Introduction

The most significant recent development, a break with the past, in the study of sexual cultures has to do with the term ‘culture’ itself: that we think of sexuality (and sexualities) as having ‘cultures’. Historically, both in academic and popular thinking, the term ‘sexuality’ most frequently elicited responses that have to do with biology. That is, whether as an area of study or as a set of ideas people have about their intimate lives, sexuality was too easily detached from the social contexts where it belongs and presented as something of itself. There is a strong tendency to view our sexual lives as dictated by their own peculiar rules that

Ironically, while, on the one hand, we think of sexuality as a world-untoitself – such that it is regarded as a very narrowly confined domain that has nothing to do with, say, politics and economics, we also simultaneously think of it as something of very general significance that is absolutely fundamental to our being. We tend to both downplay its meanings as well as inflate its significance. So, for example, if one is a bad cook, it's a minor blemish, but being ‘bad’ at sex is seen as a major crisis which requires intervention (through seeking the help of ‘sexologists’, for example).

The sexuality-as-a-drive perspective which was, most famously, both problematized but also institutionalized by Sigmund Freud presents itself in the Indian context in peculiarly Indian ways. It was, for example, at the heart of many of the arguments that were made – and continue to be made – about the difference between Hindus and Muslims, those between ‘tribal’ and ‘nontribal’ populations, and between the middle-class and poorer populations. So, with respect to the last point, the rise of sexology and the family planning movements are directly linked to the early-twentieth-century perception of the different sexual drives that supposedly characterized the educated and the uneducated (Ahluwalia 2013; Srivastava 2007). Sexology was intended to cater to the more evolved sexual desires of the middle classes, whereas family planning was directed towards controlling the uncontrollable drives of the poor, one that threatened nation-building.