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.

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. Mitra demonstrates how the intellectual history of modern social thought is based in a dangerous civilizational logic built on the control and erasure of women's sexuality. This logic continues to hold sway in present-day South Asia and the postcolonial world.

Reframing the prostitute as a concept, Indian Sex Life overturns long-established notions of how to write the history of modern social thought in colonial India, and opens up new approaches for the global history of sexuality.

About the Author
Durba Mitra is assistant professor of studies in women, gender, and sexuality at Harvard University and Carol K. Pforzheimer Assistant Professor at the Radcliffe Institute.

Reviews
"Honorable Mention for the J. Willard Hurst Book Prize, Law and Society Association"
"Winner of the Bernard S. Cohn Book Prize, Association for Asian Studies"
"A powerful critique of how the present-day study of society is entangled with histories of colonial, caste supremacist, and communalist knowledge production. Indian Sex Life is sure to become a classic in the fields of gender and sexuality studies and South Asian history."---Jessica Hinchy, Journal of the History of Sexuality
"A great step in the proper understanding and decoding of colonial knowledge structures and as to how and why women's perceived sexual deviancy functioned as a primary engine for change."---Samuel Bell, The Middle Ground Journal



Book Information
ISBN 9780691196350
Author Durba Mitra
Format Paperback
Page Count 304
Imprint Princeton University Press
Publisher Princeton University Press