Abstract
After carping and complaining for years, it may be said with some degree of satisfaction that there is now a substantial body of academic writing on sexualities in India. Mary E. John and Janaki Nair’s edited anthology of essays, A Question of Silence? (1998), and Ruth Vanita and Saleem Kidwai’s edited collection of readings from literature and history, Same Sex Love in India (2000), marked, in a way, the beginnings of this era. It may be fruitful, now, to think about what the trajectory in this field has been in the last decade and a half and what milestone Sanjay Srivastava’s new edited volume, Sexuality Studies, flags for us. I would suggest that the titles of the first and last collections named here serendipitously point towards a mapping of this journey. John and Nair broke bread in some significant sense when they shattered the ‘conspiracy of silence’ that they saw as shrouding sexuality studies in India; Srivastava’s volume marks that moment, then, when ‘sexuality studies’ can finally be named as a discipline in Indian scholarship. Is it a (re)birth or a coming-of-age? Is it normative or is it a queering, we may well ask too.
Srivastava’s cogent introduction lays out the volume’s inheritances and chosen foci that draws upon, as well as distinguishes it from, the contents and approaches of the clutch of books he cites as predecessors to Sexuality Studies. Foremost is the fact that ‘all chapters employ methods that are drawn from sociology or historical sociology’ (p. 2); using these tools, the 12 essays of the volume explore ‘relationships between the “mainstream” and its others, in order [to]… more fully understand the making of the former’ (p. 2), seek to figure out why we talk about sex now in the ways we do and why knowing histories of sexuality is imperative to this project of apprehending the contemporary. It may be demurred that the volume’s greatest strength—its clarity of vision and range and methodological unity—also results in some self-imposed limits that then eschews exploring a greater range of sexuality studies: that is, by identifying the sociological as the primary tool of inquiry, it curbs the volume’s freedom to pursue connections in sexualities with non-sociological/historical disciplinary tools—such as the aesthetic, for example. What it achieves instead, however, is a flow and ebb between essays that is unusual in anthologies that map a range of ‘studies’ organised around a theme. And it perhaps benefits from this unity, if scholars can use this focus to best advantage without forgetting that sexuality studies in India also forays into other areas with methodological instruments that are not necessarily all cited here.
The sociological approach that binds the essays, in fact, allows for a visible thread to run through and between them that is rare to such anthologies and proves the advantage of editorial clarity and control. An impressive range of social, cultural and political ‘texts’ of sexualities in contemporary India are identified as significant targets of social science study: why and how sexual behaviours, artifacts, symbols, taboos, obsessions, regulations and articulations can be read to make greater sense of how human systems of society and polity function. It is equally important to know which frames and tools are deliberately absent, and why, as Srivastava points out:
… none of the chapters included here make use of psychoanalytic (or psychologised) frameworks that have found favour in studies of Indian sexuality. Rather, the idea of ‘sexual culture’ is scattered across a number of domains that both implicitly problematise it as an independent (or self-referential) arena as well as force us to think about the various ways in which different domains (the law, the state, ‘middle-class’ opinion, science and ‘sexual-health’ programmes, for example) contribute to its construction (p. 2).
Additionally, as Srivastava notes, contributions to this volume extend the discussions of individual and group experiences of sexuality that are generically true of sexuality studies through ‘explorations of multiple sites of modernity within which individual lives are enmeshed’ (p. 3), thereby providing pointers not just to meanings produced about contemporary sexual ‘nature’ and cultures but to ‘why sex and sexuality constitute significant topics of discussion’ (p. 3).
The 12 essays in Sexuality Studies are testament to recognised and promising scholarship associated with these specialisations: colonial sexualities—in medical journals (Sanjam Ahluwalia), in old Calcutta pornographic booklets (Hardik Biswas); the sexed body, language and violence—in law, specifically family courts in Kolkata and Dhaka (Srimati Basu), in development discourse in Kerala (J. Devika); queer subjects, spaces and their politics—in Hindu nationalism (Paola Bacchetta), in sodomy laws (Jyoti Puri), in prostitution, sodomy and minoritisation (Svati P. Shah), in small town same-sex subjects (Paul Boyce), in the outing of gender, race, caste and class in ethnographic fieldwork (Diepiriye Kuku); and romance, porn, voyeurism, risk—in the pornography of footpaths and gated communities (Sanjay Srivastava), in the globalised Valentine’s Day card market phenomenon (Christiane Brosius), and in debates on consent and condoms in the globalised lives of young women in Mumbai (Shilpa Phadke). Of course, each essay is a product of consummate research and perception, employing the finest historical–sociological methods of analysis and expression, invaluable to both those already invested in any (or many) of the specific areas of investigation or those stepping gingerly into the vast and heady field of Indian sexuality studies in socio-cultural–political contexts. This is not surprising; one would hardly expect any less from Srivastava’s acute scholarship as he edits the pantheon of ‘gender/sexuality’ experts on India included here. What is further, and importantly, to be taken away from this volume is, I suggest, how its chosen areas of scholarly focus map the concerns that are foremost in thinking about and around sexualities in contemporary India.
Srivastava rightly emphasises the question of why we are talking about certain aspects of sexualities in contemporary India now, as this holds crucial pointers for understanding how sexualities circulate in and shape our everyday existences in both private and public domains. Not astonishingly, an overwhelmingly large number of essays in the volume are about queerness; the battle against 377 has turned into the defining paradigm for sexualities in India since the 1990s—a decade which also flagged the emergent globalised sexual subject, whose ‘new’ lifestyles and habitats and investments then generated fresh targets for sociological analysis. Violence, violation, voyeurism, risk, pleasure, commodity, heteronormativity, LGBTQKP—all vie for space in sexuality studies today, so charting our past, present and future lives and our concomitant intellectual pursuits.
That this field is as flaming, inconstant, mutant as its object of (intellectual) desire is proved by the fact that what the volume last records in queer politics is a 2009 Delhi High Court victory against the draconian colonial law 377 that criminalises non-normative sexual behaviours—being published, of course, before 377’s huge setback at the Supreme Court in December 2013. Here is a distinguished collection of scholarship that speaks urgently of and to our potent and fraught contemporary sexualities, and that marks the coming-of-age of a field of inquiry in the social sciences that is yet continually re-birthing and re-identifying itself. Srivastava’s anthology shows the way, and demands and merits more research and writing in Indian sexuality studies that range further afield by way of methods, tools and foci.