Deseo, Sangre y Poder – Georges Bataille y El Estudio Del Tantra Hindú en El Noreste De La India (original) (raw)
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The Concept of sexuality reflected in ancient Indian Culture: A Critical review
Modern India is one of the oldest civilizations in the world. Excavations in the Indus Valley trace civilization there back for at least 5,000 years. India's cultural history includes prehistoric mountain cave paintings in Ajanta, the exquisite beauty of the Taj Mahal in Agra, the rare sensitivity and warm emotions of the erotic Hindu temple sculptures of the 9th-century Chandella rulers, and the Kutab Minar in Delhi. The seeming contradictions of Indian attitudes towards sex can be best explained through the context of history. India played a significant role in the history of sex, from writing the first literature that treated sexual intercourse as a science, to in modern times being the origin of the philosophical focus of new-age groups’ attitudes on sex.
2021
Historians have for long ignored the human body as a theme of inquiry. While there cannot be a history of the biological body, there is tremendous scope for enquiring into the religious, social and cultural attitudes towards this body. Recently, the female body impinged on our collective consciousness in the context of the Sabarimala temple entry controversy. The debate which this issue generated gives me an entry point to examine the gendered nature of social institutions, their normative injunctions, and their cultural symbolism within the wider Sanskritic / Brahmanic traditions, since it was precisely the bias of this tradition that labelled the presence of females of a particular age group as not only polluting but also presenting a threat to the seclusion of a brahmachari deity who presided over this temple complex. By analyzing a wide corpus of Sanskrit textual tradition, I seek to argue that female and male bodily secretions are represented asymmetrically and sought to degrad...
Locating Non-normative Gender Construction Within Early Textual Traditions of India
Springer Nature, Singapore , 2022
In the world of gender historiography, it has been assumed that methodical and as well as complex works on gender, gender equity and sexuality were first initiated by Europeans. When it comes to analysing non-normative gender constructions, once again, western precedents are projected as fair instances. Sources to be tapped range from Greco-Roman literature to that of the Renaissance. We know that the Roman law banned male-male relationship though Greek literature informs us of practice of mature men acquiring a young male of lower social group as his sexual partner. The classical western medical literature recognizes categories of persons held to be physiologically and/or psychologically distinct from the norm, some of whom are distinguished primarily on the basis of their preferred sexual practices (Zwilling and Sweet in 'Like a City Ablaze': the third sex and the creation of sexuality in Jain religious literature. J Hist Sexual 6(3):359-384 (1996) [23]). Even within the Japanese literature of the Tokugawa period, we come across reference to a class of men with exclusively same-sex interest, the onna-girai. They are also referred to as or woman-haters (Saikaku in The great mirror of male love. Schalow Stanford, CA, 1990 [21]). Within the Indian context, non-normative/third-sex constructions are largely ignored by cultural historians though Indian historical tradition does refer to the opposite. The aim of the paper is to establish third gender as a historical reality based on a litany of textual references in the ancient texts and especially in the ones that Jain theologians produced propelled by Jain monastic jurisprudence which had clear sense of regulating sexual existence of monastic inmates. It may be worthwhile to look at these in the larger context of issues of gender equity.
Indian sex life: Sexuality and the colonial origins of modern social thought
Journal Of Gender Studies, 2022
Excerpt: Assembling an astonishing range of archival material – philological studies, legal surveys, forensic medical investigations, social evolutionary science and popular realist literature – Mitra attempts to rewrite the intellectual history of the Indian prostitute, and reveals the epistemic interdependence between India as an object of knowledge and investigation, and prostitution or deviant female sexuality. In this ambitious project, female sexuality is foregrounded as a central analytic in the intellectual and social histories of South Asia. Mitra’s theoretical framework inhabits the intersections of feminist historical critique, methods in queer and sexuality history, debates about colonial knowledge and the historiographic challenge of the subaltern.
Conceptualising Brahmanical Patriarchy in Early India Gender, Caste, Class and State
Caste hierarchy and gender hierarchy are the organising principles of the brahmanical social order and are closely interconnected. This article explores the relationship between caste and gender, focusing on what is possibly the central factor for the subordination of the upper caste woman: the need for effective sexual control over such women to maintain not only patrilineal succession but also caste purity the institution unique to Hindu society. STUDIES of women in early Indian history have tended to focus on what is broadly termed as the 'status of women', which in turn has led to a concentration of attention on a limited set of questions such as marriage law, property rights, and rights relating to religious practices, normally viewed as indices of status. The limited focus has left a major lacuna in our understanding of social processes which have shaped men, women, and social institutions in early India. It is now time to move away from questions of 'status' whether high or low, and to look instead at the structural framework of gender relations, i e, to the nature and basis of the subordination of women and its extent and specific form in early Indian society. In this context we may point out that although the subordination of women is a common feature of almost all stages of history, and s prevalent in large parts of the world, the extent and form of that subordination has been conditioned by the social and cultural environment in which women have been placed. The general subordination of women assumed a particularly severe form in India through the powerful instrument of religious traditions which have shaped social practices. A marked feature of Hindu society is its legal sanction for an extreme expression of social stratification in which women and the lower castes have been subjected to humiliating conditions of existence. Caste hierarchy and gender hierarchy are the organising principles of the brahmanical social order and despite their close intercon-nections neither scholars of the caste system nor feminist scholars have attempted to analyse the relationship between the two. 1 will explore here (very tentatively) the relationship between caste and gender, focusing on what is possibly the central factor for the subordination of the upper caste women: the need for effective sexual control over such women to maintain not only patrilineal succession (a requirement of all patriarchal societies) but also caste purity, the institution unique to Hindu society. The purity of women has a centrality in brahmanical patriarchy, as we shall see, because the purity of caste is contingent upon it. The task of exploring the connections between patriarchy and other structures within a historical context was pioneered by Gerda Lerner (1986) and her work is both theoretically and methodologically useful for historians. In outlining the historical process of the creation of patriarchy in the Mesopotamian region Lerner describes her growing awareness of the fact that crucial to the organisation of early Mesopotamian society was the total control of women's sex-uality by men of the dominant class. She had been puzzled by her evidence wherein women seemed to have greatly differing statuses, some holding high positions and enjoying economic independence but whose sexuality was controlled by men. This led her to recognise that there was a need to look beyond economic questions and focus on the control over women's sexuality and the manner in which reproduction was organised and thus to look for the causes and effects of such sexual control [Lerner 1986: 8J. A similar exploration of the process of establishing control over women's sexuality in a highly stratified and closed structure could be useful in analysing the connections between caste, class, patriarchy' and the state in the brahmanical texts of early India. The structure that came into being has shaped the ideology of the upper castes and continues to be the underpinning of beliefs and practices extant today. A possible starting point for an exploration of the historical evidence on the crucial place of control over women's sexuality within the larger structure in which brahmanical patriarchy was located thus could be the practices and beliefs prevalent among the upper castes as studied by anthropologists. An insightful essay by Nur Yalman (1962) on the castes of Ceylon and Malabar shows that the sexuality of women, more than that of men, is the subject of social concern. Yalman argues that a fundamental principle of Hindu social organisation is to construct a closed structure to preserve land, women, and ritual quality within it. The three are structurally linked and it is impossible to maintain all three without stringently organising female sexuality. Indeed neither land, nor ritual quality, i e, the purity of caste can be ensured without closely guarding women who form the pivot for the entire structure. As Yalman's informants pointed out the honour and respectability of men is protected and preserved through their women. The appearance of puberty thus marks a profoundly 'dangerous' situation and is the context for major rituals which indicates the important relationship between female purity and purity of caste. It is in order to stringently guard the purity of castes that very early on pre-puberty marriages were recommended for the upper castes especially brahmanas (Yalman: 25-58]. Yalman also points out that caste blood is always bilateral, i e, its ritual quality is received from both parents. Thus ideally both parents must be of the same caste. However, this cannot always be ensured and is the basis of grave anxiety in the texts. The anxiety about polluting the ritual order and the quality of the blood through women is best demonstrated in the horror of miscegeny as we shall show. In the theoretical explanations for the proliferation of caste the most polluting and low castes are attributed to miscegeny, i e, the mixing of castes ('varnasamkara'). Most polluting are those castes which are the products of reprehensible unions between women of a higher caste and men of a lower caste: The ideologues of the caste system had a particular horror of hypogamy—pratiloma or against the grain as it was described—and reserved for it the severest condemnation and the highest punishment as will be evident. Violations continued to be punished until recent times by drowning mother and child [Yalman: 52) and excommunication and ritual death. The safeguarding of the caste structure is achieved through the highly restricted movement of women or even through female seclusion. Women are regarded as gate-ways—literally points of entrance into the caste system. The lower caste male whose sexuality is a threat to upper caste purity has to be institutionally prevented from having sexual access to women of the higher castes so women must be carefully guarded (Ganesh 1985: 16; Das 1976: 129-45], When the structure to prevent miscegeny breaks Economic and Political Weekly April 3, 1993 579
IESHR, 2021
The prostitute has been central to umpteen sophisticated feminist academic works on sexuality in colonial India. Covering the devadasis (temple dancers) of Tanjore, the erudite tawai'fs (courtesans) of Lucknow, the kalavants (artists) of Maharashtra, the monogamous concubines, the nautch girls, the bazaar and cantonment sex workers, and ranging from venereal disease to soldiers, legal criminality to literary victimhood, Victorian prudery to urban Indian reformism, these studies have highlighted that the regulation of deviant female sexuality in pre-colonial times was ambiguous, while colonialism signalled increasing surveillance and disciplining. One would have thus thought that the subject and the figure of prostitute was pretty much exhausted. It goes to the credit of Durba Mitra that she not only holds her ground, but brings new insights and depth to sexuality studies by looking at the prostitute not just as a figure and a category, but a concept, which according to her is the primary grid to foundationally think and write about modern Indian society and the making of disciplinary knowledge. It is this layered and wider meaning that gives Indian Sex Life its freshness, intensity and academic depth. The book derives its title 'from a popular genre of social scientific texts produced in early twentieth century' that linked control of women's sexuality 'to the evolutionary progress of Indian society' (p. 2). Based largely on Bengal, and spanning the century from mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century, the book is an intellectual and social history of sexuality in colonial India, and the shame and stigma associated with women's sexual desires. It analyses how European scholars, British officials and elite Indian male intellectuals, with their transregional networks, utilised new fields of knowledge of society to make normative and 'scientific' claims about deviant female sexuality.