Forbidden Desire: How the British Stole India's Queer Pasts and Queer Futures

By: Sindhu Rajasekaran

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Synopsis: Before the British colonised the Indian subcontinent, it was largely protofeminist and queer.People from across the socio-economic spectrum explored and expressed their gender and sexuality in myriad ways. But to prudish Victorian eyes, this was scandalous. The Empire consistently curtailed Indian (wo)mxn&’s sexual agency and the freedoms of sexual minorities. All desire outside the heteronormative was marked as aberrant and sexually unchaste.Colonial authorities passed a posy of laws to criminalise sexually agentive (wo)mxn and queer folks. From nautch dancers to courtesans, effeminate mxn, masculine womxn, trans and queer persons, even ascetic renunciants were classified as &‘sexual deviants&’. Old prejudices were mapped onto new ones. Colonial India, in effect, amalgamated ancient and medieval fundamentalist codes of heteronormativity with Victorian attitudes towards sex.Drawing from a wide range of disciplines including feminist historiography, anthropology, histories of sexuality, South Asian queer theory, decolonial and subaltern studies, the history of medicine, legislative history, and informed by the author&’s primary archival research, Forbidden Desire aims to undo the deleterious effects of British colonialism on India's rich queer past.