A Desi Woman with Soniya Gokhale

Author & Professor Durba Mitra joined A Desi Woman podcast to discuss her critically acclaimed book, 'Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought'. Dr. Mitra traveled around the world in researching the book which offers insights into the colonial period in India and how European scholars, British officials, and elite Indian intellectuals―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. 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. Dr. Mitra discusses the ethical issues associated with being a female researcher of Colonial India and the associated 'dismemberment' both conceptually and literally.