For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India

by Anjali Arondekar

Anjali Arondekar considers the relationship between sexuality and the colonial archive by posing the following Why does sexuality (still) seek its truth in the historical archive? What are the spatial and temporal logics that compel such a return? And conversely, what kind of “archive” does such a recuperative hermeneutics produce? Rather than render sexuality’s relationship to the colonial archive through the preferred lens of historical invisibility (which would presume that there is something about sexuality that is lost or silent and needs to “come out”), Arondekar engages sexuality’s recursive traces within the colonial archive against and through our very desire for access. The logic and the interpretive resources of For the Record arise out of two entangled and minoritized one in South Asian studies and the other in queer/sexuality studies. Focusing on late colonial India, Arondekar examines the spectacularization of sexuality in anthropology, law, literature, and pornography from 1843 until 1920. By turning to materials and/or locations that are familiar to most scholars of queer and subaltern studies, Arondekar considers sexuality at the center of the colonial archive rather than at its margins. Each chapter addresses a form of archival loss, troped either in a language of disappearance or paucity, simulacrum or from Richard Burton’s missing report on male brothels in Karáchi (1845) to a failed sodomy prosecution in Northern India, Queen Empress v. Khairati (1884), and from the ubiquitous India-rubber dildos found in colonial pornography of the mid-to-late nineteenth century to the archival detritus of Kipling’s stories about the Indian Mutiny of 1857.

Genres: Theory, History, Nonfiction, India, Queer, World History, Gender and Sexuality

232 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

Reviews

[Christopher Sutch · Rating 4 out of 5]

Arondekar's project in this book contains some important work on South Asian British imperial archives. When I was still thinking I might seek an academic job in cultural studies I was attending a lot of postcolonial studies panels (mainly at the MLA). I was almost always disappointed: aside from the odd paper here or there much of the work, as I judged it, was not very good or interesting. I wish I could have heard Arondekar's work (she was researching this book at the same time I was researching my dissertation and they have some overlapping concerns).

This kind of project is what cultural studies projects _should_ be: a collection of disparate but related objects of theorization and critique, with the links well-researched and backed up by good evidence. Arondekar looks at Richard Francis Burton's missing Karachi report, the law (still on the books, in mildly different form) against sodomy in the Indian Penal Code, Victorian colonial pornography's fascination with the india-rubber dildo (not actually manufactured in India, of course, but still linked with the subcontinent by association), and some of Kipling's more archival-oriented tales around the events of 1857.

Aside from her archival evidence (which she calls into question in her first chapter as reiterations of colonial power relations a la Foucault), she uses poststructural theorists in very smart and appropriate ways. Her work is just a _bit_ too poststructuralist (and not nearly enough material) for my personal taste (I wonder about the material relations in the lives of real subjects in some of the cases she covers), but she explicitly defends poststructuralism which, in 2009, was becoming a discredited theoretical framework; you do have to respect her integrity in this matter even if you don't quite agree with the lengths she allows her theory to take her argument.

Quite a good read; one of the few academic works of recent years that I'll be keeping.

[Danny · Rating 4 out of 5]

I won't pretend I understand all of the arguments (nor will I pretend that I agree with all those that I understood), but I thought this was a fascinating analysis of the "colonial archive," and how that archive already possesses the materials that allow for disruptive readings. Occasionally the "absence is presence" mentality is bit confounding and a bit of a stretch; however Arondekar deftly reviews documents to show how sexuality was used and understood as a tool for marginalization. Of particular interest was her chapter on Richard Burton's lost report and how the documentation surrounding the report was equally important than the fact that it was "missing." Her chapters on Victorian pornography and their place in the archive were "interesting" but I don't know I quite understood it all; even if it was a bit amusing to parse 19th century smut so carefully. Toward the end of the piece she alludes to contemporary issues and ironies: how the Right-wing Indian forces paint queerness as a byproduct of colonialism and thus as a non-Indian concern; in fact, the very laws they wish to preserve in squashing homosexuality in India were imposed by the British when the colonizers painted India as a place of exotic sexuality. It was quite thought-provoking.

[Marsha Altman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read for graduate school. Good book, but very technical in historical theory, and you have to know a lot about the history of the British Raj to follow it.

[Oscar · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think I need to be best friends with Arondekar can we PLEASE be BFFLs please please please please please please please please please please please please please

[Alexandra]

read for uni! broke my brain! (in a productive way i hope?)

[Chandrashekar Gangaraju · Rating 2 out of 5]

I found it very difficult to read. The language with very thick with long sentences (many of which I had to re-read many times) and abstract concepts related to history with a lot of repetition and making some loose connections. Perhaps the book was not for me. I did feel that at points the discussion strayed from the main theme.
I finished the book feeling that I have got little information from it.

[L · Rating 5 out of 5]

Worthwhile (and short!) piece not just for scholars who work specifically on sexuality studies but anyone who relies on archival research.