What is there to gain from the encounter between Black feminisms and South Asian feminisms? I asked myself this question as I closed my copy of Durba Mitra’s Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought (Princeton University Press, 2020), and felt pulled toward Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (2019) again.1 From this associative thinking, this essay begins to answer this question.

Mitra’s Indian Sex Life is the story of how “deviant female sexuality” became the first object of the modern Indian social sciences, disciplines that emerged at the turn of the twentieth century. Mitra takes these disciplines and lays bare their conventions: to trace the origins of Indian sexuality; to gather facts about sexuality and organize them into data; to use circular thinking linking ideas about sexuality to bodies and vice versa; to encourage the evolution of unrestrained sexuality into conjugal monogamy; and to make lessons out of the testimonies of “deviant” Indian women (18–20). This is a story of form and function. Indian Sex Life provides a vocabulary for investigating this archive. And her study is an important counter-history: how in the last decades of British rule in India the concept of the prostitute comes to organize ideas about sexuality and about society at large.

In another place, Hartman’s work of critical fabulation traces the lives of colored girls, gender nonconforming people, and queer people in Northern US cities one to two generations after Emancipation.2 She does so in part through social scientific thought, like W. E. B. Du Bois’s insistence that the absence of the nuclear family hampered the progress of Black Americans, and disciplinary institutions like girls’ homes and prisons. She imagines life in these enclosures. In doing so, Hartman’s work challenges the archive and Euro-American theories of anarchy that fail to accommodate the dance hall, the streets, and mutual aid in sites like early twentieth-century Harlem and Philadelphia.3

As I engaged with Mitra on Twitter and as I read further, I was delighted to learn that Black feminist scholarship is a critical resource for Indian Sex Life. As Mitra herself insists in a recent interview, “I am influenced by these fields of study, including postcolonial and transnational feminisms, black feminist studies, and queer studies, which ask questions about how we deal with these fragmented archives and write fragmented lives.”4 Encounter is a question for these fields but also one I would like to pose to Durba: What do we learn—about the resonances among fields—when we bring citational conversations out of the shadows into the full light of day?

These fields, and the two books I’m thinking about, put the archive to work: for Hartman, to outline the contours of Black life in the enclosure of the ghetto, and for Mitra, to assemble and critique how the Indian social sciences became coherent through Indian female sexuality. But is Blackness analogous to other racial formations? Are Black gender formations analogous to other racialized gender formations?

Certain disciplinary conventions make it so putting a work of Black feminist scholarship in conversation with a work of South Asian feminist scholarship seems wrongheaded. In some thrusts of Black studies, like Afropessimism, such a conversation risks perpetuating a fantasy of multiracial coalition—the idea that all women share a struggle.5 This divide also exists in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, though on much different terms. It’s in the history of the National Women’s Studies Association, as our convener Jennifer Nash reminds us, that each field was hewed to distinct bodies and geographies. If Black feminisms (and frameworks like intersectionality) belong to Black women in the United States only, and transnational feminisms to South Asian women, the fields become mutually unintelligible.6 Nonetheless, questions remained as I read across Indian Sex Life and Wayward Lives: If gender under colonialism is a resource—of physical, domestic, and reproductive labor—and Black flesh is deprived of gender difference through the Middle Passage and chattel slavery, how to reconcile the common expectation that Black women and Indian women should enter domestic relations and reproduce?7 The common demand that these women make lives with men of their own racial background, class, and/or caste in what I have begun to call the racial family? And, finally, the common experience of violence when they fail to do so? As these questions piled up, the conversation between Black feminisms and South Asian feminisms became more urgent.

To say that the two books are asking similar questions of a common time and phenomenon is not to say that Black feminisms and South Asian feminisms are equivalent or that South Asian women’s and Black women experiences are commensurate. But encounter inquires into these differences. So, what is there to gain from such an encounter? These fields might meet on many conceptual grounds, but my aim in what remains is to return to the question of archives: How both Mitra and Hartman understand lives that come into view as objects of research, surveillance, and violence.

Encountering Figures

Both Mitra and Hartman trace the development of homegrown sociology and social thought from W. E. B. Du Bois, the Black sociologist and writer, to S. C. Mookerjee, an Indian nationalist: they attempted to capture these women’s behaviors and to drive regulations and recommendations for social life. While both “wayward” and “deviant” suggest the movement away from accepted standards, the wayward is also difficult to trace—her way and destination unknown. In the Northern United States, “colored” women were “potential prostitutes.”8 The police, social workers, and social scientists alike deemed Black women lascivious, and incarcerated them for it. Meanwhile, Indian women were “clandestine prostitutes”: social scientists feared that Indian women could maintain the veneer of piety and modesty while prostituting themselves in secret (82–83). And Indian social scientists regarded Muslim women as even more base than their Hindu counterparts (75). Both Mitra and Hartman addressed the violence these women faced: of rape, of being apprehended, of being incarcerated or sentenced to indenture. Both Hartman and Mitra took great care in assembling these archives and wearied as they did.

As I encountered what could be called the figure of the prostitute in both Mitra’s and Hartman’s books, I also wanted to understand the figure itself: how a critical approach to the archive gets at the characters of places and times beyond our reach. In South Asian, transnational, and Black feminisms alike, the figure has demonstrated the power of the state but also the desires of scholars to find closure in and remedy the past.9 Figures theorize problems of knowledge that are also and always embodied problems.

My interest in the figure might be curious because, in Indian Sex Life, Mitra refuses figuration in favor of concept history: “Women and ideas of female sexuality are not solely significations, representations, or symbols of broader social and political challenges” (15). This is a critique of historical knowledge that would subordinate the study of sexuality to seemingly more legitimate objects of study. In this light, figuration is a colonial and masculine invention of the social sciences. It fixes women. Instead, Mitra avers that “the control of female sexuality is a central driving force in the very conceptualization of social life itself as an object of study, intervention and reform” (15). The relationship of Mitra’s study to figuration is a negative one. It illuminates how figuration presages the empirical objects of the social sciences. Through colonial regulations such as the Contagious Diseases Act of 1868 and the Indian Penal Code, the figure of the prostitute becomes “social fact” (67). The disciplines in which we write inherit and reproduce the representational tools of the colonial state. Another question for Durba: How might feminist methods upend or displace the disciplines?

As she turns away from figures, Mitra devotes attention to other formal qualities of the archive of sexuality in colonial India. Abortion pulls together the many concerns about Indian women’s sexuality: the responsibility of Indian women to marry and to reproduce within marriage, and the fear that she might shirk these responsibilities to live a prostitute’s life. This was the fulcrum of the book for me. Indeed, as Mitra traces circularity in the archive of Indian women’s sexuality, the body becomes evidence of the crime of abortion through postmortem investigation (105–6). For authorities and medical examiners, abortion is indelible. The evidence centers on flora and fauna such as the lal chitra, a stick that women were suspected of using to induce abortion (117). The anxiety around abortifacients was related to fears that women covertly sought abortion so they might evade the reproductive obligations of monogamous conjugality. Ideas about racial difference infuse these investigatory narratives; they often focus on Muslim women (116). In turn, these medical and legal reports influence the natural sciences (119). This circular reasoning can be found elsewhere in the British colonial world. In the plantation societies of the British West Indies, for example, botany was both part of the imperial mission but also a site of anxiety as enslaved women used their knowledge to abort unwanted pregnancies—including those resulting from rape.10 In this way, circularity meets Mitra’s later attention to the notion of evolution: ethnology and its interest in sexuality is a necessarily transnational mode of knowledge that takes the Black woman as a primary object of difference.11 Mitra shows that representation can organize, but is not the sum total of, Indian women’s sexuality.

In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, by contrast, Hartman leans into figuration. Indeed, it appears in the title of the second chapter of the monograph: “A Minor Figure.” This minor figure might be thought of as the descendant of Venus in the archive of Atlantic slavery, the paradigmatic enslaved woman to which Hartman gestures in “Venus in Two Acts.”12 As Hartman writes: “The minor figure yields to the chorus. All the hurt and the promise of the wayward are hers to bear.”13 And she uses her method of critical fabulation to do so, taking the essential facts of a story and remixing them to find another story. Working from the letters of an incarcerated young woman, sitting with the photograph of an abused girl, she sketches the minor figure. Hartman’s approach, while different, is not incompatible with Mitra’s. Rather, it completes the picture by responding to social scientific figuration: she invents counter-figures in contrast to police records and the notes of wardens. Hartman opens the critical force of figuration. Figure carries a double meaning in Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: figures as the numbers that “documented the Negro’s modernity” and figures as the many kinds of Black life that refused those metrics.14

In conversation with Wayward Lives, Indian Sex Life creates a kind of reverb from Calcutta to Harlem and, for me, the West Indian canefields. This question also necessarily exceeds the scope of either Mitra or Hartman’s books, to make space for work that considers gender and sexuality across the African and South Asian diasporas. In the context I study, Mitra’s insights about the clandestine prostitute align with the colonial anxieties around recruiting the “right kind of woman” for Indian indentureship in the British West Indies and throughout the Indian Ocean world.15 In the nineteenth century, the British East India Company recruited women from Bihar and the United Provinces and Tamil Nadu to the West Indian colonies—to the very barracks—in which African-descended women had been enslaved, among them Jamaica and Trinidad and Guiana. As I consider how gender and sexuality structure race, labor and capital after West Indian Emancipation, I pose the “coolie” woman as a companion figure to the Black woman: differently subjected to good labor and conjugal monogamy as conditions of freedom.16

Figuration is a regime of representation. In the context of both late colonial India and the early twentieth-century United States, figuration can be violent: Colonial modernity produces racial, gendered, and sexualized subjects and ideas about them that shore up that violence. But, digging into figuration, sketching obscured figures, can also be full of possibility and imagination. In the fields that Mitra and Hartman write to, particularly Black feminisms and South Asian feminisms, figuration can inspire both critique and creation.

Encounter’s Forms

In proposing encounter, I want to move away from the logic of analogy that has undergirded the study of “transnational Afro-Asian connections.”17 It risks flattening how race, gender, and sexuality are co-constituted and differently made across geographies. But if analogy depends on the hyphen, encounter simply uses the conjunction—and, or, but—to model dialogue. I look forward to this and future conversation with Durba! I think, too, of my conversations with scholars and friends like Jordache Ellapen, Najnin Islam, and Neelofer Qadir: who, from South Africa to the British West Indies and in different moments, are outlining feminist and queer approaches to the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds. My final question to Durba: What unresolved questions might this field, formed through encounter, take up?

In Indian Sex Life and Wayward Lives, the conjunction provides clarity. In the moment in which colonized and Black peoples reinvent the social sciences and seek evolution through respectability. Where the specter of the prostitute sits in relation to the colored girls of Northern US cities and Indian women, Hindu and Muslim alike. And, in the relationship between representation and the real. Encounter acknowledges that neither gender nor sexuality nor feminism is monolithic. It nonetheless plumbs the difference to question patriarchy in all its forms.18

Stories: Sultana’s Dream is a classic fable that illustrates the power of feminist imaginations. Penned by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain in 1905 in colonial Bengal, the short story is a dreamscape in which the eponymous protagonist finds herself transported to a world turned on its head, where women are rulers and scientists and men are secluded into the menial spaces of the domestic. This world of harmony and plenitude emerges from the ashes of a male-led failed military response to external aggression (a metaphor for colonial rule). It is the outcome of women’s innately superior intellects that successfully harness the potentials of education, science, and technology. Indeed, the fable is hailed as an early model of feminist science fiction writing.

Surprisingly, this is the story with which Durba Mitra closes her brilliant book, Indian Sex Life. The move is particularly unexpected because in contrast to Mitra’s analysis of the prostitute in modern social thought in colonial India, sexuality is merely implied in Sultana’s Dream, perhaps itself an indication that it was yet to acquire a liberatory dimension in the lives of elite women such as Hossain. What matters to Mitra, however, is the fable’s form. Sultana’s Dream drives home the point that its speculations on alternative futures are consigned to the category of feminist science fiction, while an entire corpus, girded by questionable studies of deviant female sexuality, is institutionalized as social thought and analysis.

Indian Sex Life argues that modern social thought in colonial India was fueled by ideas of deviant female sexuality, cohering around the concept of the prostitute. Mitra makes the case through a series of interrelated arguments: that sexuality and specifically women’s sexuality was the racialized monocle through which Indian civilization became an object of assessment, analysis, and intervention; that colonial and elite native beliefs about the inherent excesses of female desire, encapsulated in the idea of the prostitute, came to explain Indian social history in terms of lack, lag, and endemic social ills; that the will to know and regulate manifestations of deviant female sexuality powered the development of fields ranging from philology, legal surveys, forensic medical examinations, social evolutionary science and popular literature; that this quest to knowledge fueled and shaped the conceptual and methodological orientations of these fields through the participation of British, American and Bengali Indian intellectuals.

Expertly written and meticulously researched, Mitra’s book breaks new ground by reversing conventional wisdom to spotlight emerging fields of knowledge and their footings in questionable assumptions of female sexuality. Each of the chapters takes on a field noted above, revealing the emergence of taxonomies, pathologies, and modes of regulating female sexuality and letting the analysis surf disciplinary modes—such as repetition, circular reasoning, the search for veracity, among others. Reworking more familiar ground, for example the Contagious Disease Acts and infanticide, the chapters also extend the archive into new directions, setting up the possibilities of rich engagements with this book.

Pluralizing Genealogies

Musings: I have often wondered what social life and relations would be if it weren’t for concerns about who did what with whom sexually (presupposing principles of consent and bodily integrity). What would a social world look like if sexuality as we know it does not exist? That is, if sexual regulation were not an essential dimension of social life, then would any of the intra-psychic structures, social institutions, and entrenched social differences be possible? Would girls and women continue to be subjected to the innumerable forms of sexual regulation? Would the absence of sexual normalcy and deviance not lift a multitude of oppressions shaping the lives of queer and gender nonconforming people? Would this not undermine marriage, kinship structures, lineage, inheritance and private property? Would caste structures even be possible? Would religious divides not be eliminated? If sexual relations and practices were of no social and political importance in this realm, then would it even closely resemble the world we know?

When Mitra gives sexuality a foundational place in her analyses it resonates with me, for much of my work, too, aims to show that sexuality is a social bedrock (Puri 2016; 2002). Mitra’s approach resonates with longstanding feminist efforts to understand sexuality and gender as underpinnings and engines of social life (for example, Gayle Rubin) and social thought (Kath Weston). Her contributions join the efforts of feminist scholars writing on colonial India who have surfaced sexuality’s foundational significance to the knowledge and reform projects that emerged at the time. As Patricia Uberoi argues, social reform debates were proxies for sexuality—definitions of normal and abnormal sexuality, sexual propriety, and deviance, regimes of sexual knowledge and medical practice, among others (1996: xvi).

But Mitra’s book also innovatively brings to the fore the formative impact of concerns about female sexual deviance on multiple fields of knowledge in a context defined by colonialism. In contrast to the innumerable studies on the prostitute or prostitution, hers is an effort to excavate the genealogy of the prostitute—a cipher for the imminent social threat posed by virtually all women outside of the upper-caste, heteronormative mold of Hindu marriage encompassing everyone from high-caste Hindu widows, Muslim women workers, and professional artists to industrial laborers, domestic help, and vagrants. From this vantage point, Mitra argues that rather than the homosexual/heterosexual binary, it is the concept of the prostitute that drives how India was studied and understood.

While I fully share the view that the homosexual/heterosexual binary is not foundational in the Indian context, the concept of the prostitute and the excesses of deviant female sexuality, do raise for me the question: where are the hijras or, who we would call in today’s grammar, transfeminine figures, especially since hijras have loomed large in colonial records and have been connected to sexual deviancy and prostitution? But also, where are the female nonconformers in these archival fields? Throughout the book, Mitra is careful to underscore deviant female sexuality, suggesting a narrow view of the category. In one sense, this enlarges the scope of female sexual deviance and usefully breaks with the homosexual/heterosexual divide. But in another sense, it makes the absence of gender and sexual nonconformity—Hijras and other adjacent categories, women’s non-heterosexual sexual and gender practices that were pinned to sexual deviancy—all the more palpable in Mitra’s analyses. I am curious about these absences and how to interpret them in light of the careful insistence on femaleness.

The significance of these questions extends beyond the presence/absence of figures to the possibility of revealing additional logics of knowledge-making and governance that are shaping fields such as philology, forensics, or ethnology in colonial India. For example, in my book Sexual States: Governance and the Struggle Over the Antisodomy Law in India (2016), I press against Foucauldian understandings of the homosexual’s inauguration into Indian legal history with the imposition of the penal code in 1860. At the same time, the cases related to the antisodomy law reveal distinct strands of homophobia. What stands out is the notion of the “habitual sodomite” that is itself part of a larger matrix of discourses on habitual and hereditary offenders that were enshrined in the Habitual Criminals Act of 1869 and then the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871. To what extent, then, do the archives indicate the need to parse the deviant sexualities and their multiple genealogies, thereby shedding light on the sway of logics beyond repetition, circularity, evolution, or veracity? What additional insights might be derived from foregrounding the non-heteronormative, the remaking of caste categories, as well as criminality?

Archival Ambivalences

Readings: In her iconic essay, “Venus in Two Acts,” Saidiya Hartman raises the problem of writing counter-histories of slavery’s archives for, as she explicates, it becomes virtually impossible to know anything of the enslaved Black woman outside of the founding violence that dictates what can be gleaned of power and its subjects and objects. But, for Hartman, if ancestors are not to be consigned to the death sentence that is the archive and futures are to be imagined, then a path to produce counterhistories has to be cleared. It begins by “Throwing into crisis ‘what happened when’ and by exploiting the ‘transparency of sources’ as fictions of history, . . . to make visible the production of disposable lives” (2008: 11).

Systematically showing that female sexual deviance haunts Indian colonial archives and social thought, Mitra notes that the prostitute is everywhere and nowhere. Even as she is continually invoked across a range of epistemological sites, she is simultaneously disappeared through the very process of knowing. Even as notions of deviant female sexuality thread through these various sites, all traces of female sexual desire are systematically erased. At the same time, what is feared and reviled has a defining influence, for as Mitra shows the flexibly understood category of the prostitute shapes the formation of these fields, their methodologies and their orientations.

For Mitra, then, to write a critical conceptual history of the prostitute is to write a counter-history of the figure of the prostitute. She is careful to note that her project is not about recuperating resistance and agency through what has been called the search-and-rescue model of interpreting archives. Rather, she proceeds by undermining the workings of power and authority by rendering them transparent and visible. This mode requires tracking the trope of the prostitute across philology and forensics in ways that starts to feel all too familiar by the time we get to ethnology and the literatures of social life. It means surfacing assumptions about Indian women’s sexuality stretching across British, American, and Indian accounts, even as the upper-caste Hindu analysts among them were more likely to blame prostitution on the premise of “Muslim conquest” and see Muslim women as more sexually brazen than their Hindu counterparts. While I am sympathetic to this analytical strategy, I am also wondering about the possibilities of reading archives in ways that Hartman indicates, or ones that stand between historiographical projects of recovery and those that seem to indicate a totalizing view of power. Where in the archives are the fissures and fractures that enable feminist readings that begin (or end) with the limits of power? Do the archives show that the social analysts were sometimes inconsistent and contradictory in their indictment of the prostitute, a figure that was essential to British and Indian men’s sexualities; or that the intellectuals and writers were working in a colonial context where multiple histories of sexuality-knowledge existed and collided; or that some ideas emerged even if they were defeated or unrealized; or that these male elites did not have the final word on defining and denigrating the prostitute; or that they could not eviscerate what might be catalogued as deviant female sexuality? Where are the ambivalences in the archives, the points of contradictions that remind us about the “fictions of history,” not because they are being read from our presentist viewpoint but because those tensions are already present? To what extent can we read them against unmitigated understandings of power, for without foregrounding and elevating these fractures aren’t we locked into having to uphold the very forms of power that we seek to undermine?

Sociological Complexities

Contestations: The film, Pakeezah (Kamal Amrohi, 1972), revolves around the life of the courtesan, Sahibjaan, who seeks to flee the prison-like grip of a feudal world based on the patronage and sexual pleasures of elite men. While her mother was unable to achieve such an escape a generation ago, Sahibjaan manages to attain the pinnacle of sexual respectability by being rescued into marriage and conventional kinship by a man from the same social group that has been responsible for the oppression of women as courtesans. It is part of a genre of immensely popular Hindi (AKA Bollywood) films, such as Pyasa (Guru Dutt, 1957), Amar Prem (Shakti Samanta, 1972), and Umrao Jaan (Muzaffar Ali, 1981) that take up the figure of the prostitute. While they differ in some ways, the films share an indictment of patriarchal oppression, of ill-intentioned and especially of well-meaning elite men.

In chapter 5, Mitra presses down on the search for “hidden truths” about the lives of prostitutes and the question of veracity. Here, she looks to popular literature—alleged autobiographies and testimonials of so-called prostitutes—to trouble the ever-expanding and intrusive search for the prostitute’s perspective. Mitra also turns to what she calls lay sociologies, that is, studies that were meant to educate and inform reading publics—for example, Herbert H. Risely’s People of India and Yadavchandra Lahiri’s Kulakalima. In fact, the only time that Mitra turns to a verifiable woman’s account is in the afterword with Hossain’s Sultana’s Dream.

Juxtaposing Mitra’s insights with popular films like Pakeezah and others in the early decades of postcolonial India is a reminder that the search for women’s perspectives is still incomplete. Storied through the eyes of male directors and writers, what stands out among these and other films is the idea of the chaste prostitute. To be sure, these films hit a chord precisely because they do not offer radical critiques of the idea of the prostitute or heteropatriarchal respectable sexuality. At the same time, they do not propagate the view of the oversexed female, the “any-woman” who can fall into prostitution because of her inability to restrain her sexual desire. Instead, their targets are the social order, institutions, and especially elite men’s lack of sexual and social righteousness.

My point here is not about possible continuities or ruptures with earlier discourses, but the extent to which these films raise questions about the complexities of public discourses and public debates. As a form that produces sociological narratives, films also gesture to the divergences in public opinion and debates, which I was seeking in Mitra’s discussions. They and other forms are part of the terrain through which sociologies of deviant female sexuality or, for that matter, social life are continually produced and contested. In the colonial (and postcolonial) context, public debates played a crucial role in shaping the orientations of social and sociological studies. Even as Mitra focuses on the construction of sociological terrains upon which disciplines of sociology and anthropology would come to be established, I am wondering about the surveys, the studies, and the research that went against the colonial grain (for example, sociologist G. S. Ghurye, who succeeded Patrick Geddes at Bombay University), or were debated publicly in ways that would explain the complexities—and even dark sides—of postcolonial inheritances.

These questions and others that I might ask are entirely a reflection of the rich and generative book that Mitra has written. It has been a pleasure to read and to learn from its pages, and I look forward to our collective engagements with it.

Works Cited

Hartman, Saidiya. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 12.2 (2008) 1–14.

Puri, Jyoti. “Concerning Kamasutras: Challenging Narratives of History and Sexuality.” In SIGNS: A Journal of Women in Culture and Society 27 (2002) 3.

———. Sexual States: Governance and the Decriminalization of Sodomy in India’s Present. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.

Uberoi, Patricia. “Problematising Social Reform, Engaging Sexuality, Interrogating the State.” Introduction to Social Reform, Sexuality and the State, edited by Patricia Uberoi. New Delhi: Sage, 1996.

In the introduction to Roderick Ferguson’s Aberrations in Black, he delivers a read of Marx’s theory of political economy and historical materialism as undergirded at every turn by race, gender, and sexuality. Ferguson deftly shows how Marx’s definition of alienated labor hinges on the figure of the prostitute “as the apocalyptic symbol of capital’s emergence” (9) where “both bourgeois ideologues and their radical opponents took the prostitute as the sign for the gendered and sexual chaos that commodification was bound to unleash” (9). “She and others like her were the targets of both liberal and revolutionary regulations” (10). Ferguson locates this as the structural impulses of “heteropatriarchy” (10) that undergird both of these sites, and calls for a method—now well known as queer of color critique—that refuses the promises of what he calls the “heteronormative subject” as the endgame of radical politics (10).

Durba Mitra’s dazzlingly complex Indian Sex Life expands this read of radical politics in geographic and methodological scope, arguing that “the prostitute, when dislocated from the urge to recuperate her as an identity, takes on a different history: as a concept foundational to the making of social life as an object of study.” Her prostitute becomes the conceptual center of inquiry for knowledge production—and social reproduction—itself. For Mitra, it is crucial to eschew the lure of non-normativity—the call to recuperate “the prostitute” as a “real” figure, for her “real” labor to be celebrated, eulogized, romanticized, realized, made into politics and knowledge production as we wish it to be. Though so much of that work is incredibly valuable to feminist and sexuality studies across national boundaries, Mitra seeks the prostitute not as object but as concept. This pivot elucidates how gender and sexuality are not just present—not just devices to be used to shore up the work of imagined community building—but the underpinning of modern knowledge production itself. The concept of the prostitute authorizes and authors the way we come to know and study the world, and the ways social scientific methods and knowledges are produced. Women’s sexuality, Mitra reveals, is at the core of how patriarchy, the colony, the university, and the state do their work, and imagine their work. By studying the concept rather than the object, Mitra gives feminism renewed life a method by which to disassemble history and social science, tilting the fields and feminism sideways to ask fresh questions about what it is we want and think feminism can do—well, badly, “right” and wrong.

Mitra is clear that “the prostitute” as a naming of an object, too, is mobile and capacious and comes to include many acts and subjects under the banner. She parses how this broad notion of gendered sexual “deviance was an integral part of the social scientific enterprise in this moment, a knowledge economy that stretched from the metropole to colony and back” marking “every woman as a potential prostitute.” “The unknowability of the prostitute”—the very ways that everyone was a suspect in the category, its malleability—“posed her as an ever-present threat.” Mitra suggests that the power of this is not just to study the particular history of sexuality in India, but to disrupt the entirety of “modern sexuality studies” through this “concept history” of the prostitute and its intersections with social scientific—and queer and feminist studies—method. Here, she returns to the normative—women’s unregulated sexuality as threat and impetus for new forms of governance, regulation, science, technology, and study—that grounded an earlier “wave” of academic feminism but not to relitigate the obvious injustice done to “women” as an object of study, a monolithic category. Instead, Mitra’s book takes the regulation of women’s sexuality as the “life” of the title—the conceptual organization that makes modern knowledge production possible, period.

Mitra’s approach is the next wave, the post Object Lessons, of feminist studies, that seems to have been stuck methodologically in the proper object holding pattern of the nineties and early aughts, and at this moment with renewed vigor. The book’s focus on and performance of method moves the field from the historical object to the concept history, a move that queer studies has done well but perhaps too much in a groove where reading queer means finding what is radical through the nonnormative, and reading for and as the anti-normative position. Here Mitra asks us to find in the concept history of the prostitute the undergirding of the normative for both precolonial and colonial India. Indian Sex Life shows us how women’s sexuality, gender, and embodiment are operational not just as symbols but as foundational thought. The book gives feminist and queer studies centrality in method in a way that allows the fields to move forward together rather than against the object of the normative category “women.” Indian Sex Life gets us out of the anti-normative/anti-anti-normative bind through the feminist method of concept history.

Mitra’s book also rebuilds a bridge through method to my own field, Black studies—work found across studies of intimate colonial and enslaved entanglements in the work of Brenda Stevenson, Jenny Sharpe, Lisa Ze Winters, and Emily Owens (to name but a few scholars working at this intersection, as well as Ann Laura Stoler in Postcolonial Studies). What can we learn from and across global histories that skew toward centering the normative rather than celebrating the resistance of those who hewed toward the nonnormative? How might histories of colonialism and histories of enslavement come together through feminist sexuality studies, and through the work of concept history as method? How can scholars, ethically, do work that acknowledges the material subjects and objects of racial-sexual harm and terror at the same time that scholarship trains its methods on system and structure? And how can we study the pervasive way that women’s sexuality infuses the production, unacknowledged, of so many lines of thought, of historical and scientific invention, of the ways we do our work in the university around social science even today, even in decolonial contexts? How might US and global historical studies of sexuality, and more particularly how might Black US historical studies of sexuality, find methodological ground in common with global sexuality studies from the Caribbean and Africa, but also from South Asia, East Asia, and indigenous studies?

Another set of questions then emerges within women’s, gender, and sexuality studies: How can historical studies merge queer and feminist studies so that women’s sexuality is considered under the rubric of sexuality studies (which too often reads only as queer/nonnormative) and not just as feminist? Mitra’s invocation of Rubin’s “The Traffic in Women” is key here—and as several recent feminist theorists have argued, bringing us back to Rubin’s descriptive work in this essay can feel somehow out of time with the scholarly moment of feminism. But Mitra makes “Traffic in Women” sing like “Thinking Sex” has and with and through “Thinking Sex”—as she “accounts for the constitution of women’s bodies as social fact” through modern rubrics and rituals of forensic evidence, demography, and other fields that make up the traffic in women’s sexuality—the traffic in the concept of the prostitute—in modernity. Here is where we can see her work and Ferguson’s connected in their thinking about the ways that sexuality authors both regulation and its dissent across seemingly “unmarked” terrain—for Ferguson, sociology and for Mitra, a host of social scientific methods.

The other provocation Indian Sex Life gives us is the gift of feminist method in science studies, history of science, health humanities, and social science methodology: As she says at the opening of one chapter on an autopsy: “Yet colonial science endowed the coroner with the power to narrate Kally’s death into an event, not only to speculate about the facts of the physical evidence on the body, but to use her material remains to articulate the terms of her life and character. Chambers treats the corpse under his purview as an archive of common fact, where the dead offered proof of the degradation of the living.” Again, Mitra moves us away from object—the colonized woman, the prostitute in medicine, the instrument—to focus on method and the development of a line of questioning and studying the social as a “science” that runs through the prostitute, through the threat of “nonnormative” women’s sexuality in concept, through women’s bodies in material and in epistemological ways.

Mitra urges those of us invested in feminist studies, queer studies, history of science, and the medical humanities that that there are more interesting questions than who was doing it wrong, or that they did it wrong. Instead, her work is insistent on uncovering the heights and depths of how they did it, how the specter and the concept of the prostitute authorized both colonial and anti-colonial response, how the prostitute as a concept invented modern science and social science, without making a resistant heroine or tragic victim out of the prostitute as an object or agent or case. Taking Marx’s prostitute as more than a sign or the promise of non-normativity’s chaos, she opens up new and invigorating pathways into feminist study that refuse to rehearse what we already know or to assume the ways we should already know it.

Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought is about the history of colonial archives and the extent to which it constituted the possibility of who the Indian prostitute was and how she became the edifice of Indian sexual life. The book explores the history of how certain figures—most notably that of the prostitute became a modern social subject in India. It is narrative of how “the control of female sexuality is a central driving force in the very conceptualization of social life” (15) in India. Indian Sex Life focuses on the progressive history of the ways in which the social category of the prostitute took hold in Indian thought. The idea of the prostitute was conceptualized through a diverse set of disciplines—from forensic sciences, philology, to medicine, to the legal sciences. Indian Sex Life offer an explanation to the question that the author poses at the outset: how could one account for a surfeit of the term “prostitute” being used for all women who were not upper caste and married monogamously?

In a vein similar to Mary Poovey, Mitra reconstructs the “intellectual” history of the “social body” of the Indian prostitute. And how is recounting that genealogy productive? Mitra answers that what is contained in that archival “excess” (of the figure of the prostitute) is the very norm of modern Indian sexuality. In other words, the author uses “deviant female sexuality to account for the surplus of ideas and classifications that circulated around the category of the prostitute” (5). She argues, “The concept history of the prostitute, I suggest, reveals a broad history of how ideas about the dangers and excesses of women’s sexuality shaped modern social thought” (6).

There are a number of ways to read Indian Sex Life. In this short review essay, I focus on the construction of the archive by undertaking two tasks: (a) tease out some of the implications of the idea with which Mitra prefaces her book—“excess” in relation to critical studies of colonial archives; and (b) critically look at two of the techniques used in the consolidation of this archive as described by Mitra—most notably repetition and veracity and how both these techniques simultaneously produce and control “excess.”

To my mind this book is most about archives and their excesses, not only about the figure of the prostitute being almost omnipresent textually (surfeit) but how a whole new set of social, cultural, and legal predicaments and practices are defined under this label. It is about the work “archival excesses” do—in the service of empires, political power, cultural authority, and social thought. But excess produces its own limits and disruptions. In the following essay I ask what remains hidden or absent in such an “excess,” what does it say about the ways in which such written texts are produced and perpetual anxieties that aim to destabilize the myth of a discursive unity?

In the first part of the commentary, I state some of the implications of the idea of excess by citing from historians of colonialism. In the second section, I discuss the two modalities of the creation of the Indian prostitute that Mitra writes about—repetition and veracity. And in the third, I wonder about the political implications of this abundance and raise some questions about the need to decolonize the category of the prostitute and its textual determination.

I engage with the idea of “excess,” what it means in the context of colonial-modern archives and what they leave out or unable to contain. Such an exercise becomes especially compelling given that the power of colonial archives and transparency of archives more generally are under increased scrutiny. Indian Sex Life makes a stellar contribution in grounding the history of modern Indian social thought in the idea of excessive female sexuality. It explores how multilingual and multidisciplinary texts ordered and catalogued unified that idea as a social fact. I wonder about the further implications of this abundance.

Let me clarify a few things. I choose “excess” as the lens through which I analyze Indian Sex Life because in the book “excess” functions both at the empirical level as well as an analytical scaffolding. Mitra proves (maybe implicitly) that archives are “chronicles of excess” par excellence. She writes, “I found the prostitute everywhere, across different archives from colonial India, appearing, disappearing, and then reappearing in files that seemingly had little to do with the regulation of sexual commerce” (4). The author then elaborates in detail the list of disciplines where the “prostitute” was “ubiquitous in the analysis of social life” (4). Stunningly long is also the inventory of categories of women who were included under the umbrella term “prostitute” outside of Hindu upper-caste marriage. From the courtesan to the dancing girl to high-caste Hindu widows, lower-class Muslim women workers, mendicant performers, urban industrial workers, to domestic servants. Mitra calls her book as an exercise in deciphering the significance of this an “excess of the archival presence” (4). Indian Sex Life is concerned about “excess” in another way. Ann Laura Stoler calls colonial administrations, “prolific producers of social categories” (Stoler 2009, 1) and the creation of these labels was made possible by the publication of texts in hundreds and thousands and in diverse fields. Such enterprises were undertaken both by the colonial governments as well as the indigenous publishing industries. For example, Tapti Roy stated that in 1911, there were ninety-nine printing presses in the city of Calcutta. The validity of these new social categories was manufactured in a large part by an abundance of print publications. Mitra develops the idea of “excess” in the production of the category of “prostitute” in yet another crucial way. Excess functions also as a technique of the way in which the category of the “prostitute” was constructed. Creating patterns and generalizability of social categories solidified in the archive is dependent on their capacity to be repeated. Repetition is both a technique and product of the archive. It is therefore an “excess,” directed at the consolidation of particular texts, identities, and ideas.

In Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (1997), Bernard Cohn has shown how from the eighteenth century onward, modern nation states have depended on elaborate projects of demarcating, measuring, and classifying a wide variety of things—from space, to economic process, to flora, fauna, and human populations. He argues, “European states increasingly made their power visible not only through ritual performance and dramatic display, but through the gradual extension of ‘officializing’ procedures and that established and extended their capacity in many areas. . . . Finally, nation states came to be seen as natural embodiments of history, territory, society” (Cohn 1997, 2).

Cohn elaborates that for the idea of modern nation states to thrive, naming, cataloguing, and representing the past was paramount. And for him, “the process of state building in Great Britain seen as a cultural project, was closely linked to its emergence as a imperial power and India was its largest and most important colony” (Cohn 1997, 3). The archive Mitra studies is a similar one, consolidated in India during the period between the mid-nineteenth to twentieth centuries, at the height of British rule in as well the gradual prominence of anti-nationalist movements. This archive therefore was both politically and culturally momentous. Archival publications were a “tribute” (to quote Cohn) to the labors of countless company officials who created this “endless store of information” (Cohn 1997, 3). The production of this body of information was based on the very act of repetition. Cohn discusses what he calls “enquiries”—answers to a particular set of questions which gathered knowledge on local customs and practices, for example. Another modality was the survey, for instance, which Mitra writes about extensively as well. Quintessentially a colonial mode of gathering—surveys were meant to map natural and social landscapes of colonized societies.

Mitra explains how deviant female sexuality becomes a colonial object of knowledge in and through legal surveys. She writes, “Authorities developed a mutable idea of the prostitute as a coherent and immanently knowable object, a concept they linked to everything from solicitation to trafficking to abortion and infanticide” (19). Mitra argues how a preexisting idea about female sexuality guided the “colonial method of counting” (19). “Creating a category,” “populating it with bodies,” and “new modes of taxonomizing through questionnaires and seemingly endless lists that brought together disparate social practices through diagrams and charts” (19). In other words, if colonialism ruled on the basis of mastering cultural knowledge about the colonized, then archiving and cataloging remained its most powerful mechanisms.

What one can argue on the basis of these formulations of the colonial archive is that excess was a part and parcel of such endeavor. Excess was implied in a variety of ways. A diverse and vast amount of information (and temporalities) about groups of people and social practices were made to fit a very limited number of categories—for example that of the prostitute. Colonial investigations into this category were not only “a name” but an “explanation” behind the very nature of Indian society. In that regard, repetition in using the same set of questions (constituting the survey, for example) and as Mitra argues, taking cue from Lata Mani, “the very formulation of official questions” defined the terms of what could be answered” (65). Excess was also the result of these questionnaires/surveys being completed by a vast number of people from the colonial services to members of the educated Indian middle class.

Repetition as an act, strategy, and objective of the colonial archive(s) was also a transaction in futures. For example, one can read colonial repositories as an urge to defy transience, canonize information as social facts, and reestablish the authority of these collections and the buildings they were housed in. Repetition and excess are therefore intricately tied in the construction of colonial archives. I find it useful to cite Thomas Richards’s formulation in this regard. The British Empire was the most document rich of all global empires. He writes, “The civil servants of Empire pulled together so much information and wrote so many books about their experiences. . . . In a very real sense theirs was a paper empire” (Richards 1993, 4). One can almost characterize the colonial preoccupation with documents and texts as a “celebration of excess”—in terms of both content, style, and adaptability to suit a plethora of purposes.

Popular literature—“autobiographies,” “lay sociologies”—constituted another genre by which the authenticity of the figure of the prostitute was mapped onto the textual form. These “life stories” (first-person accounts of prostitutes themselves and eyewitness accounts by other people) as Mitra argues, became the voice of the Indian prostitute. Extensive sociological, legal, and medical knowledge about the deviant Indian woman had to be corroborated by narratives which were deemed real and living. Mitra writes, “These lay sociologies and ‘autobiographies’ are a small but representative sample of numerous publications on the restraint and excesses of women’s sexuality” (178). These writings generated “scenes of impurity and pollution,” in which the prostitute stood as the emblem of decadent Indian social life. They “demonstrated the pervasive presence of a social imaginary that utilized the concept of the prostitute to create a regime of empirical truth” (178). What is fascinating is that the creators of these texts are hard to find as most of these were fabricated using “pseudonyms or claimed a woman’s voice” (178). These constituted another modality that was based on testimony—designed via a rather limited range of images and cliches that were significant to the colonial eye. Veracity of the category of Indian prostitute needed to be created by depiction and circulation of sites, events, and social characters in the context of which the deviant Indian woman with her inherent excesses gained meaning. Mitra cites the example of the cremation ghat and the funeral pyre—which uncannily implied a dramatic scene of the unfolding of deviance on the part of a young woman—either in death or in future life. Further, with the development of photography which was deeply tied to the bureaucratic imperatives of colonial rule, the manufacture and representation of excess reached a higher level of sophistication. In fact, the Indian colonial archive is replete with photographic documentation of everyday life in India, where excess was produced not only in the sheer number of photographs/images but also in the way the colonial gaze constructed the relationship between the object, photographer, viewer, and the archive (Mitman and Wilder 2016).

Indian Sex Life is a thought-provoking study of the discursive formation surrounding label of the Indian prostitute—a subject that is ubiquitous in Indian social and cultural discourses. An ever-present figure—it was shaped in its formulation during the colonial period. The deviant Indian woman became a modern subject as an image of the person who was given shape in and through new areas of knowledge like philology, social science, legal studies, forensic sciences, and popular literature. Like the extensive literature in diverse fields that were devoted to carving it out, her very subjectivity was premised on an excess—excess of desire. The spate of scholarship on her was therefore an exercise in disciplining that surplus.

In 2014, a Hindu Mahasabha (Hindu right-wing outfit in India) leader urged that girls who wore skimpy clothes be termed “prostitutes,” and it created an outrage in India. Other popular RSS-led campaigns—for example, Valentine’s Day vandalism against couples in public or violence against sex workers—constitute the public-political landscape within which we can reevaluate the figure of the deviant Indian woman. We find her still populating a plethora of discourses in contemporary Indian culture and politics. Kristina Weld reminds us that archives are sites of political struggle.

In that regard, what do we make of her second life as she is reincarnated over and over again in the current Indian sociopolitical contexts (I do not refer to any particular individual woman, nor to retrieve the voice[s] of the prostitute)?

In recent times sociologists like Zygmunt Bauman have written an “obituary of excess” by showing how “too” much can cause redundancy, waste, but it can also cause disruption and blunders. Andrew Abbott on the other hand has pondered over the troubles that excess creates. Aligning with them, I wonder how do we make sense of some of the happenings (that I have shared above) where the deviant Indian woman (potentially deviant and therefore always a prostitute) remains an omnipresent category in current political and cultural discourse?

So where do we move from here? What is the future of this archive? As we are now questioning the authority and excesses of archives in their postcolonial contexts, how does one decolonize this archive in the light of certain political appropriations of the figure of the prostitute? Or is there a way to afford a second life to this archive on the Indian prostitute? Or as Paul Basu and Ferdinand De Jong have argued, how can one locate the “uncertainty” which was generated by such excess? Colonial and hyper nationalist legacies continue to haunt the archive on the Indian prostitute and its contemporary renditions. In what ways can archive on the Indian Sex Life provide a glimpse into its own limits/or dissolution?