Forbidden Desire

How the British Stole India's Queer Pasts and Queer Futures

Sindhu Rajasekaran

• Publisher: S&S India
• Year: 2025
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9788198872579
• Subtopic: Modern British History
• Index: History

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.

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Author’s Note
• Introduction
• 1. Sexuality in Premodernity—Kama, Kink, and Mohabbat
• 2. A Brief Note on British Prudishness
• 3. Colonial Sexual Panics
• 4. Who Is a ‘Prostitute’?
• 5. Of ‘Special Oriental Vices’
• 6. The Perversity of Polyamory
• 7. Lesbians, Sluts, Dykes, and Other Deviant Womxn
• 8. O Tempora, O Mores, O Transwomxn!
• 9. Pathologising and Criminalising Sexual Fluidity
• 10. Undoing Queer Kinship Patterns
• 11. Bhadralok Types: Gay, Gayer, Gayest
• 12. The Curious Case of Fashion (Re)formation
• 13. Purifying the Arts: Erasing Androgyny
• 14. Queer Decolonial Knowledges
• Conclusion: Manifesting Queer Feminist Future(s)
• Acknowledgements
• Bibliography
• Image Citations
• Picture Section
• Copyright