Can the “queer” life in postcolonial India ever truly decolonise itself from the spectre of the British Empire? This dissertation troubles a “decolonial” narrative of queer politics in India post-2018 when Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code (widely called India’s colonial-era “anti-sodomy law”) was read down. In this dissertation I curate queer writing of and from India across its post/colonial span (canonically contained within the 20th century) to showcase how mechanics of Empire are absorbed within and still echoed by varied processes that constitute what Nishant Upadhyay calls the “hinduhomonationalism” of contemporary Indian politics. Despite a posturing of Hindu nationalism, an ideology virulent in India today, as strictly anticolonial, nationalists’ agenda of reframing India as an exclusively Hindu state (Hindu Rashtra) is violently enforced through various colonising tactics like casteism, Islamophobia, military occupations of Kashmir and the “Northeast,” civil surveillance, and border control. This dissertation explores how “queer” can help us trace the lingering presence of colonialism through such practices in the postcolonial nationalism of India which, today, is singularly imagined by and for the Hindu, who was once, and may still be, both: collaborator to and antagonist of the English.
By reanimating India’s indelible bind to colonising mechanics of c.19th western European sexology, imperial commerce, and ethnolinguistics, this dissertation showcases several processes that the nation’s queer decolonial praxis can become imitative of whilst trying to dismantle them. I pursue queer postcolonialism as a promiscuous relationship to monarchic, democratic, and autocractic models of nationhood. I describe this relationship as an “intimacy” (with the “enemy”) which I call “epicene” to harken to the paradox of India’s gendered adaptations of Empire, and of global queer grammars, whilst in joust with them in its postcolonial and, currently, Hindu(homo)nationalist epoch.
Through a selection of Indian writing, I chart myriad vectors and stakes in a system that bound Anglo-India in an ethnosexual circuitry of “mutual queering.” Additionally, I conjure spectres of nations that lay outside this colonial binary that were often recruited to aid this system.
Three key texts, each embodying a different posture within this binary intercourse, comprise my study. “Epicene Intimacies” envisions India’s post/colonial queer encounter as a triptych where each text is studied as an exemplar of three definitive gestures that constitute this encounter. My
first chapter examines multiple editions (1932, 1952, 1979, 2000) of J. R. Ackerley’s travelogue, Hindoo Holiday. Subsequently, I study Ruth Vanita’s 2006 English translation of Pandey Bechan Sharma’s Hindi short fiction collection, Chocolate (1927). I conclude with Neel Mukherjee’s “migrant” novel, Past Continuous (2007, renamed A Life Apart post-2010). These texts divide the Brit-Indian exchange in terms of a looking at (a colonial gaze), a looking back (a nationalist riposte), and a looking through (a postcolonial pastiche), respectively. Together, they help chart the tapestry of domestic frictions against imperialism and India’s adaptation to tides of globalisation that have shaped the nation’s queer discourse as one comprising multiple competing gestures.
“Epicene Intimacies” is an interdisciplinary study of Indian queer writing that makes interventions in two prominent fields: world literature and queer studies. By deliberating selecting minor authors and minor texts in bibliographies of major authors in both queer and postcolonial canons
of Indian writing, a major provocation of this dissertation is to trouble what David Damrosch categorises as the “shadow canon” in his three-tier vision of world literature. Mining these texts’ (and, at times, their authors’) fickle, often promiscuous, subscriptions to a certain genre, a canon, or an intent, that relegate them, in the Damroschian sense, to the “shadow” of the canon wars,this project adopts triumphalist tenors of queer scholars, such as Heather Love’s formulation of the “politics of refusal” to release them from institutional and formal compulsions of “world literature.” I use these texts’ slippages to genre, canon, et cetera, as generative prompts that distend what “queer” can represent in postcolonial Indian writing and what function or ideation “postcolonial” can serve.
