The Proper Female Subject: Poetics and Erotics in Early-Twentieth-Century Hindi

By the time it came under attack in late-nineteenth-century British India, the concept of śṛṅgāra rasa —the Sanskrit aesthetic mode designating the erotic, and the aesthetic experience and representation of the feelings and actions of romantic love—had informed Indian poetry for over a millennium. This article examines the rise of anti- śṛṅgāra rhetoric, and re-purposings of śṛṅgāra in Hindi literary publications of the early twentieth century, preceding and including the full-fledged print culture of the 1920s. Authors modernizing śṛṅgāra incorporated genres of quasi-literary, quasi-science writing from English, in the creation of a new aesthetic basis for śṛṅgāra based on a spiritually-exalted realism in nature. This aesthetic, spawned in a colonial North Indian public sphere of moral panic over sexual propriety, has survived into contemporary times.