Sexual Knowledge, Sexual Anxieties: Middle-class males in western India and the correspondence inSamaj Swasthya, 1927–53

2017 ◽  
Vol 51 (4) ◽  
pp. 991-1034 ◽  
Author(s):  
SHRIKANT BOTRE ◽  
DOUGLAS E. HAYNES
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Sex Education ◽  
Birth Control ◽  
Female Body ◽  
Young Men ◽  
Sexual Practices ◽  
Western India ◽  
Sexual Knowledge ◽  
Same Sex

AbstractThis article examines letters written by young men to the Marathi-language journalSamaj Swasthyaand its editor, R. D. Karve, a major advocate of birth control and sex education in western India. The letters, and Karve's responses to them, constituted perhaps the earliest sex-advice column in Indian print media. We argue here that the correspondence provides a unique vehicle for understanding the forms of sexual knowledge held by middle-class males in mid-twentieth-century India as well as for appreciating their most significant sexual anxieties. The article analyses the concerns expressed in the letters about masturbation and seminal emissions, the nature of the female body and processes of conception, birth control and same-sex sexual practices. It particularly illuminates the ways in which the concept of modern conjugality pervaded the sexual understandings of the young men who wrote to Karve. It thus offers valuable insights into specifically sexual aspects of conjugality and masculinity—aspects that have previously been unexplored.

‘What is a Beautiful Body?’

2015 ◽  
Vol 8 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 192-214 ◽  
Author(s):  
Murat C. Yıldız
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Leisure Activities ◽  
Young Men ◽  
The Self ◽  
Male Body ◽  
Sports Clubs ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Press ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This article examines the emergence and spread of the ‘sportsman’ genre of Ottoman photography in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Istanbul. The ‘sportsman photograph’ depicted young men posing shirtless or wearing tight-fitting athletic attire, flexing their muscles and exhibiting their bodies. These images were embedded in a wider set of athletic and leisure activities and constituted novel social and photographic practices. By tracing the deployment of ‘sportsman’ photographs in sports clubs and the press, I argue that they cemented homosocial bonds, normalized and popularized new notions of masculinity, confessionalized the male body and reconfigured the ways in which Ottoman Muslims, Christians and Jews performed and conveyed their commitment to middle-class notions of masculinity and the self.

Understanding R. D. Karve

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shrikant Botre ◽  
Douglas E. Haynes
Keyword(s):  
Birth Control ◽  
Sexual Practices ◽  
Indian Society ◽  
Western India ◽  
Indian Politics ◽  
Sexual Science

This chapter examines how global concepts of sexual science were appropriated in western India during the period 1927–1953 by focusing on the case of R. D. Karve, a sexual scientist and birth-control advocate who engaged in an intensely Indian politics of sexuality—that is, the ongoing debates over sexual practices and their relationship to modernity. Karve invoked sexual science to counter nationalist contentions and relied on the iconic European and American figures of sexology to undermine the logic of brahmacharya (sexual self-constraint), a practice believed to be essential to the regeneration of Indian masculinity and the nation. He also argued that the Kamasutra was superior to its ancient counterparts in Europe. The chapter suggests that Karve was highly selective in drawing ideas from European sexual science that served his iconoclastic critique of the place of religion in Indian society.

Scottish Missionaries, ‘Protestant Hinduism’ and the Scottish Sense of Empire in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-century India

2007 ◽  
Vol 86 (2) ◽  
pp. 278-313 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Constable
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Western India ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Church Of Scotland ◽  
Free Church ◽  
Intellectual Engagement ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Church

This article examines the Scottish missionary contribution to a Scottish sense of empire in India in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Initially, the article reviews general historiographical interpretations which have in recent years been developed to explain the Scottish relationship with British imperial development in India. Subsequently the article analyses in detail the religious contributions of Scottish Presbyterian missionaries of the Church of Scotland and the Free Church Missions to a Scottish sense of empire with a focus on their interaction with Hindu socioreligious thought in nineteenth-century western India. Previous missionary historiography has tended to focus substantially on the emergence of Scottish evangelical missionary activity in India in the early nineteenth century and most notably on Alexander Duff (1806–78). Relatively little has been written on Scottish Presbyterian missions in India in the later nineteenth century, and even less on the significance of their missionary thought to a Scottish sense of Indian empire. Through an analysis of Scottish Presbyterian missionary critiques in both vernacular Marathi and English, this article outlines the orientalist engagement of Scottish Presbyterian missionary thought with late nineteenth-century popular Hinduism. In conclusion this article demonstrates how this intellectual engagement contributed to and helped define a Scottish missionary sense of empire in India.

The Politics of Memory: Rededicating Two Historical Monuments in Postwar Germany

2008 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 255-280
Author(s):  
Sam A. Mustafa
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Politics Of Memory ◽  
Postwar Germany ◽  
The Past ◽  
Historical Monuments ◽  
Coffee Table

For much of the past two centuries German governments encouraged or even sponsored the construction of war monuments. By the turn of the twentieth century Germany was covered in more than a thousand such shrines, most of which had local or regional significance as places of annual celebration or commemoration. Government, media, and business all contributed to an elaborate hagiography of Germany's battles, war heroes, and martyrs, with monuments usually serving as the centerpieces. Millions of middle-class Germans attended or participated in commemoration ceremonies at war monuments all over the country, and/or filled their homes with souvenir trinkets, tableware, wall decorations, coffee-table books, and other quotidian items that reproduced images of the monuments or scenes from the events they memorialized.

Reframing Solidarity: Company Magazine as Family Album

2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 50-67
Author(s):  
Courtney Maloney
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Labor Unions ◽  
Union Membership ◽  
Cultural Dimension ◽  
Economic Factors ◽  
Standards Of Living ◽  
Concomitant Reduction ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The U.S

We are witnessing a time of shrinking labor unions across the globe. Among member states of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, rates of union membership have declined from 30% in 1985 to 20% today (McCarthy 2017). In the U.S., the current rate is just 10.7% (Yadoo 2018). We have seen along with this the concomitant reduction in working-class and middle-class standards of living. Technological, political, and economic factors have impacted this change, but there is a cultural dimension to it as well. From the moment industrial unions in the U.S. gained power, corporations began to counter workingclass solidarity with alternative narratives that emphasized individualism, domesticity, and leisure. This article illuminates such efforts with a reading of one particularly sophisticated example from the mid-twentieth century, in which a steel corporation’s company magazine used workers’ own participation and self-representations in an effort to reorient notions of solidarity toward an identification with the corporation as family.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document