Sindu Rajasekaran’s ‘Forbidden Desire’ explains how the British tamed India’s rich queer culture
Booksology Sindhu Rajasekaran presents an expansive, sinuous history of queer India in her soaring, at times wavering, panorama in Forbidden Desire: How the British Stole India’s Queer Pasts and Queer Futures. From the very beginning, the book is a polemic against the long effects of British colonialism in South Asia. It explores the ways in which Empire distilled queer bodies into “criminal” categories and left us, postcolonial “savages”, to pick up the pieces.
She is the progeny of scholars in South Asian Studies who have been working tirelessly, since the 1990s, to revise India’s history of unruly desires. Like them, she corrects the rhetoric of some of India’s purists whose conservative attitudes to sex, religion, caste and community seem haunted by the spectre of Empire and Victorian morality politics. Her citations are abundant with some of our greatest queer renegades in the academy today. Historians, archivists, social scientists, gender theorists: Anjali Arondekar, Durba Mitra, Scott Kugle, Jessica Hinchy. Some of the Big Names. Which begs the question: is there anything new to be said about the wounds Empire has levied on queer bodies? Or is Forbidden Desire a sleek, stylish remix of the scholars who have come before Rajasekaran?
Forbidden Desire is for India’s queer kids, on the cusp of learning about their elders and ancestors. It is for the allies who want to be made intimate with the subcontinent’s ancient and medieval forms and practices of queer life, and the rupture wrought by Empire in the name of the “mission civilisatrice.” It is for all sorts of ethnonationalists and normativists who practice linguistic, religious, sexual, aesthetic and casteist singularity in this excerpt of a subcontinent we call “India” today: a country that thrums still with the loans and influences of our purported antagonists.
There is danger, of course, with a project like Rajasekaran’s to revert to some illusion of precolonial India as a queer utopia. When Saleem Kidwai, dearly departed, and Ruth Vanita’s ambitious attempt at cataloguing India’s queer literary cache—Same-Sex Love in India—came out in 2001, they were iffy about this Anglophonic catch-all term, “queer,” forged in the sociocultural vernaculars of North American politics. Even “India” felt too amorphous an idea, what with its shifting borders, and its splits. Nonetheless, they were agreed: attitudes towards “same-sex” love in texts that represent the limits of post-Partition India were far from coherent.
What the British did, as Rajasekaran explains, is federalise a phobic attitude to desire, embodiment, sex work and community. It homogenised cultural and legal perceptions of a certain slice of colony which did not reproduce civilisation in monogamous, heteronormative ways. Rajasekaran frequently alludes to the legal trifecta that facilitated this scheme against deviant sex: Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code (1860), the Contagious Diseases Act (1868), and Part II of the Criminal Tribes Act (1871). Under the rubric of “deviants,” it gathered several sections of Empire: sodomites, prostitutes, and “eunuchs” respectively.
Each kind of deviant here is exemplar of a distinct form of queerness. Yet, they were often clumped with each other, and made interchangeable. See, for instance, Rajasekaran’s citation of the stellar historian Durba Mitra’s work on the colonial Indian prostitute. Read Mitra’s Indian Sex Life, Rajasekaran says, and see how they clumped the tawa’if with vagrants, or actors with domestic help.
Older scholars like Vanita and Kidwai, and academia in general, favour splitting hairs. But Rajasekaran heralds a shift in the tide, in public thought, in academic notions and nomenclatures. Instead of more labels, how about fewer? How can we take a one-size-fits-all “queer” and make ourselves plural? How can this plurality still rebut the ways in which the powers-that-be pluralised criminal acts, only to make these different “species”, queered by the law, one and the same: the enemy of civil (straight, monogamous, reproductive) society?
Can a catch-all “queer” make this “modular” plurality redemptive in our postcolonial age? This is a galvanising question that Rajasekaran teases early on in Forbidden Desire. It heralds a new age. It signals a facelift to notions of an amorphous identity that made our queer elders queasy.
There is much to admire in Rajasekaran’s largely curatorial history of Indian desire and legislation. How promiscuously she ventures into figures like the prostitute, the polyamorous, the transwomxn, the androgynous, the Bengali bhadrolok, even tracing how commonplace material cultures, like jewellery, nudity, and other sartorial choices, were queer to the British eye and, as a result, sanitised by and for the Victorians. Despite the plenitude of bodies that comprise “queer” in the Indic imagination, Forbidden Desire is not a sustained study of one figure or the other. It is a manic rehearsal of history.
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So manic, it seems, that there are times Rajasekaran contradicts herself. There are moments where she acknowledges, as Kidwai and Vanita once did, that India was not a haven for hetero-subversive Desire before the onset of colonialism. And yet, there are these gestures Rajasekaran makes that feel disconcerting. She writes, for instance, that “this must’ve been why (wo)mxn were as free as they were back then.” What fact or data persuasively backs this retroactive utopian nostalgia? Or this statement that feels sweeping, and confounding, if accurate: “Sati burnings were not as popular as witch trials, mind.”
If this is Rajasekaran’s attempt at correcting our perception of the (pre)colonial past as “regressive,” as she puts it, then her revisions of the horrors of self-immolation and her idealisation of free movement of the femme and the femme-presenting before British interference feels in service of her project, not towards historical truth and accuracy. Speaking of accuracy, Rajasekaran moves through Forbidden Desire so manically that James I of England is incorrectly identified repeatedly as James IV of Scotland when he really was James VI.
And yet, there is Rajasekaran’s astute sensitivity to the ways in which Islamic and Hindu fundamentalists conspired with and were complicit in the federalisation of Puritanism that sifted the queers out of polite society. If native collaborators exist, surely things could not have been coherently tolerant before European arrivals?
I am unsettled slightly by Rajasekaran’s use of the term “protofeminist” throughout. Granted, she confesses herself to be “something of an Anglophile.” But is it not Anglocentric to call antecedents to first wave feminism “proto”? Can precolonial feminists from the Global South not simply be called “feminists”? Or do we follow time and language set by movements of an Anglocentric Global North? Whither decolonisation?
Forbidden Desire mostly reads as the “greatest hits” of queer South Asian scholarship. Yet, there are moments of original, subversive research that feel cursory, like a tease. How deliciously Rajasekaran writes about the tantra practices among the Vajrayana Buddhists and the contradiction of kink and Buddhist philosophy. How intriguing it was to learn about the 18th century Awadhi prince Mirza Manir’s homosexuality based on Rajasekaran’s original research. How refreshing to read her intersectional approach to queer subjects that returns caste-based discriminations to queer reading that have canonically been brahminical.
There are kernels of new perspectives that take us out of the usual northern belt of Queer India, of studying Bengali effeminacy, or Bhakti poets and Sufi saints, that imagines India bilaterally in Muslim-Hindu terms and Urdu-Hindi language systems. Yet, they are buried in passages that largely capitulate to these canonical queer historical practices in India today. Were the British the only forces to reshape gender and sexuality in India, I ask, when scholars like Anjali Arondekar have shown how the Portuguese in India’s western coast have influenced caste, gender, and sex-based practices (see her 2023 monograph, Abundance)?
Forbidden Desire may very well rest upon the labours of established scholars of Queer South Asia, but it is also an essential trade book to have. In the same spirit as works by Madhavi Menon and Akhil Katyal’s semi-scholarly work for the public, albeit not as original, Rajasekaran presents a cache of scholars who often remain vaulted behind paywalls and institutional access. Oftentimes, Rajasekaran even takes some dense scholarly writing and makes the history conversational, public, accessible. To bring an impressive cast of academic interlocutors to a public comprising non-specialised readers or gesture towards their work in a survey of the public history of Indian queerness is perhaps one of the greater triumphs of the book. What use is all this queer history if it blooms and rots in the ivory towers of neoliberal institutions like libraries and archives in the Global North?
The writer is a scholar and critic from Guwahati. Their work has appeared in Wasafiri, The Caravan, Scroll, and The Hindu, among other places. They live in Kolkata.
