In this engaging book, Durba Mitra is concerned with a pivotal moment in Indian history: the creation, theorization, and application of the concept of “deviant female sexuality” in colonial Bengal. Indian Sex Life, which is adapted from Mitra's doctoral dissertation,Footnote 1 provides an archival account of how sexuality was located on and legislated through the female body from the middle of the nineteenth century through the middle of the twentieth century. Based on extensive archival research, Mitra interrogates how and why “deviant female sexuality [became the] primary grid for comprehending social life in this period” (p. 2). As her title suggests, her approach centers on the way a gendered and heteronormative understanding of Indian sexuality became central to modern social thought. The book focuses on the sexually deviant woman, often characterized in the archive as a prostitute. However, rather than following well-known coordinates through the archive that link gendered understandings of the prostitute to “so-called Victorian morality,” Mitra makes a compelling case for charting a different course, one that allows the reader to understand that it was not only British men, but also Indian men, who indicted and punished Indian women.
The book is organized into five interlocking and overlapping themes—“Origins,” “Repetition,” “Circularity,” “Evolution,” and “Veracity.” In the first chapter, “Origins,” Mitra examines the role of philology and positivist epistemologies in conceptualizing female sexuality and establishing modern sociological thought. Identifying a network of European, American, and Bengali men who studied ancient Sanskrit texts-as-history, she argues that “modern philological inquiry produced deviant female sexuality” (p. 26).
Chapter 2, “Repetition,” exposes “the systematic distillation of ideas about female sexuality in useable” and legal “forms of knowledge” (p. 65). Through an in-depth analysis of survey data and legal doctrines, such as the Contagious Diseases Act of 1868, Mitra offers a rich and deeply disturbing account of how, through discursive repetition, “the prostitute appears as an epistemological horizon”—a concept by which laws could be written and applied (p. 67). Central to the logic that Mitra exposes in her analysis is the idea that all Indian women were not only potential prostitutes, but also prone to commit infanticide, which is why the state should be granted extraordinary access to “uncover” illicit behavior.
It is in chapter 3, “Circularity,” that Mitra's argument comes into sharpest focus as she lays out, with surgical precision, the tautological, exploitative, and profoundly misogynistic attitudes held by colonial authorities as well as the Bengali men who worked alongside them. Reading forensic medical descriptions of women who appear in the archive as sexually deviant, Mitra asks, “why do the details of a woman's life and the violent circumstances of her death come to be narrated in the archive?” (p. 101) This chapter offers a searing portrait of how colonial forms of knowledge became foundational to invasive state surveillance and created feedback loops that (re)inscribed patriarchal forms of power.
Chapter 4, “Evolution,” interrogates the rhetoric used to establish women's sexual behavior as “the primary index of social and moral civilizational progress” (p. 133). This chapter exposes the universalist and comparative epistemologies which underpinned evolutionary theories and temporal understandings of social “progress.”
The final chapter, “Veracity,” highlights how popular texts produced and reproduced the “concept of the prostitute to create a regime of empirical truth” (p. 178). An afterword brings the project to a moving close, reminding the reader that the archival data analyzed throughout the book might be better understood as a “masquerade, [an] absurd performance . . . of the male author's assertion of his degrees, memberships, and affiliations,” which ultimately “read more like a distorted social imaginary than a social science” (p. 206).
For people concerned with the ways epistemologies of gender have shaped sociologies of sex and sexuality in India, this book offers ample evidence of heteronormative formations, though relatively fewer chances to see how queer lives were affected by colonial knowledge projects. Relatedly, readers hoping to better understand how the concept of the prostitute as an entertainer shaped cultural life and aesthetics might find themselves unsatisfied with the relatively sketchy details offered on her role as a performer in public life. These perspectives would have added more depth to an otherwise impressive and commendable piece of scholarship. This book will surely be of interest to feminist historians, scholars, and activists, both in and outside of (post)colonial, Indian, or South Asian studies. It is a challenging read—painful at times, but powerful, too. It is clear, to this reader at least, that this project was a labor of feminist love.
