Passionate Modernity: Sexuality, Class, and Consumption in India

This book is an interdisciplinary study of the various connections between sexuality and post-colonial modernity in India, a period marked by sexual nationalism, consumerism, free market society, and large-scale urbanization. It explores the sexual cultures that derive from these contexts, focusing especially on : Family planning, eugenics, and nationalism in early 20th century; popular culture, masculinity, and the sexual politics of the 1950s; the cultures of footpath pornography and sex-clinics in Delhi and Mumbai; contemporary sexological publications, and women’s magazines; the making of middle-class identities through discourses on consumption and morality. The book moves away from traditional explorations of sexual cultures in India that rely on religious or psychoanalytic frameworks, and combines archival and ethnographic research to present a nuanced analysis of the linkages between the variables that comprise urban culture on the one hand, and sexuality on the other.