Durba Mitra, "Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought," (Princeton University Press, 2020)

How British authorities and Indian intellectuals developed ideas about deviant female sexuality to control and organize modern society in IndiaDuring the colonial period in India, European scholars, British officials, and elite Indian intellectuals—philologists, administrators, doctors, ethnologists, sociologists, and social critics—deployed ideas about sexuality to understand modern Indian society. In Indian Sex Life, Durba Mitra shows how deviant female sexuality, particularly the concept of the prostitute, became foundational to this knowledge project and became the primary way to think and write about Indian society.Bringing together vast archival materials from diverse disciplines, Mitra reveals that deviant female sexuality was critical to debates about social progress and exclusion, caste domination, marriage, widowhood and inheritance, women's performance, the trafficking of girls, abortion and infanticide, industrial and domestic labor, indentured servitude, and ideologies about the dangers of Muslim sexuality. British authorities and Indian intellectuals used the concept of the prostitute to argue for the dramatic reorganization of modern Indian society around Hindu monogamy. Mitra demonstrates how the intellectual history of modern social thought is based in a dangerous civilizational logic built on the control and erasure of women's sexuality. This logic continues to hold sway in present-day South Asia and the postcolonial world.Reframing the prostitute as a concept, Indian Sex Life overturns long-established notions of how to write the history of modern social thought in colonial India, and opens up new approaches for the global history of sexuality. South Asian Studies Podcast Indian History Podcast Indian Anthropology Podcast Indian Sex Life by Durba Mitra Deviant female sexuality in colonial India Prostitution in Indian history Colonial control of Indian society British authorities and Indian intellectuals Caste and sexuality in India Women’s sexuality in colonial India Gender and social thought in India Hindu monogamy and colonial debates Indian social reform and sexuality Widowhood and inheritance in India Women’s labor and indentured servitude Ideologies about Muslim sexuality in India Sexuality and caste domination Trafficking and gender in Indian history History of prostitution in South Asia Modern Indian social thought Global history of sexuality Colonial discourse on Indian women Archival research on Indian social reform Women and sexuality in postcolonial India