I am delighted to invite you to a lecture by Dr. Sonia Wigh (University of Cambridge) at the Max Planck Institute for History of Science. It will be our second event in the ASTRA Colloquium series “Occult Sciences in South Asia: A Non-Western History”.

Dr. Sonia Wigh (University of Cambridge) will present a lecture entitled “Turning Tables: Tracking Movement of Desire in Early Modern South Asia” on 12 March 2026 from 13:30-15:00 in the Villa Seminar Room (MPIWG Villa, Harnackstraße 5, 14195 Berlin, GERMANY). The lecture will also be accessible online (Zoom link below).

The full program of this spring’s ASTRA colloquium series is available here.

Several erotological manuals in early modern South Asia contained a chapter detailing how the movement of desire in the female body can be tracked by the corresponding movement of the moon. While the movement of the moon could not be controlled, through following the instructions laid out in these erotological texts such as Kokaśāstra and Laẕẕat al-nisā’, a discerning man could, in theory, control a woman’s pleasure. Through a critical analysis of erotological manuals produced in Persian and Braj Bhasha (early Hindi) in South Asia between 1640–1800, this paper will track two interconnected phenomena: one, the creation of astronomical tables that tabularized the movement of desire to various body parts with corresponding fortnightly movement of the waxing and waning of the moon. This change was probably due to an effort to create a simple, scannable diagram that efficiently conveyed information that would otherwise be covered over two to three pages in prose or poetry within the text. Two, by the eighteenth century these tables were further converted into concentric circles. What does the movement from the prose to tabular to circle signify? During this change of form, it is interesting to see what information is retained, discarded, and transformed.    

Sonia Wigh is a British Academy Postdoctoral fellow at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. Her current research project “Sex, Medicine, and Manuscripts in Early Colonial South Asia” explores the medicalisation of sex through Persian sexual-medical manuscripts produced between 1750 and 1857. She is currently working on her monograph A Body of Words: A History of Sex and the Body in Early Modern South Asia, which is based on her thesis which received the C.A. Bayly Best Dissertation Award (2022). Her research focuses on the history of sexuality, medicine, and material culture in early modern South Asia. She is also part of the editorial team in leading journals such as Osiris and Medical History.