Translation as techne: female sexuality and the science of social progress in colonial India

In this article, I analyze processes of translation that shaped the science of sex in eastern India between the 1880s and the 1930s. I trace the impact of translation - the rendering of words between the language of English and Bengali as well as the travel and transformation of concepts - through close textual analysis of influential Bengali-language medical and scientific textbooks on nymphomania, female sexual excesses, and the evolution of Indian society. The translation of sexual categories was a techne by which Bengali intellectuals produced categories of social behavior and identity as equivalent and homogenous. Through claims of equivalence in translation, Bengali scientists argued for the commensurability of Indian social practices with universalist schemes of social evolution and civilizational progress. This process of exchange pivoted on the figure of the sexually deviant woman, who became a key site of translation and categorical equivalence. In thinking translation through techne, I foreground how a semiotics of female sexuality produced the social' as an object of inquiry in colonial India.