How the British tried to tame India’s diverse and amorphous queer past

In spite of its missteps, there is much to admire in this largely curatorial history of Indian desire and legislation

- Rohit Chakrabority

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”: a country that thrums still with the loans and influences of our purported antagonists.