For the record: on Sexuality and the colonial archive in india

272   JGLR / Vol. 4, Issue 1
REVIEW ESSAY


For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India
by Anjali Arondekar
Durham: Duke University Press. 2009. Pp.: 232. $ 22.95. (PB)
Lakshmi Arya*
Anjali Arondekar‘s For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in
India is pithy with insights on colonialism and sexuality in the subcontinent.
Her work disturbs in many fundamental ways the historiographical
script on colonial heterosexual masculinity. The story of colonial,
heterosexual masculinity has been told in standard ways: the reordering
of normative models of masculinity, femininity and androgyny in both
the colonising and the colonised cultures,1 the metaphor of the rape of
the colony, cultural nationalism and its production of a particular native
masculinity.2
Arondekar excavates instead the archive on homosexual practices:
the male nautch, governmental brothels in Karachi where men lay for
a price, cross-dressing hijras and the trope of homosociality between
English and native men in Kipling‘s telling of Empire. Yet it may be
questioned how far Arondekar‘s recuperation of the queerness of the
archive destabilises the phallus as its signifier. We discover that natives
deploy homosexual penetration to rape and punish the colonial intruder.
““Strangers” entering the “harems” of Persian women are stripped and
thrown to the mercy of the harem’s grooms and “negro-slaves.””3Another
archival anecdote tells of a missionary whose “conversion-mania”4 so
infuriated a Persian prince-governor that he was insulted and punished
in similar ways. The metaphor of the India rubber dildo also figures
in colonial pornography, as the female/ lesbian phallus. Conceptually,
Arondekar does not distinguish a theory of gender from a theory
of sexuality or illuminate the in/adequacy of one in explaining the other.
* Assistant Professor and Assistant Director, Centre for Women, Law and Social Change,
Jindal Global Law School <larya@jgu.edu.in>.
1. Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism (1983).
2. Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The ‘Manly’ Englishman and the ‘Effeminate’ Bengali
in the Late Nineteenth Century (1995); Tanika Sarkar, Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation: Community,
Religion and Cultural Nationalism (2001).
3. Anjali Arondekar, For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India 41 (2009).
4. Id. at 42.
Jindal Global Law Review
Volume 4, Issue 1, August 2012
© O.P. ISSN 0975-2498 Jindal Global University
2011 / Review Essay: For the Record                                   page no-273

Arondekar traces the shifts in the colonial discourse on homosexual
practices between 1830 and 1860. These years, Arondekar demonstrates,
are co-terminus with a turn in colonial discourse from a study of texts
to an investigation of practices. Historians have remarked on this shift.
Neeladri Bhattacharya, for instance, traces the shift from text to custom
as a source of the law, in the latter half of the nineteenth century.5 The
heavy reliance on the pundits and their interpretation of texts (the
Dharmasastras) during the abolition of sati in Bengal in the 1820s is starkly
different from the exercise of cataloguing oral traditions and practices
so as to ascertain the customary law of Punjab in the mid-nineteenth
century.
The enterprise of textualising India seems to give way to an inquiry
into the lived customs and practices of the native peoples. Arondekar
reads this as a turn from the British search for the origination of societies
to a more practical understanding of how societies function. Or, in my
view, from a normative conceptualisation of “what ought to be” to an
empirical inquiry into “what is.” Historiography has shown us that the
truth of texts always eluded the British and, furthermore, its pursuit
necessitated a dependence on the Brahmins.6 Moreover, the British saw
the discrepancy between “Hindu” texts (read as “what ought to be”) and
actual “Hindu” practices (“what is”) as further proof of the cussedness
of the wily Brahmins, who had hidden the original religion from the
people, reducing them to their current state of degeneracy.
With the epistemic move to “knowing” practices, competing discourses
of ethnography, ethnology and anthropology emerge during this time
(1830-60) and produce truth-claims about race, customs, climate,
geography, sexuality and colonialism. What is curious is the intersection
of these truth-claims. The wheat diet of the “martial inhabitants of
India,”7 who fill up the lower ranks of the British army, is contrasted
with the rice diet of the “effeminate and intellectual Bengalis.”
The taxonomy of races and peoples collapses between geography
and climate. This poses a challenge to the racial separation of the
Britishers and natives: do Englishmen give in to sexual excesses in the
hot, damp tropics? Such a question reflects the anxiety surrounding
British pederasty and their relations with native wo/men: phenomena
that Richard‘s Burton‘s Karachi report amply unearths in the valley of
5. Neeladri Bhattacharya, Remaking Custom: The Discourse and Practice of Colonial
Codification, in Tradition, Dissent and Ideology: Essays in Honour of Romila Thapar 20-51 (R.
Champakalakshmi & S. Gopal eds.) (1996).
6. See Lata Mani, Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India, in Recasting
Women: Essays in Colonial History 88-126 (K. Sangari & S. Vaid eds.,1989).
7. Anjali Arondekar, For the Record: on Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India 47 (2009).
274   JGLR / Vol. 4, Issue 1

the Sindh, phenomena that disrupt the “heteronormative teleologies of
colonialism.”8 Or, do bodies not matter, as cultural practices (such as a
diet of wheat/ rice) determine physiology and constitution even within
the same tropical zone?
The enactment of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) in 1860 follows upon
this systematic production of colonial anthropology. Section 377 of the
IPC is thus born in 1860. Arondekar mentions that it is unclear whether
“the jurisdiction of Section 377 extended to European subjects.”9 She
discusses a few notable cases of unnatural vices among the Indian
populace, most remarkably Queen Empress v. Khairati. Arondekar‘s
reading of this case brilliantly illustrates how Khairati becomes
knowable through the discourses of ethnography, legal medicine and
sexuality. There is scarce evidence to prove when, where and with
whom Khairati‘s unnatural offence was committed, which makes a
conviction unsustainable. Evidence only shows that Khairati habitually
wore women‘s clothes, sang and danced and that he had a subtended
anus. The forensic evidence established that he was a habitual sodomite.
Khairati was, according to colonial anthropology, a hijra.
Arondekar talks of the increasing reliance on medical evidence in the
colonial legal system, in the face of the irregularity of witnesses, codification,
etc. This is, after all, the time of Chevers‘ Indian medical jurisprudence.
The truth-claims of medical jurisprudence are, interestingly, buttressed
by the disciplinary force of colonial anthropology. The state of Khairati‘s
subtended anus, mucous membranes and anal lesions, are discursively
corroborated by ethnographic descriptions of the appearance, dress and
behaviour of hijras.
What is noteworthy here is that Khairati is not an individual criminal.
He is part of a collective, a community of habitual sodomites, a criminal
group. Ethnography meets legal medicine to produce the habitual
offender or rather a class of such offenders. Much historiographical
ink has been spilt on the subject of colonial governmentality and its
discursive delineation of criminal tribes. Criminal tribes are located
where the disciplines of ethnography and criminology intersect: where
native practices meet the criminal offences of dacoity and theft. The
hijras are one such group that collectively represents native perversion
or crimes against nature.
In my reading, the category of criminal tribes disrupts the neatness
of the division of colonial law into “public” and “private.” The “British
public law,” Arondekar suggests, was embodied in the Indian Penal
8. Id. at 41.
9. Id. at 82.
2011 / Review Essay: For the Record 275


Code.10 The “universality”of its principles stemmed from the implicit
notion that all nations would agree on questions of “what acts constituted
crimes against the community.”11 The “private” law, on the other hand,
included the difficult, incomprehensible terrain of communities, of
Hindu and Islamic Law. Arondekar invokes Kunal Parker‘s argument
that the premise of the criminal law was a “legal solicitude for the subject
firmly located within a knowable British ‘public law,‘” whereas that of
the private law was the “legal recognition of the community firmly
located within a fundamentally unknowable Indian ‘private law.‘”12
The distinction between a culturally-neutral public law and a culturespecific
private law seems to reiterate the idiom of the universalism and
reasonableness of Western epistemes as against the coloured-cultural
peculiarities of the colony.
It is also a distinction between the individual subject and the
community. I would like to posit that the universalistic lexicon of the
public or criminal law and the individual subject it presupposes meets
its limit in the criminal tribe or the hijra. In these collective figures, the
“community,” hitherto relegated to the confines of the private law, resurfaces
as the criminal community within the public law. Furthermore,
the individual modern criminal —the psychologised, pathologised
subject, the “I”—of Western criminology finds an antithesis in this
collective “We.”
How do we understand this collective criminality? Arondekar
raises an interesting question: Who is the “hijra”? Do hijras have no
referentiality other than their sexuality? How do we recover the hijra as
subject if the only idiom in which the subject is recoverable is through
the North American or European category of gender/ sexual difference?
Arondekar reflects on this sexual hypervisibility of the hijra as third
gender which elides the material histories of capital and colonialism.
Hijras, Arondekar tells us, “were often powerful figures in Sultanate and
Mughal courts and had the prerogative to collect taxes and duties in
particular areas.”13 These other histories and practices become erased
or invisible when the subject is mediated solely through the category of
gender/ sex.
And herein lies my dissatisfaction with Arondekar‘s analysis. The
poststructuralist frame is limiting. It cannot adequately address the
questions that Arondekar encounters in recovering the hijra as subject.
10. Id. at 78.
11. Id. at 79.
12. Id. at 78.
13. Id. at 91.
276 JGLR / Vol. 4, Issue 1
The only answers that emerge are those of archival loss, displacement
and irretrievability.
I would suggest that we perhaps need to ask why the discursive lenses
of European/ North American academia are unable to retrieve. And
what is it that they seek to retrieve? Sexuality? Foucault‘s path-breaking
work on the history of this entity tells us that no such thing existed
until the nineteenth century. The scientia sexualis produced sexuality as
a domain that bespoke a truth about an inward-looking, introspecting
subject.
It is this deployment of “sexuality” that provides us with a truth about
the hijra, which makes the subject knowable. It establishes a certain
relation between subjectivity and truth that enables us to understand
practices (homosexual, practices, in this case) as a manifestation of this
subjectivity.
Therefore, it does not matter if we replace the individual subject with
the collective subject/ community, the “I” with the “We,” the individual
homosexual/ pathological criminal with the hijra or “criminal tribe” as
community. The “We” continues to be the “I” writ large. It presumes
the same relation between subjectivity, truth and practices. The
practice could be cross-dressing, dacoity or thuggee. Our only way of
understanding the hijras, who collect taxes, have power in the court and
cross-dress, is with recourse to the explanation of (homo) “sexuality.”
Can we perhaps develop a paradigm to comprehend practices
which is not mediated through a recourse to the subject, sourced
either through the interiority of the recesses of the individualised mind
or the exteriority of the body? In Foucault‘s later work, there are the
beginnings of a theorisation of an alternative configuration of the fields
of practices/ action and the self. In his revisiting of pagan Greek culture
and its comparison with Christianity, Foucault develops the concept of
askesis which he explains as a ‘practice of the self.‘ Askesis is a process of
self-transformation, whereby one adopts a practice in order to become
a self. This configuration reverses the known relation between acting
and being, wherein there is a self that acts. S.N. Balagangadhara takes
this forward in this theorisation of action-knowledge and of culture as a
configuration of learning.14
Foucault traces the genealogy of the modern Western self through
an exploration of the domain of ‘sexuality‘. ‘Sexuality‘ provides a truth
about the subject, a truth spoken through discourse, as confessions of
the flesh in pre-modern times and as the modern confessions on the
14. S.N. Bala gangadhara, The Heathen in his Blindness: Asia, the West, and the Dynamic of
Religion 31-53 (1994).
2011 / Review Essay: For the Record 277

analyst‘s couch. It is the discourses of the analyst‘s couch that produce
the scientia sexualis. Arondekar adds an intriguing new perspective to
Foucault‘s work on the history of sexuality by suggesting that the scientia
sexualis— the sciences of sexuality (such as psychoanalysis) —actually
emerge from what lies beyond Europe, in the colony.
Drawing upon the work of Ann Laura Stoler, Robert Young, and
Anne McClintock, Arondekar posits that the histories of empire, “rather
than being peripheral to the cultivation of the nineteenth century
bourgeois self, were in fact constitutive of it.”15 She takes the instance of
the emergence of sexuality and the scientia sexualis in nineteenth century
Europe. In her formulation, the foreign landscape of the colony is a
space of otherness. It becomes the space of discourse, perversion and
incitement, as opposed to the silence, prohibition and regulation of the
metropole. Pornography, sexology and, I may add, anthropology are
the sites of this discursivity.
She substantiates her argument with an engagement with Victorian
pornography. It is to the elsewhere-place of the colony that Victorian
pornography is relegated: the imagination of the sexually perverse
flourishes in this elsewhereness, which is spatially, discursively, or
economically, not England. This justifies discursively the evangelical
civilising mission. Arondekar adds to this existing discursive analysis
demonstrating how the material histories of production—of the India
rubber dildo, produced in India, for example—are inseparable from
the histories of sexuality and race. She further outlines the dents that
Victorian pornography makes in colonial ideology — the consumption
of white women as pornographic vignettes by native brown men, or the
spectre of interracial sexual relations.
This engagement, interesting in itself, does not adequately tell us
how the material history of empire disturbs the genealogical excavation
of Foucault‘s History of Sexuality. The reader is left wondering how the
genealogy of sexuality that Foucault so masterfully unearths is destabilised
by the imperial histories of Europe and otherness of the colony. This
perhaps would be a question worth exploring.
~
15. Id. at 104.



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