The Anatomy of Habit

Abstract

This article examines the early twentieth-century Indian prison as a colonial sexological laboratory, arguing that it grounded a spatial form of sexual science tied to the science of confinement. Uncovering a crucial and previously unstudied Indian prison scandal, it shows how the would-be prison sexologist John Mulvany's experiments on subaltern Indian sexual “deviants” developed alongside and helped reconstitute the architecture of the prisons he administered, from Calcutta's Presidency Jail to Alipore's New Central Jail. It also demonstrates how he mobilized racist criminological theories about Indian prisoners’ desire for sociability over privacy to isolate sex offenders in graded patterns of cellular confinement and to prevent prison sex. It further explores how Mulvany's interception of the intimate letters of such sequestered prisoners led him to conceptualize pederasty as a mass site of habitual Indian racial excess. Finally, it documents how the state prevented the circulation of Mulvany's studies, anticipating outcry about having exposed Indian political or revolutionary prisoners to sexual abuse. While scholars have predominantly studied the circulation of sexology among imperial bourgeois publics through the Foucauldian framework of a sexological will to knowledge, this essay theorizes how the colonial state's dominance over penology amplifies our understanding of subaltern sexual life and of sexological epistemologies subtended by a will to ignorance.

Don't Ask, Won't Tell? Sexual Science and the Case Biography of Sodomy in Colonial India

“…Hence, Ellis could not yet identify an invert outside Europe because "the real invert, if he exists among them, as doubtless he does exist, generally passes unperceived or joins some sacred caste [sect] which sanctifies his exclusively homosexual inclinations" (Ellis,Sexual Inversion,2:21). By 1915, he claimed, "the extent of the evidence [for the same] will doubtless be greatly enlarged as the number of competent observers increases" (21).…”

“…Elsewhere, I have shown how Ellis's unreliable informant in India, W. Buchanan, editor of the Indian Medical Gazette from 1899-1919, senior officer in the Indian Medical Service, and Inspector-General of Bengal Prisons from 1902-19, sidelined the former's inquiry into inversion in Indian prisons. 21 Buchanan authoritatively claimed his warders had never observed any evidence of same-sex sexual encounters within their prisons. But under his stewardship, the prison establishment suppressed the circulation of prisoners' first-person epistolary narratives on sodomy as well as the publication of related research in the Gazette because "it was a subject of which the Government desired to know nothing."…”