Purging the pornographic, disciplining the sexual, and edifying the public: pornography, sex education and class in early to mid-twentieth century colonial Bengal

ABSTRACT

In this article, I study the works of two Bengali sexologists, Abul Hasanat and Nripendra Kumar Basu, in order to unpack the relationship between pornography and sexology in colonial Bengal. I make two arguments. First, I argue that sexologists distinguished themselves from pornography writers by framing sexology as a scientific and educational field. I show how sexology counterposed itself to pornography in order to consolidate its position in the Bengali print market. Second, I argue that this privileging of sexology vis-à-a vis pornography overlapped with the politics of class and respectability in Bengal. Sexology provided elite reformers with a tool that not only policed the sexual but disciplined and ‘colonized’ it. The middle class, however, did not represent an ideological monolith in terms of their sexual morality. This is revealed through the divergent perspectives of the two sexologists with regard to their differing views on the proliferation of pornography.

KEYWORDS:

• Sexology
• pornography
• class
• sex education
• Bengal

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their feedback which helped immensely in strengthening the argument of the article. The author would also like to thank the editors of this special issue, Darshana Sreedhar Mini and Anirban Baishya, for their suggestions and support during the writing of this article. The author would like to thank Projit Bihari Mukharji for introducing him to the works of Abul Hasanat as well as for his support while writing this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The usage of the term ‘vernacular sexology’ has been debated. Durba Mitra argues that the term ‘vernacular’ reinforces the colonial power hierarchy and the logic of othering of all Indian languages. On the other hand, scholars such as Charu Gupta, through her work on subaltern sexologists writing in Hindi, have shown how the vernacular could also play a subversive function. Ishita Pande, in her introduction to a recent collection of essays on sexology in South Asia, delves into this debate in detail. For more, see Gupta (2020), Mitra (2020b), and Pande (2020b). In this article, an interest in the ‘vernacular’ displayed by the British as well elite Indians conveys their preoccupation of wanting to discipline and sanitize Bengali, which also explains why both of my actors underscore the necessity of publishing a Bengali sexological work. The distinguishing of ‘popular’ Bengali erotica and the ‘scientific’ credentials of sexology reflects the perspectives of my actors and is tied to my argument about sexology presenting an elite authoritative vision of knowledge production and bringing together science and sexuality as markers of middle-class respectability.

2 Sexology introduced a normative framework which argued that only the specialized field of sexual science had the legitimacy to make any claims on sex. I refer to this process of disciplining sex as a result of the emergence of sexology as the ‘colonization’ of sex. I have adopted this concept from Sabine Frühstück’s work on the history of sexology in Japan, Colonizing Sex (Frühstück 2003).

3 This quotation appeared in the missionary-run newspaper in Bengal, The Friend of India, approximately in the year 1873 (cited in Banerjee 1987, 1204).

4 In addition to Bengali and Hindi, elite demands for literary reform emerged in several Indian languages during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For Urdu, see Waheed (2014); for Tamil, see Ramaswamy (1997); and for Telegu, see Mantena (2013).

5 This was true not just of Bengal, but sexology in India generally reflected the values of elites and middle classes. Shrikant Botre (2017) has shown how the emergence of Marathi sexology can be tied to upper-caste impulses to regulate the sexual. Also, Ishita Pande has shown how ‘global/Hindu’ sexologists represented an ‘unruly two-way traffic between Western and Eastern epistemologies’ as they projected sexology as an ancient indigenous science (2020a, 171). Pande argues that as the Child Marriage Restraint Act, 1929 raised the marital age for girls to 14 years, it created an age-stratified sexual morality separating the child from the adult. This enabled upper-caste ‘global/Hindu’ sexologists to further consolidate their caste hierarchy as Brahmacharya, the earliest stage of the Hindu life cycle, applicable to upper-caste Hindus was recast as adolescence and rendered timeless, universal, and resonant with the global and ‘secular sciences of the body’ (2020a, 169–206). In addition, Haynes and Botre have shown how the festering anxiety among middle-class men resulting from shifts in the age of marriage and the rise of the companionate conjugal model led them to approach and write to sexologists. See Botre and Haynes (2017).

6 Sanjam Ahluwalia has shown how middle-class and upper-class Indian men from the early twentieth century onwards used evidence of increasing population levels from the census as an instance of indiscriminate reproduction among the lower castes and Muslims, and policed their sexual practices by propagating sexual hygiene discourse and birth control techniques. See Ahluwalia (2007, 25).

7 For details on ‘global/Hindu sexologists’, brahmacharya, see note 5.

8 Stephen Legg, in his work on prostitution in inter-war India, has shown how social hygiene influenced colonial policy towards prostitution. For more, see Legg (2013). In addition, Alison Bashford has also shown how social hygiene influenced by sexology, eugenics and contagious disease regulations assumed imperial significance. For more, see Bashford (2004).

9 For more on the social hygiene movement in Britain, see Hall (2004); for the USA, see Luker (1998).

10 This quotation attributed to a missionary school teacher has been cited in Zimmerman’s book on the global history of sex education, Too Hot to Handle (Zimmerman 2015, 29).

11 Amitranjan Basu has collated the complete bibliography of Nripendra Kumar Basu’s work. See https://www.scribd.com/document/47395798/Selected-Bibliography-of-Nripendra-Kumar-Basu.