Historicizing the Typical in Bengali Sexology, 1860–1950

The precolonial corpus of kama texts frequently organized sexual subjectivity in to two four-fold groups, i.e. four types of men and four types of women. When these texts, in bowdlerized form, began appearing in print during the colonial era the competitive nature of the Bengali print market in books on sex and eroticism forced them to add illustrations of these types. As a result, the ahistorical types were forcibly historicized. Initially woodcut illustrations historicized the types through sartorial choices. Later, in the interwar years, photographs entered these books. Drawing upon the format and codes of colonial ethnographic photography these types were now progressively instantiated through actual flesh-and-blood men and women. It was at least partially under the impact of this unfolding history of visualizations the narrative too began to refer to well-known historical figures as instances of each type of gendered subject. In this paper, drawing upon a collection of about ten published works, describe this process of the historicization of the typical as well as teasing out the various investments of caste and community that provided the operational codes by which such historicization proceeded.