3 - Examining the Role of Sexology in the Sexual Pathologization of Indigenous Communities in Colonial India

Highlighting the “difference” or “aberration” of indigenous communities in India was central to the construction of their “uncivilized” status in British colonial policy and scholarship. Existing scholarship on indigeneity in modern South Asia has highlighted how elite opinion, whether it be colonial or Indian, emphasized the “strangeness” of the lifestyles of the indigenous communities. Recent scholarship at the intersections of gender, sexuality and indigeneity has noted how any sexual or marital practice that deviated from the norms of upper-caste Hindu heteronormative patriarchy was deemed “uncivilized,” reinforcing the “aberration” of the indigenous. In this paper, I argue that the field of sexology played a seminal role in this process as it endowed it with a sense of scientific objectivity and legitimacy. My paper focuses on the seven volumes of the English sexologist Ellis’ monumental work, Studies in the Psychology of Sex and demonstrates how Ellis focused on the alleged hypersexuality of specific indigenous communities in India, namely the Andamanese and the Hos. The paper reveals the manner in which the sexual practices of these indigenous communities used to make a qualitative difference between the sexual practices of the “lower races” and the “higher races” in India. Furthermore, such a pathologized view of indigenous sexuality also informed the work of elite Indian sexologists such as A.P. Pillay as well as the writings of the anthropologist, Verrier Elwin. Thus, the spectre of sexually aberrant indigeneity first cast by colonial sexology has left a lasting legacy in the sexological history of modern India.