Love in a Colonial Climate: Marriage, Sex and Romance in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

Abstract

Studies concerned with the intimate areas of human experience suggest that the institutions and social mores structured around the instinctive drives of mankind—such as sex, love and fear, are not meant to serve the same purpose in every culture. Belief systems, world views and culturally-determined expectations from life determine the texture, causation and expression of even our very basic emotions. Nature's purpose for the sexual impulse may be the propagation of the species, but in controlling and harnessing this drive for the ends of social cohesion, different cultures have had very different objectives in view and used very different means. The emotive affects associated with its expression have also varied accordingly.