This chapter focusses on sexuality in South Asia. The first section traces representations from the prehistoric to early historic as depicted in material remains, in Vedic Brahmanical thought systems, and in the Dharmasastras and the Epic-Pura?a traditions. These emphasize reproduction and heteronormative sex between married couples as a sacral, ritual act. They also reveal a preoccupation with the body and the need to control desires. Sexual abstinence was encouraged in ascetic and monastic sects in Brahmanical, Buddhist, Jain, and other sects. The second section focusses on the kama (sensual pleasure) tradition by exploring the texts outlining the rules for the erotic. Sensual love was also the primary aesthetic experience of Sanskrit literature, particularly kavyas, and was oriented towards masculinist desire in an urban landscape. Prakrit and Tamil love poetry, discussed here, vocalize feminine sensuality in a rural setting. The evolution of devotional spirituality (bhakti) transformed the erotic tradition. Tantric systems have been viewed as a parallel trend, concerned with materiality and giving center space to ritualized intercourse. Visual art continued to depict sexual themes derived from literature. The chapter ends with an overview of attitudes towards sexuality in the Mughal court and the colonial period.

Puzzling over the repetitive evocation of sexologists such as Havelock Ellis during debates over the age of marriage in the Legislative Assembly, this chapter studies sexology as a site for the dissemination of the age-stratified sexual morality upheld by the Child Marriage Restraint Act. The marriage manuals, antimasturbation tracts, samples of erotica, and sex education texts surveyed in this chapter drew equally on the new science of sex and shastric knowledge and were particularly focused on the regulation of sexuality with reference to children. In making rough translations between two epistemic and ethical orders, these works buttressed an age-stratified sexual morality, gave chronological age roots in (a primordial) India, depicted marriage reform as a return to a (Hindu) golden age, and helped align the time of the (Hindu) ritual body with the temporality of secular body and of the modern nation. While such translations might have aided marital reform, the silent exclusions – of Muslims in particular – that were inherent to this schema could not be covered over for long.