Rovel Jerome Alex Sequeira

This project rethinks the global historiography of sexuality by tracing the history of modern sexual subject-formation in India alongside anti-colonial scientific and literary nationalism. Histories of sexuality, pace Michel Foucault, have shown that sexuality was invented in Europe in the late nineteenth century by sexology, psychiatry, and biomedicine. This project argues that the “invention” of sexuality in its modular forms—the homosexual, the couple, the sexed child, and the hysteric—was underpinned by liberal understandings of autonomous personhood. In colonial India, however, the genres understood to produce the modern individual like auto/biography, novel, and history, and allied scientific genres like case study and questionnaire were seen as lacking, even as Indians self-consciously adopted them at the turn of the twentieth century. Assembling archives in English, Hindi, and Marathi, the project argues that an Indian grammar of sexuality emerged through contests over genres they were thought not to have due to their “collective” modes of expression.

This book project shows that India’s encounter with the literary and scientific infrastructures of imperial sexology under British colonial rule engendered a modern racial grammar of sex that limited the prospect of liberal sexual personhood for Indians. While in Europe, scientific methods —like the case history and the questionnaire—and literary forms—like the autobiography and the novel—redefined sexuality as an inalienable property of the individual self, in India, sexologists assumed such forms and methods to be near untranslatable because of Indians’ supposedly collectivist and irrational modes of thought, sexual practice, and kinship. Sexual scientists and writers consequently sought to selectively vernacularize these forms, in the process “inventing” racialized idioms of desire that centered exteriority as much as interiority as the hallmark of Indian sex life.