Evolution

Abstract

This chapter accounts for the foundational place of deviant female sexuality in social evolutionary thought over the period between the 1860s and the 1950s. It begins by analyzing concepts of sexuality and patriarchal monogamy in European and American ethnology. The chapter then explores the widespread impact of the field of ethnology on the ideas of a set of social analysts in eastern India who produced original theories of Indian social development in the first decades of the twentieth century. Their theories united the science of female sexuality with philology, biology, ethnology, psychology, and sociology to create original models for the evolution of Indian society. The unification of diverse sexual practices through classifications of deviant female sex constituted the social as a discrete domain of inquiry. These publications in critical social theory emerged in India at a moment when social scientific disciplines had not yet undergone disciplinary differentiation. A distinguishing feature of these publications was a claim to expertise about female sexuality through the blending of different fields of knowledge. To conclude, the chapter briefly touches on how these multidisciplinary understandings of primitivity and evolutionary development continue to shape social thought in postcolonial India.