Aging Sex: Youth, Senescence, and the Sexual Sciences in India

Youvana Vigyan [The Science of Youth], published in Calcutta in 1923, drew on the sciences of sexology and psychology to offer advice on the preservation of self, race and nation to the youth of India. The tract addressed the youth of India, while also rendering its target audience as its main object of scientific scrutiny. It sought to define a nebulous category – that referred to a stage of life, an attitude, and a sexual quality – in more circumscribed terms, with regards to a sexual activity, marriage and reproduction. At what age did childhood end and youth begin? When and how did the body blossom from childhood to youth? What accounted for a premature loss of youthfulness? How could old men be rejuvenated? While a volume entirely dedicated to the “science of youth” was rare, the scrupulous scrutiny of youth and youthfulness was a common preoccupation, even a global obsession, from the 1920s to the 60s, at a time when youth were mobilized for a range of political movements around the world.

To what extend this sexological understandings inform the political category of youth? To what extent was the category itself inherently sexualized and invariably gendered? This paper will survey works of popular sexology in Hindi to track translations of Anglo-American commonsense on adolescence and youth into north India to provide an account of its global resonance and local specificity as a social scientific category. In surveying the obsessive scrutiny of youth and senescence in “scientific” writings on sex in late colonial and postcolonial India, this paper argues that youth might be understood as a sexual category, rather than simply as one defined by age. More broadly, it calls for the need to incorporate age as a category of analysis in the history of sexuality, in India and elsewhere.