1. Loving Like a Man: The Colourful Prophet, Conjugal Masculinity and the Politics of Hindu Sexology in Late Colonial India.
- Author
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Pande, Ishita
- Subjects
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HINDU-Muslim relations , *HISTORY of books & reading , *POLYGAMY (Islamic law) , *20TH century literature , *HISTORY of banned books , *ISLAMOPHOBIA , *PREJUDICES in literature , *HISTORY , *INDIC literature ,HISTORY & criticism - Abstract
Rangila Rasul, a communal diatribe masquerading as an innocuous ‘celebration’ of the ‘Prophet of Many Wives’ published in 1924 was proscribed in 1927 for promoting feelings of hatred against the Muslims of India. Its editors defended the publication as factual in content, measured in tone, and modernising in intent. Providing a scholarly scrutiny of this bold defence, this article juxtaposes the offensive tract with laws regulating age of marriage introduced by reformers at the time, on the one hand, and works of Hindu sexology providing lessons on conjugal modernisation and marital masculinity, on the other. It finds that the contents of the tract did share a common ground with legislative social reform, just as its ‘frank’ discussion of sex matched the tone of the sex manuals ubiquitous at the time. Acontextual reading of these seemingly dissimilar texts suggest that if the private purpose of the sexmanual was to promote eugenic sex and modern marriage, its political life was driven by the abjection of forms of sexuality and conjugality viewed as ‘abnormal’, which were rhetorically ascribed to a host of ‘others’ – especially the stereotyped Muslim of the Hindu nationalist imagination. This article thus reveals an unacknowledged genealogy of marital modernity in India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2017
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