Introduction

Begin from what is elementary. Begin with the question: ‘What is sexuality?’ It is probably the most unanswerable question in the discussions on sexuality. The query seems too large to form a legitimate research programme. The object in question too dissipated in time and space to warrant an investigation. One has to be careful here. An unexamined common sense would posit the cause of this inability to answer in the mystery of the phenomenon. Its uncomprehending stare remains captivated by the charm of secrecy in sexuality's immediate being. The academic response avoids this charm. The reasoned and scientific inquiry of sexuality takes as its object the different formations that get known by the word in their historical and societal contexts of production. Too often, this form of inquiry does not address the question of the specificity of sexuality as a category. In its very important and legitimate query about the different technologies of production of sexuality in very specific moments, it remains indifferent to the question of the nature of the phenomenon itself and to the generalities that assemble in disparate formations to give one name to a profusion of acts and events.

Historical, sociological, and ethnographic studies on sexualities have amply demonstrated the constructed nature of sexualities. Here, the word constructed is used in the sense of not being natural. These studies focus rather on the modes of naturalization, and by positing themselves in opposition to ahistorical approaches to the analysis of sexualities in psychoanalytic and philosophic modes, these studies have provided rich descriptions of practices and ideologies that together constitute the modes of the sexual in different spatial, temporal, and social coordinates. In the Indian context, the trans-historical approaches to the study of sexuality have mostly engaged canonical texts – many of the times almost reducible to the Kamasutra and a few Sanskrit plays – in the Sanskritic tradition. The more sociological and historical studies have dealt with various practices mostly in the colonial and the postcolonial times extending forward to the contemporary. This chapter tries to address the general and the singular enunciations of sexuality through some very specific textual investigation.