Stolen Skin and Children Thrown: Governing sex and abortion in early modern South Asia

Abstract

What did women's bodies in pre-colonial South Asia have to do with the birth of capitalism? South Asia's pre-colonial integration into a globally emerging, early modern capitalist order reached deep into the hinterland to transform both state and society in eighteenth-century Marwar. Driving the change was an emergent elite, consisting largely of merchants, that channelled its energies towards reshaping caste. Merchants, in alliance with Brahmans, used their influence upon the state to adjudicate the boundary between the ‘illicit’ and the ‘licit,’ generating in the process a typology and an archive of deviant sex. In the legal framework that generated this archive, women were configured as passive recipients of sexual acts, lacking sexual personhood in law. Even as they escaped legal culpability for ‘illicit’ sex, women experienced, through this body of judgments, a strengthening of male proprietary controls over their bodies. Alongside, the criminalization of abortion served as a means of sexual disciplining. These findings suggest that post-Mughal, pre-colonial state formation in South Asia intersected with global economic transformations to generate new sex-caste orders and archival bodies.

Telling abortion stories: The life of Florence P. Evans (1913–1935)

“…Similarly elusive is a complete picture of Florence's 'sexual personhood'. 40 Did she have many romantic partners or one? How would she have described her sexual orientation?…”

How did the female fetus speak? Abortion, sex selection, and national futures in India

“…The question of abortion in India has received extensive scholarly attention. Historians and demographers have traced the status of the practice in colonial India (Ahluwalia, 2014;Chandrasekhar, 1974Chandrasekhar, , 1994Cherian, 2021;Sharafi, 2021), and political scientists and feminist thinkers have looked into the legal tussles around it in postcolonial India (Gangoli, 1998;Mazumdar, 1994;Menon, 1995). More recently, sociologists have turned their attention to the practice of sex selection, tracing its demographic, ethical, and political economic dimensions (John, 2011(John, , 2014a(John, , 2014bKalantry, 2017;Patel, 2006).…”