Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought

Speaker: Durba Mitra, Harvard University

Durba Mitra
Assistant Professor of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality
Carol K. Pforzheimer Assistant Professor at the Radcliffe Institute
Harvard University
 
On her new book
Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought
 
In conversation with 
Lisa Lowe
Samuel Knight Professor of American Studies
Yale University
 
and 
 
Sharon Marcus
Orlando Harriman Professor of English and Comparative Literature
Columbia University

During 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.