Durba Mitra

Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought is an account of how ideas of deviant female sexuality, often named as the “prostitute,” became foundational to modern social thought in colonial India.

NOTCHES: In a few sentences, what is your book about? Why will people want to read your book?

Mitra: Indian Sex Life analyzes how European and Indian social analysts made scientific claims about deviant female sexuality in the constitution of new fields of knowledge about society—the philological study of Indian erotics, criminal law, forensic medicine, ethnological and sociological theory, and popular literature. The prostitute, when dislocated from the urge to recuperate her as an identity, takes on a different history: as a concept foundational to the making of social life as an object of study. My study of ideas of deviant female sexuality in modern South Asia is not meant to be an additive account that globalizes already-established frameworks from Europe and America with empirical evidence from South Asia. Rather, I demonstrate that ideas of Indian sexuality were critical empirical referents in the constitution of deeply exclusionary ideas of civilizational and racial development that are the foundation for much modern social theory today.

I think people will want to read this book because it is an exciting and innovative new look at an issue with a substantial body of literature. I propose critical new methodological approaches to urgent political questions about how we write a history of women’s sexuality. I am attentive to the long legacies of racism and colonialism; especially, at a moment today when everyday people are confronting the ubiquity of systemic, institutionalized forms of patriarchy, sexual harassment, and violence.

NOTCHES: Besides histories of sex and sexuality what other themes does your book speak to?

Mitra: I think of this book as always about histories of sex and sexuality, because sexuality as an analytical concept creates new avenues to understand other key themes in the book. The most prominent themes that the book addresses are the history of knowledge and epistemology, histories of colonialism, and histories of power and violence. In Indian Sex Life, I argue that ideas of deviant female sexuality were foundational to the making of modern social thought. The book is thus a proposition about the pivotal role that sexuality plays in the making of modern disciplinary knowledge itself. I do so by utilizing feminist and queer methods to read a diverse and wide-ranging set of archives and histories of the colonial state as well as Indian anti-colonial social theories. The book speaks and contributes to histories of the human sciences, and the fields of legal history, the history of science and medicine, histories of philology, critical approaches to race science, histories of sociology and anthropology, and the politics of popular literature.

NOTCHES: How did you research the book?

Mitra: I conducted research in diverse archives and spaces in India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, the United Kingdom and the US. I worked in major libraries, regional and national government archives, and at local public libraries. I benefited greatly from deeply committed archivists and staff people who worked to keep materials accessible despite virtually no funding and often extraordinarily difficult conditions that threaten the preservation of rare and old materials. In the book, I bring together a wide range of disciplines to trace the reach of ideas of deviant female sexuality, including philology, legal sociology, ethnology, forensic science, biology, history, and popular literature across multiple languages and archives. Doing this kind of research required carefully searching and reconstructing sources haphazardly kept in archives across the world.

This is what it means to be a scholar of colonized spaces, especially a scholar of marginalized histories and silenced pasts, where knowledge is itself colonized. The archives I work in have been constantly disassembled over the course of the last two hundred and fifty years, the materials separated and moved by administrators who hoarded the books and manuscripts from collections, libraries, and footpath stalls of the colonies for the surveillance of colonized peoples and the benefit of private collections and museums in Europe and America. These materials were again circulated to the First World as part of food and development programs in the postcolonial period. As a result of the movement of archival and printed materials across the globe, I was at points only able to find fragmentary information about the biographies of authors or details about the textual production and reception of certain texts. So for example, my first chapter, “Origins,”  on philological study and the control of women’s sexuality was facilitated in large part by the Congressional PL480 project, the Books for Food project, where the US government facilitated the large scale removal and movement of publications from India to US research libraries in exchange for surplus wheat from the United States. I am also a scholar with a US passport who had the opportunity to conduct research that required moving across borders in India, Pakistan, and the UK. These positions gave me access to materials that otherwise would be difficult to access if located at an institution in South Asia.

The other challenge that women, queer people, minoritized people—especially Dalit women—encounter conducting archival research is the immense difficulty of conducting research alone, especially on controversial topics. Archival and ethnographic research requires a kind of defiance, a full-body commitment to the work. I have been kicked out of archives for wearing inappropriate clothing and have regularly had to explain my marital status before gaining access to materials. I have had people refuse to give me books in libraries because I ought to be a “good girl” and I should not read such lewd materials (like medical textbooks from a hundred years ago!).

The experiences can also have long-term consequences. I have had numerous circumstances where my safety was compromised, in India and perhaps even more acutely in overt racist acts in London and elsewhere in Europe. In the years of archival research required for this book, I was sexually harassed and experienced everyday forms of unwanted touching, and, at points, sexual assault, a common and often unspoken experience among many researchers in different spaces. These are not unique experiences to me by any means, and I was guarded from more precarious circumstances because I had resources, a safe place to stay, and network of colleagues and friends. But it is the condition under which women, and perhaps more acutely women of color, queer people, minoritized people, conduct archival and ethnographic research across the world. It is a research condition that, in my view, must shape our research questions as we seek to produce innovative histories of our present. Who gets to be unmarked and move freely in public today? What does it mean to inhabit or defy the everyday threat of unwanted sexual advances and violence? What is the visceral experience of racism in the European library or archive that possess the materials of the colony, moved thousands of miles from the place of its production? How has climate failure made these research projects even more precarious, from extreme weather conditions that threaten the preservation of already disintegrating archival documents, to fires, to extreme levels of pollution that people living and conducting research in the Global South confront every day? I think there are a powerful set of conversations emerging today, based in feminist praxis, that think critically about how we read archives, engages how we write about disappeared lives in the archives, and openly confronts the enduring reality of these research conditions.

NOTCHES: Did the book shift significantly from the time you first conceptualized it?

Mitra: Yes, I had initially imagined this project to be a social history of marginalized women based in social historical methods. When I first conceptualized the project as a PhD student, I had been searching for the category of “prostitute” in archives from colonial eastern India to write the history of women. I had set out to do a social history of the many social classes of women who were classified as prostitutes.

As I began to follow this archival category, I found the “prostitute” everywhere, across different archives from colonial India, appearing, disappearing, and then reappearing in files that seemingly had little to do with the regulation of sexual commerce. In colonial India, the term “prostitute” was used to describe virtually all women outside of monogamous Hindu upper-caste marriage, including the courtesan, the dancing girl, high-caste Hindu widows, Hindu and Muslim polygamous women, low-class Muslim women workers, indentured women transported across the British empire, beggars and vagrants, women followers of religious sects, mendicant performers, professional singers, the wives of sailors, women theater actors, saleswomen, nurses, urban industrial laborers, and domestic servants. It seemed clear to me that something systematic was occurring—a system of thinking for which we had not yet fully accounted. To understand this haunting presence required a different practice of reading that linked together seemingly disparate archives.

The project shifted to become an intellectual history that could account for the excess of this archival presence as a historical phenomenon. In colonial India, the “prostitute” was trafficked as a concept in the service of the development of colonial social science, claims to scientific expertise, and new social theories on the progress of Indian society. This book offers a critical genealogy of the concept of the prostitute to make visible structures of intellectual life that used ideas of deviant female sexuality to study and objectify Indian society.

NOTCHES: How do you see your book being most effectively used in the classroom? What would you assign it with?

Mitra: I think this book would be effectively used in the classroom alongside primary source materials that help students think critically about novel practices of reading archival materials that reflect difficult and at point violent histories of sexuality, from the medical objectification of women’s bodies in forensic medical descriptions of abortion to the sterile language of sexual classification in colonial legal archives. Luckily, many of these sources, like key sociologies of prostitution, colonial medical textbooks, and autobiographies of so-called “prostitutes” in Calcutta, are digitized and widely available for teachers. In terms of secondary sources, I think it would be productive to teach Indian Sex Life alongside comparative scholarship on historical method, work in the history of sexuality in global contexts, the rich historiography on prostitution across the modern world, feminist and queer theories that foreground questions of racism, social stigma, and labor, as well as scholarship that proposes innovative approaches to archives in postcolonial studies and Black feminisms.

I would love to see a class on decolonizing social theory that brings this book together with critical texts that critique the Eurocentric and androcentric basis of canonical social theory. I believe this book, placed alongside major texts from the nineteenth and early twentieth century that form the “canon” of social theory, would give students an understanding of the colonial, deeply patriarchal, and racist origins of concepts of social progress that undergird what has been held up as canonical knowledge for the past one hundred years. I am excited that Indian Sex Life is currently being taught in a range of courses, on feminist and queer theory, the history of science and epistemology, sexology, sexuality and racism, and caste, race, and democracy.

NOTCHES: Why does this history matter today?

Mitra: Right now, we are living in a moment of extraordinary transformation as people face state-sponsored systems of right-wing violence and what seem to be never-ending acts of gendered and sexual violence across postcolonial South Asia. These forms of violence, from rapes to lynchings, reveal the critical place of sexuality and sexual control in how we define citizenship and belonging today. Sexuality shapes acts of caste discrimination and the enforcement of upper-caste caste dominance, anti-Muslim and minority exclusion, and the ongoing subordination and erasure of women and girls who are quite literally eliminated from the living. Millions of people in South Asia at borderlands and in disputed territories live under the threat of violence, and there have major acts of sexual violence that have shown the power of the state to silence, incarcerate, and eliminate minorities.

Yet we are also witnessing the rise of some of the most extraordinary women’s, queer, and transgender movements, movements that decry sexual harassment and gender violence and critique how majoritarian movements have compromised and undermined diverse forms of gender rights with false and dangerous ideologies of national belonging. There are extraordinary anti-caste movements, demonstrations by young women (often in religious minorities), and large-scale protests by transgender communities who are critiquing normative notions of social roles based in caste, sexual difference, and the subordination of sexual minorities and women. These people have refused a jingoistic nationalism in India based in a majoritarian rhetoric that perversely claims an anti-colonial language of political autonomy and tradition to enforce heterosexual upper-caste Hindu patriarchy. Women and sexual minorities are leading movements against authoritarianism and right-wing populism at considerable risk to their bodies, their families, and their communities.

In Indian Sex Life, I argue we need to ask not only about our social histories, but also epistemological questions that are deeply historical. The book reveals how the control and erasure of women’s will and sexuality has been foundational for modern social thought. Contemporary political demonstrations are not simply social protests against particular laws or state actions, they are radical claims by women and minorities to the right to envision the future of a society.  From this critical moment, I believe we have to ask different questions about how we write the history of sexuality and gendered power. I mean it not only in terms of the symbolic place of womanhood in nationalist or majoritarian movements, but also in the critical place of ideas of women’s sexuality in the very way Indian society itself has been made into an object of knowledge for the last two hundred and fifty years. Normative ideas of sexuality have been foundational for how society has been studied and debated and have shaped the deeply patriarchal terms through which social futures were and still are imagined. In my view, the project of imagining a radically different future can only come when one confronts this history as a history of knowledge, when people lay bare deeply violent ideologies based in the erasure and the subordination of women’s desires.

NOTCHES: Your book is published, what next?

Mitra: I am currently working on a history of Third World feminist theory and the extraordinary intellectual production that resulted from South-South feminist solidarity movements in the second half of the twentieth century.

Durba Mitra is Assistant Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality and Carol K. Pforzheimer Assistant Professor at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University. Her research and teaching focus on the history of sexuality, the history of science and epistemology, and gender and feminist thought in South Asia and the colonial and postcolonial world.



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