Introduction
In 1929, an anonymous young man in western India wrote a letter in Marathi to R. D. Karve, a major advocate of sex education and birth control in western India, expressing a sense of torment at his lack of sexual self-control. The author of the letter, which was published in Karve's journal, Samaj Swasthya (The Health of Society), rehearsed his personal sexual history before indicating his anguish at his inability to stop masturbating and to prevent other seminal emissions:
I am twenty years old. In 1920 when I was in school one of the teachers informed us about male–female relations, about their mysterious character, and about the process of reproduction that is caused by sexual intercourse. This discussion affected me adversely and I got caught up in the habit of ejaculation [viryanashachi savay, literally, the wastage of semen].Footnote 1 Needless to say, I suffered from ill effects such as weakness, burning eyes, and the lack of enthusiasm for work.
My mind is never at rest unless I indulge in masturbation or ejaculate in some other way. Between 1920 and 1926, these desires arose at least once every eight days. I constantly face the ill effects of ejaculation but still I am not able to exert self-control. The desire to ejaculate is stronger than the desire to have intercourse. It sometimes happens intentionally and sometimes unintentionally.
In the last two years my desire for actual intercourse has increased. I cannot follow brahmacharya [sexual abstinence] for more than two days. In order to follow brahmacharya I tried such methods as washing my genitals with cold water, not thinking about women, and eating the leaves of a neem tree [a product believed to have special medicinal properties]. But all this effort has been in vain. Everyday I am falling further and further into a state of decline. Is there any preventive measure I can take? My parents are thinking of getting me married. Will it be better for me to marry or not to marry in order to recover my health?
My sexual desire has increased so much that I am thinking of going to a prostitute, because there is no other way for me to fulfill my desire. But if I do that, will it satisfy my desire or only increase it?Footnote 2
This letter, one of many hundreds addressed by readers to Karve between the late 1920s and the early 1950s, reflected a number of concerns shared by middle-class men in western India during this time period: the importance of conserving semen and the value of brahmacharya, the potential dangers believed to be associated with non-procreative sexual activity for a man's mental and physical health, and the possible deleterious consequences of regular semen loss for one's married life. Such a letter probably would have been unimaginable a generation or two earlier, when most young men would have been married before the age of 20, when urbanization had only begun to open up new social spaces partly freed from the scrutiny of family and community, and when no such publication as Samaj Swasthya existed as an outlet for queries based upon curiosity and sexual preoccupations.
This article suggests that the published correspondence to Samaj Swasthya—perhaps the first sex-advice column on the subcontinent—provides a rather unique source for appreciating understandings of sexuality held by middle-class men in twentieth-century urban western India.Footnote 3 In these letters, men wrote in, mostly anonymously, with questions that reflected their concerns about sexual issues. Their accounts document a wide range of attitudes and practices such as masturbation, adultery, sexual intercourse within marriage, the visiting of prostitutes, and the use of birth control. Similarly, the materials document male anxieties about such matters as sexual dysfunction, venereal disease, and procreation. A limited discussion of homosexuality and transgender issues was also present in the letters. Modelling our approach in part upon Lesley Hall's examination of the letters written by (mostly British) men to Marie Stopes roughly around the same time, we analyse the letters in Samaj Swasthya in order to unearth the forms of sexual knowledge held by middle-class men in western India during the first half of the twentieth century as well as their key sexual preoccupations.Footnote 4 An informing principle in much of the correspondence, our analysis suggests, was an underlying ideology of conjugality that was taking shape in middle-class society. The letter writers to some extent were involved in constituting the sexual character of middle-class marriage at a time when notions of modern conjugality were in a process of formation.
The letters to Karve thus help to address issues that have been rather obscure in the existing literature on sexuality in South Asian history. There has no doubt been important discussion of female sexuality during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, much of it focused on the social and discursive strictures faced by women in the context of colonial policies, social-reform movements, and nationalist activity.Footnote 5 There is, however, relatively little treatment of everyday sexual practices of women during this period or of the way women perceived their own sexual lives that is comparable to Jyoti Puri's compelling work on contemporary India.Footnote 6 But, if existing historical work on women contains significant gaps, our understandings of male sexuality have been characterized by truly huge chasms of ignorance. While the work of Joseph Alter, Charu Gupta, and several others has discussed prescriptions nationalist leaders offered to Indian middle-class men—particularly on the virtues of practising brahmacharya––there has otherwise been very limited writing in the field.Footnote 7 We know very little, for instance, about how prescriptions offered by leaders or by the print media were received by more ordinary males. Similarly, as a result of silences in the existing archives, work on queer sexuality in colonial India has left untouched a vast range of unanswered questions, compelling scholars in some cases to rely extensively on literary accounts that are often muted or indirect in their discussion of same-sex sexual practices.Footnote 8 While focusing on the strictures that a new, modern form of patriarchy placed on female sexuality in colonial India, existing work has tended to overlook the ways it also created significant dissatisfactions, uncertainties, and anxieties for middle-class men.
Similarly, the letters address serious gaps in the now very substantial scholarship on conjugality. This literature has no doubt shed great light on issues such as the domestic obligations of housewives, conceptions of the husband–wife relationship, reproduction and childcare, and the relationship between conjugality and national regeneration.Footnote 9 But it says little about the more specifically sexual aspects of marriage and the ways conjugal norms conditioned male sexual subjectivities.Footnote 10
In our view, the limitations of these literatures primarily stem from difficulties in locating source material that would shed light on such subjects, and not from a lack of scholarly interest. In part because of its rather explicit character, the correspondence to Samaj Swasthya makes it possible for us to reach a rich appreciation of the sexual predicaments faced by middle-class men in western India in the context of the emerging ideals of modern conjugality. While Karve's responses to these letters are also highly interesting, we have chosen not to devote significant attention to these responses, which lie outside the main concerns of the article.
R. D. Karve, Samaj Swasthya and the correspondence
As the publisher of Samaj Swasthya, Karve was one of several individuals in Bombay who began to take up the study of sexual science seriously during the interwar period. The cosmopolitan environment of the city, the thriving character of its print culture, the ready availability of sex-related publications from abroad in local bookstores, and the tendency of the city to be a key stopping point of Western sexual scientists in travels around India made Bombay a special hub of discussion and debate about sexual matters. Sanjam Ahluwalia and Sanjay Srivastava have explored the key roles of A. P. Pillay and N. S. Phadke in the formulation of the field of sexologyFootnote 11 ; Veronika Fuechtner has examined the visit of the German sexual scientist, Magnus Hirschfeld, to the city, where he gave at least two lectures and attracted great interest among middle-class audiences.Footnote 12 We know relatively little, however, about the relationships of such figures with each other—there is actually more information about their connections with international actors than about their interactions amongst themselves––so much remains unclear about the local social circles in which sexological knowledge was discussed and circulated.Footnote 13
Karve himself was the son of Dhondo Keshav Karve, a major advocate of women's reform in western India. Before he published Samaj Swasthya, Karve had travelled widely, especially in France and East Africa, and he may have encountered sexological literature in his periods of living abroad. He is best known today for his contributions in the field of birth control; he opened a birth-control clinic in Bombay as early as 1921 and he promoted birth-control technologies throughout his life. The heavy concentration on his birth-control activities in Marathi-language work about Karve—English-language publications are to date negligible—masks the highly controversial nature of his views on other sexual subjects. He was a sharp critic of the marriage system, both in India and elsewhere in the world; he argued that marriage was essentially a practice by which men dominated women and their bodies as a kind of property.Footnote 14 Marriage, in his view, placed unnecessary constraints on the sexuality of both men and women. He attacked concepts of virtue that insisted upon the chastity of women before marriage.Footnote 15 He supported legal prostitution, suggesting that it provided outlets to men in societies where women were likely to lose their reputations if they participated in non-marital sexual activity.Footnote 16 Karve was also an advocate of nudity as a practice that promoted physical health and was rather notorious for publishing pictures of female nudes on the cover of Samaj Swasthya.Footnote 17 His various stances created serious difficulties for him throughout his life, and left him with few allies or friends. In 1925, he was forced to resign as professor of mathematics at Wilson College because of his advocacy of birth control. Over his career, he was charged with obscenity on four occasions for various items in his publications. At one of his obscenity trials, Karve was defended by B. R. Ambedkar, the leader of the Untouchables at the time and later the chief architect of India's constitution.
Karve came to view the chief mission of his life as the dissemination of scientific knowledge on sex needed to overcome the effects of ignorance, the impact of irrational traditions, and prudery. His involvement in sex education was closely connected to his commitment to rationalism. He was a leading figure in the Rationalist Association of India and was for some time the editor of its English-language journal, Reason. Footnote 18 For Karve, ‘there is hardly any subject in which irrationalism finds greater scope than in sex matters’.Footnote 19 Sex was crucial, in Karve's view, to human happiness. The achievement of such happiness, however, required knowledge. In his book, Adhunik Kamashastra, he argued:
One can say that animals fulfill their desires without learning a scientific approach. So why do humans need a scientific approach? Vatsayana [the author of the Kamasutra, the well-known Indian treatise on sexual matters] has said that in these matters human beings depend on others for their knowledge. They do not feel sexual desire only in certain seasons of the year like animals. Men do not get their knowledge in an obvious way. Dr. IjiyeFootnote 20 (?) says that animals that live separately can still perform the act of intercourse like others of their species. Humans are not like this. If they don't get information about intercourse from others they won't understand what to do. If a woman comes close to a man in an aroused state, then [the couple] . . . can respond by just rubbing their genitals together until the point of ejaculation instead of trying to engage in intercourse. In addition . . . the issues of preventing childbirth and preventing venereal diseases are only related to human beings. So humans require scientific knowledge.Footnote 21
Karve read widely among the key figures in the global movement of sexology, including Havelock Ellis, Marie Stopes, and especially William J. Robinson (an American sexologist).Footnote 22 Over the course of his lifetime, he published books on birth control, venereal disease, prostitution, and impotence.Footnote 23 Adhunik Kamashatra, his most important work on sexual science, served as a kind of manual for middle-class men; it discussed the workings of male and female bodies, the nature of sexual intercourse, different sexual positions, and sexual problems that Karve believed were important for his audience to understand. The manual went through five editions of 2,000 copies or more (the second edition was 3,000).Footnote 24 While Karve knew English (as well as French), he published his work on sexual issues mostly in Marathi. Through use of the vernacular, he sought to disseminate ‘modern’ sexual understandings to a wider audience and at a cheaper price than the English-language literature available at this time.
Much like other publicists in western India who created journals and articles to promote their own personal causes, Karve used Samaj Swasthya to advance his views on sexual matters and other related subjects. He decided to start the journal after an article that he had written on a sexual subject was rejected for publication by Kirloskar, a reformist monthly published in Pune.Footnote 25 Karve stated his purpose for starting up Samaj Swasthya in the initial issue of the journal:
The intention of this magazine is to discuss the physical and mental healthFootnote 26 of the individual and society. The purpose of publishing [this journal] is to overcome the difficulty readers face in getting information on issues of this kind, which existing journals have been hesitant to discuss since they had reservations in writing and publishing about these subjects. We are not just interested in theoretical philosophical debate but we will also provide some information that is practical.Footnote 27
Due to the pictures of nude women on the cover and often controversial content inside, many middle-class men hesitated to bring copies of Samaj Swasthya into their homes.Footnote 28 Subscription levels were low—only 250 in the early 1930sFootnote 29 and 700 in 1952.Footnote 30 As a result, the journal struggled to break even financially throughout its lifetime. But men did read Samaj Swasthya in local libraries and at the homes of friends.Footnote 31 Clearly, the audience for the journal was significantly broader than subscription numbers would suggest and its notoriety wider still.
The correspondence to Karve began to appear in Samaj Swasthya during the first year of the journal. Karve may not have deliberately intended to establish a correspondence column. At first, he did not formally invite people to contact him; the submission of letters seemed to have been initiated by the letter writers themselves.Footnote 32 With time, the volume of letters increased significantly, and Karve devoted a section to discussing them in almost every issue. In some cases, the correspondents were readers of his journal; in others, they submitted letters after hearing from acquaintances that Karve might be able to answer some question that they had about sexual matters. In some issues of Samaj Swasthya, Karve responded to four or more letters. Individuals sometimes also wrote to Karve to ask questions that they wished to have answered outside the pages of the journal. A correspondent in one early issue asked that his query be answered by private correspondence and enclosed one anna for the reply. Karve refused to respond, saying this amount was not enough to warrant the time involved in answering; he asked readers who wanted private replies to send five rupees.Footnote 33 Even that charge apparently did not eliminate the tide of requests. By 1940, Karve had increased his fee for answering the letters personally to ten rupees; later, it went up to 20 rupees.Footnote 34 At one point in 1938, Karve mentioned that he was receiving too many letters to publish in his limited space and would have to postpone answers until future issues (though there were a small number of issues late in his career with no letters).Footnote 35
Clearly, however, Karve came to view publication of the letters as an important means of promoting a scientific perspective on sexuality and of countering popular views that he saw as reflecting ignorance, backwardness, and superstition. Though at first he published the entirety of the letters he received, he began to edit them down as their number and length grew and when authors used explicit language that might lead to prosecutions for obscenity. Much of the correspondence published in later issues thus does not provide the full wording of the original letters submitted. No doubt, such editing reflected Karve's judgment about what was most significant to publish.
Could, then, the letters have been completely concocted by Karve himself to serve his agenda (a charge that is often levelled against sex columnists)?Footnote 36 While it is conceivable that he made up a small number of letters, it is highly unlikely he did so on a regular basis. First, letter writing to prominent figures on a variety of issues, including sexuality and marriage, had become an established practice by this time; Karve certainly would have received such letters.Footnote 37 Second, in order to make up the published letters, he would have had to have engaged in a very elaborate ruse. The letters contain rather quirky personal details that would have been unnecessary for Karve to include for his own purposes. They ranged widely over a large number of subjects, including some issues that did not particularly interest him. Some letters were strongly critical of Karve, or they pressed him for personal details about his own sexual life that he was reluctant to discuss. Third, at least so far as we are aware, no contemporary of Karve ever accused him of making up the letters. If he were suspected of fabricating the correspondence, this absence would seem strange, since he had so many opponents and detractors during his lifetime. Finally, letters published in more recent sex-advice columns in India have often echoed the same themes as the Samaj Swasthya correspondence, so they seem to represent deep-seated issues among middle-class men on the subcontinent.
Of course, the correspondence with public figures and their journals was conditioned by the context of the author–audience relationship in which they were written and published.Footnote 38 The letters written to Mahatma Gandhi ask very different kinds of questions than those directed to Karve.Footnote 39 The perception of the letter writers that Karve was an expert in kamashastra (sexual science)Footnote 40 was a key consideration in their choice to consult his opinion and they often framed their questions accordingly. Writing to Karve constituted an opportunity to obtain advice outside the circles of one's kinfolk and community fellows. The correspondence to Karve addressed a significant desire for sexual knowledge in a form that would protect the identity of the authors and the embarrassing consequences of public exposure that otherwise might come with admitting to masturbation, visits to prostitutes, the contraction of venereal disease, and even same-sex sexual experience. For most correspondents, anonymity was crucial. In some of the early correspondence, writers insisted that Karve destroy their letters after he was done with them.Footnote 41 There were some correspondents who signed their names, such as Bhaskarrao Jadav, a major leader of the non-Brahman movement in Maharashtra, and G. S. Sardesai, a well-known historian of Maharashtra. Such letters addressed diverse concerns, including broader cultural issues related to sexuality, but did not discuss personal sexual matters.
In most cases, the correspondents were clearly persons of middle-class background who demonstrated a high level of literacy and who had sometimes read a wide range of sex-related material. The vast majority of the letters came from men, most of whom were unmarried or recently married; a relatively few others were in middle age or even in their sixties. During the entire 27 years of the journal's existence, only a handful of letters came from women. Most letters appear to have come from city-dwellers, though there were a few from educated men living in rural areas.
The sources of middle-class sexual knowledge
The questions posed to Karve provide a particularly valuable vehicle for detecting the forms of sexual knowledge available to educated men living in the cities. The letters make clear that middle-class unmarried young men gained their understandings of sexual matters in urban western India through a variety of sources. Such men may have been increasingly cut off from some of the kinds of information that were widely available in rural and lower-class urban contexts, such as the ritualized bawdy recitations by neighbours and family members at the time of marriages, and the performance of plays and songs that had explicit sexual content.Footnote 42 Of course, a generation earlier, many young males would have married by the age of 15–18 and would have had direct experiences of sexual intercourse with their wives. By the 1920s, by contrast, many postponed marriage until their mid-twenties. Norms of middle-class respectability increasingly discouraged both certain forms of popular entertainment and the development of non-marital relationships, including those with women of the lower classes. While no doubt some urban young men frequented prostitutes, the Karve correspondence suggests such behaviour may have been less common among the middle class than one might assume, both for financial reasons and also because of fears of the possible damage to a man's reputation that might result.Footnote 43 It is striking how rarely the correspondents mention receiving information about sexual issues in conversations with family elders. Nor did letter writers typically gain any knowledge from their classrooms; formal courses on sex education were generally absent.Footnote 44
Instead, middle-class men obtained their sexual information from a diversity of other sources in the cities where they lived. In some cases, they gained their knowledge from the street or from their male friends in schools and colleges, teahouses and ‘hotels’ (eating places), and workplaces. Karve himself mentions interactions with household servants as a mode of learning about masturbation.Footnote 45 On occasion, correspondents also report having access to erotic literature and erotic photographs.Footnote 46 ‘French stories’ and the writings of Mahdavrao Bhagal published in Samaj Swasthya were also mentioned as places where the letter writers gained information.Footnote 47
The emerging print media constituted an important source of knowledge. In particular, advertisements for sex tonics and related commodities in local newspapers conveyed extensive information. On a number of occasions, young men wrote in to Karve to ask whether some contention made in an advertisement was true. Such ads were often quite explicit in their content; the availability of these ads was so ubiquitous and their acceptance in local society was so widespread as to make it impossible for colonial administrators to prevent their publication on the grounds of obscenity.Footnote 48 In regularly suggesting that sex tonics thickened semen, heightened male vigour, and increased male capacity for reproduction, advertisements themselves were involved in the construction of middle-class sexual understandings. In delineating masturbation and nocturnal emissions as the main cause of male sexual inadequacy, they contributed mightily to defining coitus within heterosexual marriage as normative. By the 1930s and 1940s, an increasing number of advertisements promised enhanced ‘marital satisfaction’—that is, a heightening of the pleasure wives would receive from their husband's use of the product advertised. Readers of the newspapers would have encountered such advertisements almost on a daily basis.Footnote 49 Some writers in later issues of Samaj Swasthya mentioned picking up some piece of information in one of the many magazines that discussed issues of marriage, celibacy, and birth control, some of which were published only for a year or two before they were discontinued.Footnote 50 The content of these magazines must have varied, and their perspectives seem to have been informed by both indigenous and Western sexological principles.
Men also gained access to information about sexual matters in moral literature, social-reform journals, and religious tracts. In some cases, parents handed these tracts to boys in their teenage years, perhaps at times when they feared the boys might be headed down a wrong moral path. By the 1920s, there was a significant proliferation in print of indigenous writings on kamashastra (‘the science of sex’)—work that explicitly set out behavioural prescriptions for married couples, as has been discussed by Charu Gupta, Ishita Pande, and Luzia Savary. Savary specifically analyses a sub-genre of literature she calls santati shastra, which prescribed sexual behaviours for prospective parents, including the use of ‘mental force’ during sexual acts, such as focusing on the qualities the couple wanted in its ideal children during sexual intercourse in order to attain the most desirable kinds of offspring.Footnote 51 The modern kamashastra texts articulated a hybrid sexology—one that reflected the interplay between concepts drawn from Ayurvedic and other Hindu scriptural traditions, popular notions circulating on the street, emerging ideas about conjugality, and views drawn from the social-reform and eugenic literatures.
One particularly important figure in the kamashastra tradition of western India that correspondents regularly invoked in their letters—and who thus deserves to be treated at some length––was Swami Shivananda, a Hindu religious figure who headed an ashram in Varud near Amravati.Footnote 52 Shivananda wrote several widely distributed books in Marathi on issues of marriage and sexuality, including Brahmacharya Hech Jivan (Brahmacharya Is Life Itself), Dampatya Rahasya Vidnyan (The Secret of Married Life), and Manowanchhit Santati! (How to Produce the Kind of Offspring You Desire!).Footnote 53 The last of these books, which clearly falls in the category of santati shastra literature, was published first in 1924 and quickly sold all of its 5,000 copies. In 1928, Shivananda issued a second edition with a run of 10,000 copies. In his book, he offered a perspective on marriage that was steeped in Ayurvedic theories but that still reflected notions of modernity that resonated strongly among middle-class readers. Specifically, the work outlined the practices that would result in the birth of desirable kinds of offspring (this included the gender of the child) and that would ultimately contribute to the benefit of the nation. Shivananda indicated that his book was based on the authority of ancient texts as well as on personal experience; he regularly cited the Vedas and Shastric literature in backing his arguments. He also mentioned key titles from recent Western sexual science in his writings, sometimes drawing upon these works strategically to support his specific contentions about body processes.Footnote 54
Manowanchit Santati, for example, criticized Western marriage as being too strongly based upon notions of pleasure without a recognition of the obligations that came with the husband–wife bond. Divorce and premarital sex, Shivananda claimed, were beginning to be common in the West as a result.Footnote 55 Educated Indians were in danger of going down the same path by embracing ideas of love marriage, birth control, and a general indulgence of sexual desires; these trends that had produced childlessness among women and sexual weakness among men in the West.Footnote 56 At the same time, Shivananda critiqued many ‘traditional’ practices, including child marriage, the marriage of old men to young females, and polygamy, which he argued were responsible for the production of weak children. He was also a critic of prohibitions against widow remarriage, which he claimed could cause widespread adulterous behaviour.Footnote 57
Shivananda's writings at once offered principles of moral guidance and practical knowledge about sexuality that he argued every reader could use. Manowanchit Santati put forward a concept of bodily functions, based upon Ayurvedic reasoning, that emphasized the generation of sexual fluids through a complex process involving the transformation of bodily substances from food to blood to flesh and bone to semen and menstrual flows.Footnote 58 It particularly stressed the importance of brahmacharya for men and chastity for women. Sinful activity (pap) by parents resulted in the reproduction of weak children and high infant mortality; these acts would lead to the ‘decline of the body and the nation’.Footnote 59 Shivananda identified specifically the appropriate time of day and season and the timing in the menstrual cycle for sexual intercourse. Breaking with the proposed regimen, he contended, would result in the birth of barren or impotent children.Footnote 60 He also set out moral-religious prescriptions for couples to follow.Footnote 61 Shivananda repeatedly stressed the value of exerting the power of mental force in order to obtain one's ideal children.Footnote 62 In sum, he offered a notion of sexuality that linked conceptions of the body grounded in Ayurvedic texts with eugenic ideas possessing important nationalist implications and with a view of marriage grounded in emerging ideas about conjugal parenthood.
A few letters mention the writings of Mahatma Gandhi, particularly on the principle of brahmacharya. Much like the kamashastra literature, Gandhi's articles in Young India in support of restraint in sexual activity and against birth control were a major source of influence on the contemporary understandings of the marriage relationship. Like Shivananda, Gandhi offered prescriptions that warned of the deleterious consequences of semen loss for both the individual male and the nation.Footnote 63
Minor sources of sexual information mentioned in the letters were Indian classical erotic texts about sexuality, such as Ananga Ranga and the Kamasutra. In 1938, for instance, one reader took Karve to task for his reliance on Western writing on sexuality and his failure to cite Indian classical knowledge.Footnote 64 Such references, however, were hardly evidence of the influence of ancient erotic traditions passed down through the generations; rather, they reflected the reading of recent translations into English or Marathi by modern scholars. The notion that Indian culture perpetuated traditions of eroticism over many centuries in some fixed, pristine form through these texts thus would be erroneous. Another text mentioned in the letters was the medieval sex manual, the Kokashastra, which went over similar ground; we have not yet been able to determine the form in which middle-class men gained access to this text.Footnote 65
Finally, the Karve correspondents mention the work of Western sexologists. Marie Stopes, the global figure whose works were most widely available in India, was an advocate of birth control and the most prominent British popularizer of scientific sexology. She wrote a number of books that set out sexual practices that she believed would be conducive to happy marriages, including Married Love: A New Contribution to the Solution of Sexual Difficulties and Enduring Passion. These texts were widely available in India by the time Samaj Swasthya was being published.Footnote 66 Several of Stopes's books were translated into Indian languages.Footnote 67 Stopes's work set forth practices designed to heighten mutual sexual pleasure of husbands and wives, and thus to perpetuate marriages based upon companionability and affection. Some of Karve's readers clearly had read Stopes's books and asked him for his opinion on her writings.Footnote 68 A few readers even mentioned some information they had gathered through international journals and other very scholarly works on sexual science. Finally, and not surprisingly, many correspondents obtained their knowledge from reading Karve's own writings such as Adhunik Kamashatra and Samaj Swasthya. In some cases, they asked Karve to resolve apparent contradictions in what he had written.
In short, then, middle-class men in western India had access to a considerable range of sources containing information about sex that was often contradictory. The correspondents often saw no incompatibility between drawing upon texts grounded in Ayurvedic logic, popular literature, and street knowledge on the one hand and books written by Karve or Western sexual scientists on the other. The layering of different notions espoused by writers who sometimes were openly in conflict with each other was commonplace; this kind of hybridity of course was facilitated by the relative absence of any kind of formal sex education that would have insisted upon single, authoritative forms of knowledge.
Sexual anxieties
While the correspondence provides particularly useful evidence about the sources of sexual knowledge that reached young urban men, its value in elucidating their most important sexual anxieties is also fascinating. The sexual preoccupations of middle-class males were rooted both in the forms of sexual knowledge that were available and in the gaps within the available information. As we have mentioned in the previous section, many of the most important sources of knowledge to which young men had access were prescriptive in character. They offered moral pathways for readers to follow as well as guidelines for the maintenance of healthy bodies (for both themselves and their sexual partners). Men who found themselves unable to follow these prescriptions often worried extensively about their own sexual normativity, their personal respectability, the consequences of their behaviour for their physical well-being and that of their wives, and their ability to reproduce. They gave voice to these concerns in their letters to Karve.
Many of the anxieties expressed in the letters were grounded in an emerging ideology of conjugality. This ideology, as numerous scholars have discussed, was shaped by the law,Footnote 69 social-reform movements,Footnote 70 literature on women's domestic responsibilities,Footnote 71 autobiographical accounts,Footnote 72 and newspaper advertisements. As some scholars have pointed out, advocates of the new conjugality hardly sought the abolition of patriarchal relations; instead they insisted on a new patriarchy centred on the authority of the husband rather than on that of elders in the joint family.Footnote 73 While the literature on this subject has typically focused on the delineation of new feminine responsibilities, it has sometimes underplayed discussions of the important masculine obligations that husbands were undoubtedly expected to fulfil.Footnote 74
The development of modern conjugal ideology ultimately embraced the sexual realm and came to influence strongly the character of men's sexual anxieties. Advertisements of sex tonics, texts from the kamashastra literature, translations of classical Hindu erotic texts, and many of the new works of sexual science insisted that husbands ‘satisfy’ their wives sexually, though what ‘satisfaction’ might have entailed may have varied from one source to another, and sometimes may have simply indicated the ability to produce offspring. Perhaps influenced by these varied literatures, men often gave voice in their letters to a concern that sexual activity outside of marriage, with prostitutes and in adulterous relationships, would harm their reputations and those of their families. Thus, in ways that have not fully been recognized by scholars, the new patriarchy may have enhanced sexual constraints for men as well as for women, though of course the consequences for women in violating notions of conjugal fidelity were far more severe than they were for men. Reproduction was also a central concern. Much of the focus in the santati shastra literature of course was on the kinds of behaviours, sexual and otherwise, that the conjugal couple needed to maintain in order to enhance the likelihood of producing attractive, intelligent, successful (often male) children who would sustain the family name.
Themes covered in the correspondence
The questions posed by letter writers covered a diverse range of concerns.Footnote 75 In some cases, in a pattern common in correspondence about sexual matters elsewhere in the world, the correspondents began their letters by indicating that they were writing not about themselves, but on behalf of a ‘friend’. Sometimes, they wrote out of curiosity; more often they sought to address a problem they (or their ‘friend’) were facing at the time. Some wrote to attack Karve for some position he had taken on sexual matters or about political issues; defendants of Gandhi, for instance, argued with Karve on a number of occasions about his varied stances in opposition to the Mahatma.Footnote 76 A few of the questions to Karve were on major political issues then under discussion, such as nationalism, Hindu–Muslim conflict, and caste-related matters. The letters on sexual subjects—which constituted the majority—ranged widely. Some of these letters raised worries common to many cultures (such as penis size and premature ejaculation), while others articulated preoccupations that were particularly salient in the Indian context, such as the value of brahmacharya. It is striking that relatively few letters explicitly discussed issues of erectile dysfunction; the more important concern about male sexual inadequacy in the letters was that of seminal thickness and quality.Footnote 77 Also striking is the relative absence of reference to non-coital sexual acts between men and women. Oral sex, for instance, is only mentioned in a couple of letters. For the readers and Karve alike, coitus appears to have been the only normative form of male–female sexual relations. Discussion of prostitution, venereal disease, and abortion were scattered throughout the questions, as were queries reflecting curiosity about women's bodies, menstruation, and conception. As we shall see, there were a small number of questions on same-sex and transgender sexuality.
Questioners often sought Karve's views as an exponent of the most modern, scientific positions on sexual issues. Perhaps because of his strong challenges to traditional norms and his obvious access to Western knowledge, correspondents tended to perceive Karve as a special authority on the most advanced findings of Western science. For instance, one correspondent, who signed his name as Pandharpurkar, submitted a series of queries about the accuracy of folk ideas about sexuality. He asked about the validity of the principle of ‘mental force’ found in santati shastra literature, questioning whether the thoughts of the parents at the time of intercourse or the first things seen by a woman after being impregnated might affect the character of the child. Pandharpurkar especially mentioned common beliefs about the characteristics of a woman who would likely be a pativrata (devoted wife). For instance, he asked whether women who sang, whose big toe was bigger than their thumbs, who had shifty eyes, who constantly checked themselves out in the mirror, who regularly adjusted their saris, or who walked like men and talked roughly might be potentially adulterous or unfit for motherhood.Footnote 78
Overall, the letters are pervaded by a dominant sexual ethos centred on marriage and reproduction. Some letters were concerned with unmarried girlfriends or adulterous relationships, but these letters were relatively few in number. Karve's own views about the inherent inequities of the marriage system were largely irrelevant to the questioners, and his own decision to undergo sterilization without any offspring was usually alien to their perspective. Karve himself recognized that, under the present social system, the costs to a woman of violating social norms and engaging in premarital and extramarital sex were considerable, so many of his responses implicitly accepted the notion that a contented married life was the objective to be sought.
We argue that themes that appear repeatedly in the letters reflect common sexual preoccupations among middle-class men of the period. Here, we single out four illustrative themes (though the fourth surfaced in only a few letters): (1) worries about the consequences of masturbation; (2) questions about women's bodies, particularly about menstruation and the process of conception; (3) ideas of birth control; and (4) issues related to homosexual and transgender practices.
Masturbation and seminal anxieties
A large number of letters were concerned with the potential negative effects of masturbation.Footnote 79 To some extent, the preoccupation with masturbation might be seen as a product of the emergence of a period of anxious adolescence for middle-class men during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As a result of new norms of modernity and the need to delay the inauguration of work lives until after a lengthy period of formal schooling, the age of marriage rose rapidly during the first decade of the twentieth century.Footnote 80 At the same time, concepts of social respectability placed greater restrictions on the sexual lives of their potential female partners, especially those of the male writers’ own class. Social interactions across gender lines appear to have been seriously constrained, and opportunities for sexual relationships to develop were few. While there were some exceptions, the letters to Karve in Samaj Swasthya suggest that young men often had limited sexual activity other than masturbation before they married, and never any kind of public relationship.Footnote 81 Sexual uncertainty may be a characteristic of adolescence wherever it exists as a distinct stage of life but, in this context of limited social interactions between the genders, anxieties about male sexual capacity in intercourse and the ability to reproduce may have had a special chance to fester.
Young men in western India encountered a wide variety of information discouraging masturbation. These various sources all were grounded in well-established (and well-explored) Indian theories suggesting that the wastage of semen depleted one's energy and strength and that the conservation of semen was a means of generating vitality that could be deployed in the wider world.Footnote 82 No doubt, these theories were reinforced by the influence of Western notions with similar emphases.Footnote 83 Such theories have received considerable attention from historians and other scholars. Gandhi regarded brahmacharya (celibacy) as a way of developing the strength he needed to engage in his demanding forms of non-violent resistance.Footnote 84 As Bhikhu Parekh has indicated, Gandhi believed that semen was the chief source of energy in the body, that ‘all power comes from the preservation and sublimation of the vitality that is responsible for the creation of life [i.e. sperm]’, and that sexual acts involving the loss of semen ‘impeded the generation of psychic and spiritual energy’.Footnote 85 Anshu Malhotra has specifically examined how the nineteenth-century religious reformer Dayananda Saraswati advocated brahmacharya in one's youth and the delay of marriage as key to the production of healthy progeny, which in turn he believed to be critical to ensuring the regeneration of the nation.Footnote 86 In her work on north Indian notions of sexuality, Charu Gupta mentions the many tracts circulating in north India urging men to constrain their sexuality and to practise brahmacharya.Footnote 87
Advertisements for sex tonics also regularly emphasized the dangers of semen wastage.Footnote 88 These ads stressed the debilitating and shameful effects of semen loss through activity other than heterosexual intercourse, especially masturbation, wet dreams, and spermatorrhea. Most commonly, they emphasized that indulgence in these practices in one's youth undermined a man's sexual capacity or the thickness of his sperm as a mature adult, possibly damaging his ability to provide ‘marital satisfaction’ to his wife and to reproduce. In other words, the advertisements embodied what Alter has called the ‘paradox of virility’—that is, the co-existence of conceptions placing high emphasis on self-restraint in sexuality and those stressing the value of robust sexual performance.Footnote 89 The ads promised that the appropriate potions and lotions could repair the damage of semen wastage so that a man could perform strongly in intercourse.
The evidence from the correspondence of Karve suggests anxieties about semen conservation rooted in these various forms of knowledge were widespread among young middle-class males during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Letters on this subject expressed the concern that masturbation and wet dreams could produce profound, long-lasting and debilitating consequences for a man's physical health, for his memory, and for his level of mental energy. They also illustrate worries about the ability to perform sexually as husbands in marriage. In some cases, the letters were written by sexually inexperienced young men whose families had begun to inaugurate efforts to arrange their marriages and who were clearly in a state of some sexual panic. In most cases, the correspondent indicated his belief that the practice of brahmacharya would allow him to regain his mental and physical vigour as well as the capacity to engage in sex with his current or future spouse. But each correspondent professed that he found himself unable to control his desire to masturbate. One typical young man wrote:
I am writing to you after learning from a friend that you have studied kamashastra. I hope you will consider my situation and guide me. Needless to say this correspondence should be kept confidential and should be torn up immediately when it is no longer necessary to use it.
I am 21 years old and I am studying for the ISC exams. I have had the habit of masturbation for the last five years. These days I do this about twice a week. I am not physically debilitated but I have started declining mentally. The consequence of this is that I am unable to complete my work. Please guide me on how to live as a complete brahmachari? I have no experience of intercourse with women. Would I face any ill effects of this habit in my future life [i.e. in future sexual activity within marriage]? I have been ensnared by this habit because of a very strong desire for intercourse with a woman.Footnote 90
Another student echoed these concerns:
I got into the habit of masturbation two years go. It look me almost a year to understand that it is terribly harmful. Since that time, I have been trying to stop the practice but my sexual desire persists. I understand that it is not just bad but extremely bad, but still cannot prevent it. At one point, I used to masturbate every day but I have reduced my habit to once every four days. But after four days I can't control myself. . . . Repentance is not enough to stop it. I have started a business, but my practice of masturbation continues. It is said that masturbation does not just cause physical weakness but [other] bad consequences such as loss of memory, the inability to concentrate on one's studies, etc. Unfortunately all these problems are applicable in my case. I used to get 65% marks in the matriculation exams but that has come down to 35% now. I try hard to devote myself to studies but can't motivate myself. I realize that newspaper advertisements [for tonics claiming to address sexual dysfunction] are false but still if you suggest some medicine I will try my best to take that. . . . I feel bad about these artificial efforts but also feel bad about the uncontrolled state of my mind. I hope you will think seriously [about my request] and reply from your magazine. Reading your magazine is banned in my house. I will read it in the library.Footnote 91
Yet another wrote with similar concerns:
I am 23 years old. When I was 12 a puppy started playing with my genitals. After that time I got into the habit of masturbation. I had profound ignorance about what semen is . . . . This situation continued until I was 19. Then fortunately my father brought home a book by Shivananda. My eyes were opened by this book and I gave up the habit [of masturbation]. Then I read your [Karve's] books. I am uncertain about my ability to have children. Please tell me how to clear this doubt without going to a doctor . . . . The elders [in the family] are starting to pressure me to get married. I start sweating when they talk about this. What yoga asanas should I do, what should I eat, what other medicines should I take? I am not thinking about marriage right now. I have experienced a tremendous loss of semen due to excessive wet dreams. I have also thought of having sexual intercourse [presumably with a prostitute] but if I am not a man [here raising the possibility of impotence], my wife will unnecessarily have trouble. Her life will be wasted. Rather than have that happen it might be better to remain unmarried.Footnote 92
A particularly poignant account was submitted to Karve in 1951. Karve clearly had edited the published narrative down from a longer letter so we do not have the actual wording of the original. The correspondent indicated that he worked in a government office and was 21 years old. He said that he had grown up in a very orthodox environment, which he viewed as responsible for his strong obsession with sex, his shyness, and his stuttering. He indicated that he had been troubled by strong sexual desires since he was six and had masturbated two or three times every other day. He read Dampatya Rahasya (probably Dampatya Rahasya Vidnyan by Shivananda) when he was 15 or 16, and he learned about the ill effects of masturbation for his health:
I was obviously frightened by this because by that age I had started ejaculating. I tried to reduce the habit, but the desire was so strong that even if I reduced it, my thoughts about sex continued. . . . Even if I read a sentence in a story like ‘he pulled her close to him,’ I would not be able to read any further. I tried hard not to allow these thoughts to come to mind but without success and then I become overtaken by a sense of frustration. . . . These days I have also started thinking about marriage. But as I do this, I become afraid that I won't be able to satisfy my wife or keep her happy due to the weakness caused by this childhood habit. How will I be able to fulfill her expectations?
The correspondent went on to indicate that he was trying to reduce his shyness and mentioned that he had been reading religious literature but these efforts had not lessened his desire. He asked Karve several questions, such as whether childhood masturbation could lead to failure in marriage, whether even thoughts about sex (he had by this time stopped the practice of masturbation) might produce genital weakness, and whether his stammering might be due to his excessive level of sexual desire.Footnote 93
In addition to writing about masturbation, correspondents sought Karve's opinion about the value of some abstemious practice they had encountered in books or in conversations on the street that would affect their retention of semen. In December 1938, a reader mentioned Shivananda's theory that wearing a loincloth would serve this purpose. Soon after Karve answered that the theory of semen conservation was itself erroneous—he criticized Swami Shivananda directly in this response––another correspondent wrote in to agree that loincloths had little value, but he took Karve to task for his position on semen wastage: ‘How can you say that? Semen going out from the body is a loss and is evidence of deterioration of the body. Any sensible person will recognize this.’Footnote 94 Other letter writers defended coitus interruptus as a means of preventing semen loss. One correspondent, apparently drawing upon accounts circulating at the time about the life of Krishna (the hero of the Hindu epic the Mahabharata), argued that Krishna was a bhogi (person who enjoys sensual pleasures) who had 16,108 wives but still managed to be a brahmachari. According to these accounts, Krishna refrained from ejaculation in intercourse with his sexual partners, and had also absorbed the menstrual elements from their sexual organs, adding to the strength he gained by conserving his semen. The letter speculated that, while Krishna was an extraordinary person, perhaps one could become a bhogi brahmachari by disconnecting the brain signals that caused the expansion and contraction of muscles involved in ejaculation. Another man, who had been following this correspondence, wrote in soon thereafter to insist on the value of such attempts. He said he had found it impossible to refrain completely from sexual intercourse with his wife because she was so physically attractive. He outlined three steps based upon his own experience. In the first step, a man would refrain from ejaculation in intercourse. Second, the man would extract the valuable menstrual elements from his wife through his genitals. Third, through this process, he would gain strength and tej (vigour, glow, brightness). A woman would get satisfaction due to the man's power to extract these menstrual elements. Occasionally, ejaculation took place despite the man's efforts, not inside his wife's body, but ‘elsewhere’. In his case, this practice continued for 11 years, until his wife's death. Initially, he found the lack of ejaculation in sex to be disappointing but he eventually got used to it. Besides suggesting this method as a way to generate an enhanced level of energy and to increase one's life expectancy, he also advocated it as an alternative to birth-control technologies as a means of limiting reproduction.Footnote 95
Given the centrality of preoccupations about semen conservation in letters to Karve, it seems difficult to accept the argument made by Sanjay Srivastava that semen anxiety has been exaggerated in understandings of Indian male sexuality.Footnote 96 The letters concerning masturbation and the practice of brahmacharya indicate the centrality of theories of semen conservation in conceptions of middle-class sexuality. The letters suggest that such theories came to inform everyday attitudes of young men and stimulated intense forms of anxiety when these men were not able to control practices such as masturbation. The correspondents regularly drew a connection between what they saw as excessive indulgence in sexual activity on the one hand and their ability to muster the strength and energy necessary for executing the essential tasks of life on the other. Clearly, then, a focus on semen conservation was not simply the preserve of a few especially ascetic individuals; these concerns strongly influenced popular notions of male sexuality, including those held by men who prided themselves on their modernity.
The female body and conception
While the seminal anxieties of middle-class males are an especially striking feature of the letters to Karve, the correspondence also often reveals a strong sense of curiosity about the female body. The sources of sexual knowledge in urban western India clearly supplied young men much more information (and more specific preconceptions) about male sexuality than they did about the sexuality of women. Many of the unmarried men who wrote Karve had little close personal interaction with women, and the female body was often a source of mystery and sexual anxiety. For instance, the correspondents sometimes wrote out of a sense of bewilderment about the sources of sexual pleasure for women. Karve received several queries about objects that women could use to obtain sexual pleasure.Footnote 97 Several writers asked how female breasts should be touched during intercourse.Footnote 98 Karve received one letter discussing the issue of female ejaculation.Footnote 99 Another reader asked about how women masturbate.Footnote 100 By contrast, there was little discussion of female orgasm or of the clitoris or vagina as sources of sexual sensation—concerns that have often pervaded Western sex-advice columns.Footnote 101 As the concept of modern conjugality increasingly stretched into the sexual realm, however, some men wrote to Karve out of concern about how they might ‘satisfy’ their future or current wives.Footnote 102 As we have mentioned already, the meaning of ‘sexual satisfaction’ was often unclear and, in some cases, may have simply meant the ability to carry out the act of intercourse or to ensure that their wives would be able to have children rather than to promote sexual excitement.
A particularly strong area of concentration in letters asking about the female body was the subject of menstruation. Questioners drew upon widely circulating theories, steeped in the Ayurvedic tradition, that regarded human reproduction as an outcome of the combination of seminal and menstrual fluids and that depicted processes within female and male bodies as being similar to each other in nature.Footnote 103 In the writings of Shivananda, for instance, both semen and menstrual blood were the final products, or essences, of processes of digestion and transformation that began with the intake of food. Both were outcomes of a kind of purification process involving the making of six dhatus (essences) that took five days each. These processes could be enhanced by eating the right food and by conducting a clean life. According to Shivananda, the elimination of accumulated ‘filth’ (ghan) during menstruation left the most pure of the menstrual elements in the woman's body. During their periods, he argued, women were highly impure and could pollute anything in their environment. It was important for them to stay away from others for three days, and they needed to follow a critical set of ritual processes relating to the timing of food consumption and the avoidance of baths, etc. Not observing these rules, Shivananda insisted, could affect the capacity of women to bear healthy children.Footnote 104 Similar beliefs about the impurity of women during their periods were held widely in western Indian society. At the same time, however, the increasing participation of women in public life as students, shoppers, political protestors, and occasionally job-holders must have begun to create strains on such beliefs and to prompt an increased male interest in understanding the female body better.Footnote 105
Correspondents raised a number of questions that reflect the influence of the theories of female body fluids we have discussed. One questioner asked what the relationship was between menstruation and breast milk, pointing to some passage in Shivananda's writing that suggested milk was a product of menstrual flows that moved upward in the body and were converted into breast milk.Footnote 106 Another asked about the relationship between menstruation and female secretions during intercourse.Footnote 107 He went on to query whether women became weak because of menstruation, just as he believed men did when they lost semen.Footnote 108 One correspondent asked, if the impure blood in a woman was eliminated from the female body every month, where did such blood in the male body go? Similarly, another reader asked, if women benefited from eliminating blood in their menstrual cycles, could not men get a similar benefit?Footnote 109
A core preoccupation in most discussions of menstruation was anxiety about conception. On numerous occasions, readers wrote in to ask about the relationship between menstrual patterns and the ability to reproduce.Footnote 110 In some cases, their concerns were about young women (possibly their daughters or sisters) whose menstruation had not begun or was irregular; the correspondents connected these concerns to problems with childbirth and the failure of marriages.Footnote 111 In other cases, correspondents posed questions about women whose menstruation had stopped after childbirthFootnote 112 or as they reached their forties in age.Footnote 113 On one occasion, the correspondent provided detailed evidence on the timing of his wife's recent menstrual periods as he requested specific medicines from Karve to stop a possible pregnancy.Footnote 114
In a few cases, readers evoked prevailing theories articulated in Shivananda's writings, in other popular pamphlets, and in texts like the Kokashastra about the importance of the timing of sexual intercourse (in relation to the menstrual cycle) to conception and the sex of the child.Footnote 115 A reader posed the question about whether it was impossible—as some Indian writings suggested—for pregnancy to occur if intercourse took place on the sixteenth day of the cycle.Footnote 116 Shivananda had argued that pregnancy at such times was possible only if the man was extraordinary (presumably if he had shown extensive self-control in his sexual activity). In his view, the eighth and tenth nights for conception of a male child were more suitable among ordinary people whose seminal strength was limited; semen could in most cases not directly enter the womb on days late in the menstrual cycle because the mouth of the uterus became smaller.Footnote 117 Shivananda also prescribed the nights that would be best for conceiving male children and female children.
Men wrote in with a host of other concerns about conception. A common line of questioning was whether it was still possible for a man who had engaged in extensive masturbation to reproduce and whether there was any possibility of making up for sexual excess in one's youth.Footnote 118 But there were a host of related questions. How much semen was necessary for conception?Footnote 119 How frequently did one need to engage in intercourse for conception to happen?Footnote 120 Was one sexual act sufficient? Would taking sex tonics like Okasa (a widely advertised German product) help increase a man's ability to impregnate his wife, who not been able to conceive before this?Footnote 121 Several writers asked Karve himself to determine whether they were capable of having a child; one offered to send Karve a piece of cloth with samples of his semen and his wife's menstrual blood to determine whether they had the necessary qualities.Footnote 122
Birth control
Discussion of birth control also assumed a prominent place in the questions published in Samaj Swasthya. The presence of this discussion is not surprising because Karve had achieved significant recognition for his expertise on this topic. The issue had received wide attention among members of the middle class as advocates of birth control clashed with its detractors extensively in print media. An especially telling moment in this controversy was Gandhi's debate with Margaret Sanger at the time of her visit to India in 1936, which was printed in Asia Magazine.Footnote 123 Scholarship on the early history of birth control has stressed the politically charged character of the issue. Some of its advocates gave a eugenic tinge to their arguments, stressing the ways it would limit growth in the population of the rural poor; other advocates, particularly in the anti-caste movements of South India, incorporated birth control as a tool of women's emancipation in their late-colonial anti-caste agenda.Footnote 124 Clearly, the letters to Karve suggest, birth control had already achieved a significant place in discussions of sexuality among the Indian middle class before the Second World War. The subject was not just a discourse of elite men and women centred on controlling reproduction of the lower classes, but a set of practices being utilized by many middle-class Indians and being considered by many more.Footnote 125
The availability of birth-control technologies may have had a significant impact on the perception of sex within marriage, opening up the possibility of experiencing sexual pleasure without the fear of procreation. Interestingly, we found only one letter about birth control posed by a man engaged in a premarital relationship.Footnote 126 A small number of letter writers objected to Karve's advocacy of birth control, arguing that it might promote premarital sex among unmarried women and promiscuity among widows.Footnote 127 For the most part, however, Karve's questioners on the subject of birth control were men who sought information they could bring to their marriages.
Some letter writers expressed a concern to prevent the experience of further painful births or to limit the difficulties of providing care for large families.Footnote 128 But they commonly voiced their concerns less in terms of expanding options for their wives than in terms of improving their own sexual lives. One correspondent wrote that his wife had had five or six children die in childbirth; only one son, now 12 years old, had survived. He reported that she now refused to have sexual relations except on the one day during the menstrual cycle that the couple believed that conception could not take place. The wife had actually encouraged her husband to search for sex outside the marriage, but he felt that going to a prostitute was not affordable. He asked Karve what he should do.Footnote 129 Another letter writer wrote on behalf of a ‘friend’ who had been unable to engage in mutually pleasurable sexual relations with his wife for a long time. She developed phlebitis during her pregnancy, and had six days of labour pains before their baby was extracted using forceps. After giving birth, she had developed an aversion to intercourse out of fear of conceiving again. Masturbation, the letter writer mentioned, was the only option currently open to his friend, who was considering sterilization. Wondering whether sterilization would affect his wife's satisfaction in intercourse, the letter insisted that the friend wanted information about the physical consequences of the surgery, where it could be done, what it would cost, and what term in English he should use for the operation.Footnote 130 Another correspondent wrote in to indicate that he and his wife had had five children in six years of marriage; four of these survived. He learned about birth control from Samaj Swasthya and he had convinced his wife to use it. The couple had not had a child during the last 12 years as a result of his operation. ‘If I had not come across your magazine,’ he wrote, ‘I would have ten to eleven children and I would have sunk deeply in debt. I would have had to listen to the harsh words of moneylenders or I would have been unable to educate my children.’ ‘If we want to survive as a nation,’ he added, ‘then population has to be kept in proportion to income.’Footnote 131 Little mention was made in the letter of the relief use of birth-control techniques might have provided to his wife.
The letters offer some evidence about existing indigenous practices of preventing births. A few letter writers asked about methods to inhibit conception they had heard about on the street, such as coitus interruptus and the rhythm method of timing intercourse according to the menstrual cycle.Footnote 132 Some correspondents brought up abstinence as a method of preventing conception, though abstinence was more commonly discussed as a method of building up a man's energy and strength.Footnote 133
Most of the letters about birth control, however, were from people who looked to Karve as an expert on the new technologies. They asked him which devices were best, how to get a hold of them, and how to use themFootnote 134 ; at least two letters discussed birth-control methods that had proven unsuccessful. The letters referred occasionally to a technique advocated by Shakuntala Paranjpe—Karve's collaborator in the later years of the magazine—for those unable to afford commercially available products. This involved the use of a sponge (a cloth folded over several times) and oil to inhibit the movement of semen in the vagina.Footnote 135 One reader questioned whether this practice might be as risky as the rhythm method.Footnote 136 Most of this discussion concerned use of contraceptives by women; condoms were mentioned by readers or by Karve only rarely. There was also some discussion of the value of sterilization methods, including which partner should undergo the operation.Footnote 137
Some letters also illustrate significant hesitations about the consequences of using birth-control technologies. Popular beliefs about the dangers of sterilization regularly made their way into print and letter writers who read such articles sometimes wrote in to Karve for his reaction. One reader reported an article in a journal called Kama Vidnyan that apparently claimed that those men who underwent sterilization operations would become impotent and that women would lose their soft voices and acquire masculine characteristics, perhaps including the growing of a moustache.Footnote 138 Another mentioned a letter in Jeevan, which referred in its title to male sterilization as ‘castration’ (khachhikaran), again hinting at the possibility that the operation might end a man's sex life.Footnote 139 While the letters reveal that the techniques of modern birth control had not gained universal acceptance among the middle class, they certainly indicate that their use was becoming a significant subject of attention within middle-class marriages.
Same-sex sexual practices and transgender issues
There were only a small number of letters in Karve's correspondence that raised concerns related to same-sex practices and transgender issues, but these letters provide some fascinating evidence about how non-heterosexual forms of sexuality were perceived by middle-class men in western India during the late-colonial and early post-independence periods. As scholars have now begun to recognize, South Asia certainly has an extensive history of same-sex practice and of transgender identities.Footnote 140 The presence of the hijras—persons of transsexual or transgender identifications who have sometimes formed distinct communities—has particularly been well recognized in the existing literature.Footnote 141 While some historical texts clearly frowned on same-sex sexual practices, the scholarly consensus seems to be that such practices were not severely stigmatized or criminalized in the pre-colonial era. During the nineteenth century, the colonial rulers made homosexuality illegal; prosecutions under the law, however, were rare, perhaps because few Indians were concerned with reporting violations.Footnote 142 It does seem likely that the consolidation of middle-class conjugality brought with it increasingly critical views of same-sex practice (much of it accompanying negative perspectives of other forms of non-procreative sexual activity). Gandhi, for instance, referred to same-sex experimentation among boys as a ‘sexual perversion’ and an ‘unnatural vice’.Footnote 143 Critiques of homosexuality were found widely in the kamashastra literature.Footnote 144 Shivananda himself referred to same-sex practice as ‘unnatural’ and as a ‘most condemnable’Footnote 145 type of intercourse. Some literary works expressed overt revulsion against homosexuality.Footnote 146
One striking feature of the letters to Karve written by people who had engaged in same-sex sexual practices is their limited recognition of the extent of such practices in Indian society generally. Each letter writer had gained from the larger middle-class culture a sense that non-heterosexual orientations were deviant and that any such inclinations needed to be corrected. The theory that homosexuality had a biological or ‘natural’ foundation for some individuals—a theory that was then being discussed in modern sexual science––was largely unavailable to the letter writers. In contrast to some gay activist movements in India today, hijra communities were not seen by them as a source of possible identification. Each correspondent who wrote on this subject conveyed an acute sense of being alone in his sexuality, as being without significant sources of support; each turned to Karve partly out of a sense of desperation about where to obtain the information he needed to handle his own personal circumstances. In many cases, the correspondents indicated a fear that their social reputations were in danger. And, as in the case of those who raised the issue of masturbation, they expressed concern about whether they should marry and whether they would be able to provide their wives with ‘satisfaction’. Overall, they did not themselves regard their own sexuality as natural or acceptable, and agonized about whether there was a way they still might become heterosexual and develop into respectable householders.
There was a standard narrative pattern in the letters mentioning same-sex desire. The letter writers attributed their sexual orientation to some encounter with corrupting male influences early in their lives who had, in their view, distorted their sexuality; such accounts of course expressed a strong sense of distance from any kind of homosexual identity. In one case, a high-status male in rural Maharashtra recounted being groped by his brother when he was less than ten years old. After that time, he indicated, he was attracted to men; he also began the practice of masturbation after another person taught him how. He was convinced both ‘habits’ were responsible for his poor health, his short stature, his weak memory, and his poor digestive system. He worried in particular that ‘I do not have the ability to satisfy a wife’. He had thought of committing suicide but could not do this because of the many people who depended on him.Footnote 147 Another young man reported that, when he first came to the city, an older boy ‘did a strange experiment on him’. After that episode, his sexual thoughts and dreams focused for some years only on boys, never on women. The expectation of his family members that he get married, however, was now gaining momentum. While he had recently become more attracted to females, he worried whether marriage was a good idea for him.Footnote 148 A third youth, aged 18, reported that a friend and neighbour had conveyed information about sex to him when he was younger. This neighbour ‘got me into bad habits and I started playing bad games with him’. He had subsequent experiences with other boys before he had reached the seventh standard. He was particularly disturbed by one occasion when his own advances were rejected by a young man who strongly attracted him. While he was stimulated by pictures of nude women, he was mostly drawn to males of his own age. He also worried about the shape of his penis and the regular occurrence of wet dreams. Like the others, he expressed concern that his conjugal life might be a disaster if he were to get married and sought Karve's advice about what he should do.Footnote 149
A small number of other letters raised discussion of transgender practice. One was from a young man who usually thought of himself as male but who dressed in women's clothes when others in his household went out:
When others go out of town, I develop that nice sweet feeling of being a woman. . . . In the night I wear a sari of one of the women in the house. I put on the kunku (a forehead mark worn by women indicating marriage) like the other women and stand in front of the mirror forgetting the fact that I am a man. I perform all the rituals of women like cooking, washing clothes, urinating in a sitting position like women, sitting in a separate area of the house like a menstruating woman in her impure days. . . . Not just this but I treat a pillow like a child. I lift it like a child and I take pleasure in putting that child to sleep. I breast feed the child, uncovering my breast by pulling up my blouse. I pull on my own breasts by sliding my hands on them. . . . This has caused my breasts to grow a little. I feel ashamed to go out in public [dressed like this]. At night, however, my hand goes to my breasts again, I press them, getting heavenly pleasure from this act to such an extent that I ejaculate.’Footnote 150
He reported that his desire to dress like a woman frightened him and that, as a result of these concerns, he had decided to write to Karve, whom he hoped would save him from this situation. He was particularly concerned because he was sexually attracted to women and wanted to marry a specific woman.Footnote 151
There was also some limited discussion in the correspondence of gender transformation, though such letters were always written by third parties: parents, friends, and others. One letter, for instance, described a child whom the parents had assumed was female (due to the lack of testicles) until he/she reached puberty but who then started to show masculine characteristics such as beard growth and a deepening voice.Footnote 152 During the 1940s and 1950s, the correspondence column in Samaj Swasthya occasionally mentioned the case of an ‘Indira who became Indrajeet’.Footnote 153 Karve himself recommended hormone therapy, arguing that it helped individuals acquire the gender qualities they desired. But letters on this topic area were quite different from the other letters we have discussed, because they give little indication of the subjectivity of the person involved. Karve certainly provided his audience with an opportunity to gain access to information and advice about transgender issues that was not available in print elsewhere.
Conclusion
The correspondence to Samaj Swasthya provides considerable evidence both of the fact that sexual issues were becoming matters of public discussion in western India after the 1920s and of the ways that available forms of sexual knowledge informed male sexual preoccupations. Though Karve often suggested that his readers’ perspectives were ones steeped in ‘tradition’ and ignorance, the views the correspondents discussed in their letters were rarely simple reflections of static perceptions about sex. Middle-class understandings of sexuality were products of modernity. The perspectives the correspondents brought to their letters were grounded in an increasingly commercialized urban environment, the influence of the print media, access to erotic literature and photographs, the spread of ideas about social reform and eugenics, and especially the consolidation of new notions of conjugality. The correspondents gained their ideas about sex from a multiplicity of sources; the role of kamashastra literature, such as the writings of Shivananda, seems to have become particularly important in informing their perspectives. As was indicated by the case of the letter writer who accepted Karve's views on the lack of any value in wearing loin cloths but who still strongly argued for the theory of semen conservation, a perspective Karve would have opposed, correspondents may have typically folded ideas of sexual science into a heterogeneous field of sexual knowledge rather than accept these ideas in some wholesale fashion. Correspondents retained contradictory ideas about sex, and often did not seem to recognize the tensions between notions that they articulated. For instance, Indian ideas stressing the importance of semen conservation and notions drawn from Western sexual scientists co-existed alongside each other in the letters.
The correspondence clearly suggests that the new sexual order associated with the developing middle-class conjugality placed great limits on men (especially unmarried men) as well as women.Footnote 154 A period of adolescence opened up as the age of marriage increased, but it was hardly one of new sexual freedoms. For most unmarried men, the strengthening of concepts of virtue for unmarried women rendered it difficult to develop social interactions with middle-class females outside their immediate families; most of the correspondents were clearly resigned to the fact that they would have little or no sexual/romantic activity before their marriages. Notions of middle-class respectability increasingly militated against visits to prostitutes or relationships with women from the lower classes. Though some individuals certainly violated these strictures, the majority apparently did not, often out of a fear of discovery. Young men faced an emerging set of middle-class values that seriously discouraged same-sex sexual practices. At the same time, the views expressed in newspaper advertisements, in the kamashastra literature, and in the writings of Gandhi and Shivananda all insisted on the debilitating effects of seminal loss through masturbation and wet dreams. Faced with this wide range of ways in which sexual activity of any sort was discouraged culturally, the letter writers, finding the practice of complete brahmacharya impossible, portrayed their lives as one of sexual anxiety, even sexual torment. The letters thus firmly challenge any impression that might be left by the existing literature of an unshakable male sexuality confidently exerting its authority among the upper strata in Indian society.
To some extent, the very discussion of subject matters like masturbation, birth control, and homosexuality may have opened up cracks in prevailing notions of normative sexuality that would widen further after Karve's death. Karve's intellectual opposition to the marriage system and his support of non-procreative sexuality outside marriage (e.g. premarital and extramarital sex, some level of masturbation, and eventually homosexuality) no doubt offered serious challenges to many dominant values. The correspondence, moreover, often frequently blurred the boundaries between exchanges that promoted scientific understanding of sexuality and ones that served as sources of titillation.Footnote 155 But, to a great extent, the column's greatest immediate impact may have been to reinforce the norms of a conjugal sexuality that was compatible with the emerging notions of companionate marriage. Through these letters and their responses, correspondents gave expression to the view that husbands needed to be exclusively committed to their wives in their sexual practices and that they should provide their wives with ‘satisfaction’, however ambiguous that concept might be. Correspondents clearly indicated that an inability to provide such satisfaction, which they believed could stem from engagement in masturbation or from same-sex practice, might be strong reason for resisting societal pressures that they marry.Footnote 156 Due to the possibility of using birth control, satisfaction could be achieved in non-procreative sex as well, at least for some men; the correspondents hoped that worries about having more children would no longer stop their wives from participating in sexual intercourse. The concept of satisfaction, however, did not involve non-coital forms of sexual activity or even, apparently, foreplay. Female sexual initiative and passion were minor themes in the correspondence, in contrast to similar literature elsewhere in the world.
Ironically, despite his own critique of marriage, even Karve's answers often served to strengthen notions of conjugal sexuality. In his responses, Karve seriously addressed the question about whether men who had engaged in ‘excessive’ masturbation or who had strong attractions to members of the same sex should marry; he also expressed the view that the ability of the correspondents to provide conjugal satisfaction to their wives was critical to whatever recommendations he might give.Footnote 157 While Karve came to insist that social spaces for non-conjugal sexual activity should exist, he gave little thought to imagining how such spaces could be created. Thus, it is not clear whether the advice column actually contributed in any significant way to enhancing sexual possibilities for Indian men (or women) outside of marriage; the strength of existing social norms was so strong that it compelled Karve to be largely resigned to the inevitability of these norms in his answers. His responses, moreover, rarely suggested other options for sexual expression within marriage than coitus. To a great extent, Karve worked within a realm of possibilities imagined by his correspondents, and not one that was of his own making. In short, then, despite Karve's apparent advocacy of a more open sexual order, the correspondence columns in Samaj Swasthya may have served more to strengthen the normativity of the new conjugal sexuality that was developing among members of the middle class than it did to encourage alternative sexualities.
