Durba Mitra’s Indian Sex Life examines how sexuality became a site of colonial knowledge-making in modern India, and how that knowledge helped shape the categories of social science itself.
Rather than treating sexuality as a private or marginal concern, Mitra shows how ideas about women’s desire, deviance, caste, race, criminality, prostitution, respectability and reproduction were folded into broader colonial attempts to classify Indian society.
This is a sharp, unsettling work of intellectual history: part history of sexuality, part critique of empire, part excavation of how “modern social thought” often built itself through the management of bodies it claimed merely to observe. The book traces how Sanskrit erotic texts, colonial medicine, philology, anthropology, law, and race science were pulled into the same unpleasant machine.
Strong for readers interested in postcolonial theory, gender studies, sexuality studies, South Asian history, colonial knowledge systems, race science, feminist history, and the politics of classification. It would sit beautifully beside Foucault, Ann Laura Stoler, Gayatri Spivak, Saidiya Hartman, Mrinalini Sinha, or anyone thinking seriously about how desire gets turned into evidence.
Princeton University Press, 2020. First printing with full number line. Hardback edition. Light handling visible, but overall a very clean copy.
