Passionate Modernity

Combining historical and ethnographic analysis, this book deals with the making of the heterosexual imagination from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present in the Indian context.This unique book uses methods from anthropology, cultural studies and history to explore the making of modern cultures of sexuality in India. It provides an analysis of the sexual and domestic politics of the period by focusing on the vast corpus of publications and journals on sexology from the 1920s to the 1940s, and links Indian activities with those in other parts of the world. The author analyzes material that has thus far been outside the purview of scholarly studies, namely, ‘footpath pornography’, magazines such as Sexology Mirror (in Hindi), women’s magazines dealing explicitly with sex and sexuality.

"[T]he author largely succeeds in demonstrating that the narratives of sexuality and the modern self are markers of class distinctions. Srivastava shows how competing segments of the middle class make use of variously coded conceptualisations of emotional intimacy and conjugal modernity to establish their status." - Manish K. Thakur, Indian Institute of Management Calcutta, India; Contemporary South Asia, Vol. 18, No. 4, December 2010

Dr Srivastava is a social anthropologist teaching at the School of Communication and creative Arts, Deakin University, Melbourne. He is presently Visiting Fellow, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi.Apart from articles in books and journals, Dr Srivastava is the author of Constructing Post-colonial India: National Character and the Doon School; co-author of Asia: Cultural Politics in the Global Age ; and co-editor of Sexual Sites, Seminal Attitudes: Sexualities, Masculinities and Culture in South Asia.