Hybrid Sexuality: Where Kokkaka Meets Ibn Sina in Twentieth Century North India

Presenter:

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Abstract

Recent scholarship has characterized the late 19th-early 20th century as a period marked by the development of ‘Hindu sexual sciences’.  This presentation seeks to argue for a ‘hindustani sexual science’ instead. I base my argument on an Urdu-hindustani text which combines Ibn Sina’s Qanun with Kokkaka’s Kokshastra. From Kokkaka, the author borrowed the categorization of women based on physiognomy. He then harnessed it to Ibn Sina’s austere scientism that ironically, also spurned the pursuit of sexual pleasures (al-ladhdha al-hissiya). By combining both, the modern author appears to have arrived at a profile of ‘deviant’ women who the educated middle-class man was expected to recognize and avoid. At the same time, this allowed the modern writer to assuage masculine anxiety by removing passionate or rough sex from the conjugal bed. This text appears to also represent an abundance of similar texts in the same vernacular register in the cheap print market of this period. This abundance suggests a pluralism of sexologies in the period, rather than a singular sexological tradition claimed in recent scholarship.