such observations ultimately reify the ‘Orientalist’ binary in The History of Sexuality? Repurposing a question asked by Afsaneh Najmabadi and Katherine Babayan, I see the essays in this collection seeking out the domain of the sexual in India while also attempting ‘to complicate the Foucauldian model that often is translated into a binary that juxtaposes a Western scientia sexualis (which produced subjects endowed with certain scientifically classifiable sexualities) with its imagined opposite of an Eastern ars erotica (an unmitigated desire and practice of pleasure transmitted from master to disciple through secrets)’.²¹

In other words, each of these essays, in its own way, complicates our understanding of ‘sexuality’ while acknowledging our reliance on the history of sexology to grasp the concept. For instance, challenging narrower definitions of ‘sexology’ as a corpus created in Europe at the turn of the twentieth century, and subsequently disseminated to the rest of the world, Sabrina Datoo attends to what she polemically terms ‘Avicennian sexology’. Scrutinising this ‘near global episteme’ often neglected in standard accounts, she traces how this alternative tradition of sexual ethics was translated anew and came to be reflected in the practices of self-cultivation and habits of self-doubt wrought by the commodification of pleasure in early twentieth-century India.²² While this very formulation—Avicennian sexology—reveals the difficulty of thinking sex without sexology, Datoo’s analysis and the others gathered here help locate sexology in Indian history and thus translate ‘sexuality’ as a category relevant for South Asian pasts. Writing of translation itself as a located concept, Ronit Ricci explains that the problem with grasping translation begins with the English word, ‘which itself possesses no synonyms and which is not easily translated or correlated with “equivalent” terminology in other languages’.²³ Translation, Ricci continues, is ‘a process which continues to occur long after the story is first introduced into new linguistic and cultural surroundings, and through which a story takes on unique local characteristics in addition to the elements common to it across languages’.²⁴

Building on this understanding, I see translating ‘sex’ for colonial India as an ongoing process to root ‘sexuality’ as a category of analysis in Indian history, and a strategy that makes possible something beyond a derivation or ‘copy’ of the type we encountered in the example at the start of this section that involved a Hindi-language sexologist/translator dragged into court for having ‘vailed himself’ of another work so closely that he reproduced a transcription error from the original! An uncritical history that takes, say, one or more of Foucault’s ‘four figures of sexuality’—‘the perverse adult, the conjugal couple, the masturbating child, the hysterical woman’ and locates it in India—commits an analogous transcription error that might ultimately expose the project as a poor copy, a mere reiteration of a history that has already played out elsewhere. To translate sex, we would need to proceed in two steps; by acknowledging that sexuality as a category for comprehending the past is circumscribed by the nineteenth-century science of sexology, while also tracing this history of sexology in India. In taking these two steps, we begin to grasp, in a modest way, a history of ‘sexuality’ that does not float free of history but is tethered to a history of vernacular sexology.

An Indian history of vernacular sexology

In the incendiary collection of short stories by Pandey Bechan Sharma ‘Ugra’, published as a set as Chocolate in 1927, no one has sex, at least not within sight of the reader. Yet, as Rachel Berger reminds us, the collection continues to be read for traces of queer life and ‘kinship outside the norm’ in the subcontinent.²⁵ First published in issues of the nationalist journal Matvala in 1924, Ugra’s short stories had immediately been at the centre of a controversy for depicting the desire of older men for boys, or, as he termed them, chocolate, those ‘innocent, tender and beautiful boys of the country whom society’s monsters push into the mouth of ruin to quench their own lusts’.²⁶ Readers remained divided then, as they do now, on whether the stories constituted a nod and a wink to men who desired young boys or a condemnation of the practice: Mohandas K. Gandhi famously weighed in with the opinion that the stories were intended to produce disgust against ‘unnatural’ behaviour.²⁷ His essay was included in subsequent editions of the Chocolate stories to frame the short stories as a reformist intervention.

That sexuality came to be circumscribed by sexology in twentieth-century India is made starkly clear from the other paratextual material appended to the compilation of these stories published in 1927, which included an almost fifty-page-long essay dated 1 July 1927, written by Ramnath Lal ‘Suman’, a Hindi critic and poet, and entitled ‘Aprakritik Vyabhichar ka Vaigyanik Vivechan (A Scientific Investigation of Unnatural Licentiousness)’. Apparently written at the special request of Ugra to work as a ‘scientific commentary’ on ‘this hellish subject’, the essay contains ‘sometimes didactically framed but mostly speculative sections on the origins of such habits…’.²⁸ The ‘disease’ described by Ugra as chakletpanthi—a propensity for chocolate—was transcribed as sodomy in Suman’s essay, which included references to Havelock Ellis’ four-volume Studies in the Psychology of Sex, as well as the French and English editions of Feri’s L'instinct sexuel.²⁹ Had the homosocial world of Lucknow become thus contained and confined by the idiom of sexual science?

The paratextual containment of Ugra’s short stories by these references provides a stark instance of the circumscription of social and erotic life by sexology in the 1920s, but the example also helps us appreciate what brings together the otherwise disparate essays in this collection, which deal with sexualised prosthetics (Datoo) and erotic photographs (Mukharji); recount disputes between ‘respectable’ social scientists (Chandra) or between publishers of dubious sex manuals (Gupta); present us with a nationalist leader’s takes on marriage (Haynes) or with a feminist writer’s imagining of luscious sweets scarfed down under bedcovers at night (Berger). These essays provide a history of vernacular sexology that helps us understand how ‘sexuality’ became appropriated in the South Asian context, and thus became an appropriate way of comprehending its history.

Let me explain what I mean by ‘vernacular sexology’ and why I use the term despite the thoughtful critique offered by Durba Mitra in her Afterword to this volume.³⁰ While the term ‘vernacular’ is used in very different ways in each of the essays, when read together, they offer us a way of situating the ‘vernacular’ along the archival grain (thus offering us a way to think about the history of power that underwrites the knowledge of sex in colonial India); of understanding it against the archival grain (thus enabling us to recuperate how sexological knowledge could be used to subvert dominant forms of power); and, finally, of reading to the side of the archives (thus helping us look beyond ‘official’ sexology and at sources classified otherwise). First, the essays show in relief how the history of colonial power organises our understanding of the materials studied in these essays as ‘vernacular’ sources in juxtaposition with or in opposition to English-language works. This descriptive use of the term ‘vernacular’ reflects the logics of colonial archiving. In the British Library, works in various Indian languages are marked IOR/V and it is here that you will come across the works of Santram (Gupta), Abul Hasanat (Mukharji) or Pandey Bechan Sharma ‘Ugra’ (Berger). Instead of replicating the archival logic wherein works in Hindi, Bangla or Urdu appear as vernacular works by virtue of this colonial classification, the essays here provide a path for acknowledging and disrupting these archival logics. One of the recurring referents in the articles here—the Kamasutra, rendered anew into several vernaculars including English in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—helps disrupt the equating of the vernacular with the colonised, the enslaved, the inferior. The vernacularisation of ‘the Kamasutra’ in English allows us to see, on the one hand, the history of colonial power and the emergence of English as the language of science, and, on the other, the dominance of Brahmanical hierarchies and the consolidation of Sanskrit as classical knowledge.

The impulse behind writing a history of vernacular sexology is not, to be clear, to fan (Hindu) national pride or tell a story about the resurgence of subjugated knowledges, but to recall that the texts and contexts of power/knowledge are multiple and layered and seldom legible in wholly transparent ways. A critical understanding of vernacular sexology helps to acknowledge the work done by sexology under the sign of English and science, as well as the power wielded by it in the name of Sanskrit and Brahmanism. As I have shown elsewhere, through a ‘two-way translation’, the new science of sex was rendered both authentically Hindu/Vedic in a way that served the new science in its global career (by giving it a claim to antiquity), and aided high-caste Hindu claims on the national platform (by justifying its gender, caste and communal hierarchies as timeless, authentic and premised upon a secular science).³¹ The vernacularisation of the Kamasutra in the nineteenth century entailed its transformation from a document of varna/caste-based coda for the (twice born) man about town into a sex manual for the (global) everyman. Likewise, as Chandra elegantly shows here, the vernacularised Kamasutra was evoked by G.S. Ghurye to render heterosexuality timeless and thus to erase ‘the caste project of Brahmanism’. In recognising that the English/vernacular dichotomy remains the organising principle of the archive, we can theorise ‘vernacular sexology’ beyond the meanings attached to it as a term of colonial classification and thus begin to decentre British colonialism as generating the forms of power/knowledge that moulded sexual lives, or which operated as the sole causal motor behind the history of sexuality in the subcontinent.

Second, the term ‘vernacular science’ appears in science studies scholarship to describe the appropriation of science by marginalised groups for their own ends, and to characterise the contributions of non-elites, of artists and artisans, who often remain unnamed as contributors to the sciences in the modern period.³² Extending this meaning into our field of inquiry, Charu Gupta homes in on two sexologists writing from the margins, Santram B.A. (1887–1998), a radical Shudra caste reformer, and Yashoda Devi, a woman Ayurveda practitioner based in Allahabad, to trace ‘sexology’s polyvalent potential’.³³ How did Santram translate the works of the prominent British birth control activist and sex reformer, Marie Stopes, to query dominant-caste morality and to rethink the sexual body beyond the parameters imagined by upper-caste reformers? How did Yashoda Devi foreground her expertise in Ayurveda and new birth control devices to challenge male sexual privilege and patriarchal understandings of scientific authority? While, for Gupta, Devi’s and Santram’s translations simultaneously utilised and subverted the authority of both sexual science and of caste, Chandra’s article reminds us of the ways in which Brahmanical power was mobilised in the name of sexual science in South Asia. For Mukharji, Abul Hasanat, a high-ranking police officer and author of the wildly popular and much translated Jouna Bigyan (1935) and several other works including detective fiction, reversed and challenged some of the anti-Muslim tropes of Hindu sexology both in his fiction by depicting scenes of communal harmony, but also by ‘braiding’ ‘three key essentialised religio-cultural intellectual traditions—classical Indic, classical Islamicate and contemporary Euro-American authors—in order to eventually transcend them’.³⁴ If the understanding of sexology in translation has allowed us to reject conventional understandings of sexology as a ‘Western’ science imported to a putative ‘East’, the rubric of ‘vernacular sexology’ reveals more complex and layered histories of power/knowledge in the subcontinent beyond this binary.

Finally, a turn to ‘vernacular sexology’ enables us to sidestep the work of well-known social scientists, self-proclaimed sexologists, and the tracts generated by birth control and eugenics societies in Indian cities—the archives of ‘official sexology’—and to include literary fiction, pornographic tracts and communal propaganda in our study.³⁵ In his recent work, Benjamin Kahan writes of modernist literature as a form of vernacular sexology, an example of how ‘laypeople contest, define, and revise sexual subjectivity in relation to the more official modes of sexology’.³⁶ In the light of this understanding, we could revisit my initial suggestion that Suman’s ‘scientific gloss’ attached to Ugra’s fiction indicates that the discussion of sex in the public sphere became contained by sexology, with chakletpanthi translated as sodomy. Moving beyond the story of containment, we could reread the short stories of Ismat Chughtai and Ugra as samples of vernacular sexology in their own right. Berger reads these short stories in terms of ‘the gastropoetics of sex in colonial India: carnality taken for gluttony, and sex taken for food’, to show how food and sex are held on a continuum such that sexual excess can be taken for excessive hunger. To me, Berger’s reading of these stories also powerfully repositions the history of sexology outside the clinic and shows how both Ugra and Chughtai subverted the authority of official terminology by playing with them. Likewise, in Haynes’ article, Gandhi’s writings function as samples of vernacular sexology not simply because he contested dominant sexological ideas, or used eugenics to reformulate brahmacharya, but because he deployed and deconstructed sexual subjectivity outside the borders of ‘official sexology’.³⁷ And the novels of Abul Hasanat, the ‘Criminologist, Sexologist, Sociologist, Humanist, Rationalist, Psychiatrist—what not’, brought to life in Projit Mukharji’s essay, were certainly works of vernacular sexology: not only did Hasanat’s novel Milan Sangha include a subplot concerned with ‘modern sexuality and its efficient social organisation’, it also illustrated sexological views on the importance of visual stimulation in erotic life articulated in his more academic works.³⁸

Having suggested that these articles provide us with a history of vernacular sexology and thus illustrate how the ‘universals’ of sexual science gave rise to our categories of analysis in the subcontinental context, we can now discuss how they also show in relief the sexuality of Indian history.

The sexuality of Indian history in the twentieth century

On cracking open G.S. Ghurye’s The Sexual Behaviour of the American Female, a reader encounters these words:

The morals of a society are in the keeping of its women. This is particularly true of sex morals. The sexual behaviour of females reflects not only the current sexual morals of a society but also suggests their future trends…. Whatever the popular view of female sexuality current in the Western society in the recent past, the present-day idea of sex prevalent in American females—girls, adult women, married or unmarried—is that its pivotal point is orgasm.³⁹

In her contribution to this collection, Shefali Chandra showcases how G.S. Ghurye, the ‘Father of Indian Sociology’, provided a powerful critique of Alfred Kinsey’s pathbreaking Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953), rejecting every aspect of the American sexologist’s data, method and argument.⁴⁰ While on the surface radically critiquing Kinsey’s claims to universality and his representation of the (white) American woman as the ‘human female’, Ghurye’s seemingly subversive sexology deliberately obscured caste and upheld Brahmanism as whiteness by rendering the Indian past, present and future as Hindu.

Can Ghurye’s analysis be read as another example of how ‘the simultaneous orgasm works not only to render coincident the carnal temporalities of husbands and wives but also to pull into synchronous relation the past and present conditions of heteroeroticism, thereby securing its claims on the future’?⁴¹ Going further, can we read the orgasm as disseminating the middle-class logic of reproductive temporality (that ties the normative injunctions on the timing of reproduction and the organisation of family life to the time of Capital)—as the ‘homogeneous, empty time’ that we have come to understand (after Benedict Anderson) as crucial to the imagining of the nation?⁴² Indeed, in Chandra’s reading, we see that Ghurye repurposed colonial power in ways that exceeded the temporally-indexed ‘concepts of post-colonial, neo-colonial or internal colonialism’; she proposes the term ‘re:colonial’ to explicate ‘the diffused and multi-sited nature of global power…the consolidation of a new racial collaboration’ revealed by a debate over the female orgasm.

This last example allows me to illustrate my final point about the essays in this collection: they showcase how sexuality permeated diverse aspects of Indian history, and how it organised historical thought itself. The final scene—Ghurye’s reading of the orgasm—reminds us of what Durba Mitra describes in her wonderful book as evidence of how deviant female sexuality was foundational to modern social thought in South Asia across a wide range of disciplines, from sexology to Indology, law, forensics and sociology.⁴³ It also recalls how normative sexuality and reproductive temporality undergirded, naturalised and made ubiquitous the very notion of homogeneous, empty time so crucial to national imagining and to the discipline of History, as I argue in my recent book.⁴⁴ If the status of women had stood as an index for a nation’s place in the scale of civilisations in colonial discourse, Ghurye’s text shows how the sexual habits of women now appeared as the epistemic ground for debating sociological method and national history, and thus reveals what Susan S. Lanser terms the ‘sexuality of history’,⁴⁵ and which I understand as an instance of how the very concept of ‘modern History’ turns on the notions of time and space that rely on sexual normativity.

Armed with this insight, we can read Gandhi’s prescriptions for ‘societal brahmacharya’, richly detailed by Douglas Haynes as the cross-referencing and intertextuality of ideas between unlike interlocutors, as an attempt to monitor the sexual present to secure the nation’s eugenic future. In Datoo’s astute observations that wearable medical devices ‘not only addressed male sexual “weakness”, but also implied that aging itself was a pathology that distinguished categories of sexual subjects’, we find, again, a resurgence of a homogenous, progressive ‘temporality of a lifespan’ that is strangely reversible through prosthesis. The manipulation of time through prostheses is tied up, she writes, ‘with the larger stakes of nationhood, middle-class domesticity, and the gendered constraints of desire’. And, finally, in an essay that entirely problematises the historian’s quest for ‘context’, Projit Mukharji urges that we move away from deploying ‘abstract socio-geographic categories as the frame’ for our understanding of historical actors and focus instead on material objects. I read his querying of the historian’s quest for ‘context’ in the light of Abul Hasanat’s defiance of geographic, linguistic, national, religious or professional classificatory registers as a demonstration of the ways in which sexuality both pervades and problematises our understanding of ‘historical methods’, historical temporality and historical archives. In the end, then, the essays in this collection come together beautifully to read ‘history through, and as contingent on, sexuality rather than reading sexuality through, and as contingent on, history’. They show us that just as history constitutes the sexual, ‘so too does the sexual construct the historical, shaping the social imaginary and providing a site for reading it’.⁴⁶

These essays, then, provide us with a history of the linguistic and cultural translations of the ‘new’ science of sex into twentieth-century India, thus allowing us to understand the subcontinental history of ‘sexuality’ as a category of analysis. They show how the scientific understanding of sex was crucial to social and political projects at the time and highlight how a history of sexology speaks to the broader concerns of twentieth-century Indian history. They show us how various ideologies and actions—nationalism, decolonisation, consumerism, modernism—were conceptualised in and as sexual problems in twentieth-century India. Most importantly, they raise questions about historical ways of knowing. They force us to see sexuality in context, while also raising questions about the very quest for ‘context’ (Mukharji, Haynes); they problematise historical periodisation, whether by conceptualising sexology ‘before sexuality’ or by revising the division of time into before and after the colonial in India (Datoo, Chandra); and they blow open our understanding of the ‘evidence’ of sex (Gupta, Berger). India’s modernity is not evidenced by the fact that everyone was suddenly talking about sex, or because patriarchal and caste hierarchies, or the nation’s political future, were being conceptualised in debates about sex, but because the periodisation of Indian history—ancient, medieval, modern—and its rhythms of rise and fall, progress and regress, became explicable with reference to sex.

Acknowledgements

I thank Anjali Arondekar, Aprajita Sarcar, Asiya Alam and Rushaan Kumar for presenting their work at the workshop held at Queen’s University, Kingston, on 19–21 April 2018, which generated these papers; Diane Whitelaw for assisting with the logistics; and the anonymous South Asia reviewers who helped shape the contributions to this special section.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

I thank the Social Science and Humanities Research Council, Canada, and the History Department and the Principal’s Development Fund, Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada, for funding the workshop.

Notes

1. While scholars of China and Japan have written about the place of scientific sexology in the imagination of Asian modernity, in South Asian history, a focus on sexology as such has been rare until quite recently, beyond the excellent histories of contraception and birth control offered in Sanjam Ahluwalia, Reproductive Restraints: Birth Control in India, 1877–1947 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008); and Sarah Hodges, Contraception, Colonialism, and Commerce: Birth Control in South India, 1920–1940 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008). Several essays on Indian sexology appear in Veronika Fuechtner et al. (eds), A Global History of Sexual Science, 1880–1960 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018); an excellent account of santati shastra (the ‘science of progeny’) appears in Luzia Savary, Evolution, Race and Public Spheres in India: Vernacular Concepts and Sciences (1860–1930) (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019); and a rich account of sexology as the organising principle behind various forms of knowledge from forensics to sociology is to be found in Durba Mitra, Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020).

2. I am echoing a question posed with regard to gender in Mrinalini Sinha, ‘A Global Perspective on Gender: What’s South Asia Got to Do with It?’, in Ania Loomba and Ritty A. Lukose (eds.), South Asian Feminisms (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), pp. 356–74 (356).

3. Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality: An Introduction (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), p. 154.

4. Meaghan Morris, cited in Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 39.

5. For an analogous discussion of ‘culture’, see Andrew Sartori, ‘The Resonance of “Culture”: Framing a Problem in Global Concept-History’, in Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 47, no. 4 (2005), pp. 676–99.

6. Greta La Fleur, The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), p. 18.

7. This characterisation of European social thought as indispensable and inadequate for understanding the political and the historical in India is drawn from Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, p. 6.

8. For reflections on sexuality untethered from its location, see Indrani Chatterjee, ‘When “Sexuality” Floated Free of Histories in South Asia’, in Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 71, no. 4 (2012), pp. 945–62.

9. I am paraphrasing Susan S. Lanser, The Sexuality of History: Modernity and the Sapphic, 1565–1830 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2014), p. 4.

10. Gopal Das vs Jagannath Prasad and Anr. on 10 Jan. 1938, AIR 1938 All 266.

11. On unruly appropriations in the global history of sexology, see Fuechtner et al. (eds), A Global History of Sexual Science, p. 14.

12. Heike Bauer, ‘“Not a Translation, but a Mutilation”: The Limits of Translation and the Discipline of Sexology’, in The Yale Journal of Criticism, Vol. 6, no. 2 (Fall 2003), pp. 381–405.

13. Heike Bauer, Sexology in Translation: Cultural and Scientific Encounters across the Modern World (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2015).

14. Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality: An Introduction (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), p. 57.

15. Howard Chiang, ‘Double Alterity and the Global Historiography of Sexuality: China, Europe, and the Emergence of Sexuality as a Global Possibility’, in e-episteme 2, no. 1 (2009), pp. 33–52.

16. Fuechtner et al. (eds), A Global History of Sexual Science, p. 10.

17. Chatterjee, ‘When “Sexuality” Floated Free of Histories in South Asia’, p. 947. For a different view on the productive anachronism of using sexuality ‘in an epoch before the advent of “sexuality”—a term, concept, and organising principle of the self that emerged only in the nineteenth century’, see Zeb Tortorici, Sins against Nature: Sex and Archives in Colonial New Spain (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018).

18. Chatterjee, ‘When “Sexuality” Floated Free of Histories in South Asia’, p. 947.

19. Daud Ali, ‘Rethinking the History of the Kama World in Early India’, in Journal of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 9, no. 1 (2011), pp. 1–13 (2).

20. Ibid., p. 1.

21. Katherine Babayan and Afsaneh Najmabadi, Islamicate Sexualities: Translations across Temporal Geographies of Desire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), p. x.

22. 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.

23. Ronit Ricci, Islam Translated: Literature, Conversion, and the Arabic Cosmopolis of South and South East Asia (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2011), p. 32.

24. Ibid., p. 34.

25. P.B. Sharma and Ruth Vanita, Chocolate, and Other Writings on Male–Male Desire (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006); and 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.

26. The translation is drawn from Sharma and Vanita, Chocolate, and Other Writings on Male–Male Desire, p. 15.

27. Ibid., p. xxv.

28. Akhil Katyal, ‘Laundebaazi: Habits and Politics in North India’, in Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Vol. 15, no. 4 (2013), pp. 474–93 (483).

29. This appears to be a reference to Charles Féré, L’instincte sexuel: Évolution et dissolution (Paris: Felix Alcan, 1899).

30. Durba Mitra, ‘Sexuality and the History of Disciplinary Transgression’, in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol. 43, no. 6 (Dec. 2020), DOI: 10.1080/00856401.2020.1838076.

31. 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, 2018), pp. 279–304.

32. Helen Tilley, ‘Global Histories, Vernacular Science, and African Genealogies; or, Is the History of Science Ready for the World?’, in Isis, Vol. 101, no. 1 (Mar. 2010), pp. 110–9.

33. 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.

34. Beyond Mukharji’s contribution here, the concept is beautifully elucidated in Projit Bihari Mukharji, Doctoring Traditions: Ayurveda, Small Technologies, and Braided Sciences (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2016).

35. For a reading of the Arya Samaj’s Rangila Rasul (1927), the vile attack on the Prophet of Islam banned for fanning hatred between Hindus and Muslims as communal propaganda circumscribed by sexology, see Ishita Pande, ‘Loving Like a Man: The Colourful Prophet, Conjugal Masculinity and the Politics of Hindu Sexology in Late Colonial India’, in Gender & History, Vol. 29, no. 3 (Oct. 2017), pp. 675–92.

36. Benjamin Kahan, The Book of Minor Perverts (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2019), p. 2.

37. 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: 10.1080/00856401.2020.1826644.

38. Projit B. 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.

39. G.S. Ghurye, Sexual Behaviour of the American Female (Bombay: Current Book House, 1956).

40. 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).

41. Annamarie Jagose, Orgasmology (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), p. 40.

42. For a discussion of the logic of reproductive temporality as organising national time and conceptualising Muslims as the nation’s backward ‘others’, see Ishita Pande, Sex, Law, and the Politics of Age: Child Marriage in India, 1891–1937 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), pp. 206–7.

43. Mitra brilliantly shows how the ‘prostitute’ was trafficked ‘as a concept in the service of the development of colonial social science, claims to scientific expertise, and new social theories of the progress of Indian society’; Mitra, Indian Sex Life, p. 6.

44. Pande, Sex, Law, and the Politics of Age, pp. 10–1.

45. Lanser, The Sexuality of History.

46. Ibid., p. 3.