Managing the “Hypersexual and “Primitive” Sexual Instinct

Examining the Role of Sexology in the Construction of “Tribal Identity” in Late 19th- and Early 20th-Century India

Abstract

Highlighting the “difference” or “aberration” of indigenous communities was central to the construction of their “uncivilized” status in British colonial India. 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. Scholarship on 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 “savagery” of the indigenous. In this article, I deconstruct the process of the sexual pathologization of indigenous communities in colonial India and 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. I demonstrate how the British sexologist Havelock Ellis focused on the alleged hypersexuality and seasonal nature of the sexual response among specific indigenous communities, namely the Andamanese and the Hos, in his monumental work, Studies in the Psychology of Sex. I also show that such a pathologized view of indigenous sexuality was not only the mainstay of colonial sexology but 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 specter of sexually aberrant indigeneity first cast by colonial sexology left a lasting legacy in the sexological and anthropological history of modern India.