During the colonial period in India, European scholars, British officials, and elite Indian intellectuals—philologists, administrators, doctors, ethnologists, sociologists, and social critics—deployed ideas about sexuality to understand modern Indian society. In Indian Sex Life , Durba Mitra shows how deviant female sexuality, particularly the concept of the prostitute, became foundational to this knowledge project and became the primary way to think and write about Indian society. Bringing together vast archival materials from diverse disciplines, Mitra reveals that deviant female sexuality was critical to debates about social progress and exclusion, caste domination, marriage, widowhood and inheritance, women's performance, the trafficking of girls, abortion and infanticide, industrial and domestic labor, indentured servitude, and ideologies about the dangers of Muslim sexuality. British authorities and Indian intellectuals used the concept of the prostitute to argue for the dramatic reorganization of modern Indian society around Hindu monogamy.
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Many of our ebooks are available for purchase from these online vendors:. Many of our ebooks are available through library electronic resources including these platforms:. How British authorities and Indian intellectuals developed ideas about deviant female sexuality to control and organize modern society in India. During the colonial period in India, European scholars, British officials, and elite Indian intellectuals—philologists, administrators, doctors, ethnologists, sociologists, and social critics—deployed ideas about sexuality to understand modern Indian society. In Indian Sex Life , Durba Mitra shows how deviant female sexuality, particularly the concept of the prostitute, became foundational to this knowledge project and became the primary way to think and write about Indian society. British authorities and Indian intellectuals used the concept of the prostitute to argue for the dramatic reorganization of modern Indian society around Hindu monogamy. This logic continues to hold sway in present-day South Asia and the postcolonial world. Drawing attention to the surplus of representations around female sexual deviance within historical materials, Durba Mitra makes bold, ambitious claims about the concept of the prostitute and its role in the unfolding of methods in the social study of colonial Bengal. This is a valuable contribution to the global history of sexuality, and essential reading for scholars interested in modernity, colonial knowledge, gender, and cultural history.
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Date June 11, June 12, The intellectual questions Durba Mitra asks are formed as much from her archival research as from her conversations with women on their experiences of social judgment and subordination and their efforts to challenge strict social norms. Perhaps no one has influenced her more than her own mother, who was open with Mitra, assistant professor of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality and Carol K. Pforzheimer Assistant Professor at the Radcliffe Institute, about the unique challenges of being an independent woman in a world that, too often, has little space for independent women. My mother was always very clear to me.
Durba Mitra. Princeton: Princeton University Press, Reed Elizabeth City State University.
