A concept shaped by shame & stigma

Delve into this intellectual history of social strictures that have organised, disciplined, violated, and left a void in the place of women’s desires, writes Durba Mitra

In order to reveal the history of social strictures that have organised, disciplined, violated, and left a void in the place of women’s desires, I return to a seemingly timeless concept, the prostitute, to make unfamiliar an idea that we think we already know.

Indian Sex Life is an account of how ideas of deviant female sexuality, often named as the “prostitute” became foundational to modern social thought in colonial India. European and Indian social analysts made scientific claims about deviant female sexuality in the constitution of new fields of knowledge about society. In these new sciences of society, the assessment of women’s sexuality became essential to theories of social progress. Indian Sex Life makes visible this edifice of knowledge that saw deviant female sexuality as the primary way in which one could think and write about Indian society. Dictates of shame and stigma not only were enacted in everyday forms of social control of women’s sexuality but were also key in the making of disciplinary forms of social knowledge. Authorities stigmatised women in the service of new institutional and ideational forms — the philological study of origins, legal surveys of everyday social life, forensic medical investigations, social evolutionary science, and realist literature about society.

Philologists, colonial administrators, scientists, lawyers, medical doctors, social scientists, and popular writers created new categories of deviant female sexuality and made them into a system of normative concepts that could be used in the diagnosis and study of Indian society. She, the sexually deviant woman, was historicised through longue durée antiquarian studies that posited her as the ancient origin of modern social institutions and prescribed her as the measure of social evolution from primitivity to civilisation. She was mapped as the reality of a degraded social life and memorialised in first-person testimonials that made natural the terms of her exclusion.

I take the title of the book, Indian Sex Life, from a popular genre of social scientific texts produced in the twentieth century that linked sexual life, particularly the control of women’s sexuality, to the evolutionary progress of Indian society. I ask: How and why did deviant female sexuality become a primary “grid” for comprehending social life in this period? The study is situated in Bengal in eastern India, with transregional networks that reached across colonial India to London, Berlin, New York, and Chicago. It spans a period from the middle of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century, which saw the height of the British colonial state as well as the rapid growth of anti-colonial nationalist movements. Ideas about deviant female sexuality were central to these intellectual and political transformations. Bengal was a key site for the development of colonial policies as well as influential institutions, intellectual networks, and publications in the Indian social sciences.

The colonial state and an emerging network of Indian men extended the regulation of sexuality to far-reaching projects that sought to define what society should look like and how modern citizens should behave.

(Excerpted with permission from ‘Indian Sex Life’ by Durba Mitra and published by Princeton University Press.)