Their prescriptions ranged from preserving the “male seed” and regulating the conjugal bedroom to advising on maternal exercise, paternal duties, sex education, and children’s diet and upbringing. Through these overlapping concerns, sexological discourse articulated a comprehensive vision of parenting that fused sexual norms with nationalist aspirations. In doing so, it constructed a narrow ideal of citizenship that marginalized Muslims and lower-caste communities from the imagined national future.
Elite Bengali sexologists framed their discipline as a vehicle of progress, yet their writings reveal how sexual science was fashioned locally. Euro-American scientific knowledge was selectively appropriated and “braided” with indigenous intellectual traditions—often mediated through English translations—to address the perceived needs of Bengali parents. Rather than a straightforward synthesis of Western science and shastric authority, this process involved multiple actors producing distinct forms of “scientific sexology” in response to anxieties about moral decline and social disorder.
Scientific procreation and modern child-rearing were thus positioned as essential mechanisms for guiding the nation toward patriarchal monogamy and social stability. By foregrounding child development and parental responsibility, the paper demonstrates how sexology in colonial Bengal functioned as both a product and instrument of Indian modernity, intertwining reproductive science with projects of nation-making and rationalized ideals of motherhood and fatherhood.
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