Durba Mitra’s Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought is a proficient historical analysis of how notions of deviant female sexuality – often crystallized in the concept of “the prostitute” – became a central object of inquiry in diverse fields of knowledge about social life in Bengal from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Following the construction of “the prostitute” and related terms through their ubiquitous articulations in various, multilingual archives, Mitra explores how intellectual engagement with the object of the sexually deviant woman – potentially any Indian woman outside of a Hindu upper-caste monogamous marriage – was foundational for Indology as well as nascent modern scientific disciplines, from sociology and ethnology to forensics, and appeared in widely read literary and journalistic texts. As Mitra succinctly states in the introduction, “the concept of the prostitute was used to govern, explain, describe, and contest the domain of social life and knowledge” (p. 18). With sharp attention to how these textual articulations on sexuality and gender intersect with religion, class and race, Indian Sex Life expertly analyses how such knowledge was produced and circulated among American, European and Bengali elites, more precisely Hindu upper-caste men, in close entanglement vis-à-vis the legal, administrative and political realms.
Chapter 1, “Origins: Philology and the Study of Indian Sex Life”, first unpacks how the study of ancient Sanskrit texts by British, American and German Indologists paid special attention to kama – “understood as desire, love, sex, erotics, sexuality” (p. 26) – and, specifically, to women’s sexuality as an entry point to understanding modern India, often temporally flattening and collapsing Indian history and social life (pp. 39–40) through an equation of philological and (proto-)sociological inquiry. The chapter’s second half explores how Bengali “social analysts” built on such scholarship; here, the author insightfully analyses how multilingual taxonomies of women’s behavior constructed “all women outside of man’s supervision” as potential prostitutes (p. 56). The attentiveness to transnational networks of scholarship, as well as the close examination of rhetorical strategies in the establishment of epistemic authority, forms an analytical feature that runs throughout the book. The historian of racial and other colonial sciences will recognize Mitra’s descriptions of these analysts’ use of technologies of quantification, visualization, comparison and typologies – via graphs, tables and other diagrammatic renderings. (Similarly, historians of “race” will also note how “the prostitute” concept bore a definitional fluidity that acted as signifier for broader meaning-making).
Chapter 2, “Repetition: Law and the Sociology of Deviant Female Sexuality”, considers the Contagious Diseases Act of 1868 and its close connection to surveys and new forms of sociological descriptions that aimed to provide legal ground for the classification of the prostitute. It explains how “[t]he introduction of the act led to an epistemic shift, a pivotal change where Indian sexual practices became a primary object of knowledge for the British colonial state” (p. 79). This emergent legal sociology of Indian sexual practices was directly connected to new forms of medical regulation and policing in the colonial state, which was contested by women caught up in such broad categorization, whilst the monogamous Hindu marriage was naturalized as “the only legitimate and legally exempt social space” (p. 98).
Chapter 3, “Circularity: Forensics, Abortion, and the Evidence of Deviant Female Sexuality”, starts and finishes with the personal case – one that follows a pattern, as we learn – of a widow who was socially condemned and medically examined after allegedly having an abortion which ultimately led to her death. It examines how forensic medical descriptions of female bodies in connection to “a speculative sociology of Indian women’s sexuality” operated in a “circular form of reasoning”, in which the reading of women’s anatomies fed into typologies of female sexual deviance that in turn influenced the anatomical assessment of those bodies (p. 101).
Chapter 4, “Evolution: Ethnology and the Primitivity of Deviant Female Sexuality”, narrates how models of social evolutionism, first in European and American ethnology and then in writings of male Indian intellectuals, were centrally organized around the sexually deviant woman and the institution of patriarchal monogamous marriage as temporal markers of, respectively, primitivity and modernity. Finally, Chapter 5, “Veracity: Life Stories and the Revelation of Social Life” considers popular texts featuring so-called autobiographic accounts of women prostitutes in colonial Calcutta. In different textual and visual archival stories, we see how the imagery of the chaste wife – and of the devoted widow who committed sati (the burning in the husband’s funeral pyre) – is contrasted with “the evil of the fallen woman” (p. 200) who enhanced the degraded urban scenery of social impurity and whose turn to prostitution was the object of lay sociological interrogation.
The reader of Indian Sex Life might at first be disappointed by the book’s lack of a conclusion chapter, but the creatively presented reflection in the book’s afterword is immensely more profound than an afterthought. In the tradition of great feminist studies of science, Mitra engages with the radical world-making imaginations of a fictional story, a dreamscape which was written by an early feminist thinker in India, Begum Hossain; the author then questions the claims of objectivity by those men of science whose authoritative works the book analysed, without overlooking their pervasive political effects. Here, precisely due to the insightfulness of its afterword, the reader might wish the book had expanded on alternative accounts by other women intellectuals1 as well as on further stories of resistance vis-à-vis categorizations of sexual deviance, against the odds of their archival rarity. Mitra achieves an excellent overview of hegemonic accounts of knowledge production in different fields of modern social thought. However, due to a narrative approach that emphasizes coherence over possible contradictions and debates, the book is prevented from giving more insight into how, as postcolonial science and technology studies (STS) remind us, “[a]t any historical moment, scientific ideas are always multiple, always contested.”2 Moreover, Indian Sex Life might fall short of the many expectations created by its impressive title, as the book does not explicitly advance theorizations on sexuality beyond its (justified) focus on “female sexual deviance” or, as suggestively equated in the afterword, “deviant womanhood” (p. 203, emphasis added). While the workings of patriarchy are closely discussed, specific engagement with masculinities is lacking in the text. Remarks on other sexual deviance categorizations/subjectivations only find brief mention in the notes (e.g., p. 6, note 18), where all the (extremely rich!) engagement with the secondary literature happens.
Rather than critiques, my remarks in this review suggest possible pathways that we could take in the further engagement with the important topics brilliantly unfolded in Durba Mitra’s first book. Indian Sex Life offers a complex and nuanced genealogy of one ambiguous concept that stretches over different fields of knowledge. In addition to its importance for historians of sexuality and modern/colonial India, the book’s approach is very insightful for global history, history of knowledge and postcolonial STS scholars, as well as contributing to the history of all the scientific fields that its disciplinarily transgressive analysis touches upon.3 We can look forward to future intellectual output by this author.
Notes:
1 Although it is outside the geographical focus of Indian Sex Life, the case of Maharashtrian anthropologist Irawati Karve’s (1905–1970) philological and feminist engagements comes to mind here (especially her critical analysis of the epic Mahabharata).
2 Banu Subramaniam, Holy Science. The biopolitics of Hindu nationalism, Seattle 2019, p. 19.
3 For scholars interested in Germany-India connections, the book’s attention to Sexualwissenschaften and different German intellectuals is also relevant.