Book review: Durba Mitra. 2020. Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought

Durba Mitra’s Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought is an ambitious and insightful intellectual history of the concept of the prostitute in colonial India. Mitra uncovers the material, legal, medical and discursive practices by which deviant female sexuality became the primary ‘grid’ (p. 2) through which disciplinary forms of social knowledge were constructed and circulated by upper-caste, Bengali, male intellectuals, and colonial administrators. She argues that the prostitute was important in shaping debates on ‘…exclusion, caste strictures, widowhood and inheritance, sexual condemnation, women’s labor, and religious and sectarian ideologies about the dangers of Muslim sexuality’ (p. 5) in colonial India that has resonance for the postcolonial state too. The book comprises five chapters excluding the introduction. A moving afterword explains Mitra’s personal reasons for undertaking this project.

In the chapter titled ‘Origins—Philology and the Study of Indian Sex Life’, Mitra highlights a process of reverse engineering by which a dominant network of men including British colonial officers and scientists, American and German Indologists and Bengali social analysts (intellectuals) justified their ‘profound contempt for female sexuality’ (pp. 23–25) and assumptions about Indian female sexual deviance by searching for its evidence in selected premodern Sanskrit texts and epics. These included the Manusmriti, the Mahabharata, the Ramayana, the Kama Sutra, the Koka Shastra and the Ananga Ranga. She singles out the work of Richard F. Burton (1821–1890), an agent of the East India Company, because his interpretation of the Kama Sutra was extremely influential in shaping Orientalist, static, exaggerated and sensationalised accounts of Indian female sexuality at home and abroad and generated an industry that made deviant female sexuality the object of philological and other studies.

In ‘Repetition—Law and the Sociology of Deviant Female Sexuality’, Mitra contends that concerns around deviant female sexuality led to the passage of several laws. The Indian Penal Code (IPC) of 1860 allowed the state to govern sexuality and intimate relationships at an unprecedented scale through laws that criminalised foeticide, infanticide, rape, sodomy, and laws against public nuisance and solicitation, and the purchase and sale of minor girls for prostitution. The Contagious Diseases Act, 1865, was passed to protect the armed forces from venereal diseases. It gave expansive powers to colonial officers to arrest a woman/girl on charges of prostitution and submit to unconsented physical medical examination. The Calcutta Suppression of Immoral Traffic Act, 1923, was the first anti-trafficking law in the world with the explicit aim to end prostitution in Bengal. Mitra argues that infanticide and foeticide were not criminalised in England but in India because of assumptions that Indian female sexual transgressions inevitably led to such pregnancies and such women deserved punishment. Dominant discourse vacillated between protectionism and paternalism for some girls such as child widows, and derision and fear for real or imagined sexual deviance for others. It is noteworthy that other than the law against sodomy, diktats governing male sexuality (with the exception of sexual minorities), remained untouched.

Mitra emphasises that because colonial law mandated that all sexual transactions occur within the confines of a patriarchal, upper-caste, monogamous marriage primarily for reproduction, a bewildering group of women were pathologised and criminalised as prostitutes. These included Muslim and Bengali Kulin Brahman women in polygamous marriages, Baishnav (who practised Vaishnavism—a Krishna-worshipping sect within Hinduism) women who had easier access to divorce, widow remarriage and rejected strict caste strictures, female labourers in Bengal—domestic and jute mill workers due to their occupations, widows because of their poverty or assumed inability to control their sexual desires, single women above the age of 15, vagrants and mendicants. Mitra highlights the nexus of medical knowledge, public health, policing, legal and juridical processes and state policy that facilitated the repetition and circulation of ideas around female sexual deviance and established taxonomies of prostitutes.

‘Circularity—Forensics, Abortion, and the Evidence of Deviant Female Sexuality’ focuses on the expansion of forensics between 1840 to the early 20^th century in colonial Bengal; its impacts on constituting new forms of authoritative knowledge about women’s social lives and sexual deviance that are dominant even today; and the invasive state surveillance of the quotidian. Mitra’s analysis of colonial forensic narratives reveal that in instances of failed abortions resulting in deaths, coroners and judges did not restrict themselves to describing biological facts, but also speculated about women’s social lives and presumed deviance including detailed descriptions of bodily trauma and listing of indigenous herbs and instruments used for abortion. With time, these speculations were extrapolated to the bodies of other women whose deaths were also investigated, creating a circular reasoning ‘…a logic that seamlessly united anatomical descriptions of sexualized bodies with ethno-scientific assessment of social identity’ (p. 101).

‘Evolution—Ethnology and The Primitivity of Deviant Female Sexuality’ reveals that between 1860s–1950s, Bengali social analysts and their Euro-American counterparts formulated theories about social hierarchies based on their knowledge of female sexuality, philology, biology, ethnology, psychology and sociology. Through a multilingual register of terms, some analysts created (false) equivalences where a Tawaif in North India was the same as a Vaiji in Bengal and a Kalavati in Mysore. They argued that for a society to be considered truly civilised, female sexuality had to be domesticated through institutionalised, patriarchal marriage and the continued existence of prostitution was evidence that this project was incomplete in India.

In ‘Veracity—Life Stories and the Revelation of Social Life’ Mitra focuses on firstly the critiques of ‘timeless social customs’ (p. 179) that characterised debates around Hindu Brahman polygamy in the first decades of 20^th century in Bengal, secondly accounts of male eyewitnesses who write about the dangers of urban life symbolised by the prostitute, and finally the autobiographies of the fallen woman published between the 1920s to 1940s. The autobiographies reveal a deep conservatism that typically ended with the prostitute redeeming herself through ascetic practices, indicative of the epistemic constraints that prostitutes experienced when narrating their lives. Nevertheless, Mitra argues these accounts were influential because they could ‘… be used to condemn everything from women’s education, freedom from marriage, political leaders and social movements to new circulating notions of sexual perversion—including homosexuality’ (p. 200).

The book is important on multiple counts—it uses multilingual, multidisciplinary, archival material opening up debates on global sexualities; it unmasks the development of Indian (Bengali) social analysts and their subsequent collusion with colonial counterparts in stigmatising and categorising all female sexual expressions as deviant if they occurred outside of patriarchal, monogamous, hetero-normative, upper-caste marriages; and, it has resonance for postcolonial debates on gender, sexuality, sexual violence, identity-based discrimination and violence, and medico-legal jurisprudence that tackle these issues. While many students may find this book a difficult read because the language is complicated, it is meticulously researched and makes a valuable contribution to a wide range of disciplines.