“Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought” by Durba Mitra

Durba Mitra

In 2018, the Supreme Court of India struck down a colonial era law that criminalized adultery: a man who had consensual sexual intercourse with another man’s wife without the consent of the husband could be punished. The Court ruled that women are not cattle to be controlled by their husbands.

Such a patriarchal bias towards monogamy has quite a history behind it. Durba Mitra’s provocatively titled Indian Sex Life is an account of how British officers, medical practitioners, ethnologists and elite Bengali sociologists and pulp fiction writers saw almost all Indian women as prostitutes. They saw Hindu widows, married women from lower caste communities, Muslim married women, women running away from their husbands, and women deserted by their husbands, and unmarried girls over the age of fifteen as sexually deviant. Mitra goes deeper into different archives from law, medicine, books about social thought and general prose to point out that the colonial investigation of Indian sexuality was premised on the “fact” of deviant female sexual desire.

 

 Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought, Durba Mitra (Princeton University Press, January 2020)
Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought, Durba Mitra (Princeton University Press, January 2020)

The consequences of the attention to what Indian women wanted (and invariably they seemed to want to satisfy their sexual desire) played out in the law and the penal code. Mitra writes:

 

Through the reiterative use of the concept of the prostitute, social analysts launched a comprehensive knowledge project that linked a wide-range of sexual types and behaviors and brought them under the domain of the Indian Penal Code and Contagious Diseases Acts. While introducing new forms of sociological description based in new forms of medical regulation and policing, criminal law in India caused a pivotal shift by naturalizing monogamous Hindu marriage as the only legitimate and legally exempt social space.

 

Apart from laws, she quotes forensic reports and textbooks and the reasoning they would use to come to conclusions about Indian women and their sex life. One textbook, Gribble and Heher’s 1892 Outlines of Medical Jurisprudence for India, describes a case of abortion—an issue intertwined with law and morality:

 

A woman was arraigned on a charge of infanticide and also of having caused abortion. The evidence against her was that of the washerman to prove her pregnancy, a cloth stained with blood.

 

The descriptions of badly wounded naked bodies of women as recorded in the archives in various contexts in Mitra’s book drive home the point that everything was considered to be evidence of the fact that women took extreme measures to satisfy their sexual urges and destroy their pregnancies.

Mitra hopes that becoming aware of the British era notions about women may help “to differently approach how we write womanhood with a critical distance from the overwhelming and powerful epistemologies that create our archives”. This academic study makes an important contribution to the field of history of sexuality in the Indian context.


Soni Wadhwa lives in Mumbai.