| dc.description.abstract | This thesis develops the first systematic model for understanding the production, circulation, and consumption of literature that dealt explicitly with sexual themes, interconnected ideas about how individuals should behave in their sexual lives, and how these ideals connected to socio-political transformations in early modern South Asia between 1650 to 1800. By critically examining a diverse range of texts: ethical, political, legal, erotological, and medical, I argue that an individual’s embodied experience, particularly those related to impotence, infertility, barrenness, were intrinsic to understand early modern notions of sexual health, disease, healing, and pleasure.
My thesis argues that Laẕẕat al-nisā’ (The Pleasures of women) is as much a text as it is a genre, that combines more explicit sexual knowledge with compressed medical information. Pleasure in intimate acts was connected with the complex system of nerves and veins, movement of planetary bodies, and matching genital sizes to define ideal partners. Through a series of corroborative translations, this multi-version Laẕẕat tradition became emblematic of the Indo-Persian sexual knowledge paradigm that combined the pre-existing Sanskrit Kamāśāstra and Kokaśāstra tradition with the inherited ḥikmat (wisdom) from the larger Perso-Arabic tradition of ‘ilm al-bāh (knowledge of sex).
This thesis reimagines the structure and sociology of the medical marketplace and highlights the role of often neglected, yet equally important, bāzār ḥakīms (market physicians), barbers, and midwives, as medical service providers. Aphrodisiacs were thought to stimulate desire and enhance pleasurable experiences which were necessary to fulfill an individual’s generative potential. I demonstrate how early modern sexual health continued to be intrinsically linked with the ability to reproduce. Feminine yearning for a child, especially a male child, wedded the experience of childbearing to the idea of femininity itself. Impotency, its psychological, and material cures, were causes of deep anxieties for the Mughal mīrzā (gentleman). Due to the laws of partible inheritance, infertility was more than an individual issue, having eventual implications for the reproductive health of the empire. | en_GB |
| dc.rights.embargoreason | I intend to publish my thesis as an academic book and, in order for it to be accepted for publication by a reputable academic publisher, it is important that the thesis is not already available online. Publishing this work as a book is a key step to start my academic career and the inability to find a suitable publisher because the work is already available online will have a seriously detrimental effect on my future career prospects. Secondly, my thesis includes a lot of primary source material that I translated from Persian, Hindi, and Urdu and which has not been used before in academic studies. In particular, one manuscript, Laẕẕat al-nisā’ (Pleasures of women), has been used extensively in the thesis and has attracted much interest when I presented excerpts from it at conferences and workshops where I disseminated my findings and work in progress during the course of my doctoral studies. plans to produce a critical edition of this text, with English translations, requiring time. | en_GB |
