Book: FORBIDDEN DESIRE: HOW THE BRITISH STOLE INDIA’S QUEER PASTS AND QUEER FUTURES
Author: Sindhu Rajasekaran
Published by: Simon & Schuster
Price: Rs 799
A lot has been written on how colonialism affected the different aspects of the lives of the common people but we are still in the process of uncovering its true extent. Sindhu Rajasekaran’s book delves deep into the question of how the colonial experience shaped our understanding of queerness and desire.
Forbidden Desire begins with Rajasekaran reflecting on how she had to experience the gradients of queerphobia while growing up. This led her to examine the archives that made her realise that the British “stole” India’s queer pasts. The findings that she presents from her research would also be a proverbial slap on the face of those nationalists who tend to further hateful narratives against queerness and liberty in our time on the grounds of ‘saving’ Indian culture.
Each of the book’s fourteen chapters reveals an interesting aspect of identity and history. Rajasekaran shows that colonialism not only looted India’s economic resources but also ‘colonised’ the collective psyche by pushing a Victorian narrative; anything that was not understood by the coloniser was doomed to be termed as a deviation from the ‘normal’. This morality led to the criminalisation of certain kinds of desire. The author goes on to narrate how the projections of the bhadralok as effeminate or Muslims as pleasure-loving perverts were cemented on the basis of the British conception of manliness. Simultaneously, they described Brahmins as weak and wily and insisted that the subaltern communities needed to be civilised. This dehumanising gaze, Rajasekaran argues, lay at the root of the subversion and the criminalisation that have been documented across the book.
A few blind spots need to be underlined though. Caste was and still is the underlying reality that reverberates across all kinds of identity: while Rajasekaran does mention caste, the references are rather fleeting. The use of the term, “(wo)mxn” (for which she has given her reasons), may feel alien to the reader in the subcontinent, raising questions about the readership base that the book aims to attract.