Indian sex life: sexuality and the colonial origins of modern social thought
Publication details: Princeton University Press, 2020 New Jersey:Description: 290p. ; pb, 22cmISBN:- 9780691212180
- 306.70820954 DUR
Item type | Current library | Collection | Call number | Copy number | Status | Date due | Barcode |
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IIT Gandhinagar General Stacks | General | 306.70820954 DUR (Browse shelf(Opens below)) | 1 | Available | 030874 |
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306.461 BER Social epidemiology | 306.4812 COL Discipline of leisure: embodying cultures of recreation | 306.4812 ROJ Labour of leisure: the culture of free time | 306.70820954 DUR Indian sex life: sexuality and the colonial origins of modern social thought | 306.709 MEN Infinite variety: a history of desire in India | 306.768 VAK Transecology: transgender perspectives on environment and nature | 306.8150973 KLI Going solo : the extraordinary rise and surprising appeal of living alone |
Includes bibliography and index
During the colonial period, Indian intellectuals--philologists, lawyers, scientists and literary figures--all sought to hold a mirror to their country. Whether they wrote novels, polemics, or scientific treatises, all sought a better understanding of society in general and their society in particular. Curiously, female sexuality and sexual behavior play an outside role in their writing. The figure of the prostitute is ubiquitous in everything from medical texts and treatises on racial evolution to anti-Muslim polemic and studies of ancient India. In this book, Durba Mitra argues that between the 1840s and the 1940s, the new science of sexuality became foundational to the scientific study of Indian social progress. The colonial state and an emerging set of Bengali male intellectuals extended the regulation of sexuality to far-reaching projects that sought to define what society should look like and how modern citizens should behave. An exploration of this history of social scientific thought offers new perspectives to understand the power of paternalistic and deeply violent claims about sexual norms in the postcolonial world today. These histories reveal the enduring authority of scientific claims to a tradition that equates social good with the control of women's free will and desire. Thus, they managed to dramatically reorganize their society around upper-caste Hindu ideals of strict monogamy
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