FOR THE RECORD

N E X T WAV E NEW DIRECTIONS IN WOMEN’S STUDIES

A series edited by Inderpal Grewal,

Caren Kaplan, and Robyn Wiegman
 FOR THE RECORD
On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India

ANJALI ARONDEKAR

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

DURHAM AND LONDON

2009
∫ 2009 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper $
Designed by Heather Hensley
Typeset in Whitman by Keystone Typesetting, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear
on the last printed page of this book.
An earlier version of the introduction was first published
as the article ‘‘Without a Trace: Sexuality and the Colonial
Archive,’’ by Anjali Arondekar, from the Journal of the
History of Sexuality 14:1/2, pp. 10–27. Copyright ∫ 2005 by
the University of Texas Press. All rights reserved.
IN MEMORIAM

Lynda Hart
and
Leela Durgaram Shirodkar
CONTENTS

ix Preface

1 Introduction
Without A Trace

27 One
A Secret Report: Richard Burton’s Colonial Anthropology

67 Two
Subject to Sodomy: The Case of Colonial India

97 Three
Archival Attachments: The Story of an India-Rubber Dildo

131 Four
In the Wake of 1857: Rudyard Kipling’s Mutiny Papers

171 Coda
Passing Returns

181 Bibliography

205 Index
P R E FA C E

Let me begin with a vulgar question: ‘‘Tumhi kai shodhta, madam?’’

(What are you looking for, madam?) This was the question the head of
the Maharashtra State Archives in Mumbai impatiently asked me as I
arrived for my annual research visit. His impatience was occasioned by
what he perceived as my inability to answer a series of simple queries on
the nature of my research: Which colonial records did I want to see, and
for what purpose? My inarticulateness around his seemingly pedestrian
question was not organized (as one would predictably assume) around
my reluctance to reveal my interests in the figurations of sexual perver-
sions in nineteenth-century India—the state-sponsored intellectual cen-
sorship and vandalisms of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute
notwithstanding.∞ Rather, my hesitations stemmed more from a sense of
archival aporia, from what I had realized through my own research was
an unrepresentable search for an impossible object. In many ways, the
present work is an attempt to trace and push against the force of that
archival aporia.
The writing of this book was sustained by a network of friends and
colleagues in multiple places. Geeta Patel has been instrumental in the
conception and fruition of the project. Through innumerable phone
conversations and readings, Geeta nursed me through the di≈culties of
archival and historical thinking. Central to this work was also the ex-
traordinary support of the South Asian Studies feminist posse, a.k.a.,
Sisters under the Sari: Indrani Chatterjee, Raka Ray, Bishnupriya Ghosh,
Parama Roy, Mrinalini Sinha, Kavita Philip, and Kamala Visweswaran.
Since the book’s first incarnation, they have all served as unfailingly
encouraging and critical commentators. I owe a special debt to Gina
Dent and Felicity Schae√er-Grabiel. To enumerate the timely interven-
tions of support these two people performed would be impossible. Gina’s
expansive intellect and sensibility are everywhere in the workings of this
project. Felicity’s patience and love made it possible for me to imagine
an end. Anindyo Roy gave each chapter a tough reading, o√ering pro-
vocative dialogue as only he could.
A special thanks also to my Bay Area reading group: Akhil Gupta,
Vasudha Dalmia, Purnima Mankekar, Amita Baviskar, Lawrence Cohen,
and Paola Bacchetta. Colleagues at the University of California, Santa
Cruz, extended crucial support at various stages, especially, Carla Frec-
cero, Jody Greene, Lisbeth Haas, Sonia Alvarez, Bettina Aptheker, Karen
Tei Yamashita, Marcia Ochoa, Angela Davis, Neferti Tadiar, and many
graduate students, including those who took my graduate seminar ‘‘Gen-
der and Subaltern Studies.’’ I am equally indebted to the Faculty Work-
ing Group of the Subaltern Studies and Popular Culture Research Group
at the University of California, Santa Barbara, specifically Bhaskar Sar-
kar, Swati Chattopadhyay, Gyan Pandey, and Sudipta Sen. Others have
been unflaggingly present in their support: Aneil Rallin, Eve Oishi, Kath
Weston, Pratima Prasad, Priya Jaikumar, Thomas Holden, Meha Holden,
Saba Mahmood, Amaya Grabiel, Diego Grabiel, and L. A. Padua. In
India and the United Kingdom, Lily Gupta, Sameera Khan, Kamakshi
Gawde, Nitin Shirodkar, Manik Shirodkar, Aditya Shirodkar, Amina
Mulla, Malavika Shetty, and Zahid Chaudhary supported this project in
its early stages. I also thank Ritu Birla, Elizabeth Kolsky, Beth Povinelli,
Rosemary George, Philippa Levine, Antoinette Burton, Inderpal Grewal,
Lieba Faier, Ravina Aggarwal, and Veena Talwar Oldenburg for wise
counsel along the way.
Many of the ideas in this book took shape in workshops and semi-
nars including those at ‘‘Feminist Interventions: Gender and History in
South Asia,’’ University of California, Santa Cruz; the Center for the
History of European Discourses, University of Queensland, Brisbane;
‘‘Historical Problematics of Sexuality/Gender and the Global,’’ Univer-
sity of California Humanities Research Institute; the Center for the
Study of Women, University of California, Los Angeles; the Annual
Weissbourd Conference of the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts,
University of Chicago; the Department of Anthropology Colloquium,
Johns Hopkins University; ‘‘Histories of the Family in South Asia Con-

x | P R E FA C E
ference,’’ University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; the Center for the Study
of Sexual Culture, University of California, Berkeley; and the Andrew
Mellon Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Working Group, Univer-
sity of California, Riverside. Support for this project was generously
provided by the following sources: Ernestine Richter Avery Fellowship,
Huntington Library; University of California President’s Fellowship in
the Humanities; Faculty Residency Fellowship, University of California
Humanities Research Institute; and multiple research grants from the
Committee on Academic Research, University of California, Santa Cruz.
These fellowships provided financial support for research at libraries,
private collections, and national and regional archives in India, Great
Britain, Pakistan, and the United States. Of particular note is the assis-
tance of various archivists and sta√ at the Maharashtra State Archives,
the National Archives of India, the India O≈ce Collection at the British
Library, and the Huntington Library. Ramakanta Hoom and Roya Raste-
gar provided timely research e√orts in India and the United States,
respectively.
Two anonymous readers at Duke University Press o√ered perceptive
comments that generated crucial revisions in the manuscript. Ken Wis-
soker and his sta√ extended the best editorial guidance and support. My
parents, Kavita and Ramakant Arondekar, made it possible for me to
imagine a history of sexuality at home and elsewhere. Lucy Mae San
Pablo Burns’s love and intellectual companionship sustained me through
every stage of this project. To her, I will always be grateful, even as I must
‘‘mention not.’’
Though substantially revised, sections of my introduction and my
discussions on sodomy statutes and Richard Burton appear from my
article, ‘‘Without a Trace: Sexuality and the Colonial Archive,’’ Journal of
the History of Sexuality. My chapter on Kipling appeared in abbreviated
form in an essay entitled ‘‘Lingering Pleasures, Perverted Texts: Reading
Colonial Desire in Kipling’s Anglo-India Fiction,’’ included in the collec-
tion Imperial Desire: Dissident Sexualities and Colonial Literature.

NOTE

1. On January 4, 2004, the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute (bori), Pune,

India, was vandalized by a 150-strong mob, the Sambhaji Brigade, protesting
against the institute’s alleged involvement in maligning the name of the Maratha

P R E FA C E | xi
 king Shivaji. A professor from bori was thanked in the acknowledgments of a
book, Shivaji: A Hindu King in an Islamic Kingdom, written by the American James
Laine. The 128-page text provoked the wrath of the Sambhaji Brigade, a splinter
group of the Maratha Seva Sangh, an organization involved in promoting Maratha
consciousness, for a chance remark questioning the parentage of Shivaji, the
Maratha king. Thousands of invaluable historical documents and artifacts were
either systematically destroyed or stolen. The institute, one of the country’s pre-
mier research centers, has become a victim of what Anupama Katakam calls
‘‘cultural terrorism and also the politics of a caste feud in Maharashtra’’ (‘‘Politics
of Vandalism,’’ Frontline, January 17–30, 2004). The Maharashtra government,
unwilling to take on the risk of alienating the Maratha lobby, has banned the book
under sections 153 and 153a of the Indian Penal Code, and the book’s publisher,
Oxford University Press, has also withdrawn the tome from its Indian markets.
For further reading on the subject, see Anupam Katakam, ‘‘Politics of Vandalism,’’
http://www.flonnet.com/index.htm.

xii | P R E FA C E
 INTRODUCTION

Without a Trace

There were no papers, the ostensible reason for my visit, and of course,
no trace of the Rani. Again, a reaching and an un-grasping.
G AYAT R I C H A K R A V O R T Y S P I V A K , A C R I T I Q U E O F P O S T C O L O N I A L R E A S O N

T he archive still promises. At stake here is sexuality’s em-

brace of that promise. The present work considers the rela-
tionship between sexuality and the colonial archive by pos-
ing the following questions: Why does sexuality (still) seek its
truth in the historical archive? What are the spatial and tem-
poral logics that compel such a return? And conversely, what
kind of archive does such a recuperative hermeneutics pro-
duce? In what follows, there is no attempt to refuse or re-
deem our critical attachments to archival recovery; rather, this
book engages sexuality’s recursive traces in the colonial archive
against and through our very desire for access. The archival
responsibility of this book, if you will, is to propose a di√erent
kind of archival romance, one that supplements the narrative
of retrieval with a radically di√erent script of historical con-
tinuation. The critical challenge is to imagine a practice of
archival reading that incites relationships between the seduc-
tions of recovery and the occlusions such retrieval mandates.
By this I mean to say: What if the recuperative gesture returns
us to a space of absence? How then does one restore absence to
itself? Put simply, can an empty archive also be full?∞
But I am getting ahead of myself. To be sure, any meditation
on the authority of the archive must now inevitably elicit a rather weary
and cautious recognition. Even as the concept of a fixed and finite
archive has come under siege, it has simultaneously led to an explosion of
multiple/alternate archives that seek to remedy the erasures of the past.
In some ways, these archival expansions, these ‘‘archive stories,’’ resem-
ble the contours of the earlier canon wars in literary studies as they
question received notions of proof, evidence, and argumentation, par-
ticularly in fields of historical inquiry.≤ For better or for worse, the
archive has emerged as the register of epistemic arrangements, recording
in its proliferating avatars the shifting tenor of debates around the pro-
duction and ethics of knowledge. Yet an awareness of le mal d’archive
(archive fever) has scarcely attenuated the hunger for a recorded past
(and present) at a time when we face the analytical challenges of sur-
veillance, religious nationalism(s), and the literal destruction of innu-
merable historical records.≥ As Jacques Derrida himself ironically
(foot)notes, ‘‘the question of the politics of the archive is our permanent
orientation here.’’∂
One serious challenge to theorizing the politics of the archive has
been the very figurative flexibility of the concept itself. The heightened
citation of the archive has become a preapproved allegory for any and all
modes of contestation. Often robbed of historical specificity, the coup-
ling of archive with minoritized knowledge formations—such as queer,
postcolonial, and feminist in particular—has inevitably led to some sim-
plistic and triumphant forms of empiricism. How does one, then, as is
the case here, study sexuality’s relationship to the colonial archive with-
out fetishizing its historical formation, without relinquishing its episte-
mological possibilities, and without commodifying its political contexts?
Such problems are especially heightened when one is writing about Brit-
ish India in the nineteenth century, a geopolitical domain defined over-
whelmingly by an imperial archive that was ‘‘not a building, nor even a
collection of texts, but the collective imagined junction of all that was
known or knowable, a fantastic representation of an epistemological
master pattern.’’∑ There is in many ways also an established connection
between sexuality and (post)colonial studies, one that derives less from a
theoretical than from a historical context. Both, as Philip Holden rightly
suggests, ‘‘find the latter part of the nineteenth century a period of radi-
cal historical discontinuity.’’ For sexuality studies, the late nineteenth

2 | INTRODUCTION
century, following Michel Foucault’s pronouncements, is the period in
which homosexuality emerges as a set of identifications that articu-
late and di√erentiate sexuality’s relationship to knowledge and power.
For (post)colonial studies, the period marks the intensification of im-
perial domains, territorial redistributions, and the rise of nationalist
movements.∏
Rather than render sexuality’s relationship to the colonial archive
through the preferred lens of historical invisibility (which would pre-
sume that there is something about sexuality that is lost or silent and
needs to ‘‘come out’’), this book pursues the questions of how sexuality is
made visible in the colonial archive and of how this process paradoxi-
cally discloses the very limits of that visibility.π In doing so, I propose a
reading practice that redirects attention from the frenzied ‘‘finding’’ of
new archival sources to an understanding of the processes of subjec-
tification made possible (and desirable) through the very idiom of the
archive. Such an archival turn, I will demonstrate, mandates a theory of
reading that moves away not from the nature of the object, but from the
notion of an object that would somehow lead to a formulation of subjec-
tivity: the presumption that if a body is found, then a subject can be
recovered. One way to conceive of this shift to the object as subject
e√ect is to think of it as a trace, both beyond and within the Derridean
spectrality model, to consider, as it were, both the forensics and meta-
phorics of the trace.∫ That is, one must work with the empirical status of
the materials, even as that very status is rendered fictive. The theoretical
and historical provocation is thus to engage with the material imprint of
archival evidence as a ‘‘recalcitrant event’’ (to borrow Shahid Amin’s
term), ‘‘to move beyond the territory of the contested fact, the unseen
record, from the history of evidence and into the realm of narration.’’Ω
Here, the ‘‘recalcitrant event’’ as trace eludes the historian/scholar’s
attempts at discovery, o√ering instead new ways of both mining and
undermining the evidence of the archive. I would complicate Amin’s
formulations further and suggest that to read archival evidence as a
recalcitrant event reads the notion of the object against a fiction of
access, where the object eschews and solicits interpretative seduction.
This book examines sexuality’s relationship to the colonial archive
through its spectacularizations in anthropology, law, literature, and por-
nography from 1843 to 1920. Each chapter focuses on a foundational

INTRODUCTION | 3
discourse for mapping sexuality in India and considers the emergence of
sexuality under very di√erent evidentiary patterns (e.g., legal jurispru-
dence and ethnography), at di√erent historical moments (e.g., the In-
dian Penal Code in 1861 and the Criminal Tribes Act in 1871), and in
very di√erent locales (e.g., North-West Provinces and Burma). By turn-
ing to materials and locations that are familiar to most scholars of queer
and subaltern studies, I consider sexuality at the center of the colonial
archive, rather than at its margins. Throughout my readings, (lost and
found) figurations of sexuality—from Richard Burton’s missing report
on male brothels in Karáchi to a failed sodomy case in northern India,
from the ubiquitous india-rubber dildos of colonial pornography to the
archival detritus of Rudyard Kipling’s Indian Mutiny stories—are not
objects that are lost and can be recovered, but subject e√ects sedimented
through the enactments of disciplinary discourses. We return, as it were,
to a narration of a narration. Within such formulations, sexuality’s foun-
dational archival sites become more spaces of fact-reading than of fact-
finding. As Gayatri Spivak suggests in my epigraph to this introduction,
the rani of Sirmur must circulate without a trace, against the consoling
mystifications of ‘‘papers’’ and the verifiable certainties of archival dis-
covery.∞≠ One must grasp, precisely to not fix. To read without a trace,
following Spivak, is not a mandate against archival work, but rather a
call to interrogate, without paralysis, to challenge, without ending the
promise of a future.∞∞
In what follows I argue that the possibility of such readings lies in pro-
ductively juxtaposing the archive’s fiction e√ects (the archive as a system
of representation) alongside its truth e√ects (the archive as material with
‘‘real’’ consequences)—not as incommensurate, but as agonistically co-
constitutive of each other. These (new) reading practices emerge not
against the grain of archival work, but instead from within the archive’s
own productions. Yet the imperative is not about founding presence, but
rather about confounding our relationship to how and why we do archival
work. The critical task lies in crafting an archival approach that articu-
lates against the guarantee of recovery. The perspective I elaborate thus
does not end with an argument for methodological reflexivity. It derives
more importantly from an urgent need to complicate the very stakes of
our archival mediations, especially given their mobilizations within a
shifting (and often reactionary) language of political exigency. The con-

4 | INTRODUCTION
tinued e√orts of the Hindu Right in India, and of the political Right in the
United States, to mobilize the idea of the archive toward sectarian ends
(most recently through the rewriting of textbooks) is a dangerous in-
stantiation of the very logic I am referring to.∞≤

LOST AND FOUND

We must always have

a place
to store the darkness
A G H A S H A H I D A L I , A N O S TA L G I S T ’ S M A P O F A M E R I C A

The logic of this book, and the interpretive resources it requires, arises
out of my commitment to two entangled and minoritized historiogra-
phies: one in South Asian studies and the other in queer/sexuality stud-
ies. Central to the argument is an understanding of area studies as vitally
constitutive of the histories of sexuality, and vice versa. Through such an
alignment, this book moves away from the conventional (and often
reactionary) segregation of the two field formations as oppositional and
discrete.∞≥ I am drawn here by the archive’s suturing e√ects as it medi-
ates the struggles and motivations of the fields themselves. In doing so,
my goal is not to stabilize either historiographical formation as if each
were a text that could be translated over to the other. Instead, I explore
the idea of the archive as it has been articulated within these discourses
and attempt to make the concept of the archive itself the surface on
which one can found their imbrication. Of critical interest is that such
archival turns inevitably cohere around a temporally ordered seduction
of access, a movement that stretches from the evidentiary promise of the
past into the narrative possibilities of the future. That is, even as the
analytical costs and limits of archival mandates are foregrounded, read-
ing practices of recovery are nonetheless privileged over others. In both
historiographical formations the idea of the archive is freighted with
transformative hopes, ensconced in what Spivak has elsewhere called
the perilous ‘‘simulacrum of continuity.’’ The turn to the archive may
carry futurity as its promised overture, but the break between what it de-
sires and what it otherwise (re)covers renders its promise inevitably
incomplete.∞∂
Scholarship on South Asia, for example, has recast the colonial ar-

INTRODUCTION | 5
chive as a central site of endless promise, one where new records emerge
daily and where accepted wisdom is both entrenched and challenged.
These reformulations have decisively intervened in projects of colonial
historiography, decentering not just the idea of a coherent and desirable
imperial archive but also forcing us to rethink colonial methodologies
and the relations between theories, methods, and the historical condi-
tions that produce them.∞∑ Implicit in this rethinking, however, is the
abiding assumption that the archive, in all its multiple articulations, still
constitutes the source of knowledge about the colonial past. The inclu-
sion of oral histories, ethnographic data, popular culture, and perfor-
mances (to name just a few) may fracture traditional definitions of the
archive (and that, too, for the better), but these sites still produce a telos
of knowledge production propelled forward by what one will find—if
only one thinks of more capacious ways to look.∞∏ Inspired in part by the
intellectual provocations of the Subaltern Studies Group, as well as of
their dissenters, the question of the archive and its formations has be-
come a lively source of contention in South Asian historiography.∞π In
many ways, the failures of elitist historiography (both native and colo-
nial) have come to be addressed through the promise of a new histo-
riography that recovers subalternity as its focal point of narration.∞∫
These e√orts at ‘‘subalternizing’’ Indian historiography were echoed in
much of the early work of the Subaltern Studies Group and later ex-
panded to include a more self-reflexive analysis of the instrumentality of
this new subaltern consciousness.∞Ω
Yet despite such shifts in critical modes, the additive model of subal-
ternity still persists, where even as the impossibility of recovery is articu-
lated, the desire to add and fill in the gaps with voices of other unvoiced
subalterns remains.≤≠ Archival desire takes its theoretical form, I want to
argue, through a willing of subjectivity that ironically rehearses the
contradictions of its own analysis. Thus even as feminist scholars urge a
multidisciplinary (i.e., not just history, please!) and gendered under-
standing of the colonial archive, initiating much needed critique, many
still hold on to the idea of an archive that will somehow yield proper
subjects of study.≤∞ Betty Joseph’s account of the gendered presences in
the East India Company archives instructively struggles with precisely
such an archival imperative. While Joseph (a literary scholar) is careful

6 | INTRODUCTION
to mark the limits of archival retrieval via a reading of Spivak’s founda-
tional essay on the rani of Sirmur (she acknowledges that archives often
operate as fictions ‘‘misread as the real India’’), she is equally reluctant to
give up on her own desire ‘‘to narrate the story of the silenced subject of
the colonial archive in order to restore her as a historical subject.’’
Rather, Joseph argues that if representations such as the rani function
(albeit troublingly) ‘‘as fact, and have a force in history,’’ then surely they
deserve to be read (and the emphasis here is on the hermeneutical) as
proper agents of history. Consequently, Joseph finds Spivak’s ‘‘absenting’’
of the rani unsatisfactory, as it appears to deny Joseph the very material
presence she so keenly desires. As Joseph states: if we refuse subjectivity
to the rani, then the e√orts of the colonizer to ‘‘write her out of existence
[have] succeeded.’’ The clear contradiction in Joseph’s desire to write in
a female subject, so ‘‘that artificial subjects can be replaced as often
as possible by speaking ones,’’ seems startling in an otherwise excellent
study.≤≤
Such a privileged lexicon of erasures, silences, and subjects is echoed
in sexuality studies as it has equally returned to the colonial archive as a
site of recovery and legitimacy. Queer texts, subjects, and themes con-
tinue to be discovered exuberantly, and the process of ‘‘queering’’ pasts is
executed through varied archival gains and losses.≤≥ The overall argu-
ment returns continually to narratives of recovery that operate, I would
argue, through an archival logic of the ‘‘open secret.’’ Homosexuality
emerges as the structural secret of the archive, without whose conceal-
ment the archive ceases to exist. Alternately, the recovery of the hidden
documents of homosexuality surrenders presence, but only to reinstate
its archival liminality. To take some liberties with D. A. Miller’s original
formulations, writing the history of colonial homosexuality is thus ruled
by the paradoxical proposition that the homosexual is most himself
when he is most secret, most withheld from writing—with the equally
paradoxical consequence that such self-fashioning is most successful
when it has been recovered for history. This archival movement from
secrecy to disclosure reinforces what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has fa-
mously called the epistemological status of the secret, where the rela-
tions of the closet—in our case, the archive—(relations between known
and unknown) cluster around the articulation of homosexual and het-

INTRODUCTION | 7
erosexual histories. Such a movement from secrecy to disclosure relies
on the maintenance, within the epistemological system, of the hidden,
secret term, keeping all binaries intact.≤∂
Robert Aldrich’s recent tome, Colonialism and Homosexuality, exem-
plifies the perils of such e√orts as he writes that it is crucial to bear in
mind that ‘‘colonial homosexuality did not proclaim itself openly.’’≤∑
Aldrich’s scholarly e√orts are largely aimed at revealing the secret lives of
a range of male homosexuals across colonial sites, from E. M. Forster in
Sri Lanka to lesser known figures such as Jean Sénac in Algeria. While
Aldrich’s study focuses primarily on European sources, other writings on
the relationship between history and homosexuality in non-European lo-
cations echo similar analytical models of recovery. Nayan Shah’s much-
cited early essay on sexuality and the uses of history in South Asia warns
against such an unmediated recovery of the past. Shah is still one of the
few scholars of sexuality who interrogates the overdependence on a
recovered history to sanction our surviving present: ‘‘We may trap our-
selves in the need of a history to sanction our existence. South Asian
lesbians and gay men are present now. On that alone we demand ac-
knowledgement and acceptance.’’ However, even as he maintains that
‘‘the past is not a thing waiting to be discovered and recovered,’’ the
strategies of historical research he advocates still derive from a di√er-
entiated language of loss and discovery. Shah must rely on the coming-
out materials of his contemporaries (classic models of the logic of the
secret) to think critically of the archives of the past. A lexicon of ‘‘resist-
ing silences’’ and ‘‘liberation’’ is grafted onto the project of archival
research.≤∏
From literature and anthropology (the more favored locations) to law
and science, the colonial archive continues to be held up as a storehouse
of historical information on the secrets of sexuality’s pasts. In anthropo-
logical writings on homosexuality and the colonial archive, for example,
the archival turn has given rise to scholarship that sees itself as a vexed,
theoretical antidote to earlier models of a flawed, colonial geography of
perversions.≤π The archival mode here shifts from savage to salvage,
whereby colonial ethnographic and anthropological materials are re-
visited and mined for their endorsements and descriptions of homosex-
uality in all its cross-cultural forms. Repeated in these cross-cultural

8 | INTRODUCTION
forays is the colonial turn to sites of alterity for the form and content of
largely Western models of male homosexuality.≤∫
I want to be clear here that I am not suggesting that such archival
modes are facilely flawed or merely enacting a di√erent order of archival
truth claims. The new material on homosexuality does not purport to
simply ‘‘correct’’ and/or reveal the truth about the history of sexuality in
the colonial period. There might be a certain evangelical flavor to some
of the scholarship, but most of the work is keenly aware of the shifting
parameters of space, time, and knowledge, and of the status of the
archive in such entanglements. David Halperin, for example, has contin-
ually made a case for historicism in the study of sexuality, a historicism
that acknowledges the alterity of the past alongside the irreducible cul-
tural and historical particularities of our present. The recent turn to
transnationalism in sexuality studies has further foregrounded historical
di√erences across geopolitical sites, with the emphasis being on the
uneasy and sometimes impossible portability of categories of sexuality.≤Ω
As a result of such deliberations, evidentiary paradigms are being rein-
vented, as historical sources extend to include materials hitherto consid-
ered inappropriate and/or unreliable.
Despite such a rise in archival consciousness, historical anthropolo-
gists such as Ann Laura Stoler argue that the turn to archival research
remains largely ‘‘extractive,’’ particularly in studies of colonialism. While
there is no expectation of archival exhaustion (we have found it all),
students of ‘‘the colonial experience ‘mine’ the content of government
commissions and reports, but rarely attend to their peculiar form and
context.’’ Hence, she advocates for scholars to move ‘‘from archive-as-
source to archive-as-subject.’’ For Stoler, attention must be paid to the
process of archiving rather than to the archive as a repository of facts and
objects.≥≠ While there is much productive debate in Stoler’s work around
the limits of the archival imperative in colonial historiography, there is a
studied silence, or rather, a detachment from similar archival questions
in sexuality studies. This detachment appears especially curious given
Stoler’s remarkable readings of Foucault’s oeuvre in the context of em-
pire. There is much talk of sex, intimacy, and a√ect, but no substantive
engagement with such issues as they are understood (and heavily con-
tested) in the context of sexuality studies. I am not interested here in

INTRODUCTION | 9
suggesting a corrective to Stoler’s scholarship, but more in staging a
conversation between the archival imperatives of colonial historiogra-
phy and those of sexuality studies. What can sexuality studies, I ask,
learn from the archival debates in colonial studies, and vice versa? Even
as we ask what kind of history the colonial archive has, can we not,
following Halperin, equally inquire what kind of history sexuality has?≥∞
Let me now turn to that question.

‘‘ I O N L Y F I N D O N E I N T H E R E C O R D S ’’

It cannot be doubted that such atrocities are frequent in the present day. A gentle-
man of the highest veracity assured me that a late Judge of Hooghly once men-
tioned to him that when about to sentence a native to imprisonment on proof of
his having committed this crime in corpore capellae, he intimated his decision to
the native jury, who hinted that, if so much severity was to be employed against so
prevalent a crime, the prisons of Bengal would not be large enough to hold the cul-
prits. Convictions for this crime are however rare; I only find one in the Records—of
Unnatural Crime with a Cow—at Dinagepore. Police Report, l.p., 1845, p. 23.
NORMAN CHEVERS, A MANUAL OF MEDICAL JURISPRUDENCE FOR INDIA

For Norman Chevers, one of the foremost colonial experts on medical

jurisprudence, the discourse on ‘‘unnatural’’ sexual conduct in colonial
India appears embedded in an evidentiary paradox: a known prevalence
of the crime, and an equally known rarity of its documentation. That
unnatural conduct, in particular, sodomy (per os or per anus), as a condi-
tion of the colonial subject was one of the familiar claims underwriting
the project of colonial di√erence in India. Unlike sodomy in the metro-
pole, sodomy in colonial India became naturalized as a frequent phe-
nomenon (a ‘‘fact’’ corroborated by a ‘‘native jury’’), and yet one sparsely
documented in the o≈cial archive. Chevers’s iterations render native
perversity intelligible through a composite everywhere/nowhere model
of colonial governance. Such a model scripts native perversity as an
ontological presence through a language of proof, veracity, and certainty,
even as it bemoans the colonial state’s access to o≈cial documentation
of such unnatural acts. These ‘‘atrocities’’ may indeed be everywhere, but
‘‘convictions are however rare.’’≥≤
Contained within the complex grammar of Chevers’s observation is a
production of sexuality’s relationship to the colonial archive: a narrative

10 | INTRODUCTION
tracking of unnatural conduct that is ironically most attuned to the
necessities of its archival absences. A colonial terminology of facts and
figures adapts to sexuality’s inchoateness, imputing absence to its object,
precisely so that a di√erent theory of recovery may appear. Chevers
mobilizes a seamless network of evidentiary sources that range capa-
ciously from the word of ‘‘a gentleman of the highest veracity,’’ to a
venerable ‘‘judge of Hooghly,’’ to a ‘‘native jury,’’ to arrive finally (and
almost irrelevantly) at the o≈cial record, ‘‘unnatural crime with a cow—
at Dinagepore.’’ Each source is granted evidentiary equivalence, with the
(‘‘rare’’) o≈cial record emerging as a mere reflection of an already estab-
lished claim. The colonial archive no longer reads as the failed e√ort to
produce an exhaustive panopticon, but becomes instead (or perhaps in
addition) even more successful through its articulation of that very
failure. The lost record of sexuality produces an archive accustomed to
failures and absences in a colonial landscape whose panoptical reach
succeeds all the more for being exposed.
Chevers’s comments produce the colonial archive not as all encom-
passing but rather as an arrangement of knowledges that settles subjects
through a negative idiom of representation. Such an idiom depends on
invocations of loss, absence, and paucity, which in turn make possible an
even greater capture of the gaps in colonial scientism. Sexuality provides
the sightline that marks viewing as a place of ironic reversal: a discourse
of absence is wrenched from its doomed associations and cast into a
di√erent teleology of knowledge production. Throughout his writings
on ‘‘unnatural conduct,’’ Chevers isolates and folds anecdotal references
to sodomy into a seamless narrative so overlaid with examples that it
papers over the absence of the o≈cial record. What contains native
unnatural conduct, what turns its excess back into order, is a refur-
bished colonial epistemology in which the excess of sexuality e√ects its
own regulation. Chevers turns repeatedly to the figure of the native
informant—the ‘‘native doctor,’’ the ‘‘native jury,’’ the native sodomite
who is ‘‘convicted of the crime on his own confession’’—to authorize his
own observations. We are told, for example, by the ‘‘native doctor, Hin-
gun Khan,’’ that these ‘‘practices are so common as scarcely to be re-
garded as criminal by the ignorant,’’ and that the ‘‘crime,’’ because of its
high prevalence, is held in ‘‘light estimation’’ by communities such as
‘‘the Seikhs [sic].’’≥≥ Truncated excerpts on the presence of sodomy from

INTRODUCTION | 11
native histories of religion and law (ranging from mythological texts to
manuals on ancient Hindu and Mahomedan law) provide further episte-
mic fodder for an economy of colonial knowledge that criminalizes only
that which has already (not) been seen. Hindu mythology is seen to
attribute ‘‘this crime to some of their deities’’ and even encodes an
‘‘atonement for sodomy’’ in its holy scriptures.≥∂ In such an elaborate and
temporally stretched evidentiary landscape, it scarcely matters that o≈-
cial convictions for the crime are rare. On the contrary, like ‘‘the prisons
in Bengal that are not large enough to hold culprits’’ of ‘‘so prevalent a
crime,’’ the colonial archive almost balks from the weight of such enor-
mous presence. The colonial archive is thus most empty precisely when
it is most full.
Chevers’s archival diagnosis derives its much-cited authority from his
extensive knowledge and access to the archives of the criminal courts
(Nizamut Adawlut) of Bengal and the North-West Provinces of India, as
well as from his expertise in the arena of tropical disease in colonial
India. As Christopher Pinney points out, Chevers emblematizes the
growing unease with the available vocabulary of evidence in mid- to late
nineteenth-century colonial India. One notes, for example, the almost
vertiginous movement of Chevers’s narrative in the quotation I began
the section with, a narrative that folds excess into regulative logic. Even
as an ‘‘empire of knowledge’’ expanded its taxonomical gaze, its instru-
ments of surveillance and classification seemed continually incommen-
surate to the landscape it sought to map and measure. On the one hand,
nineteenth-century India marked the age of a particular kind of colonial
scientism, the center of which was the language of evidence and mea-
surement. From the establishment of the Great Trigonometrical Survey of
1818, to the inauguration of The Imperial Gazetteer of India in 1881, to
the publication of Herbert Risley’s 1891 magnum opus, the two-volume
Tribes and Castes of Bengal, the period is littered with discoveries and
administrative projects that produce India as a laboratory of colonial
scientism.≥∑ For example, Chandak Sengoopta’s history of how finger-
printing was born in colonial India attests to the relentless search for an
empirical signature that, in its ‘‘simplicity,’’ would irrefutably ‘‘evidence’’
the native body.≥∏
On the other hand, Chever’s own writings testify to the ‘‘uncertainty
of evidence in India,’’ where all is not as it appears to be. Colonial rec-

12 | INTRODUCTION
ords, for Chevers, are inherently unreliable as they demonstrate more
the ‘‘general fallibility’’ of native evidence than the success of colonial
governance. Natives inherently lie, cheat, and commit fraud, making
them incapable of providing ‘‘true evidence.’’ Like the absent record of
sexuality that paradoxically references a prevalent crime, native falli-
bility appears so widespread as to make its reform virtually impossible.
According to Pinney, Chevers turns to colonial technologies such as the
photograph precisely because they, like the fingerprint, o√er a superior
model of evidence, an index of native criminality that fixes meaning in
clear and unmediated ways. Yet even as he endorses photography as an
admirable recording device, Chevers underscores its function as an in-
strument of a√ecting power, rather than as a primary source of evidence.
For Chevers, ‘‘no measure would . . . impress more vividly, even upon
the minds of the ignorant and superstitious common people, [than] a
conviction of the di≈culty of eluding our evidence.’’≥π
Such claims to the authority of an imperial archive that records cease-
lessly and exhaustively are of course entangled in many centuries of rec-
ord making in colonial India. There is, of course, no self-evident or
singular colonial archive. With the transformation of the East India
Company from a trading operation to a ruling power in 1757 and its
growth thereafter, the reliance on record keeping increased signifi-
cantly, linking imperial governance to a massive archive of texts that
literalized the distance between colonizer and colonized. In the late
eighteenth century and the early nineteenth, colonial governance was
accomplished primarily through a ‘‘practice of archiving, a systematic
circulation, preservation, and recall of written texts that allowed rule by
remote control from London.’’ After company rule ended due to the
events of 1857, the records passed over into the archives of the new
imperial state. Central to this early archiving project, Joseph crucially
argues, was the idea that the ‘‘o≈cial record was never deemed to be a
repository for public scrutiny; it remained throughout this period an
instrument of governance.’’≥∫ It was only after Indian independence in
1947 that the archive was opened to public viewing, giving rise to what
we now understand as a certain scholarly historiography of the colonial
state. What has remained stable, even in exposure, is a narrative of the
colonial archive as a secret archive, a space precariously hinged between
a language of loss and recovery, absence and presence.

INTRODUCTION | 13
 Chevers’s description of an o≈cial archive, denuded of all traces of a
crime that must surely exist, serves as an analytical preamble to my
present work, which both seeks location in the archives of nineteenth-
century colonial India and attempts to question some of the governing
assumptions in the field of sexuality studies, particularly as Chevers’s
model of an (empty) archive of sexuality is uncannily echoed in the
analytical models of contemporary scholars of colonialism. For scholars
of colonialism and sexuality (among whom I count myself), the refer-
ences to homosexuality troublingly reiterate the very colonial dynamic
one attempts to exceed: homosexuality remains obvious and elusive—
undeniably anecdotal (in colonial travelogues, ethnopornography, and
such) yet rarely sustainable in any o≈cial archival form. Stoler, for
example, articulates the di≈cult challenge of the ‘‘absent presence of
the dangers of homosexuality’’ in Dutch archives. She speaks of the
threat of homosexuality as a ‘‘deflected discourse, one about sodomitical
Chinese plantation coolies, about degenerate subaltern European sol-
diers, never about respectable Dutch men,’’ only to withdraw and admit
that ‘‘my silence on this issue . . . reflects my long-term and failed e√orts
to identify any sources that do more than assume or obliquely allude to
this ‘evil.’ ’’≥Ω
If we are to consider such a vexed historical reiteration with the
attention it demands, then our analysis must necessarily address how
the encounter of colonialism and the emergence of archival logics segre-
gate certain objects of study such as sexuality. To do so, this book must
raise what may indeed be unanswerable and messy questions (but per-
haps that is the nature of this kind of intellectual exploration): How is
the history of sexuality recorded in the colonial moment, and how are
we returning to it to produce a counter-record of that history? In what
ways do our idioms of the archive merely rehearse a colonial mystifica-
tion through which sexuality can only be interpreted as necessary ab-
sence? Is our critical history discontinuous with the methods and fields
of argumentation of the past? If the imperial archive is the sign of
colonialism’s reach, then what do its records show? How does one think
through the current privileged lexicon of erasure, silences, and recovery
in a colonial context such as nineteenth-century India, whose archival
instantiations emphasize the centrality, rather than liminality, of the
race-sex nexus? How does one account for sexuality studies’ claims

14 | INTRODUCTION
toward an innovative interdisciplinarity if the very turn to interdis-
ciplinarity can also be understood as an epistemological ruse of the
colonial state? The extent, and especially the history, of such theoretical
formulations must surely be open to every interrogation. If not, then
Chevers’s reading of ‘‘unnatural conduct’’ as a space of absence remains
intact, indeed strengthened, since it is now reproduced in liberatory
political ends. We return to the figuration of an archive whose authority
is lamented but is never finally arguable.

TRACE/EVIDENCE: A PROVISIONAL MAP

The traveler wandering from town to town forgot

the path to his house. What was mine, what was yours, both
of the self and of the other, lost,
then, to memory.
M I R A J I , T I N R A N G ∂≠

Any book on the concept of the archive must at least partially speak not
just to the question of di√erent archives produced by di√erent disciplin-
ary formations but also to the status and protocols undergirding all
evidentiary claims. More vulgarly put: how do specific genres of texts
produce specific histories, subjects, evidence, and how are those e√ects
mobilized? Consider, for example, literary scholars who often anxiously
mine the archive as proof of their commitment to serious historical
labor and research. Even as literary scholars continue to pro√er innova-
tive readings of sexuality and the colonial archive, they often also find
themselves lambasted for their flattening of extraliterary sources and for
their preoccupation with discursive tropes of representation.∂∞ The priv-
ileging of literary formations yields too much colonial discourse analy-
sis, it seems, and too little engagement with historical documents. His-
torians, on the other hand, often turn to the transformative space of the
literary to somehow remedy, fill in, or rupture what their o≈cial docu-
ments cannot seem to produce. There is a curious portability to literary
sources, whereby they may supplement the historian’s history but rarely
appear to have a history of their own.∂≤ While the rise of interdisci-
plinary research in the study of sexuality and colonialism has done much
to undo the backlash against the overdetermination of some sources
over others, it has done so only partially. Much of the scholarship pro-

INTRODUCTION | 15
duced under the rubric of sexuality studies and queer studies fixes sex-
uality within a short-lived history in which the materialities of colonial-
ism and empire emerge as mere referents, rather than as terrains of
thick description.∂≥
For the purpose of this book, which works to resist the dissipation
that archival breadth often provides, these cautions against and for disci-
plinary thinking refer us back to the classificatory imperatives of colo-
nial knowledge. The logic of these concerns in many ways recapitulates
some of the pernicious aspects of colonial educational establishments in
India. In nineteenth-century colonial India, more specifically, the de-
marcation of the separate domains of literature and history was created
precisely to stabilize the writing of history in a fixed form and method.
Such disciplinary divisions, Indrani Chatterjee argues, cover over the
colonial state’s inability to understand that precolonial history in South
Asia, for example, was recorded primarily ‘‘in the dominant literary
genre of a particular community, located in space, at a given moment in
time.’’ Over time, the leakages between history and literature became
impossible to discern as communities changed modes of literary produc-
tion. As earlier genres lost patronage, they equally lost the status of
‘‘history’’ and became framed instead in a more colonial understanding
of literature.∂∂ Interdisciplinarity and disciplinarity, I want to under-
score, partake of the same colonial episteme, where the undoing of
disciplinary boundaries returns us not to a rupture but to a repetition
whose lineaments require careful attention. In other words, one period’s
history becomes another’s literature, making our much-touted inter-
disciplinarity a methodological requirement rather than an innovative
hermeneutical choice.
The readings I o√er thus intentionally move away from any extended
claims to radical interdisciplinarity or straightforward historical value.
Instead, I have allowed the materials in each chapter to guide me in
staging disciplinary proclivities and features that found our very desire
to write a history of sexuality that is (not) absent. Such a desire covers
over the simultaneity of loss and recovery through the temporal lan-
guage of metalepsis: we begin with presence to arrive later at absence.
The return to the archive, I maintain, both fuels and empties reading
practices: archival absence serves as the motivation for our hermeneu-
tics, while archival presence paradoxically threatens the status of that

16 | INTRODUCTION
hermeneutics itself. The archival object of sexuality, after all, emerges
only after it is lost, a be-coming that can conversely only take place if
more stories of its loss are produced. Each chapter in this book curves
around figurations of archival evidence that move the act of archival
recovery into narratives of profound undoing. While the chapters are
organized chronologically, they can be read in any sequence as their
archival traces move in and out of each other’s articulations. At the heart
of each chapter lies a form of archival loss, troped either in a language of
disappearance or paucity, simulacrum or detritus. This structure of rep-
resentation materializes archival absence in all its historical prickliness,
disorienting the teleological promise of archival claims; far from being
exterior to the archive, the fact of re-presenting absence becomes the
very condition of possibility for our archival returns.
The book’s first chapter, for example, situates Richard Burton’s miss-
ing report on male governmental brothels in Karáchi in the larger arc of
an archive continually defined by documents that appear to exceed its
grasp. Set against the changing, and often competing, definitions of
ethnology, ethnography, and anthropology in nineteenth-century British
India, and against the discursive problems associated with generating
the moral content of colonial explorations of sex, this chapter attends to
the archival myth surrounding Burton’s missing Karáchi report. Rather
than speculate on the absence or presence of this report, I am interested
in articulating what is at stake by continuing to do so. What happens if
archival attention shifts from the fetishized discovery of this report to a
more careful understanding of the contextual force its evocation carries?
What if the report, for example, were to be read less as a lost object of
archival desire than as an embedded sign whose form (as an o≈cial
technology of state intelligence) speaks the entanglements of sexuality,
colonial governance, and anthropology? After all, as I demonstrate, the
report emerges against the backdrop of the notorious conquest of Sind, a
conquest that to this day remains embroiled in a landscape of missing or
fictitious archives.
The second chapter turns to the paucity (and yet ever present lure) of
legal sodomy adjudications to amplify the narratives of loss and invis-
ibility that are the very conditions of possibility for our archival labors.
Specifically, I trace the uneven legal history of a failed sodomy case,
Queen Empress v. Khairati (1884), to ask why a colonial record that stum-

INTRODUCTION | 17
bles over critical issues of evidence, criminality, and legal codification
becomes the archival trace for crimes against nature. The success of the
case as legal evidence, I argue, draws on a colonial archive that fixes
sexuality as both loss and abundance, as (forensic) invisibility and (an-
thropological) hypervisibility. Within such a colonial taxonomy, the legal
failures of the case (no eyewitness, no victim, and no time) are e√ec-
tively erased by the ontology of the o√ence: sodomy as ‘‘native habit,’’
unpunishable by colonial law. Even as we surrender to the archival
incitement to make Khairati visible, we become, as it were, dupes to a
colonial archive that settles sexuality precisely through an idiom of
failure. To return to Khairati as a figure of (failed) sexuality alone is to
e√ectively elide the very histories that produce her in the first place. By
way of attempting such historical thickness, this chapter locates the
Khairati case at the intersection of multiple debates on the codification
of the Penal Code, the role of medical jurisprudence, and the expansion
of the imperial archive. I argue that the Khairati case must be read
equally as a corruption and a corroboration of the systems of proof and
evidence that grant subjectification under the law. In doing so, the
category of sodomy (and connectedly, of other unnatural o√ences) prob-
lematizes not just the legal translation of native sexual behavior but the
task of archival hermeneutics itself.
In an e√ort to continue to focus on spectacularized forms of sexuality,
chapter 3 engages the popular (and ephemeral) genre of mid- to late
nineteenth-century pornography. As the most recognizable (and avail-
able) forms of illicit sexual expression, the colonial pornographic texts I
examine strikingly caution against the seductions of historical recovery
and access. Unlike the structure of absence and presence that haunts
Burton’s secret report and the colonial case records of sodomy, mid- to
late nineteenth-century pornographic texts are luxuriantly accessible
objects (albeit in locked cupboards and private cases). Yet the abun-
dance and availability of such texts refuses any easy recourse to the
language of presence and empiricism. The shifting legal and sociohis-
torical representations of obscenity and of pornography betray murky
genealogies of copyright, authorship, and reproduction that render the
capture of a supposedly original text seemingly impossible. Conse-
quently, a pornographic text may well be ‘‘found,’’ but its recovery pro-

18 | INTRODUCTION
duces a model of archival supplementarity that eschews any simple
theory of recovery or origin. To explore such a model of archival supple-
mentarity, I turn to the recurring figuration of the india-rubber dildo in
colonial pornography, to narrate a more compelling and uncanny story
of archival ‘‘realness’’ and evidence.
It is of course impossible to write a book about the archive in late
colonial India without actively engaging with one of its most prolific
contributors: Rudyard Kipling. As has been exhaustively documented,
Kipling’s writings roam a range of genres and idioms, leaving one critic
to exhaustingly wonder if the ‘‘sun ever sets on Kipling’s archive?’’∂∑ By
contrast, it may seem dubious that a book that centers questions of sex-
uality and the colonial archive should end with a discussion of an author
who does not focus on sexuality in any obvious way. But in many ways
that marks the point at which I wish to end. If the archival figuration of
the india-rubber dildo instantiates a familiar avatar of sexuality, Kipling’s
archive denaturalizes any presumptive understanding of sexuality’s cus-
tomary forms, particularly under colonialism. Rather, Kipling turns to
literary narrative to speak desire, slanted not through explicit objects of
desire but through stories that fold desire into the lineages they travel.
To understand such lineages, my last chapter reads the Kipling corpus
alongside the equally mammoth production of writings on the Indian
Mutiny of 1857. Kipling’s Mutiny stories, I propose, press against the
sedimented calibrations of archival access and recovery, compelled in-
stead by the travails of archival formation itself. Refusing the solace of an
authoritative post-Mutiny archive, Kipling’s fiction mines the Mutiny’s
archival detritus as the very source of its narrations. That is, instead
of transforming earlier records of Mutiny failures into glorious sto-
ries of colonial success, the Kipling text lingers on the di≈cult pleasures
of writing, selecting, and transmitting archives. Writing such a text
becomes a gendered movement in which the terror of the Mutiny be-
comes a source of extended male articulation, assuming semantic den-
sity through narrative forms shared only between men. The stories I
examine are in thrall of the Mutiny’s narrative possibilities, celebrating
an archive found (and not lost) by the epistemological stress of its own
production.
There are perhaps risks in articulating the continuity and fractious-

INTRODUCTION | 19
ness of the colonial archive in a scholarly project that does not have at its
center a saving vision. Instead, what all my chapters elaborate is the
need for a project of archival hermeneutics that assembles reading prac-
tices adequate to the writing and survival of a robust and ethical queer/
colonial historiography.∂∏ This book, following Elizabeth Povinelli, fo-
cuses largely on ‘‘who and what’’ is being recuperated ‘‘from the breach
and shadow’’ of the colonial archive in our e√orts at making queer
history. In such explorations, the limits and possibilities of my scholarly
interpretation go hand in hand with an obligation to what Povinelli calls
a project of ‘‘radical interpretation.’’∂π With such obligations in mind, the
exigencies of (postcolonial) archival recovery return us to the detritus of
a colonial landscape.∂∫ To move within and beyond such returns is the
challenge of my present project. I do not thus see myself as disentangled
from the questions I raise; the readings I produce are as much part of the
colonial archive as the materials on which they focus.
In other words, if it is by now self-evident that the colonial archive
has emerged as the preeminent center of historical interpretation and
contestation in the historiography of sexuality, it is equally clear that the
structure of the archive is necessarily inchoate. There is always a politics
of the archive, as I have previously suggested, because it is rarely a
simple matter of revealing secrets waiting to be found. My meditations,
at the very least, suggest that archives are untenable without readers and
that ‘‘across the gap between the archives and its motivating interests
there is a perpetual agonism.’’∂Ω What are the political stakes embedded
in this relentless consumption of the idea of the archive? Is the relation-
ship between the colonial state and the archive undone, or merely refur-
bished through our intellectual labor? After all, despite our e√orts to
democratize and widen the arc of the archive, it still survives as a
talisman, as a sort of ‘‘pagan cult,’’ as Achille Mbembe describes it, where
the powers of the archive recreate through an inventive but uncannily
similar logic, the original act of creation. The debt of the colonial state,
Mbembe warns, is paid o√ through its archival debris, where new life is
breathed into the dead of the past through the archives of the present.
Mbembe speaks specifically of the case of South Africa, where the ar-
tifactualization of memory through the idea of the archive as talisman
‘‘softens the anger, shame which the archive tends’’ because of its func-
tion of recall.∑≠ Sexuality studies is an equal accomplice in such archival

20 | INTRODUCTION
mythmaking and must remain alert to its own methodological and ana-
lytical foibles. To not do so would be to forgo the histories of coloniza-
tion, to brush aside the possibilities accorded by the very recourse to the
idea of an archive. This book is one record of such possibilities.

NOTES

1. These observations are largely drawn from a series of responses to my work by

an anonymous reviewer at Duke University Press. I am also grateful to Milind
Wakankar for sharing his unpublished writing on Dalit historiography and the
text of disappearance.
2. Burton, Archive Stories, 1–25.
3. Any current awareness of the archive is impossible without an acknowledgment
of its enduring (and embattled) presence in the scholarship on slavery. The
project of this book in many ways is only possible because of such e√orts. See, for
example, Trouillot, Silencing the Past; and Sharpe, Ghosts of Slavery.
4. Following Michel Foucault (The Order of Things, 15), the idea of the archive
animates all knowledge formations and is the structure that makes meaning
manifest. Jacques Derrida has termed the quest for such a meaning-making net-
work ‘‘archive fever,’’ where the literal and figural site of the archive provides the
‘‘commencement’’ to, and the ‘‘commandment’’ for, intellectual labor. ‘‘Le mal
d’archive, archive fever’’ is the craving for this archive, the desire to enter it, to
procure it, even unto death (Derrida, Archive Fever, 4n1). Such a deconstructive
reading of the archive as a necessary and precarious repository of meaning has
both been embraced and resisted by many historians and anthropologists. The
social historian Carolyn Steedman, for example, reminds us of the material de-
posits of the past (dust, in her case) whose a√ective reach exceeds all forms of
theorizations, enacting the ‘‘real’’ drama of archive fever: ‘‘You think, in the
delirium: it was their dust that I breathed in’’ (Steedman, Dust, 19). To read fur-
ther on Steedman’s ambitious claims about reimagining cultural history through
such readings of the archive, see Tollebeek, ‘‘ ‘Turn’d to Dust and Tears,’ ’’ 237–48.
5. Richards, The Imperial Archive, 11. See also Blouin and Rosenburg, Archives, Docu-
mentation, and Institutions of Social Memory.
6. Holden, ‘‘Coda,’’ 304.
7. As William Cohen cannily puts it, ‘‘Even without Foucault, we might have sus-
pected from the Victorians that silence about sexuality composes a strategic form,
not an absence, of representation’’ (Cohen, Sex Scandal, 2).
8. Derrida uses the term spectrality to describe a model of historical attentiveness
through which the past and/or the future presses on us with a demand that we
cannot but answer. Yet Derrida is less interested in the material imprint of
the trace that forces a forensics of presence, especially in formulations of colo-
nial historiography. For an excellent reading of queer spectrality, see Freccero,
Queer/Early/Modern.

INTRODUCTION | 21
 9. Shahid Amin, ‘‘Writing the Recalcitrant Event,’’ a paper presented at the con-
ference ‘‘Remembering/Forgetting: Writing Histories in Asia, Australia and the
Pacific,’’ University of Technology, Sydney, July 5, 2001.
10. It is worth noting here that Spivak’s chapter on history extends the arguments of
an earlier piece, ‘‘The Rani of Sirmur.’’ In that prior piece, Spivak ends with the
provocation that she will ‘‘look a little further, of course. As the archivist assured
me with archivistic glee: it will be a search’’ (270). The quotation that appears as
this epigraph to this introduction fulfils the promise of that early provocation,
cautioning once again against the dangers of reading the colonial archives as
verifiable documents or signs of historical subjectivity.
11. For a related call to the writing of queer history, see Goldberg, ‘‘History That Will
Be.’’ Goldberg attempts to challenge normative historical accounts of the con-
quest by analyzing a key encounter between an Araucanian chief and Bernal in
Eduardo Galeano’s Memory of Fire to posit a futurity open to multiple possibilities.
While I am sympathetic to Goldberg’s account, his emphasis on a reading that
disrupts the heteronormativity of historical continuity (one must write to re-
produce time and place) does little to destabilize the very status of literary narra-
tive as evidence of past histories.
12. See ‘‘Statement by Faculty at Title vi Resource Centers in South Asian Studies,
Maintaining Scholarly Standards in California Textbooks: Towards an Accurate
Representation of Hinduism and Ancient Indian History,’’ February 27, 2006,
http://southasiafaculty.net.
13. I am, of course, not the first one to make this claim. Other scholars such as Ara
Wilson have argued for a ‘‘queer regionalism’’ that more locally translates the
relationship between Asian studies and queer studies. See Wilson, ‘‘Queering
Asia’’; and also Murray, Boellstor√, and Robinson, ‘‘East Indies/West Indies.’’ My
engagement, however, lies more with the broader historiographical questions
undergirding such possible dialogues.
14. Spivak, Critique of Postcolonial Reason, 207.
15. See Chakrabarty, Habitations of Modernity; Prakash, ‘‘Impossibility of Subaltern
History’’; Ballantyne, ‘‘Archive, Discipline, State.’’
16. Several scholars of colonialism have interrogated the archival assumptions and
predilections of colonial studies. For example, Thomas Richards has argued that
the colonial archive (especially in South Asia) was a product of the combined
merger of imperial knowledge as both ‘‘positive and comprehensive,’’ while Nich-
olas Dirks contends that the colonial archive registers the state’s increasing re-
liance on ethnographies as a form of knowledge. Richards, The Imperial Archive, 7;
Dirks, ‘‘Annals of the Archive.’’
17. For a quick and thorough synopsis of the shifts in scholarship on South Asia, see
Mathur, ‘‘History and Anthropology in South Asia.’’
18. Guha, Elementary Aspects.
19. Spivak, ‘‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’’ 271–311. Spivak’s early critique powerfully
made way for more capacious readings of the archive, as evidenced in the inclu-

22 | INTRODUCTION
 sion of questions of gender, race, culture, to name a few, in the more recent
volumes of the Subaltern Studies Group.
20. One recalls here Bernard Cohn’s early playful warnings of the seduction of gaps
and lacunae: two anthropologists, Philias Fillagap and Lucy Lacuna, diligently
attempt to find the missing record, without much heed to the epistemic questions
at hand. See Cohn, ‘‘History and Anthropology.’’
21. Antoinette Burton, for example, has been central in cautioning against our desire
for what is still very much a ‘‘panoptical’’ and o≈cial archive, a site of colonial
knowledge that serves as the standard through which disciplinary models are
measured. In such a policed state of knowledge, texts that fall outside the purview
of o≈cial archives become read as light on evidence, historically specious, and
largely conjectures of too much cultural thinking. It is of course no coincidence,
Burton points out, that such texts are usually gendered (as in the case of the
writings of the three female colonial subjects she speaks of), and moored (or
‘‘dwell,’’ to use her metaphor) in archives of their own making. Burton writes: ‘‘In
this sense, guardians of the o≈cial archive—however delusional they may be—
remain as convinced of its panoptical possibilities as they do of its capacity to
legitimate those who submit to its feverish gaze.’’ Burton, Dwelling in the Archive,
140.
22. Joseph, Reading the East India Company, 23.
23. For a noteworthy example of such ‘‘queerings,’’ see Vanita, Queering India, 1–14.
24. Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 1–64.
25. Aldrich, Colonialism and Homosexuality, 404.
26. In all fairness, it is important to note here that Shah’s essay appeared in a now
classic collection, A Lotus of Another Color (1993), which was the first to bring
South Asian queer materials together. See Shah, ‘‘Sexuality, Identity and the Uses
of History,’’ 122–24. See also Vanita and Kidwai, Same-Sex Love in India.
27. Kath Weston has clearly demonstrated that the ‘‘classic debates which molded
social sciences into a distinctive set of disciplines relied, often as not, on illustra-
tive examples drawn from sexuality.’’ Colonial ethnographers such as Sir Edward
Evan Evans-Pritchard, John Shortt, Bronislaw Malinowski, to name a few, use
what Weston calls a ‘‘flora and fauna approach,’’ producing scattered references to
homosexuality in their varied writings on di√erent geopolitical sites. Such refer-
ences, Weston argues, have falsely been viewed as sources of empirical fact, rather
than as hermeneutic signposts for early anthropology’s relationship to sexuality in
constructing narratives of culture and power. See Weston, Long Slow Burn, 12.
28. Rudi Bleys’s ambitious 1995 study, The Geography of Perversion, is one such exam-
ple that interprets ‘‘male-to-male sexual behaviour among non-western popula-
tions in European texts between approximately 1750 and 1918’’ (1). Covering a
dizzying, and often haphazard, array of colonial ethnographic materials from
Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Oceania, Bleys goes on an old-fashioned global
hunt for the homosexual, with the occasional apology for not having enough
materials by non-European subjects.

INTRODUCTION | 23
29. See, for example, Wallace, Sexual Encounters; and Fiol-Matta, Queer Mother. There
is a rich body of scholarship on sexuality and diaspora/globalization studies, but
such work overwhelmingly focuses on the analysis of contemporary issues, with
colonialism appearing more as a referent than as a sustained period of study. See
also Cruz-Malavé and Manalansan, Queer Globalizations. For a further critique of
such global turns, see Arondekar, ‘‘Voyage Out.’’
30. Stoler, ‘‘Colonial Archive,’’ 87, 109.
31. David Halperin writes: ‘‘Once upon a time, the very phrase ‘the history of sex-
uality’ sounded like a contradiction in terms: how, after all, could sexuality have a
history? Nowadays, by contrast, we are so accustomed to the notion that sexuality
does indeed have a history that we do not often ask ourselves what kind of history
sexuality has’’ (How to Do, 105).
32. Chevers, A Manual of Medical Jurisprudence for India, 706. See also Chevers, A
Commentary on the Diseases of India, 10–64.
33. Chevers, A Manual of Medical Jurisprudence for India, 706–8.
34. Ibid., 705.
35. There is a well-established scholarly canon that explores the imbrication of sur-
veillance, science, and governmentality in colonial India. For some key texts, see
Arnold, Science, Technology, and Medicine; Edney, Mapping an Empire; Prakash,
Another Reason; Baber, Science of Empire; Pinney, ‘‘Colonial Anthropology.’’
36. Sengoopta, ‘‘Signature of Exceeding Simplicity.’’
37. Chevers, A Manual of Medical Jurisprudence for India, 7–75. For a more nuanced
reading of the relationship between photography and imperial surveillance, see
Pinney, ‘‘Stern Fidelity.’’
38. Joseph, Reading the East India Company, 1–33. For an earlier history of the record
in Europe, see Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record. Clanchy attributes the
rise in the production and retention of records to a rise in literacy—a rise that
distinguishes Anglo-Saxon and thirteenth-century England from other periods in
English history.
39. Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire, 129n96.
40. The original reads, ‘‘Nagari nagari phira musafir ghar ka rasta bhul gaya / . . . kya
hai mera kya hai tera apna paraya bhul gaya.’’ The cited translation of Miraji’s
poem is provided by Geeta Patel in her wonderful book Lyrical Movements, 32. The
publisher’s description on the cover of that book reads: ‘‘Miraji was an acclaimed
Muslim male poet, who wrote under a Hindu woman’s name, and whom contem-
porary critics described as mad, sexually perverse, and a voyeur. Miraji’s short life
(1912–49) spanned the final period of British colonialism in South Asia, and his
work played a part in the nationalist struggle.’’
41. A text like Anne McClintock’s much acclaimed Imperial Leather, for instance, is
heralded for its deployment of a range of cultural texts, from fiction to advertise-
ments, from maps to treaties, making literature only one of the many sources in-
voked. It is not that literature as a source is redeemed in such scholarly renditions,
but placed more in commensurate relationship to other disciplinary sources.

24 | INTRODUCTION
42. Such a turn to literature’s salvific possibilities is most noticeable in the early
writings of subaltern studies scholars such as Partha Chatterjee and Dipesh
Chakrabarty.
43. These are of course all space-clearing generalizations about disciplinary predilec-
tions; there are clearly many literary scholars who attentively mobilize historical
materials and historians who understand the complexities of literary texts.
44. Chatterjee, Unfamiliar Relations, 6–9.
45. Kemp, ‘‘The Archive on Which the Sun Never Sets.’’
46. Discussions of queer historiography abound in current scholarship in sexuality
studies. For example, scholars such as Eve Sedgwick and Elizabeth Freeman have
variously turned to the idiom of ‘‘reparative criticism’’ to account for a queer
‘‘erotohistoriography’’ that transacts relationships between past and present ar-
chives through an interruptive politics of pleasure and hope. Sedgwick, ‘‘Introduc-
tion’’; and Freeman ‘‘Time Binds or Erotohistoriography,’’ 84–85. By way of a
criticism of the ‘‘hermeneutics of suspicion model,’’ Sedgwick writes: ‘‘The desire
of the reparative impulse, on the other hand, is additive and accretive. Its fear, a
realistic one, is that the culture surrounding it is inadequate or inimical to its
nurture; it wants to assemble and confer plenitude on an object that will then
have resources to o√er to an inchoate self’’ (‘‘Introduction,’’ 279). Other scholars
such as Madhavi Menon and Jonathan Goldberg in ‘‘Queering History’’ have
further nuanced questions of queer historiography through a careful attentiveness
to the texts and intellectual imperatives of the early modern period.
47. Elizabeth Povinelli is one of the few scholars who complicates our turn to the
colonial archive in her reference to the importance of ‘‘modal ethics.’’ Through
her work on aboriginal communities in Australia, Povinelli pushes the question of
how and why we recover lost materials in the colonial archive. For Povinelli,
translating into text a ritual practice that functions through its orality risks a
return to the very knowledge technologies of colonial liberalism. Such textualiza-
tions in the colonial context largely focus on rituals that lift ‘‘sex out of corporeal
practices,’’ which Povinelli argues further emphasize the relationship between
sexuality and structures of knowledge. See Povinelli, Cunning of Recognition, 73.
48. For an astute reading of the links between postcoloniality and archival hermeneu-
tics and between Spivak’s ‘‘The Rani of Sirmur’’ and Derrida’s Archive Fever, see
Shetty and Bellamy, ‘‘Postcolonialism’s Archive Fever.’’
49. Osborne, ‘‘Ordinariness of the Archive.’’ Similarly, see Proctor and Cook, Political
Pressure.
50. Mbembe, ‘‘Archives and the Political Imaginary,’’ 24.

INTRODUCTION | 25
{ one }

A SECRET REPORT

Richard Burton’s Colonial Anthropology

In India two roads lead to preferment. The direct highway is ‘‘service’’;—

getting a flesh wound, cutting down a brace of natives, and doing some-
thing eccentric, so that your name may creep into a dispatch. The other
path, study of languages, is a rugged and tortuous one, still you have
only to plod steadily along its length, and, sooner or later, you must
come to a ‘‘sta√ appointment.’’
R I C H A R D B U R T O N , FA L C O N R Y I N T H E V A L L E Y O F T H E I N D U S

There is another element . . . chiefly connected with what our neigh-

bours call Le vice contre nature—as if anything can be contrary to na-
ture which includes all things. Upon this subject I must o√er details, as
it does not enter into my plan to ignore any theme which is interesting
to the Orientalist and the Anthropologist.
R I C H A R D B U R T O N , ‘‘ T E R M I N A L E S S AY ’’

I n the final pages of his famous translation of The Arabian

Nights, Richard Burton turns his attention to le vice contre
nature, the unnatural vice: pederasty.∞ It is here that the reader
first encounters the scant but calculatedly sensational details of
a secret government report on Karáchi’s ‘‘three lupanars or
bordels, in which not women but boys and eunuchs, the former
demanding nearly a double price, lay for hire.’’ Having re-
cently ‘‘annexed Sind,’’ General Charles Napier (the ‘‘Devil’s
Brother’’) had authorized the report in 1845, specifically re-
questing Burton, the only o≈cer who could speak Sindhi, to
‘‘indirectly make enquiries and to report upon the subject.’’ We are told
that Karáchi is not more than a mile from camp, and that Burton agreed
to undertake the project ‘‘on express condition that the report should
not be forwarded to the Bombay Government.’’ Disguised as a travel-
ing merchant, Mirza Abdullah the Bushiri, Burton proceeded to infil-
trate Karáchi’s multiple sites of ‘‘porneia’’ to procure the ‘‘fullest details,
which were duly dispatched to the Government House.’’ Napier’s depar-
ture from Sind soon after resulted in Burton’s report (along with two
other ‘‘sundry reports’’ he authored on Sind) being sent to Bombay by
Napier’s rivals. So scandalous proved the contents of the Karáchi report
that its exposure resulted in Burton’s ‘‘summary dismissal from the ser-
vice.’’ Burton provides no further details, neither on the report’s con-
tents nor on its current location. Or so the story goes.≤
The mystery surrounding the explosive contents of Burton’s lost re-
port inaugurated a tale of archival losses that haunted Burton’s entire
career. Just as his career in India began (and failed) with the composi-
tion of an (allegedly) lost report on male homosexuality, his death forty-
five years later was embroiled in controversies of lost records on the
same subject. Burton, the story continues, became obsessed with trans-
lating the missing twenty-first chapter of The Perfumed Garden, reputed
to be five hundred pages of Arabic, which was to appear unexpurgated as
The Scented Garden, a staggering two hundred–page treatise on homo-
sexuality with ‘‘882 pages of text and footnotes and a 100-page preface.’’≥
Announcements of Burton’s death in 1890 were accompanied by indig-
nant accusations against Isabel Burton, his wife and the primary execu-
tor of his estate. The public consensus was that she had burnt copious
and much awaited ‘‘Oriental’’ manuscripts in an e√ort to safeguard her
husband’s reputation against further criticism. In her own letter to the
Morning Post in 1891, Isabel Burton fueled public ire, acknowledging the
burnt materials as related to the same ‘‘certain passion’’ as that described
in the Karáchi report: ‘‘His last volume of The Supplemental Nights had
been finished and out on November 13, 1888. He then gave himself up
entirely to the writing of this book, which was called The Scented Garden,
a translation from the Arabic. It treated of a certain passion.’’∂ In 1923,
Norman Penzer, Burton’s first bibliographer, chronicled the di≈culty of
even finding suitable library space for Burton’s writings and personal
collections, a di≈culty made more painful by the fact that many of

28 | CHAPTER ONE
Burton’s original ‘‘Oriental’’ manuscripts were previously destroyed by a
fire in Grindley’s depository.∑
Such mythologizations of lost writings and collections continue to be
sustained, for example, in the most recent scholarly collection on Bur-
ton, fittingly entitled, In Search of Richard Burton: Papers from a Hunting-
ton Library Symposium (1993). Contributors to the collection range from
bibliophiles to academics, from librarians to explorers, and their variety
attests to Burton’s circulation in multiple reading publics. Scattered
throughout the collection are repeated references to Burton’s lost writ-
ings, articulated variously in a language of endless lament or of pos-
sibility. On the one hand, much regret is expressed for the many manu-
scripts allegedly destroyed by overzealous relatives and numerous fires.
On the other hand, much desire is also expressed for the innumerable
Burton manuscripts yet to be found. Even as much of the Burton archive
is irretrievably lost, even more arguably remains to be found. Complicat-
ing such a telos of loss and recovery is the added obstacle of Burton’s
‘‘small and unreadable handwriting’’ that often forced him to hire an
amanuensis for assistance. Alan Jutzi argues that Burton’s handwriting
appears to deteriorate, to literally disappear into itself, as a direct result
of his need for secrecy during his much celebrated Mecca pilgrimage.
Jutzi speculates that Burton ‘‘may have trained himself to fit a reduced
script into smaller pieces of paper’’ and that the transformation in his
handwriting thus happens somewhere between 1849 and 1853, when he
went from India to East Africa. He also points out that Burton’s hand-
writing is large and readable in the early writings on India and that it
gradually fades into unreadability after his departure from that country.∏
Jutzi’s claims about the dramatic shift in Burton’s handwriting in a four-
year period are amply verified by even a cursory viewing of the available
Burton papers and texts. For example, Burton’s handwritten marginalia,
penned just a few years after he left India, are indeed barely readable.
Curiously, it is Burton’s handwriting in English that lurches into unread-
ability; his handwriting in Marathi or Arabic, for instance, remains clear
and eminently readable throughout his career. Thus even as more of
Burton’s lost archive is recovered, its contents still exceed readerly ac-
cess, folded literally into a script of secret and compacted writing.
That the archival myth surrounding the Karáchi report takes center
stage in this iconography surrounding Burton’s lost works is abundantly

RICHARD BURTON’S COLONIAL ANTHROPOLOGY | 29

clear. The report as archival object comes into existence, after all, only
through its loss—a paradoxical archival emergence that can only be
sustained through more stories of the lost report. Much scholarly energy
has been spent on the location of this report, and the mystery surround-
ing its disappearance or existence has spawned endless debate and spec-
ulation. Several biographies of Burton concur that Napier sought Bur-
ton’s linguistic and spying skills for a singularly important report in 1845
and provide di√erent theories of its existence and circulation. Scholars
such as Fawn Brodie contend that Burton’s wife burned the report along
with all the other ‘‘peculiar’’ Burton manuscripts, while Edward Rice
and Glenn Burn suggest that the report, if there was one, was an oral one
that never existed as a written document.π More hagiographical ac-
counts, such as Christopher Ondaatje’s Sindh Revisited, zealously retrace
and attempt to relive Burton’s formative years in India in the hope of
finding the infamous report.∫ A second analysis goes so far as to meticu-
lously point out that speculations around Burton’s particular brand of
participant observation (a skill that earned him the epithet ‘‘Dirty Dick’’)
must be laid to rest, as he was clearly ‘‘uncircumcised’’ when he visited
the Karáchi brothels and thus could not risk participation for fear of
exposure.Ω In other words, the report’s contents may well have been
scandalous, but stories of Burton’s own participation in the brothel’s
activities must be drastically revised. Others such as James Casada are
less generous and caustically conclude that the details of the report were
‘‘nothing more than figments of Burton’s fertile imagination.’’∞≠
The available o≈cial records tell an equally perplexing tale of the
report, of Burton’s relationship to its existence, and of its deleterious
e√ects on his army career. Burton spent seven years in India, from
mid-1842 to mid-1849, serving variously as an army field surveyor and an
intelligence o≈cer in the province of Sind. His last year in India was
spent recovering from sickness in Goa, after which he was forced to
return to England. In Sind he served under Napier, who was the gover-
nor of the province until 1849. In 1843 Burton was appointed regimental
interpreter and commissioned with the Eighteenth Bombay Native In-
fantry to Sind, which had recently and brutally been acquired as a
British possession. Burton’s service records indicate that he was a model
o≈cer and contain no mention of any scandal or unbecoming behavior
on his part. On the contrary, he is lauded for his fine e√orts as a linguist

30 | CHAPTER ONE
and a surveyor of the Bombay army.∞∞ Burton may well have narrated his
entire India career as a professional failure, but it is a story not corrobo-
rated by the o≈cial records of the colonial state.∞≤ Casada even makes
the point that Burton may have simply ‘‘forfeited his commission for
overstaying his leave’’ in Mecca (he was asked to return to India no later
than March 1854), and Burton acknowledges as much in A Personal
Narrative of a Pilgrimage to El Medina and Mecca.∞≥
In fact, Casada is not alone in questioning the veracity and substance
of Burton’s various accounts of his years in India. Most of Burton’s
accomplishments were subjected to divergent readings, some openly
hostile, others aggressively hagiographical in his own time. Casada’s
conclusions merely echo the earlier disbelief of some of Burton’s con-
temporaries who rejected less the existence or content of the report than
the inflated claims that lead up to its production. One anonymous re-
viewer of Francis Hitchman’s much touted biography, Richard Burton,
k.c.m.g. (1887), expresses sheer incredulity at the accounts of Burton’s
feats in India: ‘‘Sir Richard Burton has unconsciously been led into over-
statement. The brief period of seven years [in India] would hardly su≈ce
for the study of a single Oriental religion. In the case of Sir Richard
Burton, if we are to accept this account precisely as it stands, it was
su≈cient for the study of eight languages, for a searching investigation
into the mysteries of three creeds, for the discharge of o≈cial duties, for
a number of journeys over unfrequented parts of India, and for a consid-
erable quantity of sickness. All this, it seems to us, is a good deal more
than could be crammed into the time even if Sir Richard could have
dispensed altogether with eating, sleep and recreation.’’∞∂
On the other hand, another equally spirited reviewer expresses pro-
found outrage at any such interrogation of Burton’s accomplishments
and instead calls for an appropriate recognition of his labors by the
Queen’s o≈ce. For this reviewer, Burton’s eccentric methods and loci of
information retrieval in India are precisely what the colonial adminis-
tration must standardize to maintain control over the native populace.
In invoking the primal site of colonial rebellion, the Indian Mutiny
of 1857, the reviewer marks the first of many connections between
Burton’s labors and their importance to colonial governance structures:
‘‘Since the Mutiny arose from the administrative ignorance for all those
things for which Burton showed a devouring passion, it might have been

RICHARD BURTON’S COLONIAL ANTHROPOLOGY | 31

thought that no one’s services would have been more eagerly utilized
there, after the calamity, and as soon as he was available.’’∞∑ There are, of
course, many more such heated responses to Burton’s labors, from a
sheer dismissal of his e√orts to an exuberant acceptance of his views and
theories. Burton was and continues to be a figure who elicits a passion-
ate following among readers, especially men.
I should state here that I am concerned less with the veracity of
Burton’s recall or the account of his experiences than with the structures
and content of their recovery in his work. My interest in recounting the
story of the Karáchi report and its dissemination lies not so much in
debunking the articulated theories of its absence or presence but more
in understanding what is at stake by continuing to do so. Indeed, what I
hope to underscore are the grids of colonial intelligibility within which
the report’s claims around pederasty are strategically staged. In other
words, what happens if we shift archival attention from the ultimate
discovery of this report to understanding the compacted role its evoca-
tion plays? What if we were to consider the report, for example, less as a
lost archival object and more as an embedded sign whose evidentiary
status (as an o≈cial technology of state intelligence) decisively connects
questions of sexuality, governance, and colonial anthropology? The sala-
cious detail, after all, is lodged not in a marginal footnote but in the body
of the text, in an o≈cial form that mandates legitimacy and attention.∞∏
What would it mean, then, to abandon our fascination with the contents
of the report and to turn our attention to the secrets encrypted in the
sign of the report itself?
One must remember here that the scandal of the Karáchi report lies
in the promise of its explosive contents, in its exposure of the most
covert and unspeakable of activities: male-male sex and, moreover, En-
glish male–native male sex. While scandal in the metropole (and, re-
latedly, in the colonies) in the nineteenth century did not necessarily
concern sex, William Cohen argues that ‘‘in its quintessential and para-
digmatic form it focused on sexual transgression,’’ particularly sodomy.
But, Cohen warns, even as a scandal, such as that of the Karáchi report,
‘‘recasts secret activities into a public story of exposure, it makes ques-
tions about truth impossible to answer, however deliberately it mobi-
lizes truth-determining institutions.’’ Any conclusive demonstration of

32 | CHAPTER ONE
the truth of the scandal, Cohen deftly argues, ‘‘is inimical to a scandal’s
sustenance’’ and to its circulation as a constantly unfolding narrative.∞π
Burton’s strategic invocation of the Karáchi report and its later notori-
ety do largely follow such a movement. The constant debate around the
report’s existence certainly sustains the myth of male brothels in Kará-
chi, even as the report’s existence and its contents continue to remain
unverifiable. Our fixation on the report’s existence (contested or other-
wise) further obfuscates its coincidence of loss and emergence by tem-
porally producing a narrative of presence first and absence later. While
such a reading of the report as sex scandal may indeed be viable, what if
the fixation on pederasty (native and British) is read here not as the
secret that risks exposure but rather, following Slavoj Žižek, as a ‘‘fetish-
ist misrecognition’’? What if the report’s attachment to homosexuality/
pederasty functioned as ‘‘a reified fetishistic screen’’ whereby we return
over and over again to pederasty as the familiar metonymy of colonial
excess?∞∫ Under the sign of a formal record, the contents of the report
testify to the triumph and reach of colonial empiricism, whereby no
landscape, however elusive and transgressive, exceeds the mappings of
colonial calculations. Even in its absence, or because of its absence, the
report holds out the promise of what the empire could, and ostensibly
did, record.
Often elided in this version of the scandal of the Karáchi report,
however, is its more volatile emergence in the context of a precariously
acquired British territory. Described variously as the ‘‘rape of Sind’’ or a
political ‘‘conundrum’’ whose brutal legacy would far outlive its glory,
the British annexation of Sind was one scandal that refused to go away.
The conquest of Sind (or Sindh, the later name for the region) was
o≈cially completed in 1843 at the battles of Miani and Dubbo, where
Napier defeated the Talpur Mirs who had ruled Sind for over sixty
years.∞Ω Even as the conquest received mixed responses both in England
and in India, there was little disagreement on the key role this new
British acquisition played in upholding the security of the British Em-
pire. Strategically located in the northwestern part of colonial India and
occupying the fertile lower half of the Indus valley, Sind was viewed as
an invaluable frontier against the impending threat of Afghan, Persian,
and particularly Russian encroachment.≤≠ The British had been largely

RICHARD BURTON’S COLONIAL ANTHROPOLOGY | 33

unsuccessful in maintaining control over the northwestern frontier, hav-
ing lost the earlier Afghan wars (1841–43), and the annexation of Sind
provided a belated but necessary blockade against the perceived march
of the Russian Empire. Yet the annexation of a territory, at a time when
the home authorities were divided over the further expansion of British
power in India, still led to much debate.
The crux of the debate revolved around the vast expenditure needed
to revive and secure a vastly undeveloped region such as Sind, alongside
a grudging acknowledgment of its potential value as a crucial sea harbor
river route in a very sensitive region of British control. Concerns were
further exacerbated as accounts of Napier’s unjust conquest of Sind
become increasingly public. In a series of newspaper articles, o≈cial
reports, and trials, Napier was seen to have grossly violated the trust of
native rulers, disobeyed East India Company orders, and initiated a dirty
war whose victorious result did little to assuage public outrage. So stri-
dent was public ire in December 1843 that the Secret Committee of the
Court of Directors for the East India Company in England initially
condemned the annexation of Sind, only to later retract its resolution in
response to pressure from high-ranking government o≈cials.≤∞ For
many in the anticonquest lobby, Napier’s actions in Sind inaugurated
one of the murkiest chapters in British imperial history, supplanted
only, scholars would later argue, by the disastrous and traumatic events
of 1857.≤≤
Central to the scandal of Napier’s bungled annexation of Sind were
key missing reports and treaties. Napier, some imperial historians argue,
deliberately withheld and disappeared strategic o≈cial documents that
would have made the territorial claims of the native Talpur Mirs harder
to deny. Working against the more sympathetic wisdom of earlier com-
pany o≈cials such as his rival James Outram, Napier allegedly fabricated
treaties and reports of Mir treachery and ambition, ensuring that the
annexation of Sind was complete even before the firing of the first
bullet. A flailing Intelligence Department could also do little to dissipate
rumors about native greed and conspiracy, given its own haphazard and
unreliable structures of intelligence gathering. Despite the fact that
judicial reforms and systems of communication, hygiene, and surveil-
lance, well-established in other parts of British India, were belatedly and
unevenly applied in the region, Sind remained an uncharted and be-

34 | CHAPTER ONE
wildering landscape for the British.≤≥ Colonial and postcolonial histories
of the region emphasize the ‘‘conundrum’’ of Sind as they narrate the
territory as a false spatial fixity in the British imperial imaginary. Schol-
ars such as Hamida Khuhro carefully point out that the annexation of
Sind was always understood to be on shaky ground: British o≈cials who
read the varied reports and accounts clearly realized that such docu-
ments did not represent the whole truth and in large part constituted
paper fictions cobbled together to maintain the facade of British control
and knowledge gathering.≤∂ It is, ironically, more our contemporary
analyses that often view these archives as either unitary or stable and
truthful in a mimetic and recoverable sort of way.
In such a context, Burton’s invocation of the Karáchi report clearly
follows a well-rehearsed script of missing or fabricated archives. The
report’s spectral form stages sexuality as the suture that smoothes over
the rifts in the colonial governance of Sind. Under its sensational aus-
pices, one is compelled to foreclose the fraught conditions of its staging
and to focus repeatedly on the familiar scene of pederasty as the register
of disorder and perversion. The language of scandal mobilizes sexuality
as a distraction from the more pressing crisis of colonial governance.
Instead a report on sexuality heralds the success of colonial mapping
technologies. That is, for the report to be imaginatively tenable, Burton
must dexterously mobilize and merge multiple colonial epistemes: lan-
guage acquisition, anthropological method, and intelligence skills. It is,
after all, Burton’s unique and intimate knowledge of Sindhi, of the
customs and laws of Sind society, and of the art of disguise that make
him the ideal candidate for a clandestine mission such as the Karáchi
report. Yet even as the singularity of Burton’s skills makes such a report
possible, it is precisely that exceptionality that makes the evidentiary
status of the report as a colonial technology unreliable.
As the Napier trials and public debates (1843–47) openly revealed,
the governance of Sind was in shambles, with a company state struggling
under the weight of information gathering and reform in a vast region
divided by language and religious di√erence.≤∑ There was scarce o≈cial
agreement on how the territory was to be ruled, let alone a clear under-
standing of which indigenous languages, native customs, or intelligence-
gathering techniques were best suited to the project of colonial gover-
nance. The relationship of data collection to colonial governance was

RICHARD BURTON’S COLONIAL ANTHROPOLOGY | 35

always in crisis, particularly in regions such as Sind, as technologies of
data collection proved profoundly inadequate to the challenge of con-
ducting large-scale reports and surveys.≤∏ Following the downfall of
Orientalists such as William Jones, knowledge of Oriental languages
came under increasing scrutiny, as did emergent models of ethnography
and intelligence gathering. Repeated threats of native insurrection made
an earlier recourse to native informants unreliable, giving rise to a
unique brand of colonial empiricism that granted o≈cial status to eye-
witness accounts and personal testimony.≤π
In the Karáchi report’s imbricated configuration, however, no such
collapse of colonial knowledge structures is made visible. Instead, its
mythic invocations sustain the fantasy of a colonial panopticon, whose
reach seamlessly extends to the most covert of spying missions. Sex-
uality, that most intimate and unmanageable of colonial domains, is
observed, translated, and o≈cially documented. Yet even as the report
accedes to the mandates of such omniscient empiricism, it remains
stubbornly missing, a fantasmatic figuration that resists its own stan-
dardization. If read against the grain of its own staged notoriety, the
alleged report thus emerges rather as a dense textual palimpsest, fore-
grounding less a record of pederasty in India than a clash of the multiple
colonial epistemes undergirding its evocation.≤∫ The spectacular nature
of sexuality, and conversely, the sidelining of sexuality through spectacle,
reverses the colonial order of things. The scandal now shifts from the
contents of the report to the murky entanglements behind its concep-
tion. Yet reading the report as such a ‘‘fetishistic screen’’ is not merely to
make the familiar (albeit necessary) argument for the report’s material
contexts. It is more an attempt to think of the very contexts themselves
as being fictive and constantly rewritten; to consider, as it were, the
report’s ‘‘reflective determinism’’ as making and unmaking contexts in
relation to where it appears.≤Ω
In light of these concerns, this chapter wrestles with and expands on
the following questions: First, what does the repeated citation of the
Karáchi report tell us about a crucial time and space of transformation in
colonial India? Burton dates the report as submitted in 1845, just over a
decade before the end of the East India Company’s rule; the British
Crown begins ruling in 1857. Second, how does a record of sexuality
become a fantasmatic figuration of the debates in early Orientalism and

36 | CHAPTER ONE
anthropology? And finally, what does it mean to resituate this histo-
riographical metalepsis (e√ect for cause), to read the report as an archi-
val trace that resurfaces in muted terms in Burton’s later writings on
India, as the haunting sight of the male nautch.≥≠

‘‘ P E C C A V I : I H A V E S I N N E D / S C I N D E ’’

It can hardly be a coincidence that the Karáchi report is alleged to have

been commissioned in 1845, around the very time Napier, ‘‘the Devil’s
Brother,’’ faced serious criticism for his ‘‘rape’’ of Sind.≥∞ In 1844 a major
British publication reported that Napier had sent his superior, Lord
Ellenborough, a dispatch consisting of one ‘‘emphatic [Latin] word—
‘Peccavi.’ ’’ ‘‘Peccavi’’ is the ‘‘first person singular of the past tense, active
voice, of the verb pecco, peccare, ‘to sin,’ ’’ and thus immediately con-
veyed an ironic double meaning: ‘‘I have Scinde’’ and ‘‘I have sinned.’’
Such an ironic coupling of possession and confession clearly converged
with the wider public debate surrounding Napier’s annexation of Sind,
an annexation he himself called ‘‘a very advantageous piece of ras-
cality.’’≥≤ As Wendy Doniger reminds us, it was quickly revealed that
Napier never sent such a dispatch and that it was in fact a clever fiction
perpetrated by an overzealous reader of the popular Punch magazine.≥≥
The story caught on as the scandal of the dispatch’s fabrication did little
to abate its rapid circulation in newspapers, plays, and even historical
accounts. Like the Karáchi report, the ‘‘Peccavi’’ anecdote took on iconic
status in the Napier archive, its fictionality nestled (and often forgotten)
in an imperial landscape littered with deceit and ambition.≥∂
For Doniger, the anecdote (fictional or otherwise) still e√ectively
demonstrates a rare colonial acknowledgment of moral ambivalence
around the conquest of India, an ambivalence she equally attaches to
questions of intellectual expertise and knowledge. Did the early Orien-
talists really ‘‘have’’ India in their scholarly grasp, she asks, and does the
Anglo-American academy continue to (immorally) replicate this mode
of ownership and expertise? She adds that translations of the word
peccavi must also extend beyond its more obvious bilingual origins in
English and Latin to include third, and possibly fourth, origins in San-
skrit and later Hindi. Sind (Hindi) and Sindhu (Sanskrit) are as em-
broiled in this game of words, as are English and Latin. More subtly,
though, Doniger argues for the importance of paying attention to the

RICHARD BURTON’S COLONIAL ANTHROPOLOGY | 37

temporal and agential modes undergirding this choice invocation. As
she notes, the translation of peccavi ‘‘functions both as a complete verb
meaning ‘possess,’ as one can possess a thing (like India), and as an
auxiliary verb in the perfect sense indicating that the action represented
by the main verb (in this case, ‘sin’) took place in the past, and not in
the present.’’≥∑
While such readings are certainly illuminating, Doniger curiously
fails to attend to the most obvious aspect of the peccavi mythology:
sexuality as knowledge. Sin, original and/or colonial, hinges on ques-
tions of sexuality, and discussions of Napier’s actions in Sind inevitably
return us to that overpresent connection. The conquest is often de-
scribed in a language of sexual violence (the ‘‘rape’’ of Sind), with the
‘‘Devil’s Brother’’ emerging as the principal actor in the moral downfall.
Such allegories of violated and feminized landscapes, Jenny Sharpe and
Sara Suleri suggest, have become too problematically routinized in the
rhetoric of empire.≥∏ That is, rape as imperial allegory overwhelmingly
focuses on the script of heterosexuality, bypassing the more di√erenti-
ated risks to structures of colonial sexuality. For Suleri, in particular,
recuperating such a script ignores the great game of colonial intimacy
that circles around questions of power, masculinity, and desire between
native and English male subjects.
Recognizing the cognitive authority of sexuality couched in the ‘‘Pec-
cavi’’ anecdote allows us to situate the Karáchi report within the larger
public debates around the annexation of Sind. Such a (re)location is
especially tenable as the entanglement of sexuality, colonial morality,
and governance is writ large in the available accounts of the period.
Several debates surrounding the ‘‘conundrum’’ of Sind attribute Napier’s
unpopularity to the scope of his social and political reforms, not the least
of which was the forceful deregulation of indigenous laws and customs
concerning adultery and marriage. Burton specifically cites one such
reform, praising Napier’s commitment to justice, even as he underlines
the reform’s inevitable failure: ‘‘Abstractly just, it was just uncommonly
tyrannical.’’ Koranic revelation, Burton writes, inspired Muslim practice
in times of adultery, whereby ‘‘the men are allowed to take the law into
their own hands, and summarily to wash out an a√ront o√ered to their
honour with blood.’’≥π Miscalculating the force of such native beliefs,
Napier issued an ordinance a few months after his conquest of Sind,

38 | CHAPTER ONE
‘‘promising to hang any one who committed this species of legal mur-
der.’’ After Napier’s reforms came into e√ect, o≈cial reports of such
murders decreased, only to have the number of women committing
suicides suspiciously increase. Well-intentioned as such ‘‘justice-ideas’’
may be, Burton argues, interferences with local sexual mores could only
lead to the English ‘‘being cut down on the high road, or stabbed in our
tents, or poisoned in our houses’’ (su, 66–69, 91).
Such a mismanagement of Sind customs came coupled with wide-
spread accounts of misconduct by the British troops stationed at Ka-
ráchi, and the Indian and British press were quick to broadcast such
matters. For instance, H. T. Lambrick writes that ‘‘on 6 May, 1843, the
‘licentious Press of India’ . . . had libelled the army of Sind in asserting
that some of its o≈cers had taken into keeping former inmates of the
Mirs’ harems.’’ Even as this rumor was denied, a more shameful ‘‘scandal
of Lieutenant Leeson and his concubine’’ surfaced, detailing the nefari-
ous activities of a British o≈cer and his native concubine. Leeson, the
baggage master of Napier’s Karáchi army, we are told, arranged for his
native concubine, a former prostitute (name unknown), to be put in
charge of searching the female servants exiting the overthrown Mirs’
ladies zenanas (harems). The objective was to ensure that no jewels or
‘‘bags of treasure’’ were to be smuggled out of the zenanas without the
explicit permission of the army’s agents. The ‘‘methods of this woman’’
were so e√ective that much treasure was recovered (‘‘worth 50,000
rupees’’) and few servants dared to defy her surveillance.≥∫
While the recovery of such treasures was noteworthy and added sig-
nificantly to the ‘‘Prize fund’’ put together by the army’s agents, it brought
more embarrassment than glory. Many high-ranking o≈cers were dis-
mayed and argued that ‘‘no conquest gave a right to the personal property
of ino√ensive women and children’’ and submitted complaints against
the army’s prize agents. Further, large-scale looting of the Mirs’ posses-
sions was reported, and it appeared that many soldiers and camp fol-
lowers ‘‘did well for themselves.’’ So imminent was the threat of army
misconduct that Napier was forced to order that any soldier or camp
follower ‘‘found beyond a mile from the camp’’ without proper commis-
sion would be ‘‘apprehended and treated as a plunderer.’’≥Ω One must
recall here that Napier, according to Burton, ordered the Karáchi report
precisely because the brothels were a mere ‘‘mile from the camp.’’

RICHARD BURTON’S COLONIAL ANTHROPOLOGY | 39

 The invocation of the Karáchi report in the ‘‘Terminal Essay’’ thus
clearly draws on existing idioms of governance and morality to inscribe
its own narrative structure. Napier articulates specific concerns around
the widespread presence of ‘‘infamous beasts’’ near the army camps in a
memoir recorded for Sir John Hobhouse in 1846: ‘‘There is public moral-
ity supported by putting down the infamous beasts who, dressed as
women, plied their trade in the Meers’ time openly; and there is this fact
to record, that the chief of them were recipients of stipends from the
Ameers, as the government records I became possessed of as collector
testified.’’
Napier’s reference here to prior ‘‘government records’’ foregrounds a
clear and o≈cial foreknowledge of such ‘‘immoral activities’’ among
native subjects and rulers.∂≠ According to Napier’s claims, not only is the
native populace prone to le vice, but it is a vice that enjoys state support
from the native rulers. In such a context of moral indeterminacy, the
invocation of the Karáchi report becomes a mediating form through
which the excesses of the native cover over any excesses of the ‘‘civi-
lized.’’ Even as the focus remains on the ‘‘infamous beasts,’’ the fear of
contamination is never far behind.
One could argue, on the one hand, that the reference to an Indian
intelligence report in a translation of a foundational Arabic text simply
renarrates the mystification of The Arabian Nights through a conven-
tional recourse to colonial empiricism.∂∞ The extended discussion of
pederasty in ancient erotic texts is overlaid with the weight of a report
that proves that native pederasty is real and lives outside the pages of
Burton’s translation. On the other hand, even as such a gesture corrobo-
rates the presence of native vice, it equally, or perhaps more stridently,
invokes the scandal of British participation in such activities. The com-
missioning (alleged or otherwise) of such a report, Philippa Levine
argues, is hardly surprising in the fraught context of large-scale military
camps in colonial India. Napier, for instance, repeatedly bemoaned the
constrained conditions of the Karáchi military barracks that left soldiers
with little privacy and few forms of entertainment. For Levine, the focus
on regulation surrounding native prostitution and contagious diseases in
such military cantonments often papers over the equally paranoid o≈-
cial fear of ‘‘situational’’ homosexuality. That is, how does one attend to

40 | CHAPTER ONE
the prevention of male-to-male sexual conduct, given the sheer physical
intimacy of military barracks and the paucity of Englishwomen?∂≤
In the context just outlined, the sign of the Karáchi report thus reads
less as a marker of native pederasty than as a blueprint for potential
British (im)morality. This holds particularly true as Burton smuggles in
further references to the prevalence of pederasty as attached to the
British presence a few pages after the report is mentioned. What is
unspeakable and o≈cially untraceable (British immorality and peder-
asty) is conceived repeatedly through strategic and often outlandish
anecdotes as the inevitable e√ect of contact with native subjects. There
is a clandestine economy at work here in which the framing of the
report, its focus on exposing pederasty notwithstanding, muddles the
heteronormative teleologies of colonialism. After all, pederasty as narra-
tive deterrent can only prove e√ective when framed against the teleo-
logical alibi of a stalwart heterosexuality. Burton’s writings o√er no such
easy narrative resolution. As in the case of the ‘‘Peccavi’’ dispatch, there
can be no possible certainty to any of Burton’s claims, yet their historical
context remains solid. The great game here is not about expelling the
‘‘sin’’ of pederasty, but about tracing a historical and conceptual interface
between the sin of sex and the sin of empire. Pederasty becomes the
narrative object whose recovery warrants more a scrutiny of its condi-
tions of possibility than of the object itself.∂≥
Each anecdotal reference Burton provides is tenaciously tethered to
founding preoccupations of colonial rule in India: religious conversion,
military occupation, and native mutiny. The anecdotes are clustered
together in the essay’s section on pederasty, pro√ered up as uno≈cial
evidence of le vice in the East. One such interesting cluster appears a few
pages after the invocation of the Karáchi report, and its narrative order
merits careful scrutiny. The first anecdote here recounts the punishment
meted out to ‘‘strangers’’ entering the ‘‘harems’’ of Persian women: they
are stripped and thrown to the mercy of the harem’s grooms and ‘‘negro-
slaves.’’∂∂ In the event that the ‘‘strangers’’ resist ‘‘penetration’’ with all
the ‘‘force of their sphincter muscle,’’ a ‘‘sharpened tent-peg’’ is applied
to the said region ‘‘til he opens.’’ This cautionary tale is immediately
followed by a second anecdote that mentions a ‘‘well-established mis-
sionary to the East during the last generation’’ who ‘‘was subjected to

RICHARD BURTON’S COLONIAL ANTHROPOLOGY | 41

this gross insult by one of the Persian prince-governors whom he had
infuriated by his conversion-mania.’’ English readers, Burton adds, can
read of this ‘‘insult’’ in the memoirs of the said missionary who confesses
to being a ‘‘dishonoured person’’ after his return from the East. In case
such evidence of the widespread use of le vice as punishment meted out
to ‘‘strangers’’ and ‘‘missionaries’’ does not su≈ce, Burton follows up
with a third anecdote. He writes: ‘‘About the same time Shaykh Nasr,
Governor of Bushire, a man famed for facetious blackguardism, used to
invite European youngsters serving in the Bombay Marine and ply them
with liquor till they were insensible. Next morning the middies mostly
complained that the champagne had caused a curious irritation and
soreness in la parte-poste’’ (‘‘TE,’’ 235). Here, le vice is turned into a
space of humiliation and humor at the expense of British military pres-
ence and occupation. Burton provides none of his usual copious foot-
notes to buttress the claims in these anecdotal references, only enough
tantalizing historical detail to make one pause and consider.
The anecdotal references follow the narrative structure of the report,
whereby the prevalence of le vice dramatizes more its widespread occur-
rence in British subjects than the native bodies it purports to codify. The
radical unverifiability of Burton’s claims paradoxically makes unstable
what can easily be known and relied on. Almost playfully, Burton injects
a suspicion of le vice into many sacrosanct domains of British colonial
authority, notably within the landscape of colonial India. The sin of le
vice, it appears, hovers strategically over areas of critical British vul-
nerability. The ‘‘strangers’’ who storm Persian harems recall my earlier
discussion of the Indian press’s claims of British military misconduct in
the zenanas of the Sind Mirs. The ‘‘well-established missionary’’ who
gets ‘‘dishonoured’’ foregrounds the increasing hostility faced by the
missionaries, particularly in the northwestern frontier provinces such
as Sind.∂∑
And the ‘‘blackguardism’’ of Shayk Nasr of Bushire brings to mind one
of the most di≈cult geopolitical struggles of the British Empire: the
control of Bushire (in Iran), one of the key ports of control in the Persian
Gulf. Shayk Nasr, a pretender to the throne of Bahrain and an agent of
sorts for the Ottoman Empire, was rebu√ed six times in his attempts to
capture Bahrain. He then fled to Bushire to settle and establish a strong
commercial base gradually taken over by the East India Company.∂∏ The

42 | CHAPTER ONE
Bombay Marine ‘‘youngsters’’ so unfavorably treated by Nasr were part of
an elite fleet of ships (established in the early 1700s) used to bring peace
to the turbulent west coast of India, often against dangers from non-
English ships. The Bombay Marine eventually became what is today
called the Indian Navy.∂π Burton’s mention of Bushire is thus no careless
sleight of hand and is carefully annexed to his own production of the
Karáchi report. After all, Mirza Abdullah, the ‘‘half Arab, half Iranian’’
persona most favored by Burton, is also said to be a merchant from
Bushire, and it is through his machinations that the Karáchi report is
made possible: ‘‘[Mirza] passed many an evening in the townlet visited all
the porneia and obtained the fullest details which were duly despatched
to Government House’’ (‘‘TE,’’ 206). Like Nasr, Burton’s Mirza Abdullah
is a man of means, a cloth merchant who uses his expansive charm and
resources to mine native knowledge. Parama Roy adds that such a hybrid
personality is produced as key to Burton’s mastery as a spy and to his
access to harems and even private homes and scandals. Disguised as a
Mirza, Burton can explain away his imperfect Sindhi accent and his gaps
of knowledge in the majoritarian Shia practice of the region.∂∫
The final two anecdotes in this cluster circle around questions of
native mutiny and the general issue of military intelligence and sur-
veillance. Pederasty, or more precisely the exposure of pederasty, in the
first anecdote causes the slaughter of British soldiers: ‘‘The Afghans are
commercial travelers on a large scale and each caravan is accompanied
by a number of boys and lads almost in a woman’s attire. . . . In Afghani-
stan also a frantic debauchery broke out amongst the women when they
found incubi who were not pederasts; and the scandal was not the most
insignificant cause of the general rising at Cabul (Nov. 1841) and the
slaughter of Macnaghten, Burnes [sic] and other British o≈cers’’ (‘‘TE,’’
236).
Here, Burton takes a much bruited historical incident and renders its
narrative chronology unrecognizable through a di√erent (albeit almost
impossible) narrative of causality. One is unclear here who the ‘‘incubi’’
are that are not ‘‘pederasts,’’ and what the details of the ‘‘scandal’’ alluded
to are. Did the ‘‘frantic debauchery’’ of the women involve sexual rela-
tions with Englishmen, or were the ‘‘incubi/not pederasts’’ English-
women and/or Englishmen? Even as one dismisses the reach of Burton’s
claims, the facts embedded in the anecdote become open to revision as

RICHARD BURTON’S COLONIAL ANTHROPOLOGY | 43

we rediscover their form in a di√erent speculative fiction. If not ped-
erasty, what was it that was seen that was ‘‘not the most insignificant
cause of the general rising at Cabul?’’ As in the Karáchi report, the
context of the anecdote becomes the bigger scandal at hand, and ped-
erasty the more unremarkable detail in the most remarkable and brutal
of historical narratives.
Indeed, the ‘‘slaughter’’ of the high-ranking military o≈cials William
Macnaghten and Alexander Burns is no small event in British imperial
history. It recalls a much longer history of native insurrection during the
British occupation of colonial India, often forgotten under the over-
whelming impact of the 1857 uprising. The events of 1841 in Afghanistan
also make Napier’s annexation of the key neighboring region of Sind in
1843 that much more significant. An account (in translation) of a Hindu
sepoy, ‘‘Ramchurn Sing, 3rd Company, 27th Bengal,’’ a member of the
regiment defending Ghuzni in 1841 at the time of the infamous slaugh-
ter, paints a grisly picture of British violations, native treachery, and
general pandemonium. When the British occupied Afghanistan in 1839,
Ghuzni was stormed by the army under Sir John Keane and garrisoned
by a sepoy regiment till 1841, when the Afghans rose against the British
occupation. Macnaghten, the political agent stationed at Cabul, was
later murdered, allegedly for his betrayal of promises made to the native
Ghazees, and General William Elphinstone’s army was destroyed on its
way to India. The core of this slaughter, too, rests on a series of bungled
errors by the British: misplaced treaties, the destruction of key mosques,
and a lack of trust in native soldiers.∂Ω
Burton’s invocation of the ‘‘Macnaghten incident’’ rests (as do all his
references to pederasty) on the founding myth that pederasty must re-
main a vice specific to Muslims (of Afghani, Sindi, and Kashmiri de-
scent), extending rarely to Hindus. Such an attitude followed the domi-
nant ideology of the day that staged Muslim vice precisely to contain
Muslim threat. More specifically, in the case of Sind, the threat of Mus-
lims translated into Hindus being chosen as the liaisons for the East India
Company, with the native consul of Karáchi being a prominent Hindu.
Hindus could be trusted as they are newcomers, like the British, and thus
less vulnerable to le vice: ‘‘Sind is essentially a Muslim country. . . . The
Hindus of Sind . . . are comparatively speaking, recent immigrants.’’∑≠
Burton assures us that Hindus are to be trusted because, like English-

44 | CHAPTER ONE
men, they ‘‘hold pederasty in abhorrence and are as much scandalized by
being called Gándmárá (anus-beater) or Gándú (anuser)’’ (‘‘TE,’’ 237).
It is thus noteworthy that the final anecdote narrates an example of
Hindu pederasty—and in Burton’s own environs at that, ‘‘some forty
miles north of Karáchi’’: ‘‘During the years 1843–44 my regiment, al-
most all Hindu sepoys of the Bombay Presidency, was stationed at a
purgatory called Bandar Gharra, a sandy flat . . . some forty miles north
of Karáchi the headquarters. . . . A young Brahman had connection with
a soldier comrade of a lower caste and this had continued till, in an
unhappy hour, the Pariah patient ventured to become the agent . . . and
the high-caste sepoy stung by remorse and revenge, loaded his musket
and deliberately shot his paramour. He was hanged by court martial at
Hyderabad’’ (‘‘TE,’’ 237). Burton sets up this unusual reference by em-
phasizing that his regiment, though adjacent to a native village ‘‘that
could not supply a single woman,’’ was resistant to pederasty except for
this one case, which only ‘‘came to light . . . after a tragical fashion some
years afterwards.’’ As in the case of each of the anecdotal references
already discussed, Burton’s demurrals ironically end up highlighting the
influence of le vice, rather than its absence in British troops and person-
nel. The details of a singular case of pederasty are set up alongside an
acknowledgment of its constant threat among Burton’s regiment (the
proximity of ‘‘male brothels’’ notwithstanding), rewriting the stated rea-
sons for the commission of the Karáchi report. Yet even as the ‘‘Hindu
sepoy’’ is hanged for his sins, his actions are exorcised through the lens
of caste and the script of Muslim debauchery restored to its centrality in
the story of pederasty. So powerful are the moral imperatives of caste in
Hindu sepoys, it appears, that the higher crime here is that of intercaste
contact, rather than male-to-male sexual conduct. The Hindu sepoy may
have temporarily surrendered to le vice, but his shame emerges clearly
when he feels the need to murder the lower-caste lover. In case the
exceptionality of this case of Hindu pederasty escapes us, Burton writes
that the sepoy’s last wishes were that he be ‘‘suspended by the feet; the
idea being that his soul, polluted by exiting ‘below the waist,’ would be
doomed to endless transmigrations through the lowest forms of life’’
(‘‘TE,’’ 238).
Burton’s invocation of the Karáchi report segues, as is well known,
into his famous formulation of the Sotadic Zone, a perilous zone of

RICHARD BURTON’S COLONIAL ANTHROPOLOGY | 45

climatic extremes that engenders a geography of perversions: ‘‘Bounded
westwards by the northern shores of the Mediterranean (N. Lat. 43\)
and by the southern (N. Lat. 30\).’’ Pederasty is to be understood as
‘‘geographical and climatic, not racial’’ (‘‘TE,’’ 207). In South Asia, it
includes the strategic territories of ‘‘Afghanistan, Sind, the Punjab and
Kashmir.’’ The limits of the zone mandate a clear-cut relationship to the
vice: ‘‘Within the Sotadic Zone the Vice is popular and endemic, held at
the worst to be a mere peccadillo, while the races to the North and the
South of the limits here defined practise it only sporadically amid the
opprobrium of their fellows who as a rule, are physically incapable of
performing the operation and look upon it with the liveliest of disgust’’
(‘‘TE,’’ 206). The Karáchi report provides one such instantiation of geo-
graphic determinism as we see Sind prominently configured in the zone
of perversion. Yet Burton’s insistence on the ‘‘climatic’’ and not ‘‘racial’’
dimension of pederasty signals a rupture in an otherwise seamless narra-
tive of convenient geography. The report’s location may consolidate the
Sotadic Zone theory, but it equally demonstrates the complex entangle-
ments of race, space, and climate in early nineteenth-century British
India. How does a project of colonial di√erence stay its course if the line
between native and English bodies is organized through vagaries of
climate rather than through the determinism of race?
David Arnold provides a deft historical sketch of such complications
through a focus on the shifting parameters of race and bodily constitu-
tion in early nineteenth-century India. By focusing on colonialism as a
site of profound physical challenges, Arnold argues for a more careful
understanding of place and climate, one that moves beyond the clichéd
narratives of Englishmen wilting or alternately surrendering to their
wanton desires in the tropical heat of the colonies. He underscores the
very serious contingencies of stabilizing models of colonial di√erence in
physical landscapes such as Sind, where British soldiers routinely re-
ported a high incidence of fatal diseases like cholera. Arnold demon-
strates how some of the major medical literature of the period (such as
James Ranald Martin’s Notes on the Medical Topography of Calcutta, pub-
lished in 1837) often compared the physiologies of the British to those of
the natives to argue that each could be exposed to the same climatic
conditions and have a di√erent response. In such texts, cultural practices,
rather than skin color, determine bodily constitutions as much as climate

46 | CHAPTER ONE
and locale do. For example, Martin remarks that it is the religion and
custom of the Indians that ‘‘together with the premature development of
the generative function, produce an excitability of the nervous system
[and] diminished volume, enervation, and relaxation of the muscular
system as compared to Europeans.’’ Thus it is convenient that the ‘‘wheat
diet’’ of martial inhabitants of India (who largely served as subalterns in
the British military) guaranteed a stronger constitution, as opposed to
the rice diet of the e√eminate and more intellectual Bengalis.∑∞
Arnold’s attentiveness to the language of constitution and physiology
is important as it cautions against facilely folding all models of colonial
di√erence to a common typology of racial di√erence. This is not to say
that racialism is not part of the discourse; rather, its rise to dominance as
the defining factor of colonial di√erence emerges over complex shifts in
space and time. For Arnold, typologies of race emerged in the era before
the 1857 uprising not to police the races, but to di√erentiate between
them. He cites Burton’s description of the ‘‘Sindis (‘a semi-barbarous
race’) as a good example of such thinking: a ‘half-breed between the
Hindoo, one of the most imperfect, and the Persian, probably the most
perfect specimen of the Caucasian type. His features are regular, and the
general look of the head is good; the low forehead and lank hair of India
are seldom met with in this province.’’ Sindi men also had ‘‘ ‘handsome’
beards, a clear sign of a ‘masculine’ race, although they were not quite as
good as the Persians’ and Afghans’.’’∑≤ Curiously Arnold never alludes to
Burton’s theory of the Sotadic Zone, a more compelling instantiation of
the very colonial paradigms he proposes we address. The subtext of le
vice is very markedly scripted in Burton’s most double-edged description
of the Scindi man: ‘‘His is emphatically a conquered race. Inhabiting a
valley with a hot damp climate—the most unfavourable to unmanliness;
exposed to the incursions of the hardy natives of the arid mountains that
look down upon it, he had the bodily strength perhaps, but he had not
the strong will, and he had not the vigour of mind to resist invasion, and
to emancipate him from thraldom’’ (su, 254).

ANTHROPOLOGICAL NOTES

One point remains to be touched upon. The author has sedulously shunned all
allusion to the ‘‘still vexed’’ questions concerning the conquest of Sindh, which for
some years has been before the public. It was his intention to write a work

RICHARD BURTON’S COLONIAL ANTHROPOLOGY | 47

interesting to the linguist and the ethnographer, not to enlist himself in the ranks
of political partisanship.
R I C H A R D B U R T O N , S I N D H A N D T H E R A C E S T H AT I N H A B I T T H E V A L L E Y O F T H E I N D U S

Every one of Burton’s footnotes, whether in the Pilgrimage or in his translation of

the Arabian Nights was meant to be a testimony to his victory over the sometimes
scandalous system of Oriental knowledge, a system he mastered by himself. . . . We
must recognize how the voice of the highly idiosyncratic master of Oriental
knowledge informs, feeds into the voice of European ambition for rule over the
Orient.
E D WA R D S A I D , O R I E N TA L I S M

Often lost in the pursuit of the Karáchi report is Burton’s relationship to

that other dominant mode of early nineteenth-century thought whose
meanings were also open to continuous scrutiny: anthropology. The
linkages between colonialism and anthropology have been widely docu-
mented, with little doubt left as to the critical role anthropology played
in the consolidation of discourses of empire. Anthropology as both a
discipline and a method was clearly conceived in the crucible of empire,
and much scholarly e√ort has been expended in addressing (and redress-
ing) that tainted genealogy.∑≥ Scholars working in the interstices of
sexuality and anthropology have also extensively documented the cen-
trality of sexuality in the writings of colonial encounters. As Don Kulick
writes in a related context: ‘‘Anthropology has always tra≈cked in the
sexuality of the people we study.’’∑∂ Such scholarship has extended and
complicated not just histories of sexuality but also histories of anthropol-
ogy. The ‘‘scattered salacious details’’ have all been meticulously ex-
tracted and the script of anthropology rewritten to reflect its preoccupa-
tion with structures of sexuality.∑∑ Kath Weston and Elizabeth Povinelli,
in particular, have argued for a more capacious reading of sexuality’s
articulations in the context of anthropology, beyond the flora-and-fauna
approach that ‘‘finds’’ homosexuals in the anthropological writings of the
colonial past.∑∏ George Stocking has emphasized that this turn to a
mythic language of discovery recalls an archetype in the larger script of
colonial anthropology, and thus (one could add) is not isolated to the
scholarship on sexuality.∑π
In the wake of such interpretative caution, my goal here is not to put
sex back into discussions of anthropology in colonial India or vice versa.

48 | CHAPTER ONE
Instead, I want to consider how the particular space, time, and form of
the Karáchi report elaborate a nexus of concerns that cohere around
viable translations of colonial knowledge. That is, what does the sign of
the Karáchi report tell us about the shifting and often competing models
of ethnology, ethnography, and anthropology in early to mid-nineteenth-
century British India? What discursive problems emerge in articulating
the moral content of colonial explorations of sex? After all, even as
Burton recorded sexual customs and practices more assiduously than
most, he simultaneously reimagined anthropological methods and goals.
Burton’s colonial expeditions began in 1842 when he was twenty-one
and drew to a close in the 1880s. He was the author of some forty-three
volumes of explorations and travels, spoke forty languages fluently, and
even as his health and career declined, continued to secretly translate
and publish six books of erotica.
Assessing Burton’s contributions to anthropology is critical to any
analysis of British colonial policy, as he remained a civil servant through-
out his life and had his labors funded and supported by various establish-
ments of the British state and academy. As one of the early bibliographers
of the Burton collection at the Royal Anthropological Institute Library
writes: ‘‘It was the British empire, that grand employment agency for the
maverick, that gave him the world’s freedom, and it was the Victorian
instinct for synthesized exactitude that we can see in his passion for
detail and comparison.’’∑∫ Burton was one of the founders of the contro-
versial Anthropological Society of London (asl), as well as a member of
the Royal Geographical Society in London, and both institutes regularly
funded and published his many works of sexual ethnography, such as the
first report on hermaphrodites in Central Asia. Stocking emphasizes
Burton’s centrality to the debates in anthropology in the metropole,
describing him as ‘‘the [Anthropological] Society’s shining ornament,’’
embodying in many ways the society’s commitment to ‘‘the creation of a
‘liberty of thought and freedom of speech’ unequalled in any other scien-
tific society—a forum where one could discuss not only general matters
of human anatomy and physiology, but such questions as male and
female circumcision, and phallic worship.’’ The ‘‘anthropologicals,’’ as
members of the asl were called, had previously broken away from the
more established Ethnological Society of London (esl), citing di√er-
ences in methods and approaches to the ‘‘study of man.’’ Prominent

RICHARD BURTON’S COLONIAL ANTHROPOLOGY | 49

among such di√erences was the asl’s ‘‘politics of race’’ that advocated
racist compendiums of ‘‘anatomical, physiological and psychological evi-
dence and opinion’’ under the guise of research and colonial service.
Thus, for instance, the anthropologicals appreciated Governor Edward
John Eyre’s brutal suppression of the Jamaican rebellion in 1865. At a
public meeting held to discuss such matters, many members supported
this ‘‘true art of governing alien races,’’ and one went so far as to advocate
‘‘killing savages as a philanthropic principle.’’∑Ω
The commission of the Karáchi report occurred in a period of tur-
bulent transformation in the emergent field of colonial anthropology in
India. The time between the 1830s and the 1860s marked a significant
shift in the structures and content of anthropology’s relationship to the
British occupation of India. In his 1944 report on the role of anthro-
pology in colonial development, Lord William Hailey summarizes the
transformation as a shift from a focus on causality to one on function:
‘‘Of more recent years [we have] seen the development of a branch of
anthropological study which has a somewhat di√erent objective, namely
the investigation of the manner in which societies work, rather than the
manner in which they have originated.’’∏≠ Peter Pels argues that this
focus on function meant that the earlier ‘‘Orientalist articulation of
knowledge on foundational texts gave way to the ethnological articula-
tion of knowledge on bodies.’’ In other words, the previous Orientalist
focus on using native texts as originary sources for laws and intelligence
methods was supplanted by the translation of native bodies to serve that
purpose. The shift was mandated in part by new forms of surveillance
and documentation (education reform, increased missionary activity,
and more refined maps, surveys, and reports) that made ethnology the
central mode of colonial intelligence. The search for foundational texts
(advocated by William Jones and his followers) became less relevant as
English-language education was instituted to make English texts the
original source of moral values.
It is important to emphasize here (as many scholars have previously
done) that this shift was not discontinuous with the aims of the previous
school of Orientalism, where the translation of foundational native texts
was as explicitly intertwined with questions of governance as was the
turn to ethnology. Even James Mill’s authoritative History of British India
(1817), often seen as the main oppositional argument to the Jones model

50 | CHAPTER ONE
of Orientalism, lambasted the methods and not the contents of early
Orientalist scholarship. Tejaswini Niranjana’s work on translation theo-
ries is useful here in understanding how early Orientalists and transla-
tors such as Jones introduced the influential idea of a ‘‘textualized India’’
that then circulated as the authoritative version ‘‘of the Eastern self not
only to the ‘West’ but to their (thereby interpellated) subjects.’’ The most
significant e√ect of Jones’s labors is the emphasis on the need ‘‘for
translation by the Europeans, since the natives are unreliable inter-
preters of their own laws and cultures, and . . . [lack] the desire to
purify Indian culture and speak on its behalf.’’∏∞ Given such formula-
tions, colonial administrators had to learn Asiatic languages and become
the only reliable translators of originary sources, and later of colonial
sites and bodies.
The turn to reading bodies, however, produced significant challenges
as di√erent forms of knowledge collection (fact gathering, surveys ta-
bles, maps) required di√erent models of interpretation. The individual
report became routinized, personal observation more central, and the
terrain of intelligence gathering rife with issues of mediation and re-
liability. If local informants (and texts) could no longer be relied on, the
British had to supply their own agents and translators, a task (as in the
case of Sind) increasingly hard to accomplish. Pels suggests that the
move away from the dominance of texts ironically disrupted the hege-
monic rule of the Hindus, making way for ‘‘cultures of natural history
and orality.’’ The pivotal increase in the study of aboriginal tribes pro-
vided the canvas for these cultural histories, arguably aligning ethnology
‘‘with the biopolitical institutions of the Indian colonial state.’’∏≤ David
Ludden adds that these shifts produced a form of empiricism peculiar to
India: the study of ancient texts converged with the study of the political
present as the despotic past strategically testified to the irrationalities of
the present. For Ludden, the Indian context exposes the lacunae in
Said’s flattening of di√erent forms of Orientalist discourse, whereby
scant attention is paid to the shifts in colonial rule from the 1830s
through the 1860s.∏≥
The Karáchi report inhabits this transitional period, extending and
complicating the merger of the two Orientalisms in a curious amalgam
of the idioms of translation and ethnology. It is important to recall here
that Sind was belatedly added to the calculus of state rule and that

RICHARD BURTON’S COLONIAL ANTHROPOLOGY | 51

reforms already in place elsewhere in occupied India were haphazardly
applied to the region. Thus the early debates around Lord Babington
Macaulay’s proposals for education reform originated and were largely
contained in Bengal.∏∂ Much less is known about the content and reach
of these debates outside the radius of the Bengal presidency, especially
in the Punjab and the northwestern border provinces. The crux of the
education debates between the Anglicists and the Orientalists, argues
Geeta Patel, lay in the ‘‘value’’ assigned to di√erent parts of the colonial
archive. What were the translations of Oriental literature worth? And
was it not more worthwhile to expend resources on teaching and stan-
dardizing English texts ‘‘imbued with the ideas and feelings of civilized
Europe?’’ The overall challenge lay in establishing a language of domi-
nance that would facilitate native compliance and respect through a
shared set of texts and English language skills. However, ‘‘the post-1835
transmutations of native selves through education,’’ Patel adds, was ef-
fected not just by a turn away from classical Indian languages to En-
glish but more precisely through the ‘‘reconfiguration of the vernaculars,
so that they would be adequate to accommodate the material to be
translated into them.’’ By the 1840s, a Vernacular Society had been es-
tablished in the North-West Provinces, with Macnaghten’s Principles of
Hindu and Mahomedan Law (1841) being one of the first texts to be
translated into Urdu.∏∑ Burton, however, was repeatedly critical of the
e√orts of the Vernacular Society, and particularly of texts such as Mac-
naghten’s. In a chapter of Scinde; or, The Unhappy Valley entitled ‘‘Eastern
Cunning,’’ he advocates a wilier approach to language acquisition and
translation e√orts overall: ‘‘Our inferiority of cunning to the Oriental, is
certainly not owing to want of knowledge of the people amongst whom
we live, or to ignorance of their manners, customs, and languages. The
Macnaghtens, the Burneses [sic], and generally those who devoted their
time and energies, and who prided themselves most upon their conver-
sancy with native dialects and native character, are precisely the persons
who have been most egregiously, most fatally, outwitted, and deceived
by the natives. This is a trite remark, but it cannot be too often repeated,
too forcibly dwelt upon’’ (su, 3). And lest we forget the perils of neglect-
ing such advice, we need simply recall here that Macnaghten and Burns
are the two senior o≈cials invoked in my earlier discussion of the
connections between the sin of occupation and the sin of sex.

52 | CHAPTER ONE
 By large, the situation in Sind warranted a di√erentiated structure of
the education question, as few state funds were allocated for the estab-
lishment of primary and secondary schools along the lines of those
already in place in the Bengal and Bombay presidencies. The primary
impetus for education reform was the collection of taxes and various
forms of land revenue that necessitated an e√ective language of com-
munication between the governors and the governed. Sind, under Na-
pier’s administration, (1843–47) fell into a ‘‘period of stagnation’’ in
education, as administrators made little e√ort to address the need for a
standard language. In 1847 (three years after the Karáchi report was
allegedly commissioned), a public controversy arose in Sind around the
question of which language (Sindhi, Persian, or English) would prove
functional for o≈cial purposes, as well as for instruction in local schools.
Burton was at the center of these language debates, advocating the use of
Sindhi as the primary language of communication. In Sind, as in the
majority of India, the o≈cial language had been Persian, and this prac-
tice continued under Napier’s regime. Persian, however, was a language
of ancient literature and correspondence, argued Burton, ‘‘an unintelli-
gible jargon,’’ and very far from the language of the common man in Sind.
With the British conquest of Sind, and the added emphasis on records,
documentation, and archiving, a ‘‘double system of interpreters became
necessary whereby Sindhi was translated into Persian and the Persian
into English.’’ Such a system was clearly untenable, and Burton, along
with others such as George Stack, made a strong case for the institution
of Sindhi, a ‘‘vernacular’’ language, as the standard medium for general
communication. For Burton, the challenge did not end with the resolu-
tion of a common language; more e√orts had to be expended in manu-
facturing an appropriate alphabet and grammar that would adequately
translate Sindhi into a script (preferably Arabic-based) reflecting the
sounds and cultures of the region. Despite much support for Bur-
ton’s proposal, a Sanskrit-based alphabet and grammar were ultimately
deemed more appropriate for scripting Sindhi. The region continues to
bear the e√ects of these early debates to this day through an education
system barely appropriate to the demands of its constituencies.∏∏
Inscribed in the invocation of the Karáchi report are multiple media-
tions of such questions of translation and anthropological method. In
the success of its alleged completion are also lodged the seeds of its own

RICHARD BURTON’S COLONIAL ANTHROPOLOGY | 53

critique. For Burton’s translation (linguistic and corporeal) to succeed,
for him to infiltrate the male brothels, he must take on the role of a
colonial observer whose authenticity must displace that of the native
informant. He must speak Sindhi, as well as translate his body through
the most intimate idiom of sex. In doing so, he must, as Parama Roy
argues, ‘‘dislodge the semiotic of racial and cultural di√erence in which
colonial epistemology was grounded.’’∏π Well aware of the perils of such
gestures, Burton carefully articulates the dangers of translating out of
one’s Englishness, not through pederastic contact, but rather through
overzealous reading practices: ‘‘Thus you see how it is that many of our
eminent politicals—men great at Sanscrit and Arabic, who spoke Per-
sian like Shirazis, and had the circle of Oriental science at their fingers’
ends; clever at ceremony as Hindoos . . . whose ‘Reports’ were admirable
in point of diction. . . . They had read too much; they had written
too much; they were a trifle too clever, and much too confident. Their
vanity tempted them to shift their nationality; from Briton to become
Greek, in order to meet Greek on the roguery field; and lamentably they
always failed’’ (su, 7). By elevating sex to the status of an object in the
Karáchi report, Burton does more than document the presence of ped-
erasty; he reimagines the very objects of anthropological method.∏∫ The
‘‘fatiguing monotony’’ of ‘‘Oriental history’’ is replaced by the scant, but
sensational, details of the Karáchi report: a missing record of sexuality
promises the (impossible) success of colonial intelligence. As he writes
in a satirical rendering of such questions: ‘‘A sketch of the history and
geography of the country? No, Mr. Bull. In the first place, the subjects
have been exhausted by a host of industrious Orientalists. Secondly,
their failures in interesting you, and the per se deadly uninteresting
nature of the theme, do imperatively forbid my making the attempt’’ (su,
198–201).

A N U N H O LY S P E C TA C L E

‘‘Larkhana is celebrated for another kind of Nách [nautch], of a type

familiar to the Veteran dweller on the banks of the Nile: I would will-
ingly show you the sight, were it not haunting as a good ghost story or a
bad novel. Conceive, if you can, the unholy spectacle of two reverend-
looking grey beards, with stern, severe, classical features, large limbs,
and serene, majestic deportments, dancing opposite each other dressed

54 | CHAPTER ONE
in woman’s attire; the flimsiest too, with light veils on their heads, and
little bells jingling from their ankles, ogling, smirking, and displaying
the juvenile playfulness of limmer lads and little lassies!’’∏Ω Thus writes
the narrator of Burton’s Sind Revisited (1877), a text that purports to be a
corrective version of his earlier treatise, Scinde; or, The Unhappy Valley
(1851). If the contents of the Karáchi report remain forever in abeyance,
Burton’s larger archive nevertheless proliferates other places of refuge
for an alternative record of sexuality. Though they hardly seem to war-
rant the same extravagant attention as that of the Karáchi report, Bur-
ton’s extended revisions of his writings on Sind provide one such place
of articulation. Even as the secret of the Karáchi report, as I have thus far
argued, remains encrypted in the very lineaments of its colonial form,
its shadow resurfaces as a recursive trace in Burton’s late writings. In lieu
of the forbidden environs of male brothels in Karáchi, we have instead
sacral spaces of male connection in Larkhana. Here, sexuality is writ
large, carefully documented and yet contained within the erotic trajec-
tory of a ‘‘good ghost story or a bad novel.’’
The passage cited above stands out as one of the more startling addi-
tions Burton makes to his earlier formulations on Sind. Throughout his
writings on Sind, Burton dismisses the spectacle of the female nautch as
an Oriental site of mangled form and disharmony.π≠ He repeatedly ex-
presses displeasure when confronted with the display of a female nau-
tch, a ritual that appears singularly widespread in India. Such unease
appears particularly striking, given Burton’s declared interest in the
‘‘barbarous’’ sexual and mating customs of Sindi people. Larkhana, we
are told, ‘‘is known for its manufactures of coarse cloth, and, being upon
the high-road between Kurrachee and Shikarpur, it is the favourite sta-
tion with caravans and travelling merchants. This is probably the reason
why it is celebrated for anything but morality. The inhabitants are a
dissolute race, fond of intoxication, dancing and other debauchery, and
idle, because the necessaries are so cheap that there is no need of
working hard to live’’ (su, 240). For Burton’s narrator, the female nautch
is no cherished sign of indigenous purity to be faithfully recorded, but
merely ‘‘a system of wild superstition, explained, emblematised, and
typified by western speculators till its very form ceases to be recognis-
able’’ (su, 120).
In Burton’s cultural lexicon of India, the female nautch embodies the

RICHARD BURTON’S COLONIAL ANTHROPOLOGY | 55

incoherent and incommensurate e√ects of colonial contact, where the
nautch girl becomes at once most recognizably Indian and the least
authentic of cultural signifiers. Such harsh sentiments are echoed in his
other writings on India, where female nautch is invoked as a hazardous,
traditional mode of worlding for young Indian girls. In Goa and the Blue
Mountains (1851), he writes, for instance, ‘‘when mere children they are
initiated in the mysteries of nautching.’’π∞ Uma Chakravarti reminds us
that it is the very recurrence of the nautch girl that di√erentiates past
and present mobilizations of India in Orientalist discourse.π≤ Burton’s
writings around sexuality carefully invoke such a temporal dimension,
whereby the translation of ancient erotic texts such as the Kama Sutra
emerges as a celebratory search for revered objects of study. The nautch
girl, on the other hand, signifies an ‘‘unrecognisable’’ form of the pres-
ent, whose mongrel system of representation only elicits a trope of
disgust and distantiation. Johannes Fabian follows his discussion of the
impossibility of coeval time between colonizer and colonized by ad-
dressing precisely such temporal habits. For Fabian, anthropology in the
mid- to late nineteenth century (unlike systems of statistical classifica-
tion that render time neutral) develops as a ‘‘discipline with a negative
object,’’ where the colonized must always be ‘‘en voie de disparitioni’’ (in
the process of disappearing). Western society can thus only move for-
ward by the relegation of the savage to a signifier that was—and can-
not be.π≥
In a continued e√ort to demystify the colonial showcasing of female
nautch as native ritual, the narrator of Sind Revisited arranges for his
traveling companion, John Bull, to witness a ‘‘seedy nautch.’’π∂ During
the viewing, the female dancer is described as ‘‘wriggling her sides with
all the grace of a Punjaub bear, and uttering shrill cries which resembles
nothing but the death-shriek of a wild cat’’ (sr, 2:53). Such an image of
botched and vulgar cultural representation is supplemented in the fol-
lowing section with the ‘‘haunting’’ image of the male nautch I began
with. Gone is the language of visual excess and boredom. In its place we
have the ‘‘unholy spectacle’’ of male reverence, suspended tantalizingly
in the memory of the narrator—a visual frisson that can only be experi-
enced at the narrator’s dexterous hands. The description of the male
nautch appears for the first time in the third rewriting of Burton’s

56 | CHAPTER ONE
experiences in Sind, kept at safe narrative distance as an unreliable
fragment of memory in the narrator’s translation of the past. We are
warned of the dangers of visiting such a spectacle (‘‘sight’’), as its visita-
tions can either be lodged in ghostly hauntings (‘‘good ghost story’’) or in
unpleasant endings (‘‘bad novel’’). It is worth noting here that Burton
never describes male nautches in any of his writings on India prior to
this occurrence. Isabel Burton’s copious and detailed notes outlining
every step of her and her husband’s travels in India in 1876 also make no
mention of a male nautch. The nautch remains a narrative vision, at
best, appearing strategically in a later text aimed at correcting, or revisit-
ing, the memories of the narrator’s past.
Sind Revisited appeared almost a quarter of a century after the publica-
tion of Burton’s three earlier works on Sind. The earlier texts primarily
position Burton as a colonial recorder whose intention is to ‘‘write a
work interesting to the linguist and the ethnographer,’’ and is thus of-
fered primarily to the ‘‘Sindhi student with little hesitation’’ (sr, 1:xxi–
xxii). Occasioned by what he calls ‘‘a flying visit in the spring of 1876 to
the old haunts which I left in 1848,’’ Burton’s later text, however, osten-
sibly departs from the self-consciously ethnographic and linguistic pre-
occupations of its predecessors, producing itself more as a popular trav-
elogue aimed at illuminating and educating general English audiences.
In his preface to Sind Revisited, Burton acknowledges that the timing of
his publication may not be the most ‘‘propitious,’’ given that the ‘‘public
brain is still haunted by what has been called the ‘great Indian night-
mare,’ ’’ but he concludes that ‘‘these notes, notices and scenes in Sind’’
will nevertheless still manage to outlive (‘‘enjoy a longer life’’) the his-
torical trauma of 1857 (sr, 1:ix).
Burton’s e√orts at creating careful rhetorical distance between his
earlier more academic works and his later travelogue are tenuous at
best. His four texts on Sind all contain his signature emphasis on the
importance of the ‘‘detail’’ and of the ‘‘peculiar,’’ two narrative obsessions
that he argues provide the truth of colonial space and culture. Hence all
his writings share a much highlighted descriptive concern with the
complex of the ‘‘peculiar,’’ documented in detailed catalogues of sexual
customs, occult practices, local intoxicants, and crime data, to name a
few, mixed inevitably with a healthy dose of colonial endorsements of

RICHARD BURTON’S COLONIAL ANTHROPOLOGY | 57

the mission civilisatrice (civilizing mission). For instance, Burton writes
that ‘‘there is no better clue to the peculiar disposition of any race of
man, than that obtained by observation of the popular crimes, and the
way in which they are punished’’ (su, 194).
Sind Revisited e√ectively becomes the third edition of Scinde; or, The
Unhappy Valley, a compulsive process of cultural translation and memory
that spans decades and yields contributions such as the startling passage
on the male nautch. Weston terms such repeated returns to colonial sites
of memory ‘‘ethno-nostalgia, a language of false certitude and mystified
connections’’ that sets up (in this case) India as the site of both the
colonial home and the unfamiliar.π∑ In Burton’s case I want to suggest
that it is the return to his ‘‘public trauma’’ in India that provides the
impetus behind such acute symptoms of ethno-nostalgia. Roy adds that
the ‘‘matter of India thus becomes an important subtext,’’ a psychic
apparatus for ‘‘territorializing the unfamiliar,’’ in Burton’s famous jour-
ney to the Muslim holy site of Mecca. For Burton, his skills as a success-
ful ‘‘disguise artist, undercover agent, and ethnographer are corroborated
by repeated invocations of his ethnography of Sind.’’π∏ In the Burton
imaginary, India is thus a founding and constant site of complex ethno-
nostalgia and ‘‘failure’’ (‘‘India marks my biggest failure,’’ he writes), as he
returns to revisit his writings and translations of India. If the presence/
absence of the Karáchi report contributes to Burton’s failures in India,
the carefully produced spectacle of the male nautch promises a di√erent
end to his India story. What becomes exorcised from his earlier narra-
tions—his ‘‘scandalous report on male brothels in Karáchi’’—resurfaces
later in more muted terms as the ephemeral sight of the male nautch.ππ
The structure of such recursive traces refers us ultimately to what
Emily Apter has termed uprisings of the ‘‘colonial real,’’ the ruptures in
o≈cial discourse that intrude on the narrating subject ‘‘on the sly . . . at a
moment least expected.’’ For Apter, such terrifying flashes appear most
vividly in evidentiary writings that enjoy a privileged, ‘‘if highly problem-
atic relation to the real, for it is virtually impossible to read descriptions
of reality without awareness of the mimetic fallacies (literary conceits for
representing the visual textures of facticity) that condition the conven-
tions’’ of writings deemed realist or evidentiary. The discourse of colo-
nialism, when combined with the discourse of the real, especially perpet-
uates a ‘‘praxis for freeze-framing and hypostatizing cultural attitudes.’’π∫

58 | CHAPTER ONE
 As anthropologist and colonial bureaucrat merge in the unfolding of
an imperial archive, fiction and fact mingle promiscuously. The ‘‘colo-
nial real’’ intercedes in the interstices, in the dangerous liaisons that the
colonial observer must embark on to produce evidence of sexual perver-
sions in the colonies. Narrative sciences such as colonial anthropology
appear particularly prone to such methodological breakdowns: anthro-
pological writings on sex build on a text of the real, an account of the fact
that relies more on descriptive prowess than on accurate and meticulous
research. It is such breakdowns in rhetorical cohesions that serve as the
foundation of the spectacular story of the Karáchi report. The speaking
subject and the object of investigation become interlocked in a game of
murky genealogies as colonial observers like Burton borrow indiscrimi-
nately from discourses ranging from literature to geography. In the case
of India, such borrowings appear even more possible, and thus even
more fraught, as the imperial archive takes on gargantuan proportions
exceeding all attempts at taxonomy and regulation. Amid such chaos,
the sign of the Karáchi report embodies—in full flight, if you will—the
contaminations and sutures of colonial systems of knowledge.

NOTES

1. At the time, pederasty signified the larger terrain of sexual relations between men
and did not rigidly denote intergenerational sex. My primary research on Richard
Burton was conducted at the Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino. The
Huntington Library currently houses the largest archive of Burton materials ac-
quired through a series of purchases and donations from the Royal Anthropologi-
cal Institute and from private collectors such as Edward Metcalf and Quentin
Keynes. My thanks to Alan Jutzi, the curator of rare books, for his assistance.
2. Burton, ‘‘Terminal Essay,’’ 178–79. A footnote provides us with further informa-
tion on the two ‘‘sundry reports’’ previously compiled: ‘‘Submitted to Government
on Dec. 31, ‘47, and March 2, ‘48, they were printed in ‘Selections from the
Records of the Government of India.’ Bombay. New Series, No. xvii. Part 2, 1855.
These are (1) Notes on the Population of Sind, etc. and (2) Brief Notes on the
Modes of Intoxication, etc., written in collaboration with my late friend Assistant-
Surgeon John E. Stocks’’ (178–79). These reports resurface in extended form in
Burton’s three later works on Sind. Burton’s ten-volume translation of The Arabian
Nights was followed by a ‘‘Terminal Essay’’ addressing a number of interpretative
issues (hereafter cited as ‘‘te’’). Section D addressed ‘‘pederasty.’’ Although Burton
is careful to use words like vice and inversion, this essay represents one of the
earliest modern e√orts to collect cross-cultural and historical information about

RICHARD BURTON’S COLONIAL ANTHROPOLOGY | 59

 homosexuality. The published edition of the essay I am using is Burton’s private
copy and contains marginalia that were never incorporated. For instance, Burton
pencils in the following comment in the margins of the cited paragraph: ‘‘Addi-
tion (re comparative price of boys and eunuchs.) Seven Annas to four.’’
3. Colligan, ‘‘ ‘A Race of Born Pederasts.’ ’’
4. Isabel Burton, Morning Post, June 19, 1891.
5. Penzer, Annotated Bibliography, 291–97. Grindley’s depository was an auction
house where Burton allegedly had stored some of his prize texts. Penzer further
narrates the di≈culties he had in even procuring Burton’s collection for libraries
after the death of Isabel Burton. One of Burton’s executors, a Mrs. Fitzgerald,
‘‘started to cause endless trouble, and actually wanted to burn all the mss. And
books’’ (ibid., 22).
6. Jutzi, ‘‘Burton and His Library.’’
7. Brodie, Devil Drives, 347. See also Rice, Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton, 128–30.
8. Ondaatje, Sindh Revisited. Ondaatje’s e√orts exemplify the celebratory fervor with
which the life of Burton has been resurrected in the past few decades. As one
reviewer says of this book, ‘‘Richard Burton and Christopher Ondaatje were
bound to join up one day. The Intrepid, restless adventurer and the intrepid,
restless entrepreneur are soul mates, and only the divide of time separated them.
Now Christopher Ondaatje has solved that problem with his fascinating, some-
times moving, and often gripping account of the great Victorian explorer. Sindh
Revisited is as intriguing in its exploration of Burton’s obsessive need to push out
into the ‘unknown’ world as it is in delineating Ondaatje’s own need to push out
beyond the restrictions of his own known world.’’ John Fraser, master, Massey
College, University of Toronto (as reported on http://www.ondaatje.com, accessed
March 4, 2004).
9. Bishop, ‘‘Identities of Sir Richard Burton.’’ Bishop’s conclusions are drawn from a
review of Burton’s medical reports, which show no record of a circumcision in
his annual medical examination, conducted in 1845. While Bishop’s research is
clearly accurate, his conclusions reveal a rather limited understanding of male-to-
male sexual encounters, where the scene of ‘‘uncircumcision’’ functions as the
definitive marker of Burton’s anthropological innocence.
10. Casada, Sir Richard F. Burton, 9.
11. Kennedy, ‘‘Orientalist.’’ I am grateful to Kennedy for his informal comments on
Burton in India, and for sharing early excerpts from his book.
12. z/l/mil/5/21–22, 35, Oriental and India O≈ce Collections, British Library, Lon-
don (hereafter cited as oioc); l/mil/12/73 (1842–51), oioc.
13. Casada, Sir Richard F. Burton, 29. Dane Kennedy points out that Burton actually
lost his army commission when he entered the Foreign Service as a consul, not as
a result of overstaying his leave in Mecca (actually Cairo). He was in fact cele-
brated by the Bombay government for his e√orts on the pilgrimage. Dane Ken-
nedy, e-mail message to author, August 19, 2004.

60 | CHAPTER ONE
14. Francis Hitchman, ‘‘Review of Richard Burton, k.c.m.g.,’’ Nation, March 15,
1888, n.p.
15. ‘‘An Eminent Un-Victorian,’’ 297.
16. Joseph Boone reads Burton’s translation of The Arabian Nights as a full male body,
where the vice shares center stage with the main text, unlike Burton’s other
‘‘castrated’’ texts, where sexual details on homosexuality appear in sensational
Latin footnotes. Yet Boone misses the particular geopolitical import of the Kará-
chi report in an otherwise deft reading of the shape of the text when he juxtaposes
e√eminate Asians to hypervirile Arabs. See Boone, ‘‘Vacation Cruises.’’
17. Cohen, Sex Scandal, 1–25.
18. Žižek, ‘‘Fetishism and Its Vicissitudes.’’ Also see Apter and Pietz, Fetishism as
Cultural Discourse; and McClintock, Imperial Leather.
19. The name Sindh derives from the Sanskrit term for river or sea, sindhu. The
region is variously referred to as Sind, Scinde, or Sindh in the available colonial
and postcolonial histories. Sindh is the favored name in postcolonial histories,
and Scinde or Sind the more prominent choices in the colonial period. See
Baloch, Sindh. Baloch refers ironically to Burton in his early descriptions of the
lushness of the Sind region: ‘‘Burton, whose imagination ran riot in the Indus
Valley, metaphorically spoke of this ‘flat valley of the Indua, a luxuriant green level
blue-glazed by the intervening air’ ’’ (17).
20. Khuhro, Making of Modern Sindh, 1–31.
21. Huttenback, ‘‘Annexation.’’
22. In August 1843, Sir Henry Pottinger, a major public figure and a former senior
o≈cial in Sind, was alleged to have described Napier’s treatment of the Mirs as
‘‘the most unprincipled and disgraceful that has ever stained the annals of our
empire in India.’’ Quoted in Lambrick, Sir Charles Napier, 243.
23. Ibid., 63–133. See also Duarte, History of British Relations; and Thairani, British
Political Missions.
24. Khuhro, Making of Modern Sindh, xix, 1–31.
25. In a diary entry dated December 17, 1843, Keith Young, the judge advocate-
general appointed to assist Napier in Scinde, writes: ‘‘A√airs going on in the usual
unsatisfactory style. All whom I inspected appear to complain of the way in which
business is carried on, whether military or civil. Nobody knows exactly what he
has to do, and it is extraordinary, with the great want of order and arrangement
that exists, how matters progress at all.’’ Quoted in Scott, Scinde in the Forties, 39.
26. Bayly, ‘‘Knowing the Country’’; Bayly, Empire and Information.
27. Ludden, ‘‘Orientalist Empiricism.’’
28. Michel Foucault writes: ‘‘Sexuality appears rather as an especially dense transfer
point for relations of power.’’ Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 103.
29. Žižek, ‘‘Fetishism and Its Vicissitudes,’’ 90.
30. ‘‘Nautch: A kind of ballet-dance performed by women; also any kind of stage
entertainment; an European ball. Hind. and Mahr. nach, from Skt. nritya, dancing

RICHARD BURTON’S COLONIAL ANTHROPOLOGY | 61

 and stage-playing, through Prakrit nachcha. The word is in European use all over
India.’’ Hobson-Jobson: The Anglo-Indian Dictionary (1886; Hertfordshire: Words-
worth, 1996), 620.
31. For more on Napier’s conquest of Sind and on the heated debates that followed,
see The A√airs of Sinde; Speech of Captain William Eastwick, on the Case of the Ameers
of Sinde; ‘‘Review of the Work Entitled ‘The Conquest of Scinde, & co. by a Major-
General w.f.p. Napier, &c.’ ’’ Bombay Monthly Times, March 1, 1845.
32. Doniger, ‘‘Presidential Address,’’ 941, 943.
33. Ibid., 941.
34. More recently, Salman Rushdie writes: ‘‘There’s an apocryphal story that Napier,
after a successful campaign in what is now the south of Pakistan, sent back to
England the guilty, one-word message, ‘Peccavi.’ I have Sind. I’m tempted to name
my looking glass–Pakistan in honour of this bilingual (and fictional, because
never really uttered) pun. Let it be Peccavistan.’’ Rushdie, Shame, 92–93.
35. Doniger, ‘‘Presidential Address,’’ 940–60.
36. See Sharpe, Allegories of Empire; Suleri, Rhetoric of English India.
37. Burton, Scinde; or, The Unhappy Valley, 67 (hereafter cited parenthetically in the
running text as su).
38. Lambrick, Sir Charles Napier, 154–55. It should be noted here that Burton fully
approved of liaisons with native women. For him, such liaisons were not only
necessary given the lack of Englishwomen but also invaluable as teaching tools for
the acquisition of native languages: ‘‘The Bibi (white woman) was at this time rare
in India; the result was the triumph of the Bubu (coloured sister). I found every
o≈cer in the corps [at Baroda where he was first stationed in India] more or less
provided with one of these helpmates. We boys naturally followed suit. . . . The
‘walking dictionary’ is all but indispensable to the Student, and she teaches him
not only Hindostani grammar, but the syntaxes of native life.’’ Quoted in Burton,
Life of Sir Richard Burton, 109.
39. Lambrick, Sir Charles Napier, 220, 154–55.
40. Napier, Life and Opinions, 28.
41. Sind is repeatedly described as ‘‘young Egypt’’ in Burton’s writings and in the
related literature of the period. The term young Egypt underscores the enormous
potential the British saw in Sind. The initial view was that the territory, with its
fertile river base and natural resources, would achieve the same economic pros-
perity as Egypt. The linking of the two geographies in Burton’s translation of The
Arabian Nights is thus not entirely unprecedented. Such linkages also seep into the
debates around language acquisition, religious customs, and the larger history of
the region.
42. Levine, Prostitution, Race, and Politics, 272, 292, 326.
43. For a fictional biography of the Karáchi report, see Edwardes, Death Rides a Camel.
The Karáchi report appears in a chapter entitled ‘‘The Crucial Experiment’’ and
narrates an imaginary conversation between Burton and Sir James Hogg, from the
Court of Directors, East India Company, and a member of the Royal Geographical

62 | CHAPTER ONE
 Society. Here, Burton’s character repeatedly refers to his time in India as his
primary test for understanding Muslim society. Edwardes is also the author of
several other texts in the same vein: The Rape of India; The Jewel in the Lotus; and
with R. E. L. Masters (who wrote on homosexuality), The Cradle of Erotica.
44. There is frequent mention of ‘‘negro-slaves’’ and ‘‘negro’’ bodies throughout Bur-
ton’s writings, as well as in the writings of the nineteenth century overall. For a
detailed reading on the complex elision of slave bodies in the landscape of colo-
nial India, see Indrani Chatterjee’s pathbreaking Gender, Slavery, and Law in Colo-
nial India.
45. A detailed history of the missionary presence in India during this period can be
found in Cox, Imperial Fault Lines, esp. chapters 1 and 2.
46. Shayk or Sheikh Nasr, as he is more commonly called, is a favorite scapegoat of
such mythologies of deviance in Muslim subjects. A well known Hindu Right web-
site recycles this anecdote about Nasr’s ‘‘perverse’’ proclivities, no doubt building
on references such as those available in Burton’s translation: ‘‘The Koran tells us of
boys graced with eternal youth who will attend the faithful in paradise. The
practice of sodomy is frowned upon in the Koran if the act takes place between two
Moslems. There is nothing mentioned about a Moslem sodomising an infidel. This
seems to have the silent approval of Islam. Many European travelers and Christian
missionaries, unfamiliar with sodomite propensities of many Moslems, su√ered
sexual molestation in Persia in the hands of even government o≈cials. Part of the
circulation of the mythology of Islam and its rapacious subjects—as reported on a
Hindutva website: Sheikh Nasr, the governor of Bushire, once said to an English
missionary: ‘I stopped a caravan of Jews bound for Afghanistan, penetrating all
forty of their females in one night. They protested that such action was an outrage,
but I said the outrage was justified in that all of their o√spring would be
Moslems.’ ’’ ‘‘Islam in Action iii: Sodomy among the Believers,’’ Hindu Unity.org,
http://www.hinduunity.org (accessed October 1, 2005).
47. For more on the naval history of the East India Company, see Sutton, Lords of
the East.
48. Roy, Indian Tra≈c, 20–21.
49. Scott, Scinde in the Forties, 184. For more on the critical role Ghuzni plays in the
historiography of India, see Thapar, Somanatha.
50. Lambrick, Sir Charles Napier, 10.
51. Martin, The Influence of Tropical Climates on European Constitutions, 213.
52. Arnold, ‘‘Race, Place, and Bodily Di√erence.’’
53. There is by now a vast body of scholarship on the connections between anthropol-
ogy and colonialism. For some early seminal texts, see Lévi-Strauss, Savage Mind;
Asad, Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter; Stocking, Race, Culture, and Evolu-
tion; and Cli√ord and Marcus, Culture.
54. Kulick, ‘‘Introduction.’’
55. Tuzin, ‘‘Forgotten Passion.’’
56. Weston, Render Me, Gender Me; Povinelli, Cunning of Recognition.

RICHARD BURTON’S COLONIAL ANTHROPOLOGY | 63

57. Stocking, ‘‘Maclay, Kubary, Malinowski,’’ in Colonial Situations, 9–74.
58. Morris, Introduction, vii.
59. Stocking, ‘‘What’s in a Name?’’ Many other controversial activities are attributed
to the anthropologicals. The inner circle (which included Burton) was alleged
to have been part of an eating club called the Cannibals, and members ‘‘were
gavelled to order by a mace in the form of a Negro head.’’ Stocking adds a few
more choice comments with respect to Burton and the asl: ‘‘A latent homosexual
who maintained a virtually asexual relationship with his morally rigid Catho-
lic wife, Burton was at the same time intimate with such ‘other Victorians’ as
Monckton Miles and H. S. Ashbee’’ (ibid., 368).
60. Hailey, ‘‘Role of Anthropology.’’
61. Niranjana, Siting Translation, 9, 13, 43. For more on William Jones and Oriental-
ism, see Raymond Schwab’s influential study, Oriental Renaissance; and Sharpe,
‘‘Violence of Light.’’
62. Pels, ‘‘Rise and Fall,’’ 82–96.
63. Ludden, ‘‘Orientalist Empiricism,’’ 253–59.
64. See in particular Macaulay’s oft-cited speech ‘‘Minute on Indian Education,’’ in
Macaulay, Speeches by Lord Macaulay, 729.
65. Patel, Lyrical Movements, 180–95.
66. Khuhro, ‘‘Language and Education,’’ Making of Modern Sindh, 223–79. See also
Lambrick, Sind. Lambrick relies exclusively on Burton’s Sind texts to discuss the
evolution of the Sindhi language.
67. Roy, Indian Tra≈c, 185–210. Roy refers specifically to Burton’s ‘‘going fantee’’
habits during his infamous pilgrimage to Mecca.
68. In their introduction to a special Victorian Studies issue on Victorian ethnogra-
phies, James Buzard and Joseph Childers suggest that a definite shift occurred in
discourses of anthropology at the end of the nineteenth century. The field of
‘‘comparativist ethnology’’ appeared to give way to ‘‘ethnography,’’ a field that
centers itself around a method ‘‘known as ‘participant observation’ and focusing
on one of the many visitable-in-the-field ‘cultures’ of the world.’’ For Buzard and
Childers, these shifts are not mutually exclusive and rely on an idea of multiple
cultures, in clear contradistinction to E. B. Tylor’s single-culture concept. Some of
the questions they ask include: ‘‘Did anthropology’s modern apparatus of cultural
representation find its rationale exclusively in imperial surveillance and domina-
tion, or were there other factors, other narratives? Did ‘culture’ drive ‘race’ out of
the anthropological vocabulary, or permit it to function under other guises?’’
While Buzard and Childers do not address the relationship of the study of sex to
the emergent field of ethnography, the figure of Burton forces us to make that
connection. Buzard and Childers, ‘‘Introduction,’’ 352.
69. Burton, Sindh Revisited, 209–10 (hereafter cited as sr).
70. Burton uses the terms Nách and nautch interchangeably in his writings on India.
There exists extensive feminist scholarship on the genealogy of the female nautch
figure and its relationship to colonial epistemes of sexual regulation and trans-

64 | CHAPTER ONE
 gression in British India. For further discussion, see Spear and Meduri, ‘‘Knowing
the Dancer.’’ My interest here is more local and confined to Burton’s expositions
on the subject.
71. Burton, Goa, 125. Burton’s dismissal of the female nautch is echoed in much of the
literature of the period. Hugo James, an o≈cer in the Bengal Army and formerly
with Major Herbert Edwardes, repeats the same aversion to a female nautch:
‘‘During the evening we were requested to witness a nautch. . . . For an English-
man, five minutes attendance is su≈cient; the performance after that period
becomes irksome and uninteresting, unless he appears to be a linguist. . . . The
women appear to execute all their dances alike, at least I could discover no
di√erence between one dance and another.’’ James, A Volunteer’s Scramble, 27.
72. Chakravarti, ‘‘Whatever Happened.’’
73. Fabian, Time, 194–97.
74. A footnote explains that ‘‘Seedy (a corruption of the Arabic . . . ‘my lord’) is the
popular name in India for African blacks’’ (sr, 2:52).
75. Weston, Long Slow Burn, 24.
76. Roy, ‘‘Oriental Exhibits,’’ 203.
77. Letters from Richard Burton to Grattan Greary, 1876–1879, Metcalf Manuscript
Collection, Huntington Library. Burton’s attachment to India as both a colonial
home and a site of the unfamiliar continued until the end of his long career. He
published editorials under a pseudonym for the Times of India until 1880, and
much secrecy is structured into these editorials. In fact, Burton’s pseudonym
remains unknown, making it di≈cult to compile an archive of his writings and
editorials during the time. All we have left are a series of letters exchanged
between Grattan Geary, the editor of the Times of India, and Burton during 1876–
79 that contain many cryptic references to Burton’s anonymous contributions to
the newspaper and the urgent necessity to maintain anonymity. In one letter
Burton writes, ‘‘Imprimis be under my own name? If so I can tell you little having
fear of the f.o. [Foreign O≈ce] before my eyes! Entendez vous?’’ In another letter,
Burton expresses concern over the success of Sind Revisited in India and urges
Greary to assist in its distribution there: ‘‘By the By, Bentleys are printing my
‘Sind Revisited’ and I am anxious to give it a good chance in India. . . . What would
you advise me to do for Bombay and Calcutta? I must not fail this time.’’
78. Apter, Continental Drift, 113–20.

RICHARD BURTON’S COLONIAL ANTHROPOLOGY | 65

{ two }

SUBJECT TO SODOMY

The Case of Colonial India

The case is one of an uncommon character, but part of its peculiarity

it owes to the peculiarity of the o√ence in which there is no injured
party.
Q U E E N E M P R E S S V. K H A I R AT I ( 1 8 8 4 )

I f the archival record of sexuality founds its narration in the

contextual lineaments of a missing Karáchi report, it must
similarly realign itself to other cases of equally ‘‘uncommon
character.’’ This present chapter shifts emphasis from the Kará-
chi report’s (lost) secrets to investigate a genre in colonial India
more recognizably generative of sexuality’s archival traces: the
legal case record. For histories of sexuality, legal records, de-
spite their pathologizing bent, appear to pro√er much needed
information (however piecemeal) on the social and cultural
worlds in which sexual acts are committed (and criminalized).∞
Thus an available case record—one that provides salacious de-
tails of the crime of sodomy—should at first glance appear at a
remove from the secrecy of the Karáchi report. Yet the archival
forms of the report and the legal case record are in many ways
deeply related. Both sets of materials draw on a colonial ar-
chive that fixes sexuality as loss and abundance, as (forensic)
invisibility and (anthropological) hypervisibility. Just as the
(missing) report participates in the enactments of o≈cial dis-
courses, lending coherence to their seeming inchoateness, so
the record of the legal case ostensibly stabilizes and organizes
the (failed) singularities of colonial knowledge. Even a failed case, as
the one I will turn to, stages a ‘‘problem-event’’ that verifies ‘‘something
in a system’’: an event or act is named and forged through the idiom of
the judgment.≤
Here, then, is one such ‘‘problem-event’’: On January 31, 1884, the
High Court of Allahabad called a case in which one Khairati had been
previously convicted by Mr. J. L. Denniston, sessions judge of Mora-
dabad, of an o√ence under section 377 of the Penal Code. The charge on
which the appellant was committed and tried was the following: ‘‘That
he, within four months previously to the 15th June (1883), the exact time
it being impossible to state, did in the district of Moradabad abet the
o√ence of sodomy, by allowing some unknown person to commit the
o√ence of sodomy on his person, and was at the time of the commission
of the o√ence present, for which reason he must, under s. 114 of the
Indian Penal Code be deemed to have committed the o√ence itself, and
thereby committed an o√ence punishable under s. 377 of the Indian
Penal Code.’’ The particulars of the conviction as disclosed in an excerpt
from the judgment of the sessions judge reveal that Khairati was initially
arrested for ‘‘singing in women’s clothes among the women of a certain
family’’ of his village and thereafter subjected to a physical examination
by the civil surgeon. On examination, Khairati was shown ‘‘to have the
characteristic mark of a habitual catamite—the distortion of the orifice
of the anus into a shape of a trumpet—and also to be a√ected with
syphilis in the same region in a manner which distinctly points to
unnatural intercourse within the last few months.’’ When asked about
his physical condition, Khairati denied all charges of sodomy and argued
that he had su√ered a serious case of dysentery, thus causing the exten-
sion in his anus. His explanation was dismissed as being insu≈cient and
inadequate to explain the presence of syphilis in the same region. The
sessions judge, Denniston, concluded that while none of the three cir-
cumstances individually (wearing women’s clothes, subtended anus, and
the presence of syphilis) were enough to provide evidence of criminality,
taken together they left no ‘‘doubt that the accused had recently been the
subject of sodomy.’’≥
Even as he rendered this guilty verdict, Denniston was careful to
point out the complex legal peculiarities of the Khairati case, in which
no precise record of the crime’s enactment nor any testimony of the

68 | CHAPTER TWO
victim(s) of the alleged crime were ever located. Such a verdict, his
judgment argued, despite its legal ‘‘obscurities,’’ had to be rationalized in
the larger ‘‘spirit of the law,’’ where ‘‘misconduct of this sort . . . cannot
be reasonably exempted from punishment.’’ In passing such a judgment,
Denniston also overrode any procedural objections stemming from the
Code of Criminal Procedure by simply stating that the absence of ‘‘the
particulars alluded to in s. 222 of the Criminal Procedure Code weakens
the case, but it does not destroy it.’’ When the case Queen Empress v.
Khairati was later called before Judge Straight (that was indeed his
name) of the Allahabad High Court, Khairati’s earlier conviction was
quickly dismissed for lack of precise detail about the particulars of the
o√ence, as the ‘‘exact time, place, and persons with whom these o√ences
were committed’’ were not fully discovered.∂ Straight concluded his
remarks on the case by declaring that while the ‘‘accused is clearly a
habitual sodomite,’’ and while he could ‘‘fully appreciate the desire of the
authorities at Moradabad to check these disgusting practices, neither
they nor he can set law and procedure at defiance in order to obtain an
object, however laudable.’’∑
Several compacted historical details stand out in this remarkable
narrative enactment of Khairati’s indeterminate yet somehow relentless
criminality. The sessions judge’s judgment of the case mentions, as an
aside, that Khairati was under police supervision as a eunuch previous to
his arrest, even though he clearly was ‘‘not a eunuch in the literal sense.’’
We are also told that Khairati was arrested for ‘‘singing dressed as a
woman,’’ even though his testimony insists that while he ‘‘habitually
[wore] women’s clothes,’’ he was not singing on the occasion on which
he was detained. Further, despite their opposing judgments, Denniston
and Straight both repeatedly labeled Khairati a ‘‘habitual catamite’’ or
‘‘sodomite,’’ where the terms of his ‘‘habitual’’ criminality remained
suspended between the epistemological imperatives of legal codification
and colonial anthropology. Khairati could not legally be categorized as a
‘‘habitual o√ender,’’ a grouping that did not extend to persons ‘‘addicted
to acts of immorality.’’ As colonial police manuals, such as The Police
O≈cer’s Companion, explain: ‘‘To constitute a person, a habitual o√ender,
it is necessary, that the subsequent o√ence charged, should have been
committed by the accused after the previous convictions.’’∏ Nor could
Khairati’s alleged criminality be simply described in the established

THE CASE OF COLONIAL INDIA | 69

o≈cial idiom of ‘‘criminal tribes’’ such as the Kuravers, Bhamptas, and
Waddars, for instance, whose hereditary vices (thuggee, dacoity) colo-
nial anthropology had, by then, carefully documented and helped legis-
late.π The Thuggee and Dacoity Department ceased its activities in 1863,
but the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871 ensured the continued codification
and reification of native innate criminality. As Anand Yang and others
have argued, the quest to identify and mark those alleged to be habitu-
ated to crime by birth gradually became understood as a large-scale legal
exercise, in which the much touted edifice of British empiricism gave
way to a formidable system of irrational surveillance and brutality. The
result was a state profoundly sensitive to the threat of collective criminal
actions, but much less involved in the codification of individual crime.∫
Khairati’s ‘‘habitual’’ crime of sodomy thus stands at the cusp of the
colonial state’s relationship between an individual and a collective crime,
testing the limits of such demarcations. How does a case with merely an
individual bodily trace (‘‘subtended anus’’), no palpable injurious e√ect
(‘‘no injured party’’), no palpable location and witness, and no ostensible
threat posed to the public produce such a conceptual stress? After all,
Khairati was found mingling with the women of a family in his village
with no complaints from the family members ever recorded. Khairati’s
description as an incomplete eunuch (‘‘the man is not a eunuch in the
literal sense’’) provides a complex script, in which the case’s troubling
lack of temporality (the crucial missing ‘‘when’’ of the unnatural act) is
rerouted through an ontological criminality both judicially unmanage-
able and morally reprehensible. The language of the ontological replaces
the need for the where and/or the when, such that native sexuality is
rendered indeterminate and indefinite. In the case of Khariati, the ‘‘un-
natural o√ence’’ is as troublingly unverifiable as it is perplexingly immea-
surable. In his work on colonialism and convict society in the Andaman
Islands, Satadru Sen attributes such readings of ontological criminality to
what he calls ‘‘the Criminal Tribes’’ phenomenon, where ‘‘even those
who rejected the models of collective criminality . . . saw crime by
Indians as essentially indigenous phenomena, rooted in the structure
and the belief systems of Indian society.’’ For Sen, the sensationalist
reportage of ‘‘exotic’’ crimes such as those of sex or ritual violence
‘‘served voyeuristic tastes,’’ whereby police compilations of the crimes
(even those that would resonate with the British such as ‘‘witch mur-

70 | CHAPTER TWO
ders’’) were su≈ciently atavistic and remote in the Indian context that
the British could feel outside them. The image of the Indian criminal
‘‘became more rigidly the ‘Native Criminal’: a cultural Other who might
inspire titillation, fascination,’’ but not without reinforcing a di√erentia-
tion from the colonial ruler.Ω While Sen’s theorizations clearly encom-
pass the larger exotic landscape of colonial criminality, the case of Queen
Empress v. Khairati is not so easily contained.
Queen Empress v. Khairati reads paradoxically as an endorsement of,
and as a challenge to, the colonial ‘‘spirit of the law,’’ where Khairati’s
persecution and acquittal rely on a judicial mythos of habitual sodomy
that equally authorizes and destabilizes his criminality.∞≠ On the one
hand, the excerpted judgment from the case clearly marks the physical
indeterminacy of Khairati’s status as a eunuch, making it di≈cult to
easily disappear the case as yet another perverse instantiation of a native
group’s criminal customs and practices. On the other hand, Khairati’s
narrative could easily be folded into the many alleged mid- to late
nineteenth-century reports and anecdotal accounts that periodically re-
corded the persistence of this vice in eunuchs. So widespread and rou-
tine was the practice among eunuchs, the story goes, that its recognition
as a criminal o√ence punishable by law was often a source of community
consternation and denial. Norman Chevers, in his famous treatise on
medical jurisprudence in India, cites exhaustive research on the ‘‘very
extensive and abominable trade of unnatural prostitution regularly car-
ried on by eunuchs’’ and cautions his readers that ‘‘especially in the
larger Mahomedan towns, Upcountry, these practices are so common as
scarcely to be regarded as criminal by the ignorant. Thus we find two
prisoners, convicted of the crime on their own confession, relying upon
the plea that ‘it was their Occupation.’ ’’∞∞ Vinay Lal warns against such
analytical attempts to communalize hijra formations, arguing that the
‘‘colonial state . . . was predisposed to distinguish Hindu hijras even
while recognizing that they were alike in all respects.’’∞≤ Laurence Pres-
ton clarifies the confusion around communal a≈liations by arguing that
in nineteenth-century Western India, for instance, ‘‘hijdas . . . bor-
rowed rather freely from the cumulative social backgrounds of those
who joined the community.’’ Preston thus cites one colonial report that
claims that although ‘‘hijdas’’ come from multiple caste backgrounds,
‘‘upon emasculation [they] take the names of Musselmanee women, and

THE CASE OF COLONIAL INDIA | 71

as such, live and are buried,’’ while a second report from the same
locality and period suggests that hijras ‘‘after their transformation [cas-
tration] assumed rather fanciful, vaguely Hindu names.’’∞≥
Khairati, as a name, further functions as a cautionary tale because it
contains no clear linguistic or religiously aligned kinship. A search for
the name during the period reveals it to be used both by Hindu and
Muslim communities, rendering a reading of it as simply ‘‘Mahomedan’’
factually unreliable. Quite literally, Khairat is plural of khair and means
daan, charity-related giving alms, and khairaatii means ‘‘intended for
charitable purposes, to be given in charity, given or received in charity,
charitable (as in khairaatii shafaakhaanaa or charitable dispensary).’’∞∂
However, even as the meaning of Khairati eludes colonial religious logic,
it more provocatively gestures to a di√erent set of connections with the
colonial state, connections that reroute the relationship of Khairati from
a ‘‘habitual sodomite’’ to a potentially revenue-generating subject. Pres-
ton argues, for instance, that when colonial authorities discovered that
‘‘hijdas had claims on the public revenues through grants of cash and
lands, or apparently possessed an o≈cial and codified right to beg, the
British indulged in a most unusual correspondence attempting to ex-
plain the hijdas and devise means for their elimination.’’∞∑ Extraordinary
e√orts were made by the colonial state to foreground the ‘‘barbarous
practices’’ and sexual misconduct of the ‘‘hijdas,’’ precisely to shift at-
tention from their legal claims to revenue to their ostensibly aberrant
position in native society. Preston cites nineteenth-century colonial
sources that describe ‘‘hijdas’’ as ‘‘extorting alms’’ using the threat of
indecent exposure and conduct, even as precolonial records from the
eighteenth-century Maratha state clearly state that ‘‘in each subdistrict,
there was a vatandar hijda, a holder of a vatan ‘hereditary right’ to collect
a hak ‘perquisite,’ from the villagers.’’ ‘‘Hijdas,’’ Preston underscores,
often held their vatans by virtue of sanads, property or title deeds, legal
rights that the colonial state had no intention of upholding.∞∏
What makes Preston’s claims resonate in the case of Khairati is that
the Queen Empress v. Khairati case judgment clearly states that Khairati
was ‘‘previously under police supervision’’ for undeclared reasons. I am
wary of pushing such connections beyond the speculative because there
are few available textual references (in the form of property deeds and
the like) to suggest a more forceful reading of Khairati as a revenue

72 | CHAPTER TWO
generator along the lines of Preston’s ‘‘hijdas’’ constituencies. The inter-
vention of such a potential reading or misreading lies more in the
challenges the Khairati case poses for colonial legal studies and their
reliance on the property-subject nexus as the structure of colonial law.
For instance, scholars such as Rachel Sturman, Durba Ghosh, and Kunal
Parker have argued variously that ‘‘native’’ kinship structures largely
articulate the colonial subject’s right to property ownership and, in turn,
his or her recognition as a subject under the law. For these scholars, such
kinship structures both found and confound colonial legal structures, as
their instantiations often consolidate and exceed the imaginings of colo-
nial law. Thus Sturman argues for the rights of native children born out
of wedlock, Ghosh for the claims of Eurasian concubines, Parker for the
case of devadasis (literally, maids to the gods) in central India, and so
forth.∞π Such avatars of kinship forms outside the Eurocentric model of
marriage certainly accentuate colonial judicial lacunae, but they still
derive from largely heterosexual kinship models in positing the subject-
property nexus. Illegitimate children, concubines, and devadasis are all
variant forms of a still dominant heterosexuality, one that is significantly
complicated by Khairati’s and the ancestral right of the ‘‘hijdas’’ to prop-
erty and revenue. The cover story here is aberrant sexuality, while the
drama inexorably unfolds in the arena of revenue and taxation.∞∫
As a citational reference in the annals of legal history, Queen Em-
press v. Khairati occupies an even more forceful and perplexing presence.
Between 1885 and 1920, the case repeatedly appeared as the only prece-
dent and illustration of section 377 in the various legal commentaries,
digests, and reporters available from the period.∞Ω John Mayne’s much
referenced The Criminal Law of India (1901) lists the Khairati case as
the primary source for legal commentary on unnatural o√ences, nar-
rating it as a cautionary tale for authorities seeking convictions under
section 377: ‘‘A conviction under this section cannot be sustained when
the charge neither stated time nor place, nor pointed to any person
with whom the o√ence was committed, and when the evidence merely
proved that the accused went about in woman’s clothes, and bore upon
his person the physical signs of habitual sodomy. As the Court pointed
out, the evidence was at the very least defective, in not making out that
any o√ence had been committed within the jurisdiction of the Court
(Reg. V. Khairati, 6 All. 204).’’≤≠ D. Sutherland’s exhaustive legal digest,

THE CASE OF COLONIAL INDIA | 73

The Digest of Indian Law Reports (1890), accounts for a similar encapsula-
tion of the case: ‘‘On Unnatural O√ences: Where a person was tried
for—and convicted on a charge which did not allege the time when,
place where, or point to any known or unknown person with whom, the
o√ence was committed, and without any proof of these particulars, the
facts proved against him only being that he habitually wore woman’s
clothes and exhibited physical signs of having committed the o√ence:
Held that the conviction was not sustainable. (Cr.) i.l.r. 6 All. 204.’’≤∞
Both Mayne’s and Sutherland’s summaries of the case reproduce the
language of ‘‘habit’’ and ‘‘physical signs,’’ even as they make abundantly
clear the legal tenuousness of the crime’s particulars. Other popular
legal reporters of the period contain bibliographic references to the case
as precedent for section 377 and include Joseph Vere Woodman’s A Digest
of Indian Law Cases (1894), J. B. Worgan’s Consecutive Tables, Criminal
Cases Being an Annotation of the Criminal Cases in the Indian Law Reports
from their Commencement to the End of 1897 (1898), and B. D. Bose’s A
Digest of Indian Law Cases Containing High Court Reports, 1862–1909 and
Privy Council Reports of Appeals from India, 1836–1909, with an Index of
Cases (1912).≤≤ In every appearance, the Khairati case paradoxically be-
comes an exemplary instantiation of the scarcity of solid evidence, as
well as of the ubiquity of native perversity.
This citational mobilization of Queen Empress v. Khairati is perplex-
ing precisely because there are numerous successful sodomy convictions
available in legal tables and case records, from the establishment of the
Penal Code and the Code of Criminal Procedure in 1860 and 1861,
respectively, through 1920. For instance, the Judicial Statements (Crimi-
nal) for the North-West Provinces in 1879 record forty-one convictions
for unnatural o√ences, with seventy-two persons still under trial.≤≥ Simi-
larly, imperial returns for o√ences reported, and of persons tried, com-
mitted, and acquitted in Punjab during 1874 report sixty-two convictions
under section 377, while in 1880, thirty-eight convictions are recorded,
with fourteen persons under trial.≤∂ There are several other statistical
tables of criminal data available, such as excerpts in the annual Statement
Exhibiting the Moral and Material Progress and Condition of India, that
also contain comparative figures for persons convicted under section 377
in the di√erent presidencies.≤∑ These statistical typologies are clearly
not without their problems, but nevertheless they do figurally document

74 | CHAPTER TWO
the citational presence and possibility of cases before and after Queen
Empress v. Khairati.≤∏ However, the number of transcripts of case rec-
ords and judgments available between 1860 and 1920 in the various
presidencies contradict the high number of convictions recorded in the
statistical tables.≤π For example, I was able to find only five case records
and judgments under section 377 for the period 1860–1920: Queen
Empress v. Naiada (Allahabad, 1875–78), Jiwan v. Empress (Punjab, 1884),
Queen Empress v. Khairati (Allahabad, 1884), Sardar Ahmed v. Emperor
(Lahore, 1914), and Ganpat v. Emperor (Lahore, 1918).≤∫
Queen Empress v. Naiada (1875–78) largely contains a discussion of
the appropriate punishment available for a youth convicted under sec-
tion 377. Justice Spankie, the High Court judge, orders Naiada’s transpor-
tation for fourteen years instead of transportation for life. In Jiwan v.
Empress (1884) the available judgment similarly describes appropriate
punishment for Jiwan, a youth o√ender, for his conviction of bestiality. A
reference is made here to a similar judgment in Bhagwan Das v. Empress
(1883), but no record of this judgment is available. The judgment for
Sardar Ahmed v. Emperor (1914) provides more details of the conviction,
wherein the appellant, Sardar Ahmed, a schoolmaster in a boy’s school,
is convicted on three charges of attempting to commit an unnatural
o√ence with Tara Chand, a boy of thirteen, one of his pupils in the
school. The district magistrate, we are told, goes to great e√ort to point
out that ‘‘it is very easy to make a charge of this kind and that it is un-
safe to convict on the uncorroborated evidence of the boy, Tara Chand.
From the nature of the case there would be no corroboration of the
actual commission of the o√ences.’’ Curiously, in this case, the High
Court judge, J. Scott-Smith, rules that ‘‘even though the statement of
Tara Chand is practically uncorroborated,’’ the conviction cannot be put
aside.≤Ω Ganpat v. Emperor (1918) is the only other case besides Queen
Empress v. Khairati in which the conviction of the o√ender, Ganpat,
is put aside by the High Court judge under appeal, in this case on
the grounds that no corroborating ‘‘semen was found on the loincloth’’
of Ganpat.≥≠
I turn to this piecemeal history of Queen Empress v. Khairati to medi-
ate a conversation on the interpenetration of sexuality, governance, and
the colonial archive and to ask the following question: How does a case
that stumbles over critical issues of evidence, criminality, and legal

THE CASE OF COLONIAL INDIA | 75

codification become the colonial trace for crimes against nature? In
many ways, the Khairati case captures specific anxieties and preoccupa-
tions around the potential criminality of the colonial body where sys-
tems of proof and evidence structure who and what we understand to be
subjects under the law. Here is a case into which the incoherencies of
colonial rule are scripted as law and contained by the paradoxical full-
ness of a failed kinship attachment (Khairati is ‘‘not a eunuch in the
literal sense.’’) Within such manipulations, the category of sodomy (and
connectedly, of unnatural o√ences) complexly widens from a narrow
and tightly marked understanding of criminal sexual behavior to a crisis
of legal translation. Without an eyewitness, without a victim, and with-
out a chronology, the narration of native sodomy in Queen Empress v.
Khairati remains e√ectively buried in the impossibility of an ontological
o√ence, named as habit but still unpunishable by colonial law. A nation
of ‘‘habitual sodomites’’ is alerted to the inchoate promises of their own
sexual criminalities.≥∞ The Khairati case also stands at the intersection of
multiple debates on the codification of the Penal Code, the role of
medical jurisprudence, and the expansion of the imperial archive. It is to
some of these matters that I shall turn in this chapter, though very
briefly, and only by way of connecting to more arresting associations
raised by the Khairati case.≥≤

C O D I F I C AT I O N A N D T R A N S L AT I O N

Whoever voluntarily has carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any
man, woman or animal shall be punished with imprisonment for life, or with
imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to ten years, and
shall also be liable to fine.
Explanation: Penetration is su≈cient to constitute the carnal intercourse nec-
essary to the o√ence described in this section.
The o√ence made punishable under this section requires that penetration,
however little, should be proved strictly. Thus an attempt to commit this o√ence
should be an attempt to thrust the male organ into the anus of the passive agent.
Some activity on the part of the accused in that particular direction ought to be
proved strictly. A mere preparation for the operation should not necessarily be
construed as an attempt. Emission is not necessary.
‘‘ O F U N N AT U R A L O F F E N C E S , ’’ S E C T I O N 3 7 7 , I N D I A N P E N A L C O D E ( I N S T I T U T E D I N 1 8 6 0 ,

REVISED THEREAFTER IN 1932, 1968, AND 1982)

76 | CHAPTER TWO
In his introductory notes on the crafting of the Indian Penal Code in
1835, Lord Thomas Babington Macaulay underlines both the necessity
and the di≈culty of the task. For Macaulay, none of the presidencies or
territories of British India provide any models of criminal codes relevant
or impartial enough to work as foundations for a viable uniform criminal
code. Missing the enormous historical irony of his own words, Macaulay
passionately claims that the primary reason for such a deplorable lack of
legal models is that ‘‘all existing systems of law in India are foreign. All
were introduced by conquerors di√ering in race, manners, language, and
religion from the great mass of people. The criminal law of the Hindoos
was long ago superseded by that of the Mahomedans, and the Ma-
homedan criminal law has in its turn been superseded, to a great extent,
by British Regulations. The British Regulations, having been made by
three di√erent legislators, contain as might be expected very di√erent
provisions for the same crime.’’≥≥ He points out that the ‘‘penal law of
Bengal and of the Madras Presidency is, in fact, Mahomedan law, which
has gradually been distorted to such an extent as to deprive it of all
title to the religious veneration of the Mahomedans, yet which retains
enough of its original peculiarities to perplex and encumber the admin-
istration of justice.’’≥∂ Such irregularities are complicated for Macau-
lay by native religious sentiments, especially in matters of morality.
He writes that such structures ‘‘arm the Courts with almost unlimited
power to punish as they think fit o√ences against morality, or against the
peace and good order of society, if those o√ences are penal by the
religious law of the o√ender. . . . For example, a Mahomedan is punish-
able for adultery: a Christian is at liberty to commit adultery with
impunity.’’≥∑
Interestingly enough, Macaulay’s zealous attempts to secularize the
Indian Penal Code find their weakest link at the root of the very morality
argument that founds its strengths—the ‘‘physical di√erence which ex-
ists between the European and the native of India renders it impossible
to subject them to the same system of discipline.’’ Macaulay’s hesitations
around particular definitions of ‘‘physical di√erence’’ unfold with exag-
gerated awkwardness when it comes to formulations of sections dealing
with o√ences against the body and the state. Keeping in mind that
Macaulay’s notes were written prior to the Indian Mutiny of 1857, his
repeated emphasis on the racial di√erences between the Asiatics he

THE CASE OF COLONIAL INDIA | 77

governs and the Englishmen who rule are particularly critical. For Ma-
caulay, the crisis as a secular reformer lies in the project of, and the
desire of monitoring and translating English morality for, the gover-
nance of Indian subjects. ‘‘It is unnecessary to point out how desirable it
is that our national character should stand high in the estimation of the
inhabitants of India, and how much the character would be lowered by
the frequent exhibitions of Englishmen of the worst description, placed
in the most degrading situations, stigmatised by the courts of justice in
India.’’ Macaulay makes the point that Englishmen committing unnatu-
ral o√ences should not be tried in British India, for fear of the conse-
quences of trial on public and civil life.≥∏
Macaulay’s juridical project thus produces the central agon for the
codification of Anglo-Indian law as torn between two conflicting legal
forces, each of which represented an essential aspect of the British
colonial project. As Parker argues, the first can be broadly understood
‘‘as a legal solicitude for the subject firmly located within a knowable
British ‘public law’; the second may be described as a legal recognition of
community firmly located within a fundamentally unknowable Indian
‘private law.’ ’’ The legal imagination of the nineteenth century sus-
tained complementary and oppositional lexicons to contain each of
these forces. Grounded in legacies of Benthamism, the Indian Penal
Code embodied the exemplary nature of ‘‘British public law,’’ thus being
referred to in the reasonable language of the civilizing mission. On the
other hand, Hindu and Islamic law tended to be represented in the
language of di≈culty, error, and failure on the part of the Anglo-Indian
judiciary.≥π
Scholars such as David Skuy further provocatively argue that the
mythology of modern judicial reform that so consistently undergirded
the implantation of British law into a judicially ‘‘primitive’’ colonial
India is more likely a conceptual hoax. For Skuy, an understanding of the
process that shaped the Indian Penal Code suggests that the code did not
represent Britain’s attempt to modernize India’s criminal law; rather, its
enactment reflected developments in England that led to a massive
overhaul of the British criminal justice system. In e√ect, defects in
England’s legal system motivated the codification of Indian law. And that
only India ended up with a criminal code ‘‘illustrates that imperial
powers were often able to do in their colonies, what they were unable to

78 | CHAPTER TWO
do at home.’’≥∫ Skuy’s claims, problematic as they may be, open up an
entirely unexplored avenue of investigation in colonial legal history.
Criminal law, in particular, was also something of a natural choice for
colonial codifiers because British administrators believed that the re-
form of criminal law would meet the least social resistance. Colonial
lawmakers such as Henry Maine and C. D. Field claimed that crime was
universally understood, whereas civil law addressed what Maine termed
the ‘‘local peculiarities of the country.’’≥Ω Field further argued that the
‘‘principles of criminal law are su≈ciently simple in themselves; and
nations, whether more or less civilized, have no essential diversities of
opinion as to what acts constitute o√ences against the community, and
ought to be punished as such.’’∂≠
Yet the project of a colonial criminal penal code was not without its
detractors and skeptics. Much discussion ensued in the Law Commis-
sion as to the practical e≈cacy of such an enterprise in a geopolitical
context as culturally complicated as India. A central concern of the
discussions revolved around the necessary transparency of the Penal
Code and the concurrent problems of translation. One of the pecu-
liarities of the Indian Penal Code was its dependence on so-called il-
lustrations, descriptive anecdotes that served to explain the spirit of the
law. These illustrations drew heavily from principles of British case law
and thus relied on an analogical imperative and a narrative style that
produced a logic of recall, while still maintaining the abstraction of legal
codification. Sir Lawrence Peel, the chief justice of the Supreme Court
at Fort William, was one of the first colonial jurists to express his ire at
the use of illustrations in the establishment of an Indian Penal Code. For
Peel, the whole concept of illustrations undermined the solidity and
absoluteness of the British moral enterprise and gave native prosecutors
the right to freely interpret and indeed rewrite the law: ‘‘The first and
prominent defect in the Code as promulgated appears to me to be the so-
called illustrations. Illustration of a Law by the legislature which frames
it, may be viewed as an admission that they want the skill to make their
Law speak for itself. But the Indian legislature is not inops consilii, and
cannot plead that reason for an Illustrated law. The illustrations annexed
to this Code, would not in my opinion taken as a whole assist the
interpreters of the Law. I think it would be wiser to pass an unillustrated
Code, than one thus illustrated.’’ Peel turned to o√ences against public

THE CASE OF COLONIAL INDIA | 79

decency as a primary example of where such an illustrated code failed to
fulfill its obligations to clarity and absoluteness. He writes that the Penal
Code, through its reliance on illustrations, refuses to attend to the gamut
of o√ences possible under the law. An illustrated code is equally limited
by its own linguistic decency and by the practical indecency of the
crimes it must cover. As an example of one such limitation, he adds, that
it is ‘‘too narrow’’ to insist that the ‘‘exposure of a person . . . must be
done with intent to insult the modesty of a woman.’’ He continues,
‘‘There is no reason why this o√ence should be limited so as to be
capable of being committed only against the modesty of women. Men
may expose their persons obscenely so as to insult the modesty of their
own sex . . . intending to excite to unnatural lust.’’ He concludes his
observations by noting that ‘‘a curious instance of the defect of a Law
similarly worded occurred several years ago under the Vagrant Law then
in force in England, but the indecency of the Particulars forbids my
detailing them.’’∂∞
Sir Edmund Cox, the renowned colonial criminologist, echoes Peel’s
concerns over language and illustration in the Indian Penal Code, stating
even more plainly his objections to such matters: ‘‘The primary essential
of any legislature for India is absolute plainness of language. There must
be no doubt as to the meaning of any term employed. It has to be re-
membered that the Code is not generally used in English, but is trans-
lated into a large number of vernacular languages. These languages lack
the clearness of expression that we are accustomed to in English. In
Mahratti, for instance, there is hardly a sentence which cannot be read
in more than one way. Moreover, the oriental mind loves hair-splitting,
and will ever strive to convey to a phrase a meaning which it was not
intended to bear.’’∂≤ Cox, like Peel, reiterates the indeterminacy of trans-
lation in the ‘‘oriental’’ context, calling attention to the limitless (and
thus dangerous) readings thus possible under the code. Cox goes on to
o√er ‘‘clear’’ descriptions of crimes covered under the Penal Code, but
like Peel, he evades any mention of unnatural o√ence and adds that in ‘‘a
book intended for the ordinary reader there is no need to refer to them
more specifically.’’ I am interested here in Peel’s and Cox’s focus on the
relationship between law, language, and illustration, because it is pre-
cisely this relationship that Queen Empress v. Khairati foregrounds. The
case becomes a successful illustration for section 377 of the code, even as

80 | CHAPTER TWO
its narrative contours exceed and confound the very legal text it is meant
to authorize.
An important point to consider here is of course the enormous shift
in British liberal policy vis-à-vis India from the time of Macaulay to
the establishment of the Indian Penal Code. Most significantly, James
Stephen took over the position of law member from Macaulay. For
Macaulay, the Penal Code (for better or for worse) was to be developed
primarily as a means to educate Indians and to nudge them toward self-
governance. Stephen, on the other hand, had no such benign (albeit
misguided) aspirations and turned to the legal codes more as a weapon
of force, ‘‘eminently well calculated to protect peaceable men and to
beat down wrongdoers, to extort respect to enforce obedience.’’∂≥ Ste-
phen argued that any form of representative government founded on
European ideals was unsuitable to India. India, he insisted, was a ‘‘coun-
try densely populated, grossly ignorant, steeped in idolatrous supersti-
tion, indi√erent to what we regard as the evils of life.’’ Hence, for
Stephen, governmentality in India would necessarily have to proceed on
principles di√erent and even opposed to those in Europe.∂∂
Radhika Singha, and to a greater extent, Elizabeth Kolsky, further
theorize that the codification of law in the larger project of colonial legal
reform clearly becomes the primary testing ground for articulating the
quagmire of colonial di√erence from Macaulay to Stephen. Building on
Partha Chatterjee’s early formulations of the ‘‘rule of colonial di√er-
ence,’’ Kolsky contends that ‘‘India’s essential ‘di√erence’ made ruling by
abstract principles an inherent impossibility. Liberals in India insisted
on various forms of historical, cultural and religious di√erence to legiti-
mize colonial governance, thereby undermining the universal character
of the codification project.’’∂∑ The continued push for legal equality, as
promised in Queen Victoria’s famous ‘‘equality in the eyes of the law’’
charge, additionally complicated and broadened the scope of legality and
subjects to include not just natives but also Europeans who were non–
East India Company, nono≈cial presences in India. Macaulay’s early
references to the uneven management of European and native physical
di√erence, especially with respect to the incidence of o√ences against
the body, found a di√erent voice decades later in the debates around the
European Vagrancy Bill (1871) and the Ilbert Bill (1884).∂∏ These debates
around racial di√erence and legal governance, however, rarely extended

THE CASE OF COLONIAL INDIA | 81

to include the legislation of vices such as unnatural o√ences or sexual
crimes such as interracial rape. The range of crimes involving Euro-
peans, even under the Vagrancy Bill, included loitering, theft, and occa-
sionally culpable homicide, whereas references to sodomy or unnatural
acts appeared fleetingly, in anecdotal form. For example, S. M. Ed-
wardes, in his treatise, Crime in India: A Brief Review of the More Impor-
tant O√ences Included in the Annual Criminal Returns with Chapters on
Prostitution and Miscellaneous Matters, gestures to one such reference
involving Europeans. In a chapter entitled ‘‘O√ences against the State,’’
he warns of a new order of crime that involves fraudulent impersona-
tions of public servants via the logic of ‘‘unnatural o√ences.’’ He writes:
A certain number of cases occur annually, in which o√ences are
perpetrated by persons unlawfully assuming the guise and functions
of public servants. More often than not the criminal personates a
police o≈cer, in the belief that his chance of attaining his end is
thereby increased. This belief must have weighed with two European
loafers who, posing as detectives, attempted to blackmail an Indian by
threats of charging him with an attempt to commit an unnatural
o√ence with a European boy. The time and place of their attempted
extortion were well chosen; but the Indian fortunately had su≈cient
courage to withstand their demands and make an open complaint to
the police who had no di≈culty in arresting both the men and the
boy, and securing their conviction at the Sessions.∂π
No case record of this conviction is provided, leaving us to speculate on
the assumptions and modus operandi of the ‘‘two European loafers,’’ on
the racial economies of perverse acts, and on the unusually benevolent
behavior of the local police.
Additional documentation on ‘‘unnatural vices’’ in Europeans is un-
available in the legal digests or reporters from the various presidencies.
It is unclear if, and in what form, the jurisdiction of section 377 extended
(even in theory) to European subjects. What is available, though, are
various piecemeal court martial records of Europeans, often cryptically
cited, that resulted, almost always, in the speedy return of the person in
question to England. Such records, however, exceeded the jurisdiction
of the Penal Code and were handled internally as either classified rec-
ords of the military departments under scrutiny or as memorandums in

82 | CHAPTER TWO
the Home Department files.∂∫ There are, however, some notable excep-
tions to such archival arrangements. Thus we encounter, for instance,
the court martial case documents of Archdeacon William Noyes of Ran-
goon, a senior chaplain on the Bengal Ecclesiastical Establishment. On
April 11, 1893, Noyes was charged by a commission of his peers with
‘‘having behaved with improper familiarity and indecency towards cer-
tain private soldiers of the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry Regiment
on several occasions between February 1891 and December 1892.’’ In the
detailed transcripts available of the commission’s examination of the
witnesses, the chief witness Private Bishop went on to ‘‘state that a
controversy took place between the Archdeacon and himself, in which
the former asked him what harm it was to take hold of a man’s hand, and
the witness retorted that he had not only done that, but had kissed him
and messed him about like a woman.’’ Bishop added that he consulted
his fellow soldiers and had found others who had had Noyes touch them
in ways that ‘‘almost amounted to sodomy.’’ Noyes was found guilty of
the charges and discharged without pension on ‘‘medical certificate of
mental aberration.’’∂Ω
In the many ecclesiastical department discussions that follow, there is
some consideration of charging Noyes under the Penal Code, a proposal
later abandoned because ‘‘no indecency may be proved, [although] there
are strong prima facie grounds for thinking that Archdeacon Noyes has
been so imprudent and foolishly familiar with the men under his spiri-
tual charge.’’∑≠ There is much to be said about this case, particularly its
public dissemination (the Mandalay Herald ran daily reports on the
commission’s handling of the case) and the terms under which Noyes’s
predilection for ‘‘unnatural acts’’ was subsumed and later disappeared.
Of most critical interest is the extensive corroborating evidence avail-
able in the Noyes case, as opposed to the paucity of corroborating details
in the Khairati case. Available records cite detailed information on the
time and place of the indecent actions. For example, Noyes is charged
with behaving with ‘‘improper familiarity,’’ but the charges are careful to
point out that he did not commit these acts on ‘‘certain days in the
months of February and October, 1891 respectively,’’ but only did so on
‘‘a certain day in August 1891, and on the 20th day of September 1892.’’
Even the victims of Noyes’s actions seem well versed in the structures of
evidence gathering and appear to have maintained careful records of the

THE CASE OF COLONIAL INDIA | 83

acts in the midst of their personal distress. Bishop, the key witness,
states in his testimony that as soon as Noyes had finished ‘‘rubbing
himself against’’ him and left the premises, he ‘‘sat down in the o≈ce
and wrote a letter of complaint to the Archdeacon, which he sent up by a
servant.’’ Not only did Bishop write such a letter of complaint but he
appears to have had the wherewithal to have ‘‘made copies of the letter,’’
and one of them was produced ‘‘and is on the record.’’ The contents of
Bishop’s letter indicate reasoned distress, threatening exposure to higher
authorities and urging the archdeacon that ‘‘it would be a lot better if
you was [sic] to get married.’’ The trail of evidence continues with the
archdeacon claiming that the letters speak an indecency that resides
solely in the mind of Bishop and should thus be regarded as such. The
archdeacon’s claims are further refuted by more evidence that ‘‘if the
Archdeacon’s conduct was as innocent as he represents it to have been
and if Private Bishop was bringing false charges against him, it is un-
intelligible to us how he consented to continue to hold intercourse with
him, to receive him as a guest to dinner, and to administer holy commu-
nion to him.’’∑∞
Yet despite such overwhelming corroborating evidence, there is still
much discussion in the available records of the possibility of more evi-
dence. On multiple occasions, e√orts are made to revisit the proceedings
in case there might be something to suggest that the archdeacon’s health
was not quite right when he committed his actions. His counsel claims
that ‘‘it must have been a sort of mania,’’ while ‘‘Archdeacon Noyes
stated to have su√ered from apoplectic (not epileptic) seizure, with
cerebral symptoms and depression of spirits, some time after the of-
fences were committed and the charges brought against him.’’∑≤ Unlike
Khairati, Noyes is never subjected to any physical examination, either of
his anus or of any other bodily parts. Instead, Noyes undergoes nu-
merous mental health examinations in which he is repeatedly ques-
tioned on his past mental history and urged to provide some signs of
insanity. As one letter dated December 13, 1894, reads: ‘‘Is there any-
thing in the evidence as to Mr. Noyes’ health which leads you to think
that the time when he committed the o√ences he was not responsible
for his actions?’’ A second letter dated December 19, 1894, seems baΔed
by the story the evidence tells: ‘‘In short, there is nothing to show that he
was not, at the time, responsible for his actions . . . no evidence of

84 | CHAPTER TWO
antecedent immoral tendencies . . . physical disease had not a√ected or
disturbed his mental equilibrium.’’ The letter writer concludes by stating
that ‘‘the case is therefore exceedingly di≈cult to understand, and only
the strongest corroboration of the evidence against him would, from a
medico-legal point of view, convince me of his guilt.’’∑≥
Even, or rather especially, in acts of indecency, the rhetoric of colo-
nial di√erence moves through a language of ontology folded into a
language of codification and law. For Noyes to sustain the mandates of
colonial law, he must be tried and charged, only to be returned to a space
of rare ‘‘aberration and mania.’’ Despite the precise (and repeated) evi-
dentiary articulation of time, place, and victim(s), Noyes can never be
cast into the role of a ‘‘habitual sodomite,’’ and ultimately colonial bina-
ries remain intact: Khairati’s damning ‘‘habitual sodomy’’ stands in stark
contract to Noyes’s milder ‘‘immoral tendencies.’’∑∂

D O C T O R K N O W S B E S T:
THE FORENSICS OF SODOMY

After long opportunity of becoming acquainted with the people of India, we freely
admit that these legal opinions upon their character are of infinite value in court—
but nowhere else.
NORMAN CHEVERS, A MANUAL OF MEDICAL JURISPRUDENCE FOR INDIA: INCLUDING THE

O U T L I N E O F A H I S T O RY O F C R I M E A G A I N S T T H E P E R S O N I N I N D I A ( 1 8 7 0 )

Queen Empress v. Khairati, as we have already seen, relied heavily on the

pivotal evidence of the civil surgeon’s examination to ascertain the crim-
inality of Khairati’s body. Medical jurisprudence provided the most irre-
futable testimony against Khairati, a testimony that spoke the ‘‘truth’’ of
the body even as the body eluded the judicial requirements of its crime.
To a large extent, medical jurisprudence, as in the Khairati case, became
the most reliable truth technology of a colonial legal system ravaged by
disputes over witness unreliability, codification, and orders of evidence.
That is, as legal medicine gathered disciplinary force, it mobilized dis-
tinctly ethnographic knowledge to produce its truth value in court.
Khairati’s perceived links to a community of eunuchs thus attaches itself
to the medical expert’s reading of him as a habitual sodomite.∑∑
Making this dubious commingling of ethnographic knowledge and
medical jurisprudence dangerously seamless was the doctor’s status as an

THE CASE OF COLONIAL INDIA | 85

expert legal witness in court. In a case’s proceedings, ‘‘only facts and
opinions’’ were permitted as forms of viable evidence by the Indian Evi-
dence Act (1872). An expert witness, such as the good doctor, could prof-
fer both facts and opinions, while nonexpert witnesses could provide
testimony relating only to facts they had actually seen or perceived. In
the case of Khairati, by making the ‘‘fact’’ of physical evidence (the sub-
tended anus) reveal multiple opinions, the language of medical jurispru-
dence allowed one to say and to narrate, particularly in cases of sodomy,
what could thereafter not be refuted, giving rise to a medically verifiable
discourse of perverse otherness. Kolsky, for example, notes further that
such use of medical expertise and evidence should also be related to ‘‘the
increasing colonial investment in the administration of criminal law and
the decline in the role of both the native law o≈cers and the Islamic
criminal law.’’∑∏ John Woodru√e and Ameer Ali’s Law of Evidence Appli-
cable to British India (1898) also emphasizes that the Islamic law of evi-
dence in colonial India did not permit written documents or circumstan-
tial evidence and placed full evidential responsibility on direct proofs,
such as confessions and four eyewitness testimonies, making the usage of
medical expertise a procedural impossibility. Following the enactment of
the Penal Code, systems of Islamic law became obsolete, paving the way
for a successful transfer to structures of medical jurisprudence.∑π
I belabor the role of medical jurisprudence in the penal process
mainly to underscore its overwhelming presence and reliability in colo-
nial cases involving o√ences against the body, including homicide, rape,
and unnatural o√ences. Interestingly, such confidence in the supposed
truth of medical evidence was not always shared by its experts and
researchers. Chevers, the most popular proponent and practitioner of
Indian medical jurisprudence, stands out as the first to aggressively
foreground the critical lacunae and contradictions in the accepted man-
dates of medical jurisprudence. For Chevers, the most di≈cult challenge
lay in the incorporation of the ‘‘intimate peculiarities of the native
character in adducing the truth—the Bengali e√eminate stereotype, the
Rajput warrior mode etc.’’∑∫ Chevers acknowledged that while this focus
on the ‘‘peculiarities of character’’ was ‘‘absolutely unfair to the people of
India at large,’’ it still proved ‘‘highly valuable to us in our present
enquiry.’’∑Ω Chevers’s commentaries repeatedly delineated the flattening
instrumentality of colonial case law (‘‘of infinite value in court—but

86 | CHAPTER TWO
nowhere else’’) as opposed to the more di√erential mandates of scien-
tific explorations. Custom and superstition necessarily converged with
medical readings of a crime, making it imperative that ‘‘the antiquity of a
crime . . . always be taken into account in legal investigations.’’∏≠ For
‘‘the most facile, and most fatal, error into which delineators of national
character have fallen in all ages, is that of representing prevalent cus-
toms as national crimes.’’∏∞
Unnatural o√ences, particularly sodomy, appear to be a source of
some confusion not just in Chevers’s but also in other colonial medical
jurisprudence textbooks and studies. One factor contributing to the
confusion around unnatural acts relates to the alleged preponderance of
the crime among the native population. As I have previously argued in
my introduction, Chevers directly contradicts his own cautionary logic
around ‘‘prevalent customs’’ in his documentation of the widespread
nature of sodomy in India as proof both of its customary and its criminal
logic. Chevers further details some scattered genealogies for the inci-
dence of sodomy, derived from a range of religious, administrative, and
anthropological texts, that all similarly establish the traditional addic-
tion to this vice among native subjects. The recurring argument empha-
sizes the elusive yet obvious presence of unnatural acts, while simulta-
neously foregrounding the di≈culty of their prosecution.
Edwardes, a forensic criminologist, echoes Chevers’s concerns with
respect to convictions for these crimes:
A certain number of cases of unnatural o√ence are heard annually in
the Indian courts, but they are not su≈ciently large to justify the view
that homosexual or unnatural practices are particularly prevalent. On
the other hand, such o√ences are di≈cult to detect and still more
di≈cult to prove to the satisfaction of the courts, which wisely re-
quire that no shadow of doubt or ambiguity should attach to the
evidence. Apart from this fact, the position of the police vis a vis of
such o√ences su√ers from the absence of any strong public opinion
on the subject among the lower classes, some of whom do not appear
to regard homo-sexual aberrations with the same repugnance as the
upper and educated strata of Indian society.∏≤
Here, slight di√erentiations in native communities start to emerge, as
the ‘‘upper and educated strata of Indian society’’ are granted some

THE CASE OF COLONIAL INDIA | 87

separation from the widespread nature of the crime. Writing in 1924,
Edwardes was clearly sensitive to the increasing presence of natives in
the ranks of the judiciary and other administrative structures, and his
reference to the ‘‘repugnance’’ of some natives allowed for the rhetorical
possibility of such presence. Yet such colonial gestures of accommoda-
tion are often tested, as can be seen in the 1937 case of a native advocate,
‘‘T. K. a Higher grade pleader, Taunggyi.’’ Taunggyi, the case records
relate, is charged with section 13 of the Legal Practitioners Act (1879) for
failing to report his prior conviction under section 377 of the Indian
Penal Code. The argument of the defense’s case relies on the possibility
of reform available to any criminal under the law, no matter how hei-
nous his or her crime. Taunggyi, we are told, was ‘‘only about at his
17th birthday’’ when he committed this ‘‘o√ence of a disgraceful char-
acter’’ and was thus granted a lenient ‘‘sentence of whipping.’’ While the
defense makes no attempt to condone Taunggyi’s past actions, it em-
phasizes that the spirit of the law requires that any individual ‘‘who
is making an honest attempt to reform,’’ or is a ‘‘member of an honour-
able profession,’’ must be given a chance to reconstitute himself. The
court accepted the defense’s argument, releasing Taunggyi with a small
warning that ‘‘persons who apply for entrance into the ranks of the
profession fully and frankly disclose all the circumstances of their past
career.’’∏≥
However, Taunggyi’s case stands out as a rare exception against the
logic of native ontological perversity. Throughout, eunuchs (alternately
described as hijras) and other types of catamites stand in for the native
subject as addicts of these unnatural acts, ‘‘distinguished in the streets,
by their sallow countenances and lusterless eyes. They generally walk
hand in hand, swinging their arms.’’∏∂ These physical markers provide
the lexicon for erasing the ‘‘shadow of doubt or ambiguity’’ that haunts
the collection of evidence against unnatural practices. Hence we turn
repeatedly, as in the case of Khairati, to the hybrid language of ethnol-
ogy and technology, concretized through the minutiae of rectal mucous
membranes, anal lesions, and ‘‘true sodomy wounds’’ that defy all struc-
tures of doubt and ambiguity. For example, Wilson Johnstone, writing
from ‘‘Loodiana,’’ hopes to provide ‘‘an important note of the Physical
Evidences of Sodomy, which he speaks of as being rife in the large cities of
India and common in State jails.’’ Johnstone’s findings on the theory

88 | CHAPTER TWO
of the condition of the mucous membrane produce the mucous mem-
brane as the primary evidence of sodomy through a bizarre sign system
of rupture:
Penetration seldom reaches beyond an inch, and the force expends
itself on the semi-lunar folds which, in the empty gut, droop on either
side (provided the gut has not been distended by systematic sodomy
when the mucous membrane loses its rugoe [rugae] and the sphinc-
ters their contractible power) . . . the shape of the wound is charac-
teristic, and it cannot be produced by any hard substance. A true
sodomy wound is triangular; the base external, with the sides of the
triangle retreating into the fundament. Wounds willfully made will
be found on the upper and lower surfaces . . . on the upper and right
aspect of the rectal mucous membrane, evidently made by the left
hand. (It is noteworthy that about 70 per cent Punjabees . . . are left-
handed in minor operations, and it is often useful, in elucidating
evidence, to hand the prisoner a needle to thread.)∏∑
P. Hehir and J. D. B. Gribble, two eminent practitioners of medical
jurisprudence, go further in detailing the physical detection of sodomy.
A chapter in their treatise, Outlines of Medical Jurisprudence for India,
produces a grammar book on sodomy and bestiality through a careful
taxonomy of the crimes’ social history. We are given sections on the
‘‘peculiarities of sodomites’’ who ‘‘usually present a somewhat feminine
appearance’’ and on ‘‘sodomites free from hereditary taint’’ who pri-
marily turn to ‘‘unnatural connections’’ from a ‘‘yearning for extraordi-
nary excitement.’’ Hehir and Gribble di√er from Chevers and others,
however, in their descriptions of the ‘‘medical appearances of native
sodomites.’’ They distinguish between ‘‘those addicted to the crime,’’
who exhibit the e√ects ‘‘both of active and passive criminality,’’ and
the cases of ‘‘boys who are victims and passive agents only.’’ Hehir
and Gribble are also the first to discuss ‘‘forms of unnatural immorality,
such as Tribadism (tribadism: unnatural and immoral practices between
woman and woman: formerly called ‘lesbian love’),’’ only to reiterate the
medical impossibility of the crime: ‘‘We should not expect to find any
characteristic appearances whatsoever. Medical evidence in such cases,
must therefore, be negative.’’∏∏ Once again, medical jurisprudence’s nar-
rative precision (the exact shape of the wound, the types of angles)

THE CASE OF COLONIAL INDIA | 89

makes unnatural o√ences visible (and invisible) in a language that no
criminal court can deny.

(UN)SEEING SEX

I have thus far proposed that to read the Khairati case against the logic
of simple archival recovery is to necessarily engage with the forensics
and metaphorics of its production, that is, to work with the empirical
details of the materials, even as that very empirical status is being ren-
dered fictive. Such a critical turn not only makes a story of the law but
also o√ers a vivid commentary on the literal workings of archival logic.
After all, our captivation with the colonial legal record must inevitably
grapple with the notion that Khairati remains, to use Sudipta Sen’s
words here, ‘‘a composite documentary and archival figuration.’’ Sen
reminds us that court cases participate in an evidentiary project that
tra≈cs in the archival violence of indictments, testimonies, and judg-
ments. Such an evidentiary project dissimulates the ‘‘abusive/refractory
content of the interrogation/response, or indeed the very recalcitrance
or insubordination of the original ‘speaking-subject.’ ’’∏π In the Khairati
case, every reading of its archival imprint thus requires a violent repeti-
tion of Khairati’s forensic embodiments (subtended anus), even as Khai-
rati as subject cannot be found.
In searching for an archive in which to figure a relation to sexuality,
we might do well to turn to Khairati’s story, to defamiliarize, as it
were, the customary script through which hijras as a group or collectivity
are fixed. Within such a script, hijras spectacularize sexual di√erence in
(othered) locations, providing endless fodder for academic study. Gaya-
tri Reddy, for instance, argues that in the past few decades, scholars in
the West have made hijras/‘‘hijdas’’ the default hypervisible figures for
information on sexuality in the form of an exotic third sex or as untram-
meled, transgendered di√erence.∏∫ My task here is not to elide (an
impossibility in any event) a language of reification as I write of hijras,
but rather to underscore the couplings of colonialism and sexuality that
mediate such reifications. Even as figures such as Khairati become un-
derstood and categorized as hijras, what falls away is their imbrication
with systems of capital and colonialism. As Reddy argues, it is clear that
other, more material histories demand attention. For example, hijras
such as Khairati were often powerful figures in Sultanate and Mughal

90 | CHAPTER TWO
courts and had the prerogative to collect taxes and duties in particular
areas. Such connections to capital and state formation are repeatedly
erased by scholars who avidly traverse archives and geopolitical sites in
their quest to ‘‘discover’’ sex and gender di√erence. Geeta Patel, for
example, cautions against such quests, reminding us that hijras elude
such markings of sex and gender di√erence precisely because ‘‘they do
not inhabit gender in the usual (i.e., North American or European) way.’’
The composite archival figuration of the hijra mandates a reading prac-
tice that mediates gendered di√erence through sexual di√erence. When
hijras lift up their saris or skirts to register an insult in India, Patel
argues, ‘‘the insult becomes almost incidental to the telling; analytic
attention shifts to the ‘proof’ of their di√erence through anatomical
revelation.’’ In such a forensic practice, a history such as Khairati’s is
literally ‘‘sexualized out of view’’; hijras appear to have no referentiality
apart from their sexuality, and they have little value apart from their
sexuality to those who would study them.∏Ω To see Khairati as a recover-
able subject is thus to (un)see Khairati as foundering under the weight of
such limiting visibility.

NOTES

1. See Robertson, ‘‘What’s Law Got to Do with It?’’; and Cocks, ‘‘Making the Sod-
omite Speak.’’ Such readings of legal records clearly draw heavily from Michel
Foucault’s critique of the historical contradictions within legal and medical cases.
See Foucault, ‘‘Signs and Cases,’’ in Birth of a Clinic; and Foucault, Herculine
Barbin.
2. These quotes are taken from two recent issues of Critical Inquiry that focus specifi-
cally on the epistemology and politics of ‘‘case-making.’’ The first issue explores
the e√ects and logics of cases in discourses of ‘‘torture, genocide, obesity and lyric
poetry’’ (Berlant, ‘‘Introduction,’’ 1). The second issue, of more interest here,
‘‘focuses on what happens when the substance of a caseness is provided by the
‘person’—an idea of a person, a kind of person, a norm of personhood’’ (Berlant,
‘‘On the Case,’’ 663).
3. Queen Empress v. Khairati, Indian Law Reports (1884), Allahabad (6) 204–206.
4. William Cohen wryly points out that it is a curious coincidence that judges
and counsels in nineteenth-century sodomy trials invariably have ‘‘credential—
confirming appellation[s].’’ He refers specifically to the famous 1870 Boulton-
Park trial in London in which the judge has a ‘‘proleptically Genetian name’’:
Judge Flowers. Of interest is that the counsel representing Frederick Park is listed
as ‘‘Mr. Straight.’’ See Cohen, Sex Scandal, 83n14.

THE CASE OF COLONIAL INDIA | 91

 5. Queen Empress v. Khairati, Indian Law Reports (1884), Allahabad (6) 204–206.
6. Sahid, ‘‘Police O≈cer’s Companion,’’ 228–29. Further clarification of the term
habitual o√ender is provided in the Proceedings of the Government of the N.-W.
Provinces and Oudh. Judicial (Criminal) Department, December 1884 (available in
the India O≈ce Archives). A ‘‘habitual criminal is defined to be anyone who is
convicted of any of the o√ences specified in chapter xii and xvii, Indian Penal
Code, or any o√ence against property punishable with three years’ imprisonment
or more, and who is shown to have been previously convicted of any such o√ence,
whether the same o√ence or not. The term also includes anyone who is pro-
nounced by a convicting Magistrate of the 1st class to be a professional bully or
professional perjurer or habitual thief’’ (p/6/2208 (1884), Oriental and India
O≈ce Collections [hereafter cited as oioc])
7. For more on criminal tribes and ‘‘hereditary vices,’’ see Naidu, History of Railway
Thieves; Gunthrope, Notes on Criminal Tribes.
8. Yang, Crime and Criminality.
9. Sen, Disciplining Punishment, 47–51.
10. There is much more to be said here about the colonial mobilization of eunuchs as
a community of illicit subjects in British India. Critics such as Gayatri Reddy have
emphasized that the very term eunuch contains multiple subcategories and gene-
alogies that require careful historical scrutiny and contextualization. See Reddy,
With Respect to Sex, 17–44.
11. Chevers, Manual. Chevers goes on to describe in considerable detail the range of
research on the subject. He writes, for instance, that ‘‘out of the one hundred
eunuchs then in the Mynpoory District, fifteen confessed to the Acting Joint
Magistrate that they either had been, or were then guilty of Sodomy. Their Vuzeer
stated that there were, at that time, about two or three thousand of these people
in the Company’s dominions in Hindustan, and also a large body in Bombay’’
(706–8).
12. Lal, ‘‘Not This, Not That,’’ 122. Lal also gestures to more contemporary incarna-
tions of this dangerous colonial logic. Sharply critiquing texts such as Ja√rey,
Invisibles, he writes: ‘‘When it comes to Muslims, any number of canards are
passed o√ as self-evident truths and historical ‘facts.’ No one has ever disputed
that it was customary to have eunuchs at the courts of Muslim kings; what is
objectionable, however, is the attempt to continue to communalize the history of
the hijras, and to attribute essentialist religious identities to them. The supposi-
tion that Muslim rulers deliberately sought to render a large number of Hindu
men hijras is quite fantastic, and no one has advanced any evidence to render this
argument plausible’’ (Lal, ‘‘Not This, Not That,’’ 136n14).
13. Preston, ‘‘A Right to Exist,’’ 376.
14. Platts, Dictionary of Urdu, 498; see also Yule, Hobson-Jobson. I am grateful to Va-
sudha Dalmia and Geeta Patel for their assistance in the translation of the name.
15. Preston, ‘‘A Right to Exist,’’ 372.
16. Ibid., 377.

92 | CHAPTER TWO
17. See Rachel Sturman, ‘‘Property and Attachments’’; Ghosh and Kennedy, Decen-
tring Empire; and Kunal Parker, ‘‘A Corporation of Superior Prostitutes.’’
18. In an informal conversation on possible readings and misreadings about the
surveillance of figures such as Khairati, Indrani Chatterjee points out that in the
aftermath of 1857, border figures such as eunuchs often functioned as potential
recruits for both colonial and nationalist forces. I have as yet not researched this
line of inquiry.
19. The Khairati case continued to be cited past 1920, and it is still routinely refer-
enced in current legal commentaries on section 377. However, a discussion of the
post-1920 period in colonial India requires a more sustained discussion of the
project of Indian nationalism and its e√orts at legal reform—an area that lies
beyond the parameters of this exploration. For more on contemporary debates on
section 377 in India, see Bhaskaran, Made in India.
20. Mayne, Criminal Law of India, 177.
21. Sutherland, Digest of Indian Law Reports, 923.
22. Woodman, Digest of Indian Law Cases; Worgan, Consecutive Tables; Bose, Digest of
Indian Law Cases.
23. oioc, l/pj/6/26/1616 (1880).
24. Criminal Justice in the Punjab and Its Dependencies, appendices 2, 9.
25. House of Commons, Statement Exhibiting the Moral and Material Progress and
Condition of India During the Year, 1864–72.
26. For more on the relationship between statistical typologies and the colonial state,
see Appadurai, ‘‘Number in the Colonial Imagination.’’ Appadurai approaches the
colonial taxonomical impulse and its relationship to surveillance and control
through the disruptive potentialities of its very ‘‘enumerative strategies.’’
27. Worth considering here is the easier availability of sodomy cases in the records of
the Nizamut Adawlut and the Sudder Foujdaree Adawlut prior to the establishment
of the Penal Code in 1860. I was able to locate over fifteen judgments between
1829 and 1859 in the Reports of Cases Determined in the Court of Nizamut Adawlut,
1827–50.
28. Queen Empress v. Naiada, Indian Law Reports (Allahabad, 1875–78), (1) 43–47;
Jiwan v. Empress, Punjab Reports (Punjab, 1884), 4; Queen Empress v. Khairati,
Indian Law Reports (Allahabad, 1884), (6) 204–6; Sardar Ahmed v. Emperor, All
India Reporter (Lahore, 1914), 565; and Ganpat v. Emperor, All India Reporter
(Lahore, 1918), 322.
29. Sardar Ahmed v. Emperor, All India Reporter (Lahore, 1914), 565.
30. Additional uncorroborated figures are provided for the incidence of sodomy in
texts such as Edwardes, Crime in India. He writes: ‘‘Most provinces annually
report a small number of cases of unnatural o√ence, eg., 47 in Bengal in 1917, 19
in Assam in 1921, Calcutta recorded 12 cases in 1920. In Bombay, where few cases
appear before the courts, the o√ence is su≈ciently well known among the lower
classes to have earned for those addicted to it an apt but unprintable sobriquet in
the vernacular. Pederasty has usually been regarded as a peculiarly Muhammadan

THE CASE OF COLONIAL INDIA | 93

 foible, and cases have occurred in Bombay, in which lower class Musalman
women desiring a divorce from their husbands, have not hesitated to accuse the
latter before the Kazi of unnatural practices . . . the records of the courts and
police, however, serve to indicate that the occasional commission of such o√ences
in not confined to the Muhammadan community, and there is a suspicion that
one or two at least of the young Hindu extremists of comparatively recent years,
who paid the penalty for their crimes were united by the bond of homo-sexuality’’
(34).
31. My questions here partially interrogate the considerable and rich scholarship
already available on the shifting codifications of sodomy statutes and their instru-
mental relationship to normative cultures of representation. As legal and cultural
critics have argued, sodomy statutes stage the ideological crises of their times,
articulating through their legal indeterminacies and cultural capital the symptom-
atic registers of hegemonic distress. Following Jonathan Goldberg’s groundbreak-
ing work on the subject, we continue in some ways, as critics, to ‘‘never deliver
the sodomite per se, but only, sodometries, relational structures precariously
available to prevailing discourses’’ (Goldberg, introduction, 20). For Goldberg,
sodomy in particular is excessively mobilized in accounts of European contact
with the New World, where the attribution of sodomy to the indigenous body
sanctions subsequent conquest and plunder. My preoccupations here extend such
critical gestures more specifically to questions of legal jurisprudence in the con-
text of late nineteenth-century colonial India, where the codification of o√ences
against the body, such as sodomy, articulate the constitutive challenge of a secular
system of colonial criminal law.
32. There appears one intriguing reference to ‘‘unnatural o√ences’’ in the jurisdiction
of Moradabad, where Khairati was convicted. In the Selections from the Vernacu-
lar Newspapers (1886), we find the following excerpt: ‘‘The Sitára–I-Hind (Mora-
dabad), of the 28th February, received on the 3rd March, referring to the case of a
student of the Káyasth caste at the Moradabad Zila School, who lately committed
suicide by throwing himself into a well owing to his passion not being returned by
another student, observes that love-tales, which abound in Urdu, are at the bot-
tom of such unfortunate occurrences. Parents should take special care to prevent
their children from reading such mischievous books. The Káyasths should first
teach their sons Sanskrit, and not Persian, in order to save their morals from
being spoilt.’’ oioc, l/r/5/63 n.w. Provinces (1886), 204.
33. Macaulay, Life and Works of Lord Macaulay, 9:315.
34. Ibid., 315.
35. Ibid., 321.
36. Macaulay’s note in India Law Commission, The Indian Penal Code, 490. Macau-
lay’s preoccupation with anchoring the laws of the body in the production of an
appropriately secular subject is echoed in the current Indian context. The battles
taking place in the contemporary legal domain in India all seem to involve a
contest over the appropriate codification of sex—from legal challenges to the

94 | CHAPTER TWO
 sodomy laws to decriminalizing prostitution. The cultural space of excavation
remains Hindu. The establishment of sodomy statutes under section 377 of the
Penal Code provides a critical genealogy, a topos of nation formation, if you will,
between colonial and postcolonial histories, a genealogy that links the judicial
incoherencies of British rule with the barbaric judicial communalism of post-
Partition India. For a more detailed discussion of postcolonial histories of section
377 and beyond, see Kapur, ‘‘Erotic Disruptions.’’
37. Parker, ‘‘Corporation of Superior Prostitutes.’’
38. Skuy, ‘‘Macaulay.’’
39. See Maine’s minutes dated September 11, 1868, National Archives of India (here-
after cited as nai) Legislative (a), May 1872, no. 579; and Field, Some Observations
on Codification in India. These two references are more carefully discussed in
Kolsky, ‘‘Codification in British India.’’
40. Field, Some Observations on Codification in India.
41. Knight, Observations by Sir Lawrence Peel, 9–10.
42. Cox, Police and Crime, 81–93.
43. Stephen, History of the Criminal Law, 345. I am grateful to Veena Talwar Olden-
burg, Ritu Birla, and Geeta Patel for helping me think through the works of James
Stephen.
44. Stephen, ‘‘Foundations of the Government of India.’’
45. Kolsky, ‘‘Codification and the Rule of Colonial Di√erence,’’ 633. Also see Singha,
Despotism of Law, 286–311; Parker, ‘‘Historiography of Di√erence.’’
46. Mrinalini Sinha’s discussions of the Ilbert Bill controversy are now standard
reading for any student of South Asian historiography and provide a careful
elaboration of its multiple negotiations of racial di√erences and the colonial
judicial process. See Sinha, Colonial Masculinity.
47. Edwardes, Crime in India, 6.
48. Phillipa Levine’s illuminating argument on the connections between ‘‘sexually
transmitted diseases and the business of politics and governance’’ in post-Mutiny
British India is worth summarizing here. For Levine, the success of the script of
colonial governance, especially as it skirts the threat of homosexuality among its
armed forces in India, depends primarily on its management of the debates
around venereal diseases. Levine adds that such a shift of focus to the e√ects of
venereal disease as the emerging threat to the empire is particularly critical to
understanding the ‘‘centrality of sexual politics in the maintenance of empire.’’
‘‘Without available women, soldiers unable to control their passions in the tropi-
cal heat of the East would turn to rape—or worse to one another. The constant
haunting fear of homosexuality, the presence of which would undermine the
manly adventure of imperial conquest, underscores the whole debate on prostitu-
tion in this era, despite a conspicuous reluctance to discuss the question in o≈cial
circles.’’ Levine, ‘‘Venereal Disease,’’ 580.
49. oioc, l/pj/6/350/1193–1194 (1893).
50. Ibid.

THE CASE OF COLONIAL INDIA | 95

51. Ibid.
52. Ibid.
53. Ibid.
54. oioc, l/pj/6/400/1129 (1895). There are twenty files available on Noyes in the
l/pj records between 1893 and 1895, making it perhaps the most discussed case of
European indecency and immorality in British India.
55. Kolsky, ‘‘Body Evidencing the Crime,’’ 276–300.
56. Ibid., 287.
57. There is some brief commentary available on the comparative incidence of un-
natural vices in ‘‘Musulmans’’ versus ‘‘Hindoos’’ in Chevers, Manual, as well as in
some other citations I have provided here. I have come across several such fleeting
references to the overdetermination of Muslims as sodomites—it is an analytical
terrain that I take up in much more detail in the concluding discussions of
this book.
58. Chevers, Manual, 4.
59. Ibid., 5.
60. Ibid., 12.
61. Ibid, preface (n.p.).
62. Edwardes, Crime in India, 33.
63. In the Matter of T. K., a Higher Grade, Pleader, Taunggyi, Civil Miscellaneous
Application No. 43 of November 18, 1937, in Ten Indian Rulings (Rangoon, 1937).
64. Chevers, Manual, 706.
65. Johnstone, ‘‘Physical Evidences of Sodomy,’’ 213.
66. Hehir and Gribble, Outlines of Medical Jurisprudence for India, 409–15.
67. I am grateful to Sudipta Sen for sharing his forthcoming manuscript, ‘‘Subordina-
tion, Governance, and the Legislative State in Early Colonial India.’’ See also
Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures.
68. Reddy, With Respect to Sex, 17–43.
69. Patel, ‘‘Risky Subjects.’’

96 | CHAPTER TWO
{ three }

A R C H I VA L AT TA C H M E N T S

The Story of an India-Rubber Dildo

T hus far I have explored what it means, especially in sex-

uality studies, to insist on archival variations of the recov-
ery imperative. Even as a Foucauldian understanding of geneal-
ogies cautions against the consolations of mimetic approaches,
an identificatory relationship of past histories to present for-
mulations of sexuality continues to flourish. As my two pre-
vious chapters have argued, we still look to the past to find,
imagine, and materialize archives of our own historical desire.∞
Pornography, more so than others, one could argue, is a histori-
cal form that requires the most complex project of recovery in
the history of sexuality and archival formation. Acknowledged
by far as the most explicit form of sexual expression, pornogra-
phy, however, is equally continuous with the very logics of
circumscription it claims to exceed. It is, after all, a genre
whose content is not ‘‘governed by secrecy and discretion, but
whose circulation is.’’≤
This chapter centers the popular (and ephemeral) genre of
mid- to late nineteenth-century pornography to interrogate
the limits and possibilities of our archival habits in a history
of sexuality of colonial India. Some questions I consider are:
What is gained, for example, if the props and architecture of
pornography become equal subjects of our archival desires?
How do we make sense, in other words, of archival figura-
tions like the india-rubber dildo, whose colonial iconography is
a primary space through which Indian male sexuality in the
nineteenth century is emptied and reimagined? What does it mean for
the material history of objects to provide a genealogy for a history of
sexuality? What happens, in other words, if we tell the story of the india-
rubber dildo?
In the broadest (and perhaps most literal) sense, I want to briefly
reflect on the checkered presence of pornography in the o≈cial archive.
That is, even as pornography emerges as a foundational site of mid- to
late nineteenth-century writings on sex, pornographic texts themselves
physically reside at the borders of the o≈cial archive. As the ‘‘public
scandal’’ of the Ashbee collection in the British Library vividly demon-
strates, the material presence of pornography in o≈cial archives con-
tinues to stir heated debates. Henry Spencer Ashbee, pseudonym Pisa-
nus Fraxi, was an eminent Victorian businessman, bibliographer, and
collector, notably of erotica and of the writings of Miguel de Cervantes.
On his death in 1900, the British Museum became the sole beneficiary
of Ashbee’s extensive collection of manuscripts and books. While news
of the bequest generated much excitement (his Cervantes collection was
extraordinary and included 384 editions of Don Quixote alone), museum
authorities also found themselves in a bit of a fix as Ashbee’s will clearly
stated that they must accept all or nothing of his collection. After ex-
tended discussion, most of the controversial erotica was strategically
placed in sequestered ‘‘private cases’’ and ‘‘locked cupboards,’’ with an
undetermined portion destroyed as being valueless and o√ensive to the
public good.≥ Despite such early losses, the Ashbee collection of erotica
remains the principal archival source for research on English-language
pornography of the nineteenth century. To this day, the collection (with
the addition of the Dawes bequest) is housed in the British Library’s
infamous ‘‘Private Case,’’ with readers allowed to examine the texts only
under the watchful gaze of the library sta√. Pornographic materials
become part of the open public record, even as their access remains
mediated through paradoxical structures of restriction and surveillance.∂
In a narrower and more critical sense, I am concerned with what
reading mid- to late nineteenth-century pornography teaches us about
archival hermeneutics. In many ways, these pornographic texts provide
the best cautionary tale against the seductions of historical recovery and
access. While a mythos of loss and paucity surrounds my earlier chapters
on Richard Burton’s secret report and the colonial case records of sod-

98 | CHAPTER THREE
omy, mid- to late nineteenth-century pornographic texts are plentifully
available (albeit in ‘‘locked cupboards’’ and ‘‘private cases’’). Yet such
plenitude eschews any simple turn to the rhetorical mystifications of
presence and facticity. Adjudicated by shifting legal and sociohistorical
representations of obscenity, the pornography I examine eludes simple
determinisms of meaning and genre. Missing and/or fraudulent gene-
alogies of authorship, copyright, and reproduction further make recov-
ery of an ‘‘original’’ text seemingly impossible. Thus, even as a text is
‘‘found,’’ its presence foregrounds a model of archival supplementarity
rather than one of discovery and newness. To attend to the story of the
india-rubber dildo, through its uncanny realness, is to understand the
figuration of archival evidence precisely through such intonations of
supplementarity. Let me now turn to that story.

THE SUBSTITUTION OF INDIA RUBBER

In a section entitled ‘‘On pleasures that take away the maidenhead or

virginity, But which involve no danger whatever of getting in the Family
way or Pregnancy,’’ the author of Love and Safety or Love and Lascivious-
ness with Safety and Secrecy (circa 1885), a sex manual ostensibly de-
signed for women, introduces readers to the munificent charms of the
india-rubber dildo.∑ Proclaiming the dildo as the ‘‘only true artificial
prick’’ to have survived the vagaries of time, the manual provides the
following description from an advertisement for a newly improved Vic-
torian version of the product: ‘‘The grand desideratum accomplished is
the substitution of india rubber for the shaft of this article instead of
ivory, silver, horn, wood, wad, glass, porcelain, or leather, heretofore
used, none of which substances could resemble the real thing in e√ect,
however beautifully they might be shaped and painted. The india rubber
shaft, when dipped in warm water to bring it to blood heat, is su≈-
ciently soft and elastic to titillate the female seat of pleasure, without
excoriating the passage, or injuring the mouth of the womb.’’∏ The ‘‘sub-
stitution of india rubber,’’ the author joyously announces, diversifies and
facilitates women’s pleasures, providing for exciting possibilities in dif-
ferent kinds of dildos. For instance, it can be used to accentuate the
thickness of a premade dildo, and a popular usage in Paris is to ‘‘place
round the thick end [of the dildo], an inch from the top, a thick ring of
india rubber . . . this will represent the knob; now over all draw an

THE STORY OF AN INDIA-RUBBER DILDO | 99

American letter, india rubber, and another on that, and so on for about
four: you will have a dildoe [sic] exactly resembling in feel and e√ect a
prick.’’π The lure of Love and Safety’s india-rubber dildo promotion is that
while the new dildo may not be as beautifully sculpted as the early dildos
made of ivory or silver, its e√ect, touch, and warmth provide women
with an uncannily ‘‘real’’ pleasure. The dildo thus sets forth a di√erent
order of mimesis as it exceeds the normative visual register, presenting
the reader instead with a new evaluative register of a√ect. Its resem-
blance to a penis lies not in that it looks like a ‘‘prick,’’ but in that it feels
like one. In the one-dimensional world of Victorian pornography, in
which size and beauty conquer all, and in which masculinity is uni-
laterally linked to the physical presence and sexual prowess of the penis,
the presence and success of this india-rubber dildo bestirs a di√erent
level of receptivity and tells a more compelling and covert story.
‘‘The modern invention of india rubber,’’ the author of Love and Safety
carefully explains, is the transformative key to the dildo’s success, to its
satisfying the ‘‘passions, the loves, the lust of the women.’’ In the ‘‘Old
World’’ this instrument was called ‘‘The Phallus, or sculptured resem-
blance of a man’s prick,’’ and its modern equivalent, the author points
out, is the dildo, known to ‘‘be generally adored and worshipped by the
women of the New.’’∫ Empire and Victorian sexuality conjoin in the self-
conscious hybridity of the india-rubber dildo as the author uses the dildo
to mark the onslaught of modernity, the movement from the Old World
to the New World, indicating casually in this analogy the creation of a
new order of modernity with the colonial manufacture of india rubber.
William Woodru√’s The Rise of The British Rubber Industry during the
Nineteenth Century (1958) describes in detail the colonial manufacture of
india rubber, and provides one of the most exhaustive histories of how it
came to English shores. He opens by noting: ‘‘India rubber has been
known to Europe since the discovery of the New World, yet the story
whereby it became the basis of one of the most critical and strategic
industries of modern times extends only to the past century.’’Ω And
Woodru√ does indeed provide us with a story of intrigue and espionage,
betrayal and commerce, as he charts the complicated patterns of manu-
facture through which india rubber becomes part of the British indus-
trial process. The raw material for the manufacture of india rubber,
Woodru√ tells us, originally came from the ‘‘moist clayey lands of the

100 | CHAPTER THREE

Amazon basin, and extending over a large district of Central and South
America.’’∞≠ He points out, however, that this dependency on raw mate-
rials from the Amazon was carefully altered by English entrepreneurs
and bureaucrats, who wanted to ensure that the raw materials came
from areas over which they had colonial control: ‘‘Sir Clements R. Mark-
ham had already transplanted the quinine-yielding chichona tree from
South America to India and in 1870 . . . he turned to the cultivation of
rubber. The plants and seeds which he brought back with him . . . were
soon distributed through the Botanical Gardens at Kew to the tropical
colonies. The story of the distribution of these supplies in the nine-
teenth century is . . . in part the story of Britain’s role as the leading
mercantile nation.’’∞∞
As Woodru√ demonstrates, the manufacture of india rubber an-
nounced in many ways the ingenuity of British rule: plunder the raw
materials from one part of the New World (South America), take them to
a centralized space in the metropole (the Botanical Gardens at Kew),
then redistribute them along the shores of a British colony (India), and
you have the makings of a booming rubber industry.∞≤ The india rubber
lauded as the key to Britain’s mercantile magic emerges as an artificially
transplanted and artificially grown product, its seeds reproduced far
from its actual origins in South America. Woodru√’s history thus pro-
vides the india-rubber dildo with a complicated and insistently colonial
referent of its own. Technologies of sexuality fuse with technologies
of colonial industry, demonstrating, as Deirdre David argues, how the
‘‘possession of empire in Victorian Britain was always and necessarily
stamped upon the [products of the] imperial metropolis.’’∞≥
Located amid such multiple locations (it is a product of both the
colony and the metropole), paradoxes (it is both supremely artificial and
truly ‘‘real’’), and histories (it is both old and new), the india-rubber
dildo indeed functions as a ‘‘grand desideratum.’’ A rich bounty of signifi-
cation, it is worthy of worship and exploration, appearing ubiquitously
in much mid- to late Victorian pornography as seamlessly fitted into the
texture of the pornographic narrative as it is into the ‘‘female seat of
pleasure.’’ And yet the story of the india-rubber dildo has not been told,
its presence not recalled, its e√ects not examined. Is it because the
dildo’s presence is so familiar, so rehearsed, so part of the furniture and
props of the pornographic mise-en-scène that the labor behind its con-

THE STORY OF AN INDIA-RUBBER DILDO | 101

struction does not even register? In other words, is the linkage between
sexual and colonial iconographies so obvious that it needs no marking?
Or is it rather a linkage that cannot (obviously) appear, gathering repre-
sentational power precisely through such an ellipsis?∞∂
I am interested in the story of the india-rubber dildo because its
entanglements open a space to interrogate our very attachment to, and
need for, archival evidence. The figuration of the india-rubber dildo (as
both material and absent presence) captures a central representational
paradox at the heart of our archival labors. Presence, after all, as I have
thus far argued, is the plangent predicate for any archival logic, despite
concessions to the fact that this meaning is always under erasure and in
need of reconstruction. That is, the archive (broadly conceived) is a
collection of knowledge(s) with no center, except that ‘‘something miss-
ing’’ needs to be continously added. With the addition of the india-
rubber dildo, I will suggest, such ideals of recovery and repleteness are
undone, rerouted instead to an attachment to an object that takes on a
strident autonomy apart from the enabling relationship it is ostensibly
set up to stabilize. The dildo’s materiality both provides and dislodges
presence as it pushes forth a series of relationships between finding and
what is found, between archival traces that come from another place and
the place to which they come.∞∑
This story of the india-rubber dildo is also designed to move the
emphasis away from an already well-rehearsed scholarly concern with
Victorian pornography’s rampant heterosexuality toward a recognition
of the significance dissolved in such pornographic rituals of significa-
tion. In this chapter, I narrate the recurring appearance of the india-
rubber dildo as at once an imaginative and archival consolidation of the
economic and racist institutions of industrial and imperial culture and
as a corruptive sign in the colonial order of things: foreigners and for-
eign substances are managed for home profits, on the one hand, and
used for pleasures that go out of bounds, beyond management, on the
other. Linking the particular story of India to the particular produc-
tion of the archive of pornography, it becomes obvious that Victorian
pornography solidifies and struggles with already established prohibi-
tions and prejudices concerning race and gender: English masculinity
emerges as a precariously guarded shrine of the mission civilisatrice,

102 | CHAPTER THREE

interracial unions are carefully monitored, and same-sex desire seeks
fragile sanctuary in the realm of white male fantasy.
My assertions, however, first call for at least a partial critical genealogy
of the india-rubber dildo’s presence/absence and of its narrative place-
ment in histories of pornography, in particularly pre–twentieth century
English-language pornography.∞∏ The dildo (not specifically the india-
rubber dildo) appears, from very early on, to be enmeshed in questions of
both visibility and false presence or fraud. There is, as Sarah Toulalan
states, a fairly elaborate history of dildo sightings in seventeenth-century
pornography in England, all of which attest to the dildo’s established
presence in the archive of pornography. Yet for Toulalan such sightings
signal more invisibility than visibility for a history of queer representa-
tion. The dildo scenes, for Toulalan, are too much in the grip of a
heterosexual narrative that places the dildo in a purely compensatory
relationship to the male penis. These scenes are touted as ‘‘flu√er’’ scenes
that lead up to the final climax of heterosexual coitus. Instead, she
focuses rather facilely on same-sex scenes of erotic play that do not
involve the dildo to signal their importance to lesbian historical repre-
sentation.∞π Valerie Traub, on the other hand, provides a more complex
historical context for the dildo’s presence/absence in pornography, argu-
ing that in early modern France and England, dildos were conspicuously
absent because their representation was too attached to legal under-
standings of fraud and liability. That is, trials of women for sodomy or
tribadism arose principally through charges of their usage of a ‘‘fake
penis,’’ leading to a fear of representing women with prosthetic devices.∞∫
No attention, however, appears to be paid to continuing representa-
tions of the dildo in nineteenth-century English pornography. In his pio-
neering work, The Other Victorians, Steven Marcus focuses our attention
on the plethora of details and untold facts of Victorian life that lie
‘‘thickly scattered’’ amid the pages of pornographic writings, details usu-
ally invisible in the mainstream of Victorian literature.∞Ω There is no
overcoming the imbricated e√ects of sex, class, and money in any Victo-
rian narrative, Marcus reminds us, in what has by now become a critical
mantra of our times. However, while Marcus unveils pornography as a
palimpsest of sorts, tightly stacked at the nexus of a changing mid- to late
Victorian climate of sexual mores and class mobility, the threads of race

THE STORY OF AN INDIA-RUBBER DILDO | 103

and colonialism, as woven together in the india-rubber dildo, are no-
where to be found in his analysis.≤≠ While Marcus’s work is admirable as
an early pioneering study of sexuality in Victorian culture, the lacunae in
his analysis still appear in current scholarship on pre–twentieth century
pornography. There remains a dearth of critical material on Victorian
pornography, and little e√ort has been made to connect it to the history
of empire. This holds especially true in the wake of substantial scholar-
ship by Ann Laura Stoler, Robert Young, and Anne McClintock, who
have powerfully demonstrated that the racial configurations of the im-
perial world, rather than being peripheral to the cultivation of the
nineteenth-century bourgeois self, were in fact constitutive of it.≤∞
A quick survey of the scant scholarship on the subject will illustrate
my point. Walter Kendrick’s The Secret Museum (1987) and Lynn Hunt’s
excellent edited collection of essays, The Invention of Pornography (1996),
are still the two most enlightening books on the subject.≤≤ Pornography,
these texts tell us, is broadly speaking a battleground for cultural nego-
tiations between everything from religion to aesthetics. Like Marcus,
Kendrick and Hunt and her collaborators develop formidable critical
parameters for analyzing pornography that are complex, culturally sensi-
tive, and sharply historical. Yet more than three decades after Marcus’s
work, the threads of race and colonialism remain absent: Kendrick’s
‘‘secret museum’’ and Hunt’s ‘‘invention’’ somehow detour around the
project of colonialism. A rare exception to such critical omission is Lisa
Sigel’s Governing Pleasures (2002), which not only situates the produc-
tion of Victorian pornography squarely within the terrain of empire but
also foregrounds the growing popularity of a genre she calls ‘‘imperial
pornography.’’≤≥

THE PORNOGRAPHY OF EMPIRE

For a long time, the story goes, we supported a Victorian regime, and we continue
to be dominated by it even today. Thus the image of the imperial prude is embla-
zoned on our restrained, mute and hypocritical sexuality.
M I C H E L F O U C A U LT, T H E H I S T O R Y O F S E X U A L I T Y

The very first paragraph of Michel Foucault’s immensely influential

History of Sexuality invites us to overthrow old histories of the Victorian
regime and discard forever that stifling ‘‘image of the imperial prude’’

104 | CHAPTER THREE

engraved on our silent and carefully monitored sexualities. Indeed, the
field of empire, the ‘‘imperial part of the Victorian prude, never reap-
pears in Foucault’s chronologies of the technologies of sexuality, some-
how short-circuited and left buried in an otherwise pioneering work. In
an attempt to address this omission, Stoler’s ambitious work, Race and
the Education of Desire, revisits Foucault and argues for rerouting his his-
tory of sexuality through the history of empire, suggesting that none of
Foucault’s objects of knowledge (the masturbating child, the hysterical
woman, the Malthusian couple, and the perverse adult) could have
existed ‘‘without a racially erotic counterpoint, without reference to the
libidinal energies of the savage, the primitive, the colonized—recurring
reference points of di√erence, critique and desire.’’≤∂
In locating the imperial part of the Foucauldian equation, I take my
cue from Stoler’s argument and move directly to a discussion of Fou-
cault’s notion of the ‘‘perverse implantation,’’ whereby sexual perver-
sions, or ‘‘illegitimate sexualities,’’ have to be ‘‘replanted’’ (like the seeds
of the india rubber) not in the circuits of ‘‘reproductive’’ activity but
rather in the ends of bourgeois profit or knowledge. ‘‘Let them take their
infernal mischief elsewhere,’’ Foucault reasons, pointing out that it is only
in the safely ‘‘elsewhere’’ that the illegitimate avatars of sexuality and
untrammeled sex have ‘‘a right to [safely insularized] forms of reality . . .
everywhere else, modern puritanism imposed its triple edict of taboo,
non-existence and silence.’’≤∑ Foucault’s diagnosis of an elsewhere, a
space where aberrant (‘‘infernal’’) sexual matters can be shepherded into
profitable service, provides the precise entrée for a discussion of the
supplementarity of pornography’s relationship to colonialism. In Fou-
cault’s order of things, where the twin cycles of pleasure and prohibition
mutually constitute each other, pornography becomes the prescribed
discourse of transgression, maintaining through its prolific reproduction
the equally prolific business of such regulatory discourses as religion and
science. The imaginative space of the colony, I will argue, stages the same
scenes: an imagined breeding ground for a spectrum of imagined sexual
vices that in turn vivify the rhetoric of an evangelical civilizing mission.
And both—pornography and colonialism—yield tremendous profit and
rely on the ‘‘image of the imperial prude’’ for their elsewhere location.
Victorian pornography set in, or concerning, the colonies, thus be-
comes the double elsewhere of Foucault’s imaginings, a place that is

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both discursively and literally outside the realm of the English bourgeois
homeplace. Here, I narrate the story of that double elsewhere, arguing
that despite Victorian pornography’s boldness in the treatment of ‘‘sex-
ual perversions,’’ it ultimately instantiates the many economic and cul-
tural ravages of empire. Once contextualized outside the physical land-
scape of the metropole, the lexicon of Victorian pornography exceeds
the plotted terrain of the Foucauldian twin peaks of incitement and
regulation, falling instead in the interstices of the two. As embodied
in the materiality of the india-rubber dildo I began with, this pornogra-
phy is at once transgressive and deeply self-regulating, at once fantas-
matic and insistently real. Focusing on a diverse range of mid- to late
nineteenth-century pornographic texts—from The Story of a Dildoe,
Queenie, The Ups and Downs of Life, Love and Safety, and Venus in India to
excerpts from pornographic journals such as the Pearl and the Boudoir—I
flesh out the narrative movements through which British management
and rule of the racialized colonial other is simultaneously displaced onto
and subsumed within the language of a range of ‘‘sexual perversions.’’≤∏
Such an emphasis does not vulgarly add race and colonialism to the
analytic mix. Rather, it insists that race and colonialism can only be read
through sexuality read otherwise.
It is important to remember that the careful usage of race, and of the
foreign space, appears similarly policed in the burgeoning sexology ma-
terial of the late Victorian period. The assumed cultural and political
di√erences between sexology as a discourse in which matters of ‘‘illegiti-
mate sexualities’’ are legitimately studied and pornography as a dis-
course in which the same matters take shape more furtively, collapse in
their shared relationship to empire. I take up this discussion of sexologi-
cal literature and its relationship to colonialism elsewhere in my demon-
stration of how William Acton (in the early period), Havelock Ellis, and,
to some extent, self-proclaimed Christian sexologists such as Elizabeth
Blackwell attempted to allay the desires for satisfactory models of sex-
uality through a descriptive capture of all that is considered perverse and
illegitimate.≤π Medical discourses, along with pseudoscientific transla-
tions of materials (such as the Kama Sutra), shift the focus of sex from a
hidden truth to one that could be showcased, documented, and cate-
gorized. The ars erotica of the East, with its sodomitical bent, is rendered
less threatening and less perverse through a reading of the Kama Sutra as

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a methodological treatise and a series of meditations on sexual positions
(appropriable by any race). The scientia sexualis of Foucault’s formula-
tions does emerge, but only through a systematic objectification of what
lies beyond English borders and imaginations.
It is important to review first some material facts about the relation-
ship of pornography to empire. By the 1890s, England had spectacular
exports in everything from cotton clothes to nude erotic photographs.
George Cannon, William Dugdale, and Henry Hayler were lauded entre-
preneurs of pornography, a substantial section of which involved por-
nography set in the colonies.≤∫ The genre of pornography, however, was
not a stable and ‘‘safely insularized’’ space, as the very definition of, and
demand for, what constituted obscenity and pornography were under
constant debate. For example, the Society for the Suppression of Vice in
1875 ran a crusade against a book entitled Rabelais due to its use of
suggestive and antiquated phraseology, forcing writers like Algernon
Charles Swinburne to ask what Victorian society was to do with canoni-
cal texts like the Bible or Shakespeare’s plays. Laws were also being
passed and repealed to keep pace with the changing standards of Vic-
torian taste: The Customs Consolidation Act of 1853 ‘‘contained the first
express prohibition intended to ban the importation of pornography . . .
any indecent articles were to be seized by the customs authorities.’’ The
legislature then shifted to domestic sources with the passing of Sir John
Campbell’s Obscene Publications Act in 1857, which in turn was heavily
criticized and modified in 1868 by Sir Alexander Cockburn, giving rise,
in turn, to the infamous Hicklin test of obscenity.≤Ω Additionally, as
Allison Pease argues, Victorian pornography—that is, texts ostensibly
undertaken for the sole purpose of sexually stimulating their readers—
were not written, ‘‘as popular criticism would have it, for a privileged
clientele of gentlemen bibliophiles.’’ For instance, the preface of Charles
Skilton’s Bibliotheca Arcana (1885) claimed that ‘‘books and plates of this
class do not reach the masses; and they cannot exercise a pernicious
influence upon youth, because they only exist in the cabinets of a few
fortune tellers.’’≥≠ But judging by the vast number of pornographic mate-
rials seized by the Society for the Suppression of Vice, it seems clear that
pornography had definitely crossed class lines.≥∞
That the distribution and reproduction of pornographic texts had not
only crossed class lines but may also have crossed national borders

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became apparent to me when I was researching this chapter. I first came
across a reference to Venus in India (1885) at the University of Bombay
archives, where I was told facetiously by the head librarian that the text
was one whose circulation in India must have rivaled that of the Bible in
colonial times.≥≤ I belabor this purely speculative comment because it
reproduces a relationship of sexuality to the archive that is both ubiqui-
tous and conjectural. It is impossible to ascertain accurately the impact
of such pornographic material, given the clandestine ways in which it
was circulated, copied, distributed, and sometimes even translated. Still,
it is significant that such pornography made available for ‘‘native au-
diences,’’ and especially for native men, the image of English women dis-
played as objects of desire or plunder, thus overriding, in some ways, the
very policed racial parameters within which pornography was written.≥≥
Deana Heath has written extensively about the divided censorship
debates in the British colonies, with India providing a particularly com-
plex case in point. Heath suggests that the censorship of obscenity, and
in turn, of pornography, produced a discourse of culture that worked to
bolster the project of colonial di√erence. Yet as my earlier discussions of
the legal case of native sodomy and its impossible reform demonstrate,
the colonial state’s desire to produce an exhaustive archive of the peoples
it ruled was often undone by the comparative analysis needed to make
such reform e√ective. That is, for antipornography laws to be instituted
in colonial India, standards of obscenity had to be carried over from
Britain to colonial India. The very presence of antipornography laws in
Britain translated not only into the questionable morality of the sup-
posedly civilizing colonizers but also undermined the rhetorical force of
Britain’s ability to govern India. Thus there appears a discourse of con-
tradictory lament in the o≈cial archives with respect to the question of
obscenity and pornography in the Indian context. On the one hand, we
read of colonial o≈cials repeatedly complaining about the rampant per-
version of Indian culture and speaking of the need to regulate such
outpourings in discursive materials. On the other hand, there is equal
despair at the thought of brown subjects ‘‘viewing postcards of naked
white women, or of English-educated Indians reading works like The
Lustful Turk or Venus in India.’’≥∂
Such uneven censorship regulation requires some understanding of
how di√erent colonies performed under di√erent rules of empire. These

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rules profoundly a√ected not only the extent of British intervention in
indigenous politics but also the di√erent ways in which the people in
particular colonies began to be imaginatively sexualized and racialized
in nineteenth-century pornography. McClintock gestures to this point
in her work on the genealogies of imperialism, but she flattens the
di√erent colonies into one homogenously sexualized landscape, thus
overlooking specific contexts in a complex region like India. Historians
of India note variously that India—a congeries of sometimes indepen-
dent states, maintaining a range of relationships with Britian—was never
a colony as the African countries were.≥∑ McClintock speaks, for exam-
ple, of a ‘‘long tradition of male travel as an erotics of ravishment . . .
where as legend had it, men sported gigantic penises and women con-
sorted with apes.’’ She calls the spaces of this European plunder the
‘‘porno-tropics,’’ ‘‘a fantastic magic lantern of the mind onto which Eu-
rope projected its forbidden sexual desires and fears.’’≥∏ While McClin-
tock’s general claim of a vast sexualized colonial fantasy may be true, it
was not always a hypersexual space of ‘‘gigantic penises’’ or a simple site
of ‘‘forbidden’’ colonial desires and anxieties. Instead, as I shall argue,
the discovery, or as Jyotsna Singh has recently reminded us, the ‘‘multi-
ple discoveries of India,’’≥π involved a more textured and often ambiva-
lent sexualization of India. This sexualization is one that more often
displayed the conventional dictates of nineteenth-century sexuality than
the exhibition of its forbidden fantasies.
In the colonial process, India performs as a crucial example of what
Jonathan Dollimore calls the ‘‘perverse dynamic,’’ as its conceptualiza-
tion is fraught in racial, governmental, and cultural terms. It is both
foreign and yet strangely familiar. As Dollimore says, ‘‘the perverse
dynamic challenges not by collapsing order, but through a reordering
less tolerable, more disturbing than chaos. Its di√erence is never the
absolutely unfamiliar, but the reordering of the already known, a dis-
closure of a radical interconnectedness which is the social, but which
present cultures can rarely a√ord to acknowledge and must instead
disavow.’’≥∫ In India, as I have argued in my introduction, the natives
were ‘‘brown’’ (a shade unnervingly closer to ‘‘white’’ than ‘‘black’’),
capable of partial self-governance (India was a colony under so-called
indirect rule), and the inheritors of rich literary and intellectual tradi-
tions that ultimately gave rise to important European intellectual move-

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ments such as the Oriental renaissance. Indians appeared higher in the
stratification of races than Africans, whereby, using alleged Anglo-Saxon
attributes as both the ideal and the norm, the inhabitants of India were
considered more acceptable than those of Africa as they were said to
have none of the supposed indolence of the blacks. Queen Victoria, for
example, was anxious that ‘‘all her colonial Governors should know her
feelings on this subject’’ of race and was adamant that Indians should not
be racialized as ‘‘black subjects.’’≥Ω
The events of the 1857 Indian Mutiny, however, derailed earlier no-
tions of how the ‘‘natives’’ were to be racialized and governed. May 10,
1857, explicitly inaugurated an era of crisis and vulnerability for the Brit-
ish in India. On this day, Indian sepoys mutinied against their o≈-
cers ‘‘with the extraordinary scene at Meerut—its burned bungalows,
smashed prisons, and slain Europeans—becoming a familiar sight in the
months ahead.’’ Suddenly, it appeared, as Jenny Sharpe suggests, that
‘‘the British found themselves without a script they could rely upon.’’∂≠
The anxiety over how to read the 1857 Mutiny, either as a victory for co-
lonial Orientalist logic or as a breach of it, translated into clear spheres
of colonial management.∂∞ The shifting contemporaneous codification
of the event, from ‘‘the Sepoy Mutiny’’ to the ‘‘Great Rebellion’’ to Karl
Marx’s coinage of it as the ‘‘First War of Independence,’’ underlined
the problem of its ‘‘correct’’ reading and signification in the colonial
imaginary.
In both Indian and British history, the 1857 Indian Mutiny marked a
clear touchstone in Indo-English relations. A significant shift occurred
in the English management of India both as cultural and economic
capital after the Mutiny; in November 1858, the East India Company
(formerly responsible for the management of India) was replaced by the
much more formal Government of India under Queen Victoria. The
rhetoric of colonialism had to be rescripted so that the otherness of the
Indian colonial subject could be maintained and a solid basis of in-
feriority elaborated. According to Francis Hutchins, ‘‘India had entered
the general English consciousness in the first half of the century as an
illustration of the abominable depravity which might flourish beyond
the pale of the Christian religion. Until 1857, however, India had seemed
remote, its depravity little more than theoretical. At a stroke the Mutiny
made India both grimly real and relevant . . . and the English public

110 | CHAPTER THREE

followed with horrified fascination the unveiling of every minute detail
of Indian perversity.’’∂≤ The British now stressed Indian decadence to
protect colonial ideology from the taint of the earlier emphasis on the
shared Aryan roots of the two peoples. In fact, many late Victorian ideas
and images of India, Benita Parry argues, suggest ‘‘that the Indians were
feared not only as subjects who had once rebelled, and who could do so
again, but also as perverts threatening to invade and seduce the white
world. A visitor to India was warned by a seasoned Anglo-Indian lady,
‘You’ll never understand the dark and torturous minds of the natives. . . .
and if you do, I shan’t like you—you won’t be healthy.’ ’’∂≥
Such alleged linkages of the British Empire in India with forms of
sexual scandal (publicly highlighted by the involvement of several high-
ranking empire o≈cials, such as Sir Hector Macdonald, who was dis-
covered in 1875 in acts of pederasty) had created the overwhelming
impression of empire as a corrupting influence.∂∂ Any openness to the
contaminations of empire was said to be dangerous, eroding English
reserve, and creating feverish imaginative responses that could only
destroy English masculinity. For instance, Acton documents that one of
the major stimulants for adolescent masturbation was pornography writ-
ten by English adventure heroes.∂∑ Thus it was seen as no coincidence
that some of the classics of British erotic literature were written by men
who voyaged not just to Europe but also to the many colonies. John
Cleland, the author of Fanny Hill (1748), ‘‘spent thirteen years in the
legal department of the East India Company in Bombay,’’ and William
Potter allegedly wrote the much circulated Romance of Lust (1875–76)
while living in India.∂∏

‘‘ ’ T I S T R U E A N D C O N S T A N T ’’

’Tis true and constant, ne’er away does roam

The fondest husband sticks not close to home;
Take this sweet girl, and when with joy you’ve thrilled, oh;
Then thank your friend for sending you a Dildoe!
T H E S T O RY O F A D I L D O E

I turn now to a pornographic text that takes even further the celebration
of the invention of the dildo that I began with, devoting its entire narra-
tive to extolling its pleasures. The Story of a Dildoe: A Tale in Five Tableaux

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(1891) chronicles the adventures of three young women—Laura, Maud,
and Flora—who purchase a dildo and explain to the reader some of its
possible uses.∂π We are provided with several role-playing scenarios in
which the woman wearing the dildo is identified as ‘‘masculine.’’ So
transformative is the e√ect of the dildo that it makes Flora, one of the
heroines wearing it, ‘‘feel all the impatient fury of a man when attempt-
ing to rape a virgin.’’ There is also much discussion about the important
function of initiation that the dildo will perform: one of the female
protagonists tells us how she regards with ‘‘positive horror’’ and igno-
rance the prospect of ‘‘feeling a man’’ and how the dildo is finally making
it ‘‘possible to taste pleasures without the danger and wickedness of a
man’’ (Story, 13). Several details stand out from among the repetitive
scenarios of sexual pleasure that dot the text. One example is the ver-
batim reappearance of the advertisement for the india-rubber dildo seen
in Love and Safety. In The Story of a Dildoe, the advertisement is much
longer and provides us with more instructions for the care and usage of
the dildo. ‘‘The most complete article is made with a stomacher, in order
that one female may fix it firmly on herself so as to operate upon another
female. . . . The upper strings are passed round her waist, and tied in
front; and the under strings round the thick part of the thighs, and tied
behind. In this manner the machine will remain firm and e√ective
throughout the ‘soft encounter’ ’’ (Story, 15). This dildo is so accessorized
as to be even more likely than a penis to produce the desired e√ects on a
woman. Again, the emphasis is not on a visual resemblance but on one
more fungible, more lifelike in function than in appearance.∂∫
I do not wish to overpronounce the appearance of this advertisement
in two di√erent pornographic texts, especially given the fraught history
of publication in Victorian pornography. Marcus, Kendrick, and Sigel
variously point out that the world of Victorian pornography was much
tainted by the presence of imposters o√ering reprints posing as new. For
instance, John Camden Hotten, a notorious London bookseller and pub-
lisher, was ‘‘a master of the racket of reprinting. He would take a work
that was some fifty years old, alter but not entirely change the text and
title—adding something in the way of further spice to both—and then
reprint it as a new work, at two guineas a throw.’’∂Ω Despite such occupa-
tional hazards, several observations that the author of The Story of a

112 | CHAPTER THREE

Dildoe makes with respect to the function and circulation of porno-
graphic texts are worth noting.
First, there is the metanarrative of an ever-circulating ‘‘canon’’ of
pornographic texts within the world of pornography itself. The three
protagonists of The Story of a Dildoe refer constantly to the ‘‘bad books’’
(Story, 12) they have read, to how these books are harmless and easily
procurable, and to how necessary the books are to the stimulation of
sexual activity (‘‘Come, Maud, lubricate her fanny, whilst I read’’). We
are presented with self-consciously parodic scenes of a pornographic
book-of-the-month club meeting as the three girls get together for their
regular meeting and exclaim over the new books they have received:
‘‘They eagerly gathered around her [Flora]. As she unpacked them and as
she turned over the leaves and displayed the pictures various were the
exclamations that followed; and amidst blushes and laughs and exclama-
tions of delight and wonder the books were read’’ (Story, 33). Most of the
books contain information about ‘‘extraordinary Eastern habits,’’ and the
range of texts is enough (‘‘stories, poems, dictionaries, catalogues, adver-
tisements’’) to prompt one of the eager ladies to assemble a mock syl-
labus. She promises to introduce her friends to ‘‘a course of reading, and
accordingly from several learned authors, works, notes,’’ and her ulti-
mate desire is to be a collector and to ‘‘have a perfect Eldorado of curious
literature’’ (Story, 79–81). The editors of the pornographic journals, the
Pearl (1879–81) and the Boudoir (1883), are even more aggressive in
their emphasis on a growing circulation of pornographic texts in Vic-
torian society. In one installment of the Boudoir, a new lover calls on his
lady and leaves her ‘‘several bawdy books,’’ much to her delight. We are
provided with a list of the most popular books, which the reader is
expected to be well versed in, as well as their costs: ‘‘He left her several
bawdy books to read, including Fanny Hill, The Ups and Downs of Life, and
The New Ladies’ Tickler. Also, three large and especially interesting vol-
umes, full of large coloured plates and every variety of erotic reading—
including tales and songs—called The Pearl magazine, which he assured
her cost him thirty pounds.’’∑≠ Smarting from the increasing raids by
members of the Society for the Suppression of Vice and the extreme
ways in which obscene books were simultaneously denied their exis-
tence and displayed as exhibits in legal cases for their increased suppres-

THE STORY OF AN INDIA-RUBBER DILDO | 113

sion, one editor of the Pearl o√ers a biting explanation for the journal’s
title, one almost worthy of William Makepeace Thackeray: ‘‘At last our
own ideas have hit upon the modest little ‘Pearl’. . . . especially in the
hope that when it comes under the snouts of the moral and hypocritical
swine of the world, they may not trample it underfoot and feel disposed
to rend the publisher, but that a few will become subscribers on the
quiet. To such better disposed piggywiggies, I would they have only to
keep up appearances by regularly attending church, giving to charities,
and always appearing deeply interested in moral philanthropy, to ensure
a respectable and highly moral character.’’∑∞
Second, the connection between the growing sale of ‘‘facetious’’ books
and the growing sale of dildos in the advertisement is worth noticing. We
are told how easily available the dildo is to the public: ‘‘These pleasing
instruments (with directions of use) can be obtained at all booksellers
who deal in facetious works, and also at some first rate houses of accom-
modation. A couple day’s notice is required, also a deposit of ten shillings
which will be allowed in the purchase’’ (Story, 16). That there were many
booksellers who dealt in ‘‘facetious works’’ is clear. Between 1834 and
1880, the Society for the Suppression of Vice confiscated more than
385,000 obscene prints and photos, 80,000 books and pamphlets, five
tons of other printed matter, 28,000 sheets of obscene songs and circu-
lars, and various other ephemera.∑≤ Whether the spread of the imagina-
tive discourse of these facetiae in mass culture did indeed produce a real,
increased demand in the material production of dildos is impossible to
determine. There are no records of india-rubber dildo production despite
references to its presence in a range of fiction. Concomitantly, it is
impossible to say who these dildos were produced for, and whether the
purchasers were mainly Englishwomen or not. However, there does
appear in the March 15, 1892, issue of the journal India Rubber World a
rather ominous sounding article entitled ‘‘The Trade in Questionable
Rubber Goods’’ that might o√er up some possible answers. The India
Rubber World was one of the leading economic journals of the late
nineteenth century and produced biweekly updates on the manufactur-
ing process and products of india rubber in England and North America.
In his history of india rubber, while referring to the production of un-
named ‘‘questionable’’ goods, Woodru√ points out that such production

114 | CHAPTER THREE

accounted for a ‘‘stealthily conducted trade since the fifties of the last
century.’’∑≥
The article in the India Rubber World begins with the provocative
phrase, ‘‘It is a very di≈cult thing to keep a secret,’’ and goes on to de-
tail the conditions under which these ‘‘questionable rubber goods’’ are
made. There is a palpable aura of illicit activity as the author, T. J. B.
Buckingham, weaves a narrative of danger, deceit, and excitement: the
factory in which the goods are made has ‘‘windows so draped that the
outside world may not peer in,’’ and ‘‘everything looks as if the propri-
etor was all ready to pull up stakes and hurry away.’’ The contamination
of the pornographic narrative seems to have seeped even into this eco-
nomic journal, as the description of the factory acts more as a titillating
invitation to peer into its interior than it does as a warning against future
producers of ‘‘questionable india rubber goods.’’ Yet we are never told
what the questionable goods are, except that they are sold ‘‘in a stealthy,
shamed-faced way but very little money is expended on the plant,’’ and
that in Europe they ‘‘are on sale in a variety of stores.’’∑∂
The munificent dildo of india rubber, whether or not it appeared ‘‘on
sale in a variety of stores,’’ does appear as staple fare in Victorian por-
nography, either carefully highlighted as in the case of The Story of a
Dildoe or casually inserted in random scenarios of sexual pleasure, as in
several episodes in the Pearl: ‘‘The godemiches [dildos] were brought
forth, and proved to be of monstrous size, to our ideas; they were made of
the finest vulcanised india rubber, beautifully moulded and finished with
all appendages complete.’’∑∑ In most of these instances, the material of
the dildo is always remarked on and cited as a guarantee of the dildo’s
superiority and e≈ciency. In one case, it is a ‘‘big india-rubber instru-
ment’’ tucked away in a drawer in the dressing table;∑∏ on another occa-
sion the dildo disappears, but the qualities of the india rubber are still
extolled: ‘‘What do you think of my sweetheart? Isn’t she a beauty?
There’s an elastic belly to spend on, and I can assure you it has a moist en-
gaging entrance to it—feels like velvet, and clutches like India rubber.’’∑π
I describe these appearances of the india-rubber dildo for two rea-
sons: first, the reification of india rubber in these pornographic texts as
e≈cient, modern, lifelike, and beautiful resonates strongly with the
history of the manufacture of india rubber, a history powerfully linked to

THE STORY OF AN INDIA-RUBBER DILDO | 115

the management of colonial India. The technologies of manufacturing
india rubber in the late nineteenth century much resembled the tech-
nologies of colonial rule in India. The first stage in the manufacture of
india rubber in the metropole was purification: the raw rubber had to be
rid of any ‘‘foreign matter. The rubber was cut up by hand and the more
obvious forms of adulteration . . . introduced by the native as good
measure removed.’’ The rubber was then fed into a filtering machine,
where it was cleansed further, and added into a plasticizing machine
that molded and ‘‘kneaded the rubber e√ectively.’’ Once through that
process, it was passed into a ‘‘softening machine,’’ where critical artificial
chemicals were incorporated into the rubber to ensure its appropriate
malleability. It was only ‘‘when the material had been cleansed, ground,
softened and compounded’’ that it was ready for the process of vul-
canization.∑∫ Not all kinds of raw rubber were deemed acceptable for
such manufacturing processes. The proper choice of wild rubber proved
crucial to the cost-e≈cient production of india rubber. Asiatic rubber
was the most prudent choice, as opposed to ‘‘Seramby’’ or ‘‘Negro-head’’
rubber, which ‘‘consisted of scraps and strips of latex peeled o√ the bark
of the tree, and was generally suspected of heavy adulteration.’’ Asiatic
rubber was less impure than the latter type of rubber, and Woodru√’s
history informs us: ‘‘The Ficus elastica tree and Urceola elastica, a vine
like plant of the East Indies yielded the greatest supply of rubber. . . .
Imports of Asiatic rubber into the United Kingdom remained unimpor-
tant until the late [eighteen] fifties when a rapid increase in deliveries
took place from approximately 10,000 cwts. imported in 1857 to 21,808
cwts. imported in 1900.’’∑Ω
Such a manufacture was echoed in the process of creating the perfect
native subject. Gauri Vishwanathan delineates how the business of em-
pire building was facilitated through the intellectual purification of the
native Indians, which supposedly obtained from the introduction of
English-language literature and the careful filtering out of native literary
and intellectual traditions.∏≠ The emphasis, as in the india-rubber manu-
facturing process, was on slowly curing the natives of their ‘‘adulterat-
ing’’ instincts, on somehow incorporating alongside these instincts a
respect and need for English rule: ‘‘The imagery of grafting that perme-
ated the discourse [of colonial administration in India] pointed to an

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emerging theory of organicism that conceived of political formation as
part of a process of cultural synthesis.’’∏∞
The immense demand for purified india rubber in the nineteenth
century can be seen in the import of nearly 20 million pounds to Great
Britain in 1882, for example, and in the extensive allocation of land
for india rubber plantations in British-controlled Ceylon, Malay, and
Burma.∏≤ For instance, the acreage under rubber had increased in Malay
from about 350 acres in 1877 to about 20,000 in 1914 and 43,000 acres
in 1920. Such demand for increased production was accompanied by an
equal one for manual labor in the plantations, a demand met by the
successive waves of south Indian immigrants who benefited from the
growth of transport and communication facilities between south India,
Malaysia, and Burma.∏≥ As many scholars have argued, conditions on
the india rubber plantations were exceedingly brutal, whereby a newly
installed plantocratic system continued previous patterns of slavery.∏∂
These stories of the production of india rubber thicken the pornographic
narrative in which the india-rubber dildo is installed. It is through such
histories of labor and production that the dildo, so conspicuously absent
in material form, begins to take shape as an object. The historicity of
pornography opens through the historicity of colonial modes of produc-
tion and vice versa; neither history is thus complete in itself.

S W A R T H Y, S I L E N T V I S H N U S

The logic of the india-rubber dildo—as an object that produces both

presence and absence—translates into other scenes of colonial sexuality.
The india-rubber dildo, the ‘‘truly artificial prick,’’ I want to suggest,
functions as a symbolic conduit for other signifiers of colonial sexuality
in mid- to late nineteenth century pornographic works. More specifi-
cally, the india-rubber dildo reemerges in di√erent form in the complex
avatar of Indian male sexuality. We will see that male Indian sexuality is
noticeably absent in Victorian pornography, as opposed to the hypersex-
ualized male figures of African origin. Indian men do appear frequently,
but mainly as enablers, as foils and observers, as silent laborers in the
prolific sexual activities of their colonizers. They are pimps, factotums,
guards, and occasionally even social equals to the English characters, but
rarely do they emerge as the rampaging, virile sexual animals that most

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stereotypes of the colonial other would have us believe. There is a
studied avoidance of any interracial intimacy, either between the sexes
or within the same sex, in the scenarios of Anglo-Indian encounters.
Like the india-rubber dildo, the Indian male, too, becomes an agent of
access to pleasure, but never the subject or object of it. The absent
Indian male presence ostensibly forecloses on all possibilities of interra-
cial sex and enables colonial desire ‘‘with love and safety,’’ proclaiming
the new charms of indirect rule.∏∑
It is through the conditions enabled by colonial and economic history
that pornographic journals such as the Pearl enjoyed short-lived success.
The publishers of the journal advertised its wares in the following terms:
‘‘Every stretch of voluptuous imagination is here fully depicted, roger-
ing, ramming, one unbounded scene of lust, lechery and licentious-
ness.’’∏∏ The most popular features were predictably ones that dealt with
the English vices of flagellation, sodomy, and onanism. The two most
popular features were called ‘‘Selections from Lady Pokingham’s Jour-
nal’’ and ‘‘Miss Coote’s Confessions,’’ which have at least one material
signifier of India, either human or object, that observes, enables, and
facilitates but is never principal in the sexual activities taking place. For
instance, in the February 1880 issue, there is a ‘‘most handsome col-
oured fellow with a Hindoo cast of features’’ who inhabits the household
where the sexual activity takes place, but he is never invited to partici-
pate. This is in sharp contrast to ‘‘black Joseph’’ or ‘‘Sambo,’’ the two
African figures who are depicted in egregiously racist and oversexualized
ways and perform predictable feats of sexual prowess. The same issue
o√ers another typical example in which the colonel’s servant, who is a
‘‘handsome swarthy Vishnu,’’ knows ‘‘imperceptible secrets’’ that he re-
tains to assist his English master’s rapacious sexual appetite.∏π
Other examples in the Pearl include vignettes called ‘‘An Instance of
Self-Denial,’’ wherein an Indian man, entrusted with the care and virtue
of a female slave, can claim ‘‘self-denial’’ by ‘‘fucking her in the arse,’’ a
practice not represented as a violation by its sheer noninclusion in
prescribed heterosexual behavior.∏∫ The pornographic material I read
went to great lengths to point up Eastern men’s unusual proclivity for
‘‘buggering’’ their women. I found no examples of Englishmen sodomiz-
ing each other, only scattered references to their ‘‘frigging’’ Indian men,
but usually only as punishment or for the supposedly larger goal of

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‘‘knowledge and duty,’’ as in the case of Richard Burton. Burton’s ac-
counts negotiate the erotic spectacle of the colony, with its abundance of
male brothels, through the optic of what he calls ‘‘participant observa-
tion.’’ Burton, despite his penchant for native customs, a quality that
earned him the title of ‘‘white nigger,’’ insists that his interest in chroni-
cling ‘‘oriental sexual perversions’’ is purely scientific and informs his
theories on the Sotadic Zone of homosexuality.∏Ω
A second recurring aspect of the Pearl is stories with at least two
explicit sexual scenes between women, again usually with the native
male servant in silent observation. The women are generally shown
using extremely large dildos, and they rarely perform oral sex on each
other. The largeness of the ‘‘phallic object’’ (sometimes one to two feet)
is much remarked on, with lengthy descriptions of the material from
which they are made (‘‘they were made of the finest vulcanised india
rubber, beautifully moulded and finished’’), reminding the reader that
this ‘‘aberrant’’ act is still always contained in the tradition of colo-
nial manufacturing policies. Like the ‘‘native secrets’’ that the swarthy
‘‘Vishnu’’ bestows on the colonel, which are then translated and used in
the English context, the vulcanized india rubber also carries the story of
a colonial transaction in which rubber as raw material is imported from
the colonies before it is transformed into a national English product.
(England, as mentioned before, was one of the leading manufacturers of
vulcanized india rubber in the late 1880s, when rubber became the new
economic savior for the English markets.) We are also repeatedly told, by
means of their titles and other aphorisms in the texts, that ‘‘we all do it,’’
suggesting that even an ostensibly perverse act can be incorporated into
the larger, normative realm of heterosexuality.
The primal scene of interracial sex is also negotiated carefully, with
much attention paid to the potential threat of miscegenation. In one of
the period’s early bestsellers, The Lustful Turk (1828), the lascivious Dey
kidnaps, rapes, and then buggers an English virgin, producing no half
breeds, despite the book’s failing to mention that no birth control is
used. The Lustful Turk ends on a fascinating and amusing note, with the
Dey castrated by Silvia, one of the female protagonists, after which his
‘‘pinnacle of strength’’ is packed o√ and sent to England as bounty: ‘‘It
fell to [Emily’s] lot to have the shaft,’’ which was later given to a boarding
school that ‘‘shows [it] as a reward for good behaviour to the little lady

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scholars.’’π≠ When juxtaposed with Venus in India (1889), this text pro-
vides a revealing dialogue on race relations. The Lustful Turk is set in pre-
colonial times and carefully advances analogies between Greek myths of
violated females and the plight of the English girl, Emily. Venus in India,
on the other hand, chronicles the sex escapades of an equally lusty
Captain Devereux in colonial India who, despite his uncontrollable sex-
ual urges, cannot bring himself to have sex with native women. Given
the extreme anxiety created in the English after the 1857 Mutiny in
India, after which interracial ‘‘alliances’’ were severely frowned on, this
self-monitoring of Devereux’s desire appears particularly telling.
Venus in India also regularly underscores the inherent contradictions
in the relationship between sexuality and empire, most obviously played
out in the dissonant styles of description and writing in the text. On the
one hand, the elsewhere of empire is meant to generate and sanction
untrammeled libidinal responses; on the other, by resisting those very
temptations pro√ered by a colonial landscape, an English character can
prove his inner strength and racial superiority. Unlike most other mid-
to late nineteenth-century pornographic texts that give little space to
nonsexual activities or their protagonists’ personal introspection, the
protagonist of Venus in India is constantly overwrought with self-doubt
and guilt about his desire for sexual pleasure. The pornographic novel
here becomes a novel of sentiment, as Devereux constantly pledges
allegiance to his wife in England and indeed rejects a possible sexual
liaison with an English girl under that pretext, an otherwise unheard-of
occurrence in Victorian pornography. He is also unusual in his steady
attention to the desires of the women he has sex with; the narrative
explicitly outlines moral prohibitions for what he can and cannot do,
and acts that are usually a prerequisite in Victorian pornography, such as
incest and pederasty, are completely ruled out. Here are some of his
thoughts on such matters: ‘‘In other words if I ever did ‘seduce’ a girl, it
was for her own pleasure as much as for mine, and my care was that in
opening her thighs to me she did not open them to danger, or to future
care and misery.’’π∞ The captain’s narrative also turns into an ethno-
graphic journey, replete with detail about the Indian landscape and its
customs—not sexual customs, but rather information about modes of
transportation, indigenous laws, and the quality of English cantonment

120 | CHAPTER THREE

life in India. For instance, he describes the construction and function of
an ‘‘ekkha, a two wheeled conveyance used in Northern India’’ for over
three pages, telling us in excruciating detail about its good and bad
points as a system of transportation.π≤ Such a map of ethnographic ba-
nality turns the pornographic narrative into a proximate anthropology.
There is a second running ambivalence in Venus in India that further
highlights the unusual qualities of this text. The narrative glorifies, in-
deed overdetermines, English virility in general: for example, the text is
strewn with descriptions of Devereux’s numerous sexual marathons, in
which he has sex with several women in one night. The narrator also
predictably denigrates native male sexuality and renders it threatening
with such references as the Afghan’s ‘‘beastly black pole.’’ Such osten-
sible di√erences between the native and the Englishman are confusingly
elaborated in scenes that depict acts of sodomy. We are told from the
outset: ‘‘He knew . . . how addicted Afghans are to Sodomy,’’ and how
capable not just of buggering the English memsahib but also the English-
man. As the Afghan who Devereux encounters ominously says: ‘‘I have
poked and buggered your sister . . . I will now poke and bugger thee.’’π≥
Moreover, buggering, the worst sexual act imaginable, and the one
that separates the civilized from the savage, is quite literally unimagin-
able: ‘‘The Colonel did not wish to think of a daughter of his could be
buggered, therefore she had not been buggered.’’π∂ It is important to note
that most of the native men with the predilection for sodomy are Af-
ghans, Punjabis, and Sikhs: all clans of native men characterized for
their bravery and prowess in martial arts.π∑ Even as Devereux begins his
amorous activities in India, there is a second war brewing between the
soldiers of the English army and the rebelling Afghans of the North-West
Provinces during the period (1878–80). In fact, Venus in India begins
with a reference to ‘‘the war in Afghanistan.’’ Rarely do we find a Bengali
sodomite.π∏ Even Kipling, in his often repeated never-the-twain-shall-
meet mode, makes clear that such a union between the East and West is
only possible when the two men involved are strong, and his ballad uses
the example of an Englishman and an Afghan. Making such mythically
structured warrior-like figures into emasculated and depraved sodomites
ensures, as it does in Venus in India, that they do not threaten English
masculinity or desire Englishwomen in any way considered natural or

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attractive. Thus, in one of the most fascinating scenes in the text, two
Afghans enter the household of an English colonel. Their entry is de-
scribed in tropes mythologized in colonial scenes of the 1857 Indian
Mutiny: senseless killings of English soldiers, rapes of Englishwomen
and innocent children. One Afghan sexually assaults Fanny, the colonel’s
older daughter (we are never really told the details of the assault), while
the other Afghan buggers Amy, the younger daughter, after which he is
caught and killed by Devereux.ππ The latter’s relief is palpable when he
scrutinizes Fanny and Amy and exclaims, ‘‘To my inexpressible joy I
discovered that Fanny [and Amy] had not been ravished! The close little
maidenhead was distinctly there, unbroken, unscathed.’’π∫ He then pro-
ceeds eventually to ‘‘ravish’’ the two sisters himself. This primal scene of
an Englishwoman being assaulted by a native man again references the
events of 1857. Yet this time around, the Afghan’s sexual transgression is
rerouted and scripted as unsuccessful and ine≈cient.

D A N G E R O U S AT TA C H M E N T

To the old bawd’s bedroom at once Peg went

To seize upon the implement.
She rushed to the couch, she searched the bed,
Underneath the pillow, she spied its head.
She seized it and cried: ‘‘Full well I know
Far better than Joe’s the old Dildoe.’’
‘‘ T H E O L D D I L D O E , ’’ T H E P E A R L , S E P T E M B E R 1 8 8 0

While it is now clear that the production of Victorian pornography was

not indi√erent to the dictates of colonial rule, I want to emphasize
equally that these dictates were not always upheld. Thus far I have
argued that the story of the india-rubber dildo is imbricated in the story
of colonial manufacturing history and that of archival production. Tech-
nologies of narrated sexuality intersect with technologies of imperial-
ism, proliferating the pleasures and profits of the Victorian world. The
india-rubber dildo ‘‘diversifies’’ and ‘‘adds’’ to women’s pleasures, a nec-
essary metonymy for heterosexuality, just as the manufacture of india
rubber disseminates and extends England’s economic powers. I have
also suggested that the india-rubber dildo as an enabling agent of plea-
sure, as a substitute for the ‘‘real’’ penis, converges with the representa-

122 | CHAPTER THREE

tion of Indian male sexuality as subsidiary, as a constant foil to the
plenitude of English male virility. There is, however, a third, and more
problematic, structure of signification in Victorian pornography that
diverges from the two readings I have set forth. This structure of signifi-
cation returns us to the critique of the logic of presence that I began
with. We are now left with an archival textuality that is both ubiquitous
and unreliable, pushing forth a relationship between the proliferation of
unreliably sourced pornography, the materialities it instantiates (and
obviates), and the desires encapsulated in, by, and through the logic of
the colonial archive.
To attend to such a structure of both excess and ellipsis, it is worth-
while to more attentively revisit Jacques Derrida’s well-cited (and often
misunderstood) logic of the supplement. Broadly speaking, Derrida pro-
poses a new, di√erentiated order of understanding representation, es-
pecially in contexts in which meaning operates through binary struc-
tures of presence and absence (e.g., in the world of pornography, where
the penis is ostensibly the ‘‘real/natural’’ and the dildo the ‘‘artificial/
unnatural’’). In the logic of supplementarity, the imitation or the repre-
sentation is always ‘‘dangerous,’’ forcing one to forget the vicariousness
of its function as it passes for the very presence it only supplements. The
representation is an indication both of progress, of technology, and of
the ‘‘possibility of perversion, regression that adheres to the power of
substitution,’’ and it allows us to absent ourselves and act only through
proxy. The scandal, in Derridean terms, is that the image, the substitu-
tion, is in fact what makes the ‘‘world move.’’πΩ
In the Victorian world of india-rubber dildos, the logic of the supple-
ment adheres insistently, preventing any simple reading of the dildo as
compensatory substitute, or a reminder of lack.∫≠ As Peg’s cry, in the
ditty that begins this section, suggests, sometimes the ‘‘old dildoe’’ is
dangerously ‘‘far better than Joe’’: sometimes imitation is far better than,
or too much like, the real. Cast within the chiasmus of the truly artificial,
the dildo adds to, cumulates, and often obviates presence. Dildos serve
as prosthetic devices, not just for Englishwomen but also for English-
men: ‘‘Many elderly gentlemen, whose a√airs have shrunk into their
bellies, are in the habit of strapping [on] these instruments’’ (Story, 16),
ensuring sexual performance that far exceeds their ‘‘real’’ form. In this
seamless and e√ective union between the ‘‘shrunken’’ parts of the En-

THE STORY OF AN INDIA-RUBBER DILDO | 123

glishman and the charms of ‘‘these instruments,’’ the separation be-
tween the real and the artificial disappears. Erin O’Connor argues that
such a harmonious relationship between man and prosthetic device,
where the device cannot be detached from the labor that makes it seem
to come alive, creates a hypnotically perfect symbiosis.∫∞ Dildos thus
become exemplary trompe l’oeil devices: ‘‘It gives me comfort, for we
learnt the trick / I close my eyes, and think ‘tis Marcelle’s prick.’’∫≤
Dildos also serve as originators of an other, more disorderly term of
representation that defies easy capture, ‘‘altering nature’s plan’’ as it
were: ‘‘As Laura stood with her magnificent priapus sti√ before her, she
certainly looked a curious being. Out of harmony with the eye’s experi-
ence, but not repulsive, quite the contrary’’ (Story, 45). In this depiction,
the ‘‘magnificent priapus’’ does not merge ‘‘harmoniously’’ with the body
it is attached to; it bestows new meaning and new presence, super-
imposing itself on the ‘‘eye’s experience’’ of the male phallus. The Story of
a Dildoe registers the confusion of such curious impressions. As the
narrative develops, Laura’s desire for men slips away, and she becomes
instead fascinated and mesmerized by the dildo she has strapped on. The
other girls in the story echo Laura’s fascination with the dildo: it ‘‘wins
our admiration by its magnificent proportions and the boldness and
originality of the conception’’ (Story, 46). In this narrative, the proxy, as
Derrida argues, indeed is what dangerously makes ‘‘the world [of por-
nography] move.’’
Such supplementary readings, I want to finally suggest, not only
unfold outward into the material realities of colonial manufacture but
also fold inward into the archives that record the vicissitudes of the
British Empire. In Victorian pornography and the colonial archive lies
both the fantasy of conquest and the nightmare of incorporation and
loss. Devereux articulates this constitutive agon at the heart of imperial
discourse when, after having killed the Afghan and ravished the English
girls, he becomes impotent and tormented by bouts of nervous depres-
sion. Denied the foil of the native male, Devereux must confront his
own presence in a chain of supplementarity and recognize that he, too,
is a substitute for an anterior presence, an indication of a void that
precedes and thus necessitates his own presence. In a tone of acute loss
and puzzlement, he exclaims: ‘‘But I have never been myself since that
fierce night of the Afghan. Before that night, I was a man.’’∫≥

124 | CHAPTER THREE

NOTES

1. See Dinshaw, Getting Medieval, 1–54.

2. To be more precise, William Cohen addresses the complex duality of pornography
through a discussion of its movement between the private and the public, between
the genre of literature and that of scandal. See Cohen, Sex Scandals, 122–28.
3. Gibson, Erotomaniac, 147–59. Ashbee privately issued, under the scatological
pseudonym Pisanus Fraxi, three extensive bibliographies on erotica: Index Li-
brorum Prohibitorum (1877), Centuria Librorum Absconditorum (1879), and Catena
Librorum Tacendorum (1885).
4. Such structures of surveillance are clearly not restricted to the ‘‘Private Case’’ of
the British Library. I elaborate the example of the British Library as it was the key
source for the specific colonial pornography I examine in this chapter. As G.
Legman and Patrick J. Kearney point out, access continues to be restricted to
collections of erotica housed at the Enfer or the Bibliothèque Nationale, the New
York Public Library, and the Kinsey Institute for Sex Research at the University
of Indiana. See Legman, introduction. Private collectors, however, still far out-
number the libraries that house erotica.
5. Empress of Asturia, Love and Safety.
6. ‘‘The Dildoe [sic] or Ladies Syringe,’’ ibid., 59; emphasis added.
7. Ibid., 62.
8. Ibid., 56–57; emphasis added.
9. Woodru√, Rise of the British Rubber Industry, 1.
10. Ibid., 36.
11. Ibid., 42–43.
12. For a further discussion of the distribution of raw materials from the colonies, see
David, Rule Britannia. Deirdre David points out that ‘‘as the rich example of Kew
Gardens indicates, beginning in the eighteenth century, the British technology of
empire literally uprooted vegetation from the colonies, replanted it in the moist
earth of Surrey, and created a horticultural monument to colonial appropriation’’
(121).
13. Ibid., 204.
14. The logic of an ellipsis nominally gestures to words or ideas understood even in
their absence. There is a sense that something determinate and fixed can easily be
added to fill in for what has been (obviously) left out. Here, I am more concerned
with the idea of an ellipsis that conceals obviously yet whose rhetorical lapses
reference something more indeterminate and dangerous.
15. My argument is continuous with, but not collapsible to, the logic of fetishism.
Fetishism foregrounds the loss of plenitude and authenticity. In its much cited
Marxist avatar, it is a term that articulates an e√ect of capitalism in which
representations (specifically, of value) gather a fantasmatic autonomy distinct
from the material relations they ostensibly stand for. In the psychoanalytic
sense, the fetish exemplifies the disavowal of lack or absence through the forma-

THE STORY OF AN INDIA-RUBBER DILDO | 125

 tion of a substitute. For an excellent discussion of the logic of fetishism, and
its relationship to colonial texts, see Williams, ‘‘ ‘Where All Things Sacred and
Profane.’ ’’
16. The Oxford English Dictionary provides the following definition of dildo: ‘‘(1) A
word of obscure origin, used in the refrains of ballads. Also, a name of the penis or
phallus, or a figure thereof; spec. an artificial penis used for female gratification;
the lingam of Hindu worship; formerly, also, a contemptuous or reviling appella-
tion of a man or lad; and app. applied to a cylindrical or ‘sausage’ curl. (2) A tree or
shrub of the genus Cereus (family Cactaceæ). Also dildo-tree, dildo-bush, dildo
pear tree.’’ See http://www.dictionary.oed.com (accessed March 24, 2005).
17. Toulalan, ‘‘Extraordinary Satisfactions,’’ 55–56. This essay usefully suggests that
the classics of seventeen-century literary pornography often recount the lives of
prostitutes (etymology of pornography) and are thus written primarily as conver-
sations between women (53).
18. Traub, ‘‘Perversion.’’
19. Marcus, The Other Victorians, 96–97.
20. It seems especially so when there are ‘‘thick’’ details alluding to that narrative of
Victorian social history. See The Lustful Turk. In The Lustful Turk, one of the
pornographic texts Marcus analyzes, the female protagonist, Emily Barlow, is on
her way to India when her ship is captured. Another example is William Potter’s
The Romance of Lust (1873), which Marcus describes as ‘‘pure pornotopia in the
sense that almost every human consideration apart from sexuality is excluded
from it’’ (Marcus, The Other Victorians, 95). But H. S. Ashbee, the famous Vic-
torian bibliographer, describing the novel as ‘‘orient pearls’’ set in a connective
narrative, also reveals that the ‘‘gentleman’’ author composed this novel partially
in India and died in 1879 in Catania. See Scheiner, Encyclopedia of Erotic Litera-
ture, 114–15.
21. Stoler, Education of Desire; Young, Colonial Desire; McClintock, Imperial Leather.
22. Kendrick, Secret Museum; Hunt, Invention of Pornography.
23. Sigel, Governing Pleasures.
24. And yet even a work like Stoler’s, that explicitly engages with Foucault and whose
subtitle is ‘‘The Colonial Order of Things,’’ fails to investigate substantially the
space of nineteenth-century European pornography, the area of discourse that
most flagrantly exhibits the intersection of race and sexuality in a bourgeois
setting. The closest Stoler comes to such an analysis is her examination of some
nineteenth-century Dutch medical tracts that exhibit a pornographic prurience in
their description of the women of Java (Stoler, Education of Desire, 6–8, 183–90).
25. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 3; emphasis added.
26. I have deliberately chosen to focus on hitherto neglected texts of Victorian por-
nography, leaving aside more familiar texts such as The Autobiography of the Flea
(1887), My Secret Life (1888–94), and The Romance of Lust (1873–76). Crucial to
any argument I make about the neglected racial and colonial contexts of Victorian

126 | CHAPTER THREE

 pornography is that the selection of texts so far o√ered up for critical analysis has
aided that neglect.
27. See Anjali Arondekar, ‘‘The Assumption of Race: The Geopolitics of Sex,’’ article
manuscript.
28. Hyam, Empire and Sexuality, 149, 34. It is important to acknowledge here that
Ronald Hyam’s book is strewn with historically specious arguments. Thus I have
carefully cited references that are more generally established as part of the o≈cial
historical record.
29. For a detailed discussion, see St. John-Stevas, Obscenity and the Law, 65–85. The
Hicklin test of obscenity, as laid down by Cockburn, read: ‘‘The test of obscenity is
whether the tendency of the matter charged as obscenity is to deprave and corrupt
those whose minds are open to such immoral influences and into whose hands a
publication of this sort may fall’’ (ibid., 70).
30. Skilton, Bibliotheca Arcana, xix.
31. Pease, ‘‘Dangerous Aesthetics,’’ 46–49.
32. Devereux, Venus in India.
33. C. J. Scheiner argues, regarding national boundaries and the circulation of por-
nography, that the imprints on books were often misleading as to their place of
publication. For instance, he writes: ‘‘The first editions [of the Pearl, 1879–81]
stated themselves to be printed at Oxford; in actuality they were printed in
London. When this printing was sold out, a complete reprint of the text by Auguste
Brancart appeared in Belgium about 1890, the imprint altered to London. Printed
for the Society of Vice. 1879’ ’’ (Scheiner, Encyclopedia of Erotic Literature, 126). I
would push Scheiner’s argument further and speculate that the ‘‘French books’’
that are so notoriously blamed for corruption in the nineteenth century could in
fact be English books simply published in France to throw o√ the police.
34. Heath, ‘‘Comparative Colonialism, Moral Censorship, and Governance,’’ 238. See
also Gupta, Sexuality, Obscenity, Community. Through a careful reading of vernacu-
lar literatures in late colonial India, Gupta situates the production of the obscene
within a genealogy of communal and gendered formations. In particular, she
demonstrates how the vernacular press and writers (particularly in Hindi) mobi-
lized the colonial ambivalences of obscenity laws to repathologize Muslim and
gendered bodies.
35. For more careful elaborations on the subject, see Hutchins, Illusion of Permanence.
36. McClintock, Imperial Leather, 22.
37. Singh, Colonial Narratives, Cultural Dialogues, 4–25. Singh suggests that the colo-
nial conquest of India was a historically di√used process that derived from a series
of ‘‘discoveries of India’’ that range from early modern encounters to the later
manifestations of the Raj and the postcolonial Indian nationalist state.
38. Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence, 33.
39. See Eldridge, British Imperialism, 137. ‘‘In India, if Englishmen had harsh things
to say about the dark southern tribes, other sections of the population measured

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 up to European standards of beauty. The Aryans of the north, as politician
and administrator Sir George Campbell put it, were often ‘magnificently hand-
some’ with features of an English cast and a gratifying inclination to revere a
pale skin.’’
40. Sharpe, Allegories of Empire, 57–61.
41. For further reading, see Kaye, Kaye’s and Malleson’s History.
42. Hutchins, Illusion of Permanence, 84–85.
43. Parry, Delusions and Discoveries, 4.
44. Hyam, Empire and Sexuality, 88–100.
45. Marcus, The Other Victorians, 1–34.
46. Hyam, Empire and Sexuality, 90.
47. Further references to this work will be made in the running text as Story.
48. In the few references to native women’s usage of dildos, or of dildolike objects, we
find no mention of the usage of india-rubber implements. For instance, Havelock
Ellis quotes the notes of a colonial o≈cer in the Indian Medical Services who
‘‘assures him, however, that there cannot be the least doubt as to the frequency of
homosexuality among women in India, either inside or outside the gaols.’’ He
continues with the notes that add: ‘‘The act itself is called chapat or chapti’’ and
that ‘‘sometimes a phallus called saburah is employed.’’ To elaborate further on
the eccentricity of the phallus employed by such ‘‘tribades,’’ Ellis’s informant
provides him with ‘‘facts’’: ‘‘In the gaol of R., the superintendent discovered a
number of phalli in the females’ inclosure; they were made of clay and sun-dried,
and bore marks of use.’’ See Havelock Ellis, ‘‘Sexual Inversion in Women,’’ Studies
in the Psychology of Sex, 2:208–9.
49. Marcus, The Other Victorians, 75.
50. Quoted in Scheiner, Encyclopedia of Erotic Literature, 150.
51. Grove Press, The Pearl, 1 (issue no. 2, July 1879). All quotations from the Pearl are
taken from this compilation of the journal’s issues from 1879, published by Grove
Press in 1968.
52. Bristow, Vice and Vigilance, 49.
53. Woodru√, Rise of the British Rubber Industry, 72.
54. Buckingham, ‘‘Trade in Questionable India Rubber Goods.’’
55. Grove Press, The Pearl, 44 (issue no. 2, August 1879); emphasis added.
56. Scheiner, Encyclopedia of Erotic Literature, 150.
57. The Initiation of Aurora Trill, ‘‘For Private Circulation Only’’ (published by s.n.,
1932), 254. A copy is housed in the Private Case of the British Library.
58. Woodru√, Rise of the British Rubber Industry, 22.
59. Ibid., 38.
60. Vishwanathan, ‘‘Currying Favor,’’ 115–18.
61. McClintock, Dangerous Liaisons, 117.
62. ‘‘India Rubber and Gutta Percha Cultivation in Ceylon,’’ n.p.
63. Adapa Satyanarayana, ‘‘ ‘Birds of Passage’: Migration of South Indian Labour Com-

128 | CHAPTER THREE

 munities to South-East Asia, Nineteenth to Twentieth Centuries, a.d.’’ (Changing
Labour Relations in Asia (clara) Working Paper 11, Amsterdam, 2001).
64. See K. Ravi Raman, ‘‘Bondage in Freedom: Colonial Plantations in Southern In-
dia, c. 1797–1947’’ (Centre for Development Studies, Trivendrum Working Paper
327, March 2002). Raman recounts, for instance, how india-rubber plantation
workers rebelled against their European manager and drowned him in a vat of
latex in protest.
65. Sinha, Colonial Masculinity, 1–5. Sinha extends the discussion of a problematic
Indian male presence in colonial discourse to an analysis of the English in India
and argues that ‘‘the emerging dynamics between colonial and nationalist politics
in the 1880s and 1890s in India is best captured in the logic of colonial mas-
culinity’’ (1).
66. Grove Press, The Pearl, 1 (issue no. 1, July 1879).
67. Ibid., 277 (issue no. 8, February 1880).
68. Ibid., 69 (issue no. 2, August 1879).
69. See Burton, Erotic Traveler, 55–63. Burton attributes the ‘‘vices’’ of sodomy, ped-
erasty, and the general range of homosexual activities not to racial failures but
rather to environmental influences that can be localized in geographic zones. He
calls the region of such vices the Sotadic Zone and maps it as covering ‘‘the whole
of Asia Minor and Mesopotamia.’’ I take up Burton’s works in much more detail in
my previous chapter on the Karáchi report and its relationship to colonial rule.
70. The Lustful Turk, 89.
71. Devereux, Venus in India, 1:19.
72. Ibid., 2:1–3.
73. Ibid., 2:46–47.
74. Ibid., 2:62–63.
75. C. R. L. Fletcher and Rudyard Kipling underscore the power of such characteriza-
tions in their ‘‘theory’’ of martial and nonmartial races in India in A School History
of England (1930): ‘‘[The East India Company’s] early conquests had made over the
unwarlike races of Bengal and of the South. . . . Early in Victoria’s time we had to
meet those magnificent fighters the Sikhs of the Punjab, and the fierce Afghans of
the north-western mountains. . . . As we conquered them, so we enrolled in our
Indian army all the best fighting men of these various races; of the army the Sikhs
are now the backbone; but the Afghans still have to be kept at bay beyond the
northern mountains. They are the ‘tigers from the North’; and, if our rule were for
a moment to be taken away, they would sweep down and slay and enslave all the
defenceless dwellers on the plains’’ (242–46).
76. For more evidence, see Sinha, Colonial Masculinity.
77. Devereux, Venus in India, 2:38–39. Interestingly, Devereux underlines the speed
his ‘‘shoes’’ with ‘‘india rubber soles’’ provide him in his capture of the Afghan.
The Afghan, significantly, is stopped in a timely fashion, because of the ‘‘rotten
cotton’’ of his coat, which gives away under the captain’s pull.

THE STORY OF AN INDIA-RUBBER DILDO | 129

78. Ibid., 2:40–41.
79. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 144–45.
80. For a range of feminist and queer readings of the dildo, see Hart, Between the Body;
Hamming, ‘‘Dildonics’’; and Findlay, ‘‘Freud’s ‘Fetishism.’ ’’
81. O’Connor, ‘‘Jumpy Starts.’’
82. Grove Press, The Pearl, 268 (issue no. 8, February 1880).
83. Devereux, Venus in India, 75.

130 | CHAPTER THREE

{ four }

IN THE WAKE OF 1857

Rudyard Kipling’s Mutiny Papers

Mercifully, the act of writing was, and always has been, a physical plea-
sure to me. This made it easier to throw away anything that did not turn
out well: and to practise, as it were, scales.
R U D YA R D K I P L I N G , S O M E T H I N G O F M Y S E L F

The foolish person in search of a little disinterested information about

things may find the so-called Indian Mutiny an unexplained historical
phenomenon. He will get little or no information from Mr. Kipling.
F R A N C I S A D A M S , ‘‘ O N R U D YA R D K I P L I N G , ’’ F O R T N I G H T LY R E V I E W ( 1 8 9 1 )

P erhaps the most striking feature of Rudyard Kipling’s writ-

ing might be the staggering volume of its output. Kipling’s
publishing career stretched over fifty-five years (from 1881
through 1936), and by last count, over four thousand separate
printings of his work are in existence. During his lifetime,
Kipling’s prose and verse (including his earliest work in paper-
back and in provincial newspapers) were distributed globally
in India, England, the United States, Canada, Australia, New
Zealand, Chile, and South Africa. Yet despite (or precisely be-
cause of) such prodigious productivity, no comprehensive bib-
liography of Kipling’s works has ever been possible. Problems
of copyright, unidentified texts, and multiple printings are only
some of the many obstacles facing collectors and scholars of
Kipling’s works.∞ Kipling himself contributed to such biblio-
graphical woes, often choosing to suppress or destroy his own
materials or limit publication to a few privately circulated copies.≤ He
also allegedly wrote under a variety of mysterious pen names, some of
which still remain unknown, making it impossible to fully establish the
extent of Kipling’s authorship.≥ Even as such vexations of collection and
authorship abound, the authority and expansiveness of Kipling’s texts
remains relatively unchallenged. As in the case of Richard Burton, Kip-
ling’s archive can never be fully constituted, yet it need not be, for its
futurity rests in that very deferred possibility. As one critic wryly notes,
Kipling is ‘‘the archive on which the sun never sets.’’∂
Central to the authority of Kipling’s archive are, of course, his mas-
sive works on the entanglements of empire and British India, ranging
from prose to poetry, reportage to pamphleteering, chronicling every
(excruciating) minutia of Anglo-Indian life. Even George Orwell, an
avowed Kipling critic, reminds us: ‘‘Tawdry and shallow though it is,
Kipling’s is the only literary picture we possess of nineteenth-century
Anglo-India.’’∑ Not only do Kipling’s writings serve as the primary liter-
ary archive of the British Empire but they also founded new a√ective
attachments to Anglo-India. What Kipling saw and translated, what
made his stories sell, contemporary readers were told over and again,
was his ability to enliven India, to transform it from a space of imagina-
tive boredom to a space of desirable homosociality and marvel. As An-
drew Lang, one of the foremost literary critics of the 1890s, wrote: ‘‘Mr.
Kipling makes us regard the continent [India] which was a bore as an
enchanted land, full of marvels and magic which are real.’’∏ Virginia
Woolf recalled her reading experience of Kipling’s fiction and describes
his fictional landscape as a blissful ‘‘world of men’’; not a dispassionate,
detached world, but a world so permeated with intense masculine emo-
tion that it seemed incomprehensible to women readers: ‘‘One blushes
at all these capital letters as if one has been caught eavesdropping at
some purely masculine orgy.’’π Other critics such as Robert Buchanan,
who identified Kipling with ‘‘the voice of a hooligan,’’ acknowledged
grudgingly that under Kipling’s tutelage, India’s usefulness as imagina-
tive capital had been recuperated; India had again become a site of
pleasurable literary production: ‘‘Mr. Kipling’s little glimpses seemed
unusually fresh and new . . . and in the background of them we per-
ceived . . . the shadow of the great and wonderful national life of India.’’∫
In a literary archive in which the glory of the Indian empire stretches

132 | CHAPTER FOUR

to such extensive narration, the subjects Kipling does elide thus generate
particularly nagging silences. An interested reader looking for any sub-
stantive engagement with the crucial events of 1857 will find ‘‘little or
no information from Mr. Kipling.’’ The ‘‘so-called Indian Mutiny,’’ per-
haps the most transformative event in the history of India, we are told,
remains strikingly ‘‘an unexplained historical phenomenon.’’ Such an
omission appears even more perplexing, given the firm hold the Indian
Mutiny had on the popular imagination. The subject of the Indian Mu-
tiny spawned an enormous archive, surpassing in volume the represen-
tations of any other historical event during the long nineteenth century.
By the 1890s over fifty novels, countless histories, first-person accounts,
o≈cial reports, sermons, pamphlets, poems, and parliamentary debates
on the Mutiny had been published.Ω
For nineteenth-century reviewers such as Francis Adams, the absence
of any substantial engagement with the 1857 Indian Mutiny is in fact the
key to Kipling’s success. Kipling’s extensive knowledge of and literary
monopoly over the Indian landscape provides the perfect backdrop for
Britain’s economic dominance of the subcontinent, muting the echoes
of a disturbed colonial history. It is only when sites of imaginative unrest
such as the Indian Mutiny are controlled and/or disappeared, Adams
argues, that any comfortable narrative relationship with India can be
established.∞≠ Kipling’s ‘‘imperial archive’’ smoothes over past failures of
pre-Mutiny intelligence, such that the (successful) pursuit and control
of native knowledge becomes its primum mobile. Such a shift is ex-
emplified spectacularly in Kipling’s most canonical Anglo-Indian novel,
Kim (1901), in which its boy hero (through his travels) e√ortlessly ac-
cesses and assimilates vast fields of crucial intelligence. In Kim, the India
Survey, a seemingly powerless geographical bureau, collects su≈cient
knowledge to overthrow a powerful Russian plot to extend control on
the Indian subcontinent.∞∞ ‘‘Projected back from the 1890s on to the
1850s,’’ this fantasy of complete surveillance, Gautam Chakravarty notes,
revises the Mutiny archive, constituting a new epistemological field for
post-Mutiny writings. For example, Chakravarty reminds us that there
were no Mutiny records of ‘‘British ethnic spies,’’ an absence erased by
the insertion of figures such as Kim who seamlessly move in and out of
native society.∞≤
Rather than routinely relegating Kipling’s writings to such an authori-

RUDYARD KIPLING’S MUTINY PAPERS | 133

tative post-Mutiny tradition, I am interested here in quite a di√erent
problematic. While Kipling’s fiction certainly participates in the literary
rewriting of the Mutiny archive, it equally struggles with the ‘‘nonnar-
ratability’’ of the Mutiny as an object of representation. That is, the
elision of the Mutiny both fuels and empties narrative movement: its
absence serves a narrative lack that generates the story; its presence
provides a closure that threatens the very status of narrative itself. Even
as the scandal of the Mutiny recedes to the margins of the text’s develop-
ment, its secret paradoxically demands to be told.∞≥ Such a structure of
representation and reproduction reprises the very archival movement I
have been interrogating in my previous chapters. As I have argued, the
promise of presence as future knowledge is always circulated in relation
to historical desire, a desire for absent bodies, subjects, and texts, as well
as for the evidentiary models they enable. The critical challenge, I have
reiterated, lies in imagining a practice of reading that incites relation-
ships between the seductions of recovery and the status of archival
hermeneutics itself.
Part of my contention here is that Kipling’s forms of writing trouble
this perpetual axis between presence and absence, between something
that can be recorded and something that cannot, that has so predictably
been the script for archival formation. Instead, the Mutiny’s impossible
telling is generated through an ‘‘associative afterlife,’’ a range of archival
e√ects that are less interested in the truth claims of the Mutiny than in
understanding how and what its archive signifies. The concept of ‘‘after-
life’’ treads a complex temporality of analysis, a virtual representational
limbo, where the threat of the Mutiny remains palpable even as it is held
in abeyance.∞∂ What is at stake is the promise of an archive that serves as
a form of protection against the past but remains inseparable from the
problems of archiving in the present. Far from producing an authorita-
tive post-Mutiny archive, Kipling’s fiction thus solicits archival disarray
in all its fractiousness, nuancing the teleological movement into which
the role of the archive has been deposited.∞∑ Rather, the Kipling text, as I
will suggest, embodies an archive riven by the epistemological stress of
its own production.∞∏
In this chapter, I have chosen to move Kipling’s writings back into the
aesthetics of archival formation, seeking the material of the historical

134 | CHAPTER FOUR

even as it is thickened and torn open within the language of fiction.∞π In
Kipling’s literary landscape, the figuration of the Mutiny evokes the risks
of hermeneutical certainty, of endorsing historical desires around the
possibilities and politics of imperial futurity itself. Instead of enacting a
fantasy of an authoritative (and restorative) archive, the many voices of
Kipling’s texts repeatedly attenuate that authority, rarely letting us forget
its origins as a staged response to the crisis of the Mutiny. Yet I am not
suggesting here that Kipling’s archival meditations result from any delib-
erate anti-imperial perspective, rather than from a desire to negotiate a
di√erent place from which to begin.
In what follows I will argue that the success of Kipling’s literary
archive lies in his ability to root the more popular language of colonial
celebration in and not against the failures of the Mutiny. That is, instead
of simply revising earlier records of colonial breakdown into redemptive
imaginings of colonial control, Kipling mines the very language of fail-
ure to secure narrative success. Writing almost against the injunction to
forget, Kipling’s anamneses bring the Mutiny into dense compaction
with the travails of archival formation itself. Indeed, only in failing does
the Mutiny acquire narrative force, and only at the point of being un-
imaginable does it return as a generative archival trace in Kipling’s
fiction. The stories I examine in this chapter linger on the di≈cult
pleasures of writing, selecting, and transmitting archives. There is no
attempt here to overcome the representational burden of the Indian
Mutiny; rather, Kipling’s stories are owned by and in thrall of its narra-
tive possibilities. The lapses of the Mutiny become the scenes of Kip-
ling’s fiction: failure becomes the very thematics of celebration.
To this end, Kipling refashions the colonial encounter, domesticating
it into the facticities of everyday life, such that the engagement with and
enactment of colonial terror becomes a source of extended male ar-
ticulation—founding imperial presence rather than eradicating it. This
refashioning depends on a particular eroticized dynamics of narration
whereby the rhetorical production of the imperial archive is made not
only plausible but also desirable. Kipling’s archive becomes a harbinger
of a new model of colonial masculinity in which attachments between
men are detoured through narrative forms (fiction, historical records,
biographies) rather than through bodies. These are narratives into which

RUDYARD KIPLING’S MUTINY PAPERS | 135

the incoherencies of colonial rule are secreted as pleasurable hauntings,
as gestures contained by the paradoxical fullness of a defeated mas-
culinity. Such narrative e√orts, I demonstrate, uncover the slippages
between the desired and the feared, between the colonizer and the
colonized, foregrounding the contradictory e√orts that serve as the warp
and woof of imperial texts, binding their incoherencies into archives
constitutive of late nineteenth-century e√orts to represent India.

S T R A N G E TA L E S O F T H E R E C O R D R O O M

‘‘What a hopeless muddle it all is,’’ writes the narrator of Kipling’s ‘‘In the
Year ’57,’’ as he surveys with perplexed longing all that is ‘‘worth keeping
of the Mutiny papers.’’ Published in the Civil and Military Gazette in two
parts on May 14 and 23, 1887, the story unfolds in the literal archival
space of an Indian records o≈ce. The resident native clerk, the familiar
‘‘Babu’’ figure, brings the narrator a bulging file, ‘‘a foot thick, and as
fresh in appearance as if it had just been put into the record room,’’
blandly announcing that this is all that is left of the ‘‘Proceedings of the
Government of Punjab—July ’57—selected.’’ The ensuing scene is one of
archival disarray as the file falls apart, revealing more than 150 letters in
blue, white, and yellow, stacked in no particular order and bearing the
date of the month of July. All the narrator knows for certain, we are told,
is that the letters were either written by, or directed to, ‘‘J. L.,’’ Sir John
Laird Lawrence, ‘‘the saviour of Punjab.’’ In palpable excitement, Kip-
ling’s narrator peruses the letters, impatient to restore them to some
chronological and thematic order. Such a task seems initially doomed as
the Mutiny letters speak piecemeal stories, relaying dense but incom-
plete details of their writers’ lives and histories.∞∫
Some letter writers are referred to only by their initials (‘‘What J. L.
said to R. M. is not on the file’’), even as key and familiar military figures
from the Mutiny period (Lieutenant Colonel John Nicholson, Colonel
Henry Van Cortlandt, Lieutenant Colonel Herbert Edwardes, and Colo-
nel Robert Sandeman) make brief recognizable appearances. Of interest
is that the named military figures are notable colonial heroes, cele-
brated for their brutal suppression and execution of the rebelling native
mutineers.∞Ω Most prominently, the story’s central character, Lawrence
(‘‘J. L.’’), holds a celebrated but equally controversial position of military

136 | CHAPTER FOUR

honor in British colonial history. In 1849, following the Second Anglo-
Sikh War that resulted in the subjugation of the Sikh kingdom and the
absorption of Punjab into the East India Company, Lawrence became a
member of the Punjab Board of Administration headed by his brother,
Henry Lawrence. John Lawrence, some historians argue, was respon-
sible for substantial reforms in the province of Punjab, ranging from the
abolition of internal duties to the establishment of a common currency
and postal system and the development of an economic infrastructure
that earned him the title of ‘‘the Saviour of Punjab.’’≤≠ His e√orts were
not regarded favorably by his brother, however, and ultimately led to the
abolition of the administrative board, after which Sir John Lawrence was
appointed the chief commissioner of the province. Significantly, Law-
rence’s negotiations with native Sikh troops and a timely treaty with the
Afghan ruler, Dost Mohammed Khan, are alleged to have prevented the
Mutiny from overtaking the Punjab in 1857. Troops dispatched by Law-
rence in July 1857 were said to have been primarily responsible for
recapturing Delhi from the rebellious sepoys. There are of course many
less laudatory historical accounts of Lawrence’s role in the ‘‘saving of
Punjab’’ that foreground his brutal military policies, his betrayal of na-
tive loyalties, as well as his encouragement of a tyrannical ‘‘cult of
personality’’ brand of governance.≤∞
Su≈ce it to say here that the story’s references to heavily memorial-
ized figures such as ‘‘J. L.’’ draw from an available historical shorthand
that reduces the Mutiny to a series of fixed and reproducible representa-
tions and facts.≤≤ By the time Kipling penned this story in 1887, the
Mutiny had become a stock but queasy historical feature of colonial self-
presentation, a durable frame of reference whose nightmarish content
both settled and unsettled the colonial civilizing mission.≤≥ Not only is
the scene of the Mutiny a standard place holder of post-1857 writings on
India but its representation also follows a formulaic set of narrative
turns. As Chakravarty persuasively argues, post-Mutiny fiction (espe-
cially in the 1880s and 1890s) routinely draws from an eclectic archive of
colonial records (e.g., eyewitness accounts, o≈cial reports, private let-
ters, military intelligence), fashioning narratives that masterfully trans-
form the breakdown of colonial surveillance and knowledge into a my-
thos of heroism and military success. In doing so, languages of history

RUDYARD KIPLING’S MUTINY PAPERS | 137

and fiction converge, establishing a record of the Mutiny that smoothes
all uncertainties into their proper places.≤∂
Although Kipling’s renderings of the Mutiny have much in common
with Chakravarty’s assessment of post-Mutiny fiction, ‘‘In the Year ’57’’
explores rather the rifts in the seemingly transparent telling of history to
provide insights into the very changes in the modes of reading the
Mutiny. Within such renderings, the Mutiny becomes less a stable refer-
ent predating the story’s narration than an unwieldy sign, mired in a
language of detail and accounting. For Kipling’s narrator, the exigencies
of survival during a time of siege are foregrounded by the scores of
garbled letters requesting ‘‘forage, ammunition, recruits’’ and monies for
additional intelligence gathering. ‘‘Everything’’ in the letters seems ‘‘in-
complete, fragmentary, jumbled, leading nowhere,’’ a disorderly archive
of information that promises no narrative relief or closure. That is, until
the ‘‘strong handwriting’’ of John Lawrence appears to calm the spilling
narrative chaos. The ‘‘disorderly procession’’ of letters transforms into a
scene of enormous imaginative potential: the shadowy figures in the
letters give way to the stamp of a ‘‘great living frieze’’ where there is no
sign of trouble, but only ‘‘determination and sleepless vigilance.’’ J. L.
steps in from the shadows to restore order, and the Mutiny papers are
relegated back to the record room. The story ends with a promise that
‘‘peace will come back,’’ not through an exhuming of such archival
detritus, but rather through ‘‘the will and the hand and the power of
John Lawrence, Chief Commissioner of Punjab.’’≤∑
This lengthy, anonymous story, subsequently never republished, is
referenced by Kipling himself as he recollects his attempts to make a
Mutiny story out of the ‘‘file of John Lawrence’s ordinary o≈ce letters for
the month of June 1857.’’≤∏ Kipling’s confession that the writing of a
Mutiny story was ‘‘an exceeding big job and one altogether beyond [his]
scope’’ has often been read as evidence that the ‘‘the theme of the story’’
was not so much the historical events of 1857, but rather the histo-
riographical and hermeneutic challenges of an e√ort to write on the
Indian Mutiny.≤π That such challenges were too much for Kipling to take
on is arguably made even more evident by the fact that this story serves
as one of the few published pieces in which he wrote directly about the
events of the 1857 Mutiny. Andrew St. John further suggests that the
story clearly demonstrates Kipling’s own discomfiture with the language

138 | CHAPTER FOUR

of records and regulation, explained specifically through the story’s deifi-
cation of Lawrence and his style of renegade governance.≤∫
Such theories of Kipling’s discomfort with structures of o≈cial record
keeping must be read, however, through (and not against) the experi-
ences of his early journalistic forays in India. Arriving in Lahore in 1882,
after an eleven-year exile in England, Kipling promptly commenced
work as an assistant editor of the Civil and Military Gazette (hereafer
cited as cmg), a subsidiary of the more influential Pioneer in Allahabad.≤Ω
The city of Lahore provided the backdrop to this story, as did the many
rapid changes in Anglo-Indian life. The explosive 1883 Ilbert Bill (grant-
ing senior Indian magistrates the power to judge British subjects), the
Kohlapur Conspiracy in 1881 (a minor echo of the 1857 Mutiny), and the
convening of the first meeting of the Indian National Congress in 1885
were but a few of the raging issues of the time.≥≠ Of particular signifi-
cance was the escalating conflict in Afghanistan, with the British ner-
vously battling for control in Central Asia against the growing threat of
the region’s Russian occupation. The British had already fought two
vicious wars in Afghanistan, only managing to secure partial control in
1880 after cobbling together a treaty with the Afghan emir, Abhul Rah-
man. As a reporter for cmg (a newspaper based in proximity to the
headquarters of the British military in Simla) Kipling was constantly
called on to translate French reports on Russian intelligence and at-
tended several high-level meetings of the Afghan Boundary Commission
in that capacity. A constant leitmotif of Kipling’s ‘‘scraps’’ on the Afghan
situation is a mistrust of Russia, the threat of Russian agents in India,
and the duplicity of the emir of Afghanistan. These early journalistic
encounters demonstrate Kipling’s variegated engagement with o≈cial
archives: he directly translates, transacts, and narrates colonial intel-
ligence into forms of digestible public information.≥∞
Kipling’s ‘‘In the Year ’57’’ serves as a fitting conclusion to my book’s
preoccupation with archival hermeneutics and the logic of presence.
The story yields a sightline for a reading of archival evidence not as
plenitude but as remainder, not as all that was, but rather as all that is
left behind. The found object is a bewildering file, so overloaded with
di√use materials that it impedes the factual collation of a catalogue. But
as the story unfolds, this narrative unhinging itself becomes the distrac-
tion, the source of the story’s movement. Where Kipling’s narrator seeks

RUDYARD KIPLING’S MUTINY PAPERS | 139

the materials for a Mutiny story, he meets instead an archival bind that
forces him into an acknowledgment of his own feverish desire for pres-
ence. ‘‘Who in the world is the o≈cer with the painfully illegible signa-
ture who writes to J. L?’’ asks the narrator in frustration; ‘‘Who was the
man who wanted to get rid of the unpleasant memento of the late 10th
Irregular Cavalry?’’ he demands to know.≥≤
As the example of these ‘‘Mutiny papers’’ demonstrates, the colonial
archive emerges as a vertiginous space of ghostly mobility, taking shape
in acts of deliberate memorialization. The salvific power of found ob-
jects cedes authority to the more enduring power of archival traces: the
fragmented voices of British men longingly immortalized here through a
refusal of the figure of death. The story can no longer record what once
was; instead, it revels in its own possibilities of replication, in its knowl-
edge that it can also carve out a di√erent archive: ‘‘If the record-room
shelves could speak, what strange tales they could tell of pigeon-holed
recommendations, schemes strangled at birth, or rising from the grave
in after-years, when the original father was dead and a stranger reaped
the credit!’’ The shaping narrative premise of the story works to honor
the ghosts of the men (materialized in their often illegible handwriting)
and by the same gesture surrenders them to what they most resisted: the
mandates of a printed record. Thus even as the narrator applauds ‘‘this
long ridge of papers that show, without the gloss of print, the very bed-
rock, and base of the storm-tossed administration,’’ he carves a futurity
for the papers through their translation into print.≥≥
By all accounts, ‘‘In the Year ’57’’ mediates between a language of
history and journalism, and reads as a cautionary tale against the fiction
of archival access, as well as a paradigm for how that very caution should
be narratively (and pleasurably) mobilized. Such readings of the story’s
self-conscious narrative parameters—the impossible task of taking on as
fictional provenance so ‘‘muddled’’ a subject as the Indian Mutiny—raise
also, I want to suggest, a very di√erent set of questions for the larger
Kipling corpus: What must his text limit to stage its own limitations
productively? Why does a repeated ‘‘incompleteness’’ provide coherence
to the Mutiny papers, or rather why do the events of 1857 become
amenable to a language of failure? And finally, how does Kipling brace
and weld the horrifying memory of the Indian Mutiny into a di√erent
archive of Mutiny papers?

140 | CHAPTER FOUR

‘‘ T H E L I T T L E H O U S E A T A R R A H ’’

Under the arches a man could, in some feeble measure, enter into the spirit of the
place, put himself back into the troublous past and think things that are united, if
the voice of the Empire speaks truth to the Spirit of the Times. But in the Judge’s
room that illusion vanished. The ‘‘little house at Arrah’’ might have been any
civilian’s quarters anywhere in India. And yet not wholly so. Above the hearth
where Wake wrote the diary of the long, long days from the 27th of July to the 4th
of August, were stacked in an orderly row the Codes of the Law; and a little breeze
came in through the pleasant open arches of the verandah and murmured among
the o≈cial papers on the Judge’s table.
R U D Y A R D K I P L I N G , ‘‘ T H E L I T T L E H O U S E AT A R R A H ’’

Appearing in 1888, barely a year after the publication of ‘‘In the Year ’57,’’
Kipling’s short story, ‘‘The Little House at Arrah,’’ was only the second
occasion on which Kipling directly took on the subject of the Indian
Mutiny.≥∂ As in the case of ‘‘In the Year ’57,’’ this story, too, engages with
the perils and pleasures of archival formation, focusing on the heroic
deeds of a handful of British male civilians during the eponymous siege
of Arrah. Arrah, a small town in British India that also served as the
headquarters of the Shahabad district, was situated in the Patna division
of the Bengal presidency and constituted a key station on the East Indian
Railway, about three hundred miles from Calcutta. Kipling’s story re-
volves around ‘‘ten white men and fifty-six natives’’ barricaded in a
house at Arrah between ‘‘the 27th of July to the 4th of August, 1857’’
against the onslaught of mutineers. A British regiment, dispatched to
the rescue from Dinapur, was repulsed after severe fighting and later
relieved by the arrival of Major Vincent Eyre and his troops on the scene.
At the center is the diary of the magistrate of Arrah, Mr. Wake, which is a
lost record of the ‘‘long long days’’ scrawled on a wall, now overlayed by
the ‘‘formal’’ codes of the law.
Less known as historical event than the infamous massacres of British
subjects at Cawnepore and Lucknow, the siege of Arrah still accounts for
a notable case of British male heroism during the Indian Mutiny. The
‘‘little house at Arrah’’ was first and foremost not quite a ‘‘house,’’ but a
billiard room, a sanctuary of male homosociality, hastily fortified against
the onslaught of native insurgents.≥∑ Indeed, as Kaori Nagai notes, at first

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glance, the ‘‘siege of Arrah, fought exclusively by men . . . had little to
contribute to the sexualization of the Mutiny.’’≥∏ In his eyewitness ac-
count of the event, John Hall, an assistant surgeon and member of the
besieged European contingent, ruefully writes that ‘‘as a story, the de-
fence at Arrah lacks the romantic interest which the presence of women
and children has imparted to other episodes of the rebellion.’’ Nor, he
adds, ‘‘is the sympathy of the multitude excited even by a melancholy list
of killed and wounded,’’ and we are not provided with a lurid description
of ‘‘horrors which had prevailed elsewhere.’’ Most significantly, Hall
hastens to point out that even as the residents of the ‘‘little house at
Arrah’’ were exposed to enormous peril, such peril was largely ‘‘volun-
tarily incurred, the path of escape being open to the last.’’≥π
It is precisely this ‘‘unexciting and unromantic’’ event with an all-
male cast that takes center stage in Kipling’s story as the narrator details
the di≈culties of recording a siege whose very premise seems shaky at
best. After all, the men ‘‘voluntarily’’ confined themselves to the billiard
room, despite an available and open ‘‘path of escape.’’ And finally, as the
narrator writes, the billiard room may have indeed been a very ‘‘pleasant
place’’ of solitude and peace for an occasional male guest, but as a ‘‘place
of defence—as a refuge of strong men fighting their lives—the notion is
too absurd!’’≥∫ In considering an event that often lies at the margins of
popular Mutiny histories, Kipling takes up a story where the desire for
an unassailable archive itself seems improbable. Even as the narrative
unfolds as a carefully controlled palimpsest, the marks of interpretative
struggle remain visible and tattered in display. These marks, I will sug-
gest, produce an acutely anamorphic narrative that troubles its own
authority and the authority of the event it is meant to memorialize. To
do so, ‘‘The Little House at Arrah’’ centers the question of the archive in
relatively overt ways, exposing the inconsistencies in Mutiny records
even as it adheres to the injunction to keep such matters silent. The
incompleteness of the archive becomes a foundational matter; there is
no easy restoration of the record, unmoored as it is from the meta-
phorics of certainty and truth.
In a pointed demonstration of the unreliability of available records,
the narrative structure of the story directly engages the historical and
memorialized Mutiny that has called it into existence. Multiple and
often conflicting interpretations of the events at Arrah figure the very

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dynamics that constitute the place as an object of memorialization. Yet
even as Kipling undercuts familiar tropes and facts of Mutiny lore, the
a√ective appeal of Arrah is made to survive such narrative twists and
turns. It is as if the charge of Kipling’s story lies in its freighting a
depleted historical event with new and complex meaning. An excerpt
from Sir George Trevelyan’s Competition Wallah (1864) inaugurates the
story, framing it squarely in a politics of archival longing and loss. Tre-
velyan’s words remind the reader that the ‘‘wall on which Wake,’’ a
survivor, ‘‘wrote the diary of the siege has been whitewashed’’ and that
the physical structure of the little house has been completely destroyed.
Critics such as Nagai argue that Kipling’s citation of Trevelyan’s famous
account of the siege of Arrah draws from a well-established understand-
ing of the Indian Mutiny as a source of national inspiration. The events
at Arrah recall a history of heroic male valor and passion, a much-needed
relief from dry nineteenth-century accounts of British success in trade
and science archived in objects and papers. Arrah represents a space of
fresh memorialization for Trevelyan at a time when the achievements of
the British Empire were slowly beginning to recede from memory. What
makes Trevelyan’s account all the more compelling, Nagai writes, is its
focus on the participation of Sikh soldiers who stayed faithful to the
British civilians during the siege. Trevelyan’s account of Arrah recon-
structs and relives the lost archive of Wake’s journal on the wall, inaugu-
rating a series of Mutiny memorializations that were to culminate in
Lord George Curzon’s famous Delhi Durbar of 1903.≥Ω
Kipling’s story, however, seems less seduced by the force of Tre-
velyan’s memorialization of Arrah than Nagai would have us believe.
Rather, the reference to Trevelyan sets up the story’s central dialectical
structure: the di≈culties of sustaining Mutiny memories, even as one is
bound to their constant reiteration. The narrative shifts in a curious and
emphatic way between an unwavering account of a traditional Mutiny
archive and an uneasy relationship to its historically assumed validity.
Does Kipling intend to subject traditional Mutiny histories to severe
interrogation, or does he instead intend to use his fiction as a cautionary
tale, o√ering its heady excess only to shunt us back to the safer repeti-
tions of Mutiny memorializations? As the narrator mockingly remarks,
Trevelyan’s story of the ‘‘little house at Arrah’’ may indeed be ‘‘better’’
and more well-circulated than most renditions of the siege, but Tre-

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velyan is, after all, a ‘‘rail-straddling Liberal with jelly-fish convictions.’’∂≠
Such remarks do more than diminish the impact of the Trevelyan refer-
ence; as readers, we are invited to meditate rather on the task of histori-
cal recuperation in all its formulations. The narrator’s reference to Tre-
velyan’s ‘‘liberal’’ politics may well hint at the possibility of much that
remains unsaid in the story. Yet there appears no guarantee that what is
left out will in fact significantly alter what has been left in.
Thus, on reading Trevelyan’s full description of Arrah in Competition
Wallah, we learn that the besieged British civilians were in fact reason-
ably forewarned and had plenty of opportunities to leave the station.
Their decision to remain behind may have had to do with the foolish
need to ‘‘save the empty name of British rule.’’ Indeed, as Trevelyan
plaintively asks, ‘‘Was it worth while to run so frightful a risk for a
shadow?’’ In lieu of scenes of panic, chaos, and terror, Trevelyan’s ac-
count foregrounds the careful preparations undertaken by the British
civilians at Arrah as they gathered food, water, and fortification.∂∞ More-
over, as he notes in a second account of Arrah, the celebrated cama-
raderie between the Sikh soldiers and the British civilians glosses over
the racial troubles in the billiard room itself. After all, Trevelyan re-
minds us, was not one of the native ‘‘defenders of Arrah’’ a ‘‘Mussulman’’
named ‘‘Syed Azimooden’’ subsequently exposed to much abuse in the
Anglo-Saxon media? Was not, he asks, Azimooden accused of supplying
the ‘‘mutineers with information as to the hiding-places of English fugi-
tives? Is it or is it not the fact that Coer Sing gave particular injunctions
to the sepoys, that, when the house was stormed, Syed Azimooden
should be excepted from the slaughter?’’∂≤ In case readers might con-
sider using such information to weaken the historical force of Arrah,
Trevelyan concludes: ‘‘But, as long as Englishmen love to hear of fidelity,
and constancy, and courage bearing up the day against frightful odds,
there is no fear lest they forget the name of ‘the little house at Arrah.’ ’’∂≥
By showcasing Trevelyan as (reliable and unreliable) historical source,
Kipling sets in motion the story’s general narrative logic whose e√ect is to
carefully erase the distinctions between history and fiction. The resulting
undi√erentiation centers the Indian Mutiny in a semiotics of uncer-
tainty, such that every account of its memorialization becomes actively
unreliable. Far from being a stumbling feature, such undi√erentiation
becomes at once the Mutiny’s enabling condition and perhaps its most

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enduring product. Instead of mocking the surety of Mutiny records, the
story enmeshes itself into historical accounts marked by their inconsis-
tency. To do so, Kipling does not draw exclusively from colonial or native
renderings of the Arrah siege; instead, the story’s narrative turns to e√ect
a certain tense and uncertain commerce between the two genres. Fol-
lowing the citation from Trevelyan, the story moves into an account of
the siege as narrated by the old khansamah (house steward) of the Arrah
main residence. The khansamah’s shaky account is clogged with remind-
ers of his frailty, and each detail of the ‘‘great fight’’ is put forward with
the proviso that he is an old man who cannot be expected to remember
much. Well-digested details of the siege of Arrah (the intrepidness of the
British, the loyalty of the Sikh troops, the savagery of ‘‘Kunwar Singh’’
and his marauding sepoys), all ‘‘matters of history,’’ pepper the khan-
samah’s account, only to be cautiously consumed as information that may
or may not be tenable. As the khansamah solemnly repeats as a sort of
uncanny textual echo: ‘‘It may be so. I have forgotten.’’∂∂
On the one hand, it is tempting to read the gaps in the khansamah’s
account as symptomatic of all (unreliable) native accounts. Especially as
Kipling’s narrator is quick to point out that the khansamah’s account can
easily be ‘‘checked’’ (and hence corrected) against the content of ‘‘State
papers.’’ The khansamah is, after all, an old, defeated man, ‘‘perplexed
with an English-speaking grandson whose education he cannot keep up’’
with.∂∑ On the other hand, the story’s checking imperative impels one
into more scrutiny, into the many details that remain unchecked, as it
were, by the narrator of the story. For instance, we are summarily told
that ‘‘ere relief came to Arrah from Buzar, not Ghazipur, an abortive ex-
pedition had started from Dinapur and been up en route in hideous
fashion.’’∂∏ Yet little is said about the lead native mutineer, Kunwar Singh,
beyond the point that his real name ‘‘was Coer Singh.’’ This despite the
fact that the khansamah inadvertently produces Kunwar Singh as a fear-
less leader who takes on the wrath of the ‘‘gorah-log,’’ white people, only to
be unceremoniously wounded in a surprise attack by a ‘‘Sahib’’ when he is
quietly ‘‘washing his mouth’’ in the holy waters of the Ganges. In a story
where the valor of British civilians takes center stage, such examples of
less than stellar martial conduct clearly stand out. Kunwar Singh even-
tually dies of this wound, and ‘‘on that day, he had been burned.’’ Or, as the
khansamah predictably adds: ‘‘This I have only heard.’’∂π

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 In a curious reversal, Kipling’s inattentiveness to the figure of Coer
Singh leads us to explore further the crucial role he played in the siege at
Arrah. Of note is that the name of Coer Singh is spelled variously in vari-
ous historical accounts of Arrah: Kumar Singh, Kanwar Singh, Konwar,
Coer Singh, and Koer Singh. The most widely adopted spelling is Kuer
Singh.∂∫ Available accounts of Singh paint him variously as a bankrupt
landlord (zamindar) working in cahoots with the British, as a titular
leader coerced into the rebellion under threat of death, or as a fearless
warrior rallying troops against the British. However, scholars such as S.
K. Sinha argue that it is impossible to celebrate or condemn Singh’s
historical role without a fuller account of the events that preceded the
infamous siege of Arrah. Arrah, and the Patna division at large, had seen
a series of ‘‘mini-revolts’’ prior to the more spectacularized Mutiny of
1857. Patna was an especially sensitive communication center on land
and water routes from Calcutta to Punjab at a time when the British
were reeling from their losses in the Anglo-Sikh war in Punjab. Sinha
writes that if Singh joined the rebellion ‘‘because of his desperate finan-
cial condition or because of his patriotic urge,’’ such motivations were
‘‘not mutually contradictory.’’ Singh’s involvement in an anti-British plot
of 1845–46, his supporting role in suppressing prison riots against the
British at the Ara Jail in 1855, and his final role as ‘‘Veer [brave] Kuer
Singh’’ all attest to the shifting roles he played in the events leading up to
Arrah. Any engagement with the imperial lore around Arrah and the role
of Singh must necessarily grapple with such complex and often conflict-
ing readings of the events at hand. Sinha’s own history of the events at
Arrah provocatively dismisses the entire memorialization of Arrah as a
mere embellishment of the available facts. Drawing on a systematic
mapping of sepoys and troops in the area, Sinha suggests that the sepoys
under Singh simply had more pressing matters at hand, with the pres-
ence of a handful of British civilians hardly constituting a serious threat.
A sage commander like Singh, Sinha reasons, was clearly more com-
mitted to combating the columns of British soldiers coming from Dina-
pore and Buxar than capturing a handful of harmless British civilians in
a rickety house at Arrah. As he writes: ‘‘British historians have not taken
these facts into account. . . . In Hollywood style, it is sought to be made
out that the few besieged civilians at Ara beat back several assaults of
thousands of Sepoys.’’∂Ω

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 As extraordinary as Sinha’s dismissal of the memorialization of Arrah
may appear, it is ironically implicit in Kipling’s mobilization of the
Mutiny as subject. Not, of course, because Kipling is deliberately allud-
ing to such a reading, but because his story emerges in a historical
context in which the precariousness of the Mutiny record has already
become a well-worn feature of its production.∑≠ Not only were the mili-
tary triumphs and failures of the Mutiny a matter of sustained debate in
the nineteenth century but its very material claims appeared equally
unreliable. The force of the Mutiny record, as Jenny Sharpe has so
compellingly argued, rests on its spectacular documentation of the sex-
ual violation of Englishwomen at the hands of the native mutineers.
Even in the face of sustained suspicion, such allegations of sexual assault
continued to circulate, allegorizing the Indian Mutiny as the ultimate
scene of native savagery. Sharpe points out, for instance, that legal
records of natives persecuted of such sexual crimes are rare if not com-
pletely absent, as are testimonies or eyewitness accounts of any such
violations.∑∞ Instead, as Edward Leckey’s Fictions Connected with the In-
dian Outbreak of 1857 Exposed (1859) suggests, the entire edifice of Mu-
tiny record keeping bears serious scrutiny. All sacrosanct sources of
information—o≈cial reports, eyewitness accounts, military records, ad-
ministrative surveys—are worthy of serious ‘‘exposure,’’ as genres of
‘‘fiction,’’ falsely promulgated under the name of history.∑≤
Central to Leckey’s project of exposure is a particular focus on the
importance of inscriptions on walls in Mutiny records and testimonies.
These writings, like the Wake diary on the wall at Arrah, appear to
provide the crucial missing link to the ‘‘real’’ events of the Indian Mu-
tiny. The archival force of these inscriptions lies in their immediate
relationship to record keeping. That is, the authors of the inscriptions
not only experience the events of the Mutiny as they unfold but they
directly record their experiences on walls and buildings at the same
time. There is thus less likelihood of record tampering and fabrication
given the immediacy and very material form of such inscriptions. Or so
it seems. For Leckey, the ‘‘various inscriptions which have been pro-
duced as written on the walls of the prison-house by Cawnpore [sic]
victims’’ are a striking example of the very fictions he seeks to expose.
One such inscription, for example, reads: ‘‘Here we are 250 persons in
this little place, here we lie in filth. We all shall be killed in two days’

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time, and may God avenge the slayers of innocent blood.’’ Leckey sys-
tematically takes such inscriptions apart, noting that if they had indeed
been written by prisoners, they would surely not have known that they
were to die in two days’ time, as these decisions were not made until the
day of the alleged massacre. Leckey dismisses the allusions to filth,
arguing that it was well documented that the prisons were clean and
that, in fact, ‘‘certain servants had been provided to look after the clean-
liness, and the partial comfort of the prisoners in other respects.’’∑≥ He
even goes so far as to refute the very presence of any inscriptions on
the prison walls. Rather, Leckey suggests that the inscriptions ‘‘which
soon became numerous, were put there by the troops, to infuriate each
other in the work of revenging the atrocities that had been perpetrated
there.’’∑∂
Regardless of whether Leckey’s exposures are indeed accurate or
themselves new fictions, it is worth underscoring that his uneasiness
with inscriptions on walls is echoed by other writers of the post-Mutiny
era. Trevelyan, Kipling’s liberal ‘‘with jelly-fish convictions,’’ also ad-
dresses the perplexing preponderance of inscriptions in his account of
the detritus left behind after the alleged massacre at Cawnepore. The
massacre that is Mutiny lore eclipsed all other such atrocities. As Trevel-
yan describes it, ‘‘those who, straight from the contested field, wandered
sobbing through the rooms of the ladies’ house,’’ only found ‘‘broken
combs, torn cu√s, cracked glasses, strewn locks.’’ There were no reveal-
ing or shocking inscriptions on the walls, as ‘‘all on that day who passed
within the fatal doors agree positively to assert that no inscription of any
sort or kind was visible on the walls.’’ Instead, Trevelyan speaks with
some dismay of the strategic use of inscriptions by those who understand
and thus exploit their archival and imaginative potential. He writes that
‘‘before the month was out, the bad habit, common to low Englishmen,
of scribbling where they ought not, here displaying itself in odious form,
had covered the principal buildings of Cawnepore with vulgar and dis-
gusting forgeries, false in date, in taste, in spelling, and in fact.’’∑∑ Again,
the point here is not to extol Trevelyan’s investigative abilities, nor to
agree with his claims of the inscriptions being ‘‘vulgar,’’ ‘‘false,’’ and full
of inaccurate facts. After all, as readers we are still left with much that
the text overtly refuses to address: If false, vulgar, and disgusting in na-
ture, what was it that the inscriptions claimed had transpired? And in the

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face of their forgeries, what is it that remains unsaid, and thus perhaps
unspeakable?
The incompatibility of these various Mutiny ‘‘exposures’’ and ‘‘fic-
tions’’ does not come down to the simple question of which one is true.
Indeed, what these various accounts delineate is ‘‘how di≈cult it is to
write a history of the Indian Outbreak.’’ Leckey, for instance, speaks
of the enormous a√ective costs of ‘‘shredding’’ such elaborate fictions,
which though necessary, leave him anxious and full of loss. The ‘‘in-
tensely melancholy pleasure which the first contemplation of the pic-
ture had a√orded,’’ he writes, is refigured in the exposure of these fic-
tions that lend themselves more to ‘‘melodramatic entertainment at the
minor theatres.’’∑∏ It is this sense of ‘‘intense melancholy pleasure’’ that
Kipling’s Arrah story works to extend. Thus, even as Kipling confronts
any memorialization of the Mutiny with a story of its own undoing, it is
also clear that far from constituting a discrediting charge, ‘‘The Little
House at Arrah’’ is designed paradoxically to promote the very cause of
the Indian Mutiny. Instead of diluting the historical force of the Mutiny
by exposing its ‘‘fictions,’’ the story suggests more emphatically that the
very turn to such fictionalization augurs well for the Mutiny’s imagina-
tive reign.
In Kipling’s story, the loss of the ‘‘intense melancholy pleasure’’ of
Mutiny stories is diverted into a refiguration of the lost object, not just as
something else but also as itself. The melancholy here is about being had,
about losing out on the telling of a good story. In the face of the physical
evidence that simply does not add up, Kipling’s narrator urges us to turn
to stories that still ‘‘should be told’’: ‘‘It was not di√erent in the half-light
and smoke blackness . . . to imagine Herwald Wake, Boyle, Calvin and
the others coming down the narrow staircase, their soldiers sore with
much firing, while the Sikhs stood ready to go and take their turn. . . .
How they must have sweated and sworn and raged and hoped against
hope when they heard the firing of Dunbar’s detachment from Dinapur
growing fainter and fainter, and then dying away behind the trees of
Kunwar Singh’s house at the far end of the compound! There are not
many of the men of Arrah left now, but one in Aligarh could tell the story
of the siege as it should be told.’’57 When the narrator can at last look
with some irony at the physical remnants of the siege of Arrah, it is as if
Kipling has managed a singular restitution, salvaging the Indian Mutiny

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from being a phobic site to more a space of cathartic scrutiny. And that
imaginative possibility lies not in the o≈cial papers but in the lost
activities of the billiard room. To yield to that possibility, we are told,
‘‘would have been undesirable.’’∑∫

ON A CITY WALL

‘‘But what in the world do all these men do?’’ I asked. ‘‘The curse of our country,’’
said Wali Dad. ‘‘They talk. It is like the Athenians—always hearing and telling
some new thing. Ask the Pearl and she will show you how much she knows of the
news of the City and the Province. Lalun knows everything. . . . Can you, with your
telegrams and your newspapers, do better?’’
R U D Y A R D K I P L I N G , ‘‘ O N A C I T Y WA L L’’

Even as Kipling sounds a critique of historiography in ‘‘The Little House

at Arrah,’’ he equally draws on its possibilities, suggesting other places of
beginning. To do so, Kipling turns to a di√erent archival wall, to a set of
inscriptions forged in the very place of their contradiction: fiction. In his
‘‘On a City Wall,’’ perhaps one of his longest and most ambitious stories,
Kipling directly addresses the figurative possibilities a√orded by Mutiny
histories.∑Ω We move here from the missing writings on the wall in Arrah
to a wall whose viewing exceeds all expectation. Kipling restores the
Mutiny story not by granting authority to a di√erent set of ‘‘facts,’’ but
rather by crafting a text that actively participates in the process of
archival production. To be on the city wall is to found an archive of
immeasurable possibility, to exceed the cataloguing impulse imposed by
‘‘State papers’’ and to ‘‘know everything.’’ In this startlingly complex
story, Kipling recasts the memorialization of Arrah into a living archive
of empire. What if Indian Mutiny histories, Kipling’s narrator appears to
ask, are the real fictions? What if the Mutiny acquires meaning precisely
through its own fictionalization, through a repudiation of its own origins
in loss, death, and insurgency? What if his story can do better than all
our ‘‘newspapers’’ and ‘‘telegrams?’’
Such a reworking of the Indian Mutiny finds its literal location in a
‘‘little white room’’ perched on a city wall in the beleaguered city of
Lahore. That this room belongs to Lalun, a ‘‘member of the most ancient
profession in the world,’’ should come as no surprise. As I argued in an
earlier chapter, Richard Burton’s intelligence ‘‘research’’ in the Karáchi

150 | CHAPTER FOUR

report provides the perfect precedent for such a narrative move. As in
the case of Burton’s alleged forays into the seamy underworlds of India,
the location of Lalun’s ‘‘little room’’ o√ers less knowledge about sex than
a means to seek knowledge through sex. From the outset the context of
Lahore, acquired by the British after a series of bloody Anglo-Sikh wars
in 1849, returns us to a key site of the imperial martial imaginary.∏≠
The room’s strategic potential is remarked on as the story opens: if
you looked out of its windows, ‘‘you saw all the cattle of the City being
driven down to water, the students of the Government College playing
cricket, . . . the red tombs of dead Emperors beyond the river, and very
far away through the blue heat-haze a glint of the snows of the Hima-
layas.’’ The room thus primarily constitutes a place from which to view
capacious historical geography, as any move outside its windows would
mean you ‘‘dropped thirty feet sheer into the City Ditch.’’ And if that
does not seem important enough, we are coyly reminded that it is the
place where ‘‘all the City seemed to assemble . . . to smoke and to talk’’
(Indian Tales, 293).∏∞
Access to the knowledge that the room o√ers is invitingly achieved
through the concatenations of male homosociality. Unlike the activities
of the billiard room at Arrah that remain forever in abeyance, the ac-
tivities in Lalun’s room are a source of much elaboration. Here, the
memory of the Mutiny is tempered through rituals of male kinship that
are forged over the carefully desexualized body of the native courtesan.
In this discursive redirection from the Mutiny as a site of horror to the
Mutiny as a site of male homosociality, the story displaces the focus of
colonial panic from the military threat posed by the native population in
general to the possible sexual threat posed by the native woman. The
story’s narrator reminds us that the politics of sexual conduct and its
consequences are constitutive to the business of empire. We are told,
tongue in cheek, that the ‘‘beauty of Lalun was so great that it troubled
the hearts of the British government, and caused them to lose their
peace of mind.’’ And just in case we miss the import of this declaration,
the narrator explains further: ‘‘By the sublety [sic] of Lalun, the admin-
istration of the Government was troubled and it lost such and such a
man’’ (Indian Tales, 295–96). Despite its irony, the mention of the loss of
‘‘such and such a man’’ clearly alludes to the problem of venereal disease
that besieged the Indian empire, especially in post-Mutiny India.

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 For feminist historians of British India, Kipling’s focus on a figure like
Lalun draws on the established linkages between sexuality and colonial
governmentality. With its strong military presence, Kipling’s Lahore sits
at the center of debates around venereal disease and the armed forces in
British India.∏≤ Philippa Levine, for example, reiterates the familiar for-
mulation that the increase in the number of native prostitutes indicated
less native perversion than the appetites of the soldiers who frequented
the infamous ‘‘Lal Bazaars’’ that sprang up around the military barracks.
There is even some well-grounded speculation that more soldiers died of
venereal diseases than in combat during the 1857 Indian Mutiny. Conse-
quently, the passing of the Contagious Diseases Acts after 1870 had very
di√erent repercussions for women in the metropole and in the colonies.
While the three British acts (1864, 1869, and 1869) exercised control
over Englishwomen registered as prostitutes, such control in India was
more arbitrary and to be exercised on any woman suspected of being a
prostitute. The logic behind such a di√erence in rule, Levine argues, was
based on a colonial understanding of native morality, seen as endemi-
cally depraved and fallen, especially in the female. Kipling’s narrator
corroborates this line of thinking, albeit ironically, as he introduces the
story: ‘‘In the West, people say rude things about Lalun’s profession, and
write lectures to young persons in order that Morality may be preserved.
In the East where the profession is hereditary, descending from mother
to daughter, nobody writes lectures or takes any notice; and that is a
distinct proof of the inability of the East to manage its own a√airs’’
(Indian Tales, 293). Levine further suggests that such a reading of native
women’s morality in a post-Mutiny era of venereal diseases firmly lo-
cates the racialized prostitute’s body as the purveyor of a threat so deadly
that the English soldier’s body is no match for its e√ects. Because native
prostitution is widespread, so also is the onslaught of venereal disease
understood as being transmitted primarily through the body of the na-
tive prostitute. Consequently, the frequent contact between native pros-
titutes and the English troops conveniently becomes an issue of less
import, as more public attention is paid instead to the ‘‘unnatural’’ and
‘‘debilitating’’ e√ects of the native woman’s sexual labor.∏≥
But Lalun is not a prostitute in any conventional sense, and Kipling’s
recourse to her ‘‘little room’’ does more than merely deflect the discus-
sion from the behavior of British soldiers to that of wily native women.

152 | CHAPTER FOUR

Lalun is, after all, a ‘‘courtesan,’’ a well-anointed figure in the landscape
of colonial India. Tawa’ifs, the more familiar name for courtesans, were a
source of much grief to colonial authorities. Keenly involved in contem-
porary politics, the arts, and even matters of the law, courtesans were
said to have played no small role in the fanning of Mutiny fires among
the local armed forces. Veena Talwar Oldenburg further proposes that
the ‘‘lifestyles of the courtesans’’ posed serious ‘‘resistance’’ to more
patrilineal forms of inheritance and kinship in a region where such
matters were understood through genealogies of heterosexual reproduc-
tion. Courtesans controlled extensive property and occupied positions of
enormous power within local feudal systems.∏∂ Kipling’s depiction of
Lalun leaves no doubt as to her influence and wealth as a courtesan: her
jewelry alone ‘‘was worth ten thousand pounds,’’ and should a thief be
foolish enough to ‘‘murder her for its possession,’’ he would surely be
torn ‘‘limb from limb’’ by her followers in the city (Indian Tales, 303).
In Kipling’s ‘‘On the City Wall’’ the problem of the resistant courtesan
and of her disease-producing body is carefully rearranged and recast in
another order of things. Lalun’s salon, the potential location for disease
and insurgency, is transformed to a space where the real work of colonial
intelligence takes place. Gone is the threat of army barracks, disease, and
immorality; in its place, we have an idyllic and diverse melting pot of
cultures where men of all races gather to exchange intellectual views
and to enjoy each other’s company: ‘‘In the long hot nights of latter April
and May all the City seemed to assemble in Lalun’s little white room to
smoke and to talk. Shiahs of the grimmest and most uncompromising
persuasion; Sufis who had lost all belief in the Prophet and retained but
little in God; wandering Hindu priests passing southward on their way
to the Central India fairs . . . M.A.’s of the University, very superior, very
voluble—all these people and more also you might find in the white
room’’ (Indian Tales, 300).∏∑ It is in Lalun’s salon that Kipling’s narrator is
able to finally record colonial life in its unfettered form. As he bustles
around lending books to Wali Dad, the main native male voice in the
story, there is hardly a hint of the sexual activities that presumably go on
in such a venue. The story’s attention remains focused on the filial
relationship developing between Wali Dad and the English narrator as
the two exchange information and pleasantries on all subjects, from
politics to literature, from art to religion. In case we think less kindly of

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such a blossoming male friendship, Wali Dad firmly reminds us that they
are simply following in the footsteps of the great Greeks. Did not the
‘‘inhabitants of the city of Athens,’’ he asks with great flourish, also main-
tain such forms of friendship that ‘‘rigorously secluded their women?’’
(Indian Tales, 312–13).
Lalun’s potential to bury ‘‘such and such a man’’ is thus never put to
test; instead we are told that such a threat can be quietly put to rest.
Lalun’s body is carefully recast, desexualized, and made to produce infor-
mation on the underground workings of a native resistance movement.
Lalun herself o√ers no defense against this revision of her role and
announces herself ‘‘least inclined to orgies which were nearly certain to
end in strife’’ (Indian Tales, 300). We are told repeatedly that to know
and understand Lalun is to know and understand the native mind:
‘‘Lalun is Lalun, and when you have said that, you have only come to the
Beginning of Knowledge’’ (Indian Tales, 299). No threat of disease ema-
nates from Lalun in this story. Rather, the narrator is more intent on
demonstrating the extent of her knowledge in matters close to the ruling
of empire. ‘‘Lalun knows everything,’’ he acknowledges as he inter-
rogates her on the exact details of the passage of a military regiment to
Agra (Indian Tales, 301). In many ways Lalun shoulders the promise of
the archive, slanting her o√erings through the semantic entanglements
of desire and knowledge. To know Lalun is to know India.
Through Lalun’s window on the city wall the narrator scripts his read-
ing of the Indian Mutiny, and through her eyes he gains access to the
activities of the native mutineers. As a partially omniscient narrator, he
records the events as they happen, even if he is not fully capable of
comprehending their import.∏∏ His habit of record keeping finds most
e√ective form in the familiar historical references that pepper every
narrative turn in the story. These references seize the reader’s attention,
even as their referentiality is redirected to a di√erent end. That is,
Kipling’s rewriting of the Mutiny solicits known historical referents,
while at the same time relegating their prior references to a space of
historical misreading. Bahadur Shah Zafar, for example, a key leader in
the Mutiny, is recast in the avatar of the story’s abject native mutineer,
Khem Singh. As is well-documented, Zafar was no ordinary native leader.
A renowned Urdu poet, mystic, and an overall peaceful monarch, he was
thrust into the center of the Indian Mutiny by rebelling Indian regiments.

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Many view Zafar as one of India’s first nationalists, a leader who united
di√erent creeds of Indians, spawned a cultural renaissance, and was
equally acceptable to the many princely states battling against the British.
After the fall of Delhi and his defeat at the hands of the British in 1858,
Zafar was exiled to Rangoon, Burma (now Yangon, Myanmar), and spent
his last days in exile there.∏π Kipling’s depiction of Singh clearly draws on
such histories of Zafar, only to empty them of all threatening rupture. As
we shall see, Lalun enables the narrator to minimize and lay to rest the
brutal myth of the rebellion, unveiling in its place the figure of an old
warrior, Singh, whose allegiance to the cause of the Mutiny appears as
arcane and useless as the wizened body in which it is encased.
The Singh who takes the place of Zafar is a onetime king who has
returned from exile in Burma and, thanks to the ‘‘kindness of the Gov-
ernment,’’ is imprisoned in the low-security environs of Fort Amara (an
edifice whose ‘‘blackened wall’’ can be seen from Lalun’s little room). His
‘‘memory’’ carefully ‘‘changed’’ from his years in Burma, Singh returns to
his native land with no more thoughts of cutting ‘‘the throats of all the
Sahibs in the land.’’ But as the story progresses, Singh recovers some of
his lost fire, ‘‘his memory’’ comes ‘‘back to him,’’ and with it the ‘‘old
hatred’’ that had nearly been ‘‘e√aced in far-o√ Burma’’ (Indian Tales,
308). Through a series of bumbling e√orts set against the chaotic and
violent celebrations of a Mohurram festival, Singh escapes Fort Amara.
Such a potentially rousing escape, however, provides no promise of a new
rebellion. Instead, at the end of the story, we are left with the abject
figure of the old mutineer who is rejected by the younger natives and
dismissed by the English authorities, both considering him too unimpor-
tant for their political purposes. We are told that ‘‘ ‘57 [may have been] a
year that no man, Black or White, cares to speak of’’ (Indian Tales, 310),
but in this version of Kipling’s Anglo-India, the horrifying ‘‘glamour’’ of
the year is gone, ‘‘passed away’’ (Indian Tales, 329–30), with the writing
on the city wall gesturing to the activities between men in Lalun’s salon,
rather than to the memory of a bygone native insurrection.
Despite such rearrangements of Mutiny threats, this story provides
no easy literary remedy to the unspeakability (and unverifiability) of
1857. Even as Lalun pro√ers her secrets, it is clear that her status as a
native informant remains tenuous at best. The narrator reminds us that
his record of the events is in fact marred by misreadings of its own

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evidentiary production. Singh, after all, is granted safe passage out of
Lalun’s little room by a narrator who claims no knowledge of his com-
panion’s identity. All this we are told through the narrator’s own self-
sabotaging observation that ‘‘I caught him by the wrist and felt a bangle
there—the iron bangle of the Sikhs—but I had no suspicions’’ (Indian
Tales, 325). While the Indian Mutiny may have temporarily been laid to
rest in the space of this story, its e√ects live on in a realm of befuddling
continuity. As the narrator notes in the last line of the story, he has been
thoroughly but pleasurably duped: ‘‘But I was thinking I had become
Lalun’s Vizier after all’’ (Indian Tales, 331). At the center of Lalun’s lit-
tle room is yet another story that can perhaps never be reasonably
recovered.

T E L L M E W H AT H E WA N T S

Kipling’s Mutiny stories, I want to ultimately argue, o√er an allegory of

lasting insight for his overall archive.∏∫ The archival frissons inspired by
the Mutiny find their way into most of Kipling’s later fiction as he
continually grapples with the challenges of crafting a literary archive
that will survive beyond the inevitable detritus of empire. A pleasurable
trajectory of loss organizes the landscape of his Anglo-Indian fiction as
his stories carefully nurse the tensions of their own production and
futurity. The writing of such stories becomes a gendered movement,
where the story invites the reader to come to it through a series of
iterations that promise a future. These iterations emphasize, almost
casually, the kind of violence that must be practiced (and endured) to
survive life under colonialism. Kipling’s stories become witness and
bearers of an archive that is absent, disembodied, but still inexorably
called forth and compelled via a series of metonymic connections.
In a remarkable scene from ‘‘The House of Shadows,’’ the first piece of
fiction by Kipling to appear in the Civil and Military Gazette in 1887, the
male narrator describes the experience of being haunted by a male
presence who he can sense but cannot see, a presence he seeks but
cannot find. ‘‘When he comes to the room I am in, he stops, puts the
purdah aside and looks at me. I am sure of it, for when I turn, the purdah
has always just fallen. He must be the man who takes so impertinent an
interest in my breakfast. But he will never face me and tell me what
he wants. He is always in the next room. Though I have hunted him

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through the house again and again, he is always in the next room.’’∏Ω
‘‘He,’’ and ‘‘he must be a man’’ (‘‘Shadow,’’ 247), we are told, enters the
narrator’s room every night, casts aside the dividing curtain, gazes at the
narrator’s prone and pliant body, and then retreats into the shadows. His
face is never seen, his desires never known: ‘‘He will never face me and
tell me what he wants.’’ Yet his presence is palpable, his memory unfor-
gettable. Kipling’s narrator, bewitched and obsessed with the pursuit of
this ‘‘he,’’ can do little else but recognize that he ‘‘interferes sadly with
one’s work’’ (‘‘Shadow,’’ 248). As the narrator finally admits in a gesture
of acute self-consciousness and hope: ‘‘I believe now that if he dared he
would come out from the other side of the purdah and peep over my
shoulder to see what I am writing’’ (‘‘Shadow,’’ 248).
This liminal male presence—intimate but elusive and unsettling—
that hovers over the body of this narrator’s text encrypts in many ways the
very archival modes I have been foregrounding. A crucial link is always
made between loss and recovery, between the writing of a text and its
recipient, collaborator, and source who, in most cases, is male. It is as if
each of Kipling’s narrators struggles with the burden of possibility, with
the hope that somehow his narrative gesture will be the one to draw the
elusive ‘‘he’’ out from the mysteries behind the purdah. The gesture of
moving aside the veil to reveal the presence behind it is also a particularly
gender-coded one. Within the Indian traditions of the zenana (harem),
the chastity of the female is safeguarded against the gaze of the male, a
prize only yielded to him as a sign of ultimate surrender. To see the
desired object is to consume it. In the scene described above, this ritu-
alized gesture is repeated, albeit between two men. Here it is Kipling’s
narrator who takes on the role of the ‘‘Oriental’’ female behind the purdah
whose body, space, and text is invaded by the male presence who gazes at
him but does not permit the narrator to gaze back. Yet by the end of the
story, Kipling’s narrator is no longer passive and suppliant. Instead, he
wants desperately to return the intruder’s gaze.
It is this constitutive ambivalence of presence and absence that creates
the very possibility of a Barthesian ‘‘dialectics of desire,’’ of a game of
pleasurable narrative hide-and-seek, of an addictive ‘‘site of bliss,’’ that
Kipling’s narrators seem unable to give up.π≠ Indeed, in most of his stories,
the narrators go to great lengths to carefully elaborate the structural
psychodynamics behind their individual acts of narration. Despite the

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cultural injunctions to silence on the subjects the narrators write about,
they are still inexorably drawn to them; many of the prefaces to individual
collections of short stories emphasize the enormity and danger behind
the narrative task undertaken. In the preface to ‘‘The Story of the Gads-
bys,’’ Kipling urges his readers to ‘‘remember that I wrote this story as an
Awful Warning,’’ a warning that will probably lose him the a√ection of his
very dear friend, Captain Gadsby. The narrator of the collection Life’s
Handicap warns us that ‘‘the most remarkable stories are, of course, those
which do not appear—for obvious reason,’’ the obvious reason being that
while the stories are true, ‘‘not one in twenty could be printed in an
English book, because the English do not think as natives do.’’π∞ Other
individual stories strike similarly alarming notes in terms of the nature of
the narrative material they cover. Even in ‘‘The End of the Passage,’’ as the
assistant engineer Hummil dies, we are told, ‘‘in the staring eyes was
written terror beyond the expression of any pen’’ (Indian Tales, 191). All
we know is that Hummil ‘‘spoke in broken whispers for nearly ten
minutes’’ (Indian Tales, 188) and that what he says is too harrowing for the
reader’s ears. In all these narratives, it is the intrepid narrator who braves
cultural obstacles, linguistic barriers, and his own profound fear of what
he sees to bring home the ‘‘plain tales’’ of the Raj. And in all these
narratives, new avatars of a failed, exhausted colonial masculinity are
being created as Englishmen retreat, surrender, and collapse under the
Raj’s pressures. The stories are also carefully screened for their unspeak-
able horror, a horror that only the narrators can wholly see and decipher.
Over and over again, the narrators return to scenes of terror and aliena-
tion, compelled into narrative by the sights they uncover.π≤
In her work on narrative obsessions and their links to fetishism,
Emily Apter connects such narrative structures to a particular kind of
pleasurable preoccupation: ‘‘The literary psychodynamics of vision: the
conceit of seeing . . . heightens erotic atmosphere by placing the reader-
viewer at a distance (the suspense of image-suspension) or situating him
or her at some transgressively hidden vantage point. The reader is a
lonely voyeur, hunched over a keyhole, and the space that separates him
or her from the spectacle correlates to the temporality of lingering on the
way to a sexual aim . . . what Freud called perversion . . . and what
Peter Brooks (glossing Freud) has described as the protracted foreplea-
sure of narrative ‘clock-teasing’ ’’π≥ A footnote to the above passage fur-

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ther points us to the section ‘‘The Sexual Aberrations’’ in the Three
Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), in which Sigmund Freud places
the burden of perversity on the rather elusive notion of ‘‘lingering’’:
‘‘Perversions are sexual activities . . . which either (a) extend, in an
anatomical sense, beyond the regions of the body that are designed for
sexual union, or (b) linger over the intermediate relations to the sexual
object which should normally be traversed rapidly on the path towards
the final sexual aim.’’π∂ For Freud, these aberrant activities are problem-
atic beginnings, preliminary stages that lose their ‘‘abnormalcy’’ when
placed in a strongly teleological model of sexuality that must have as its
endpoint the stabilizing space of heterosexual genitality. The founding
split in all of Freud’s revisions of these essays is his inability to account
for the breakdown in such developmental models.
What happens, however, I want to ask, if this ‘‘lingering’’ or ‘‘fore-
pleasure’’ supersedes the value of genitally defined pleasure, or more in-
terestingly, what if ‘‘lingering’’ becomes, because of and not despite
its defined incompleteness, the desired object of narrative focus? In
Kipling’s fiction, the narrators perform the role of Apter’s hunched-over
reader, peering through the keyhole into what they announce is the
underbelly of Anglo-Indian life. His tales ‘‘linger’’ on the bodies of
‘‘strong men’’ in di√erent stages of decay and companionship and betray
the structural logic of a colonial world that sustains itself only through
‘‘uncompleted narratives’’ of a crumbling masculinity and/or failed or
thwarted heterosexuality. Kipling’s world is a self-contained male-only
fantasy, with women acting as complicated enablers, aesthetic foils
to the inexorable logic of a deferred heterosexuality. The swashbuck-
ling no-nonsense heroes of earlier empire fiction are replaced by self-
tortured Englishmen whose only source of pleasure and rationality is not
the business of ruling, nor their women, nor the countryside, but the
company of one another and of their native male companions. Kipling’s
Anglo-India is strewn with the traces of men who are either dead,
hovering on the brink of insanity, missing from their homes, or carefully
navigating their survival amid the creaking machinations of a tired En-
glish bureaucracy.
There is no turning away from the ghosts of these men in Kipling’s
Anglo-India. Like the obsessed narrator of ‘‘The House of Shadows,’’
Kipling’s other narrators, too, share a tormented relationship of loss and

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recuperation with the male figures who dot their narrative horizon. Men
are constantly dying, blowing their brains out, or simply rotting in the
savage heat of the Anglo-Indian sun. The only immortality, the only
refuge promised to the men, we are told over and over again, lies in the
stories of their lives that the di√erent narrators so carefully record. As
Wressley of the Foreign O≈ce, one of Kipling’s bitterest characters, says
when he hands over his ‘‘magnum opus . . . the work of [his] life’’ to the
narrator: ‘‘Take it and keep it. Write one of your penny-farthing yarns
about its birth. Perhaps—perhaps—the whole business may have been
ordained to this end’’ (Indian Tales, 678).
Relationships between men in Kipling’s India are thus not routed
through attachments to women, but through an attachment to stories of
di√erent shapes and memories: some stories are written, others unwrit-
ten, some fragmented, some whole, some stories such as that of Wress-
ley’s speak of a life’s lost work, while others like that of young Charlie in
‘‘The Finest Story in the World’’ speak of pirate ships and failed literary
aspirations. These stories fill the worlds of the men we meet: civilians,
subalterns, and, significantly, even natives. East is east, and west is
indeed west, as the popular Kipling refrain goes, except when, as the
often ignored last line of that stanza tells us, ‘‘two strong men stand face
to face, though they come from the ends of the earth.’’π∑ When it comes
to the circulation of stories, no exchange or liaison between men is
taboo; race lines, class lines, and even lines of mortality are crossed and
overcome. Creative collaborations and narrative pacts are struck be-
tween Englishmen, as well as between the native servants and their
English masters.π∏ Each narrator plays an active part in each story’s
unfolding, reminding the reader constantly of his participation and con-
trol over the narratives he is crafting. Instead of merely framing what his
eyes see, the narrative incorporates the narrator into the very picture it
presents, thus eradicating the distant relation of observer and observed.
The narrator is as much part of the world he is describing as he is privy to
its internal rumblings; similarly, the content of the stories is as much
about the relationship between the individual narrator and his male
subject(s) as it is about the lives of his protagonists.
Yet these stories are no simple records of colonial masculinity surviv-
ing against all odds. Instead, the men are avatars of a colonial mas-
culinity ravaged by doubt and fear, paralyzed by the fragility of its own

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construction. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick is almost too gentle in her charac-
terization of the British Empire as a ‘‘remedial public school, a male
place in which it is relatively safe for men to explore the crucial terrain
of homosociality.’’ππ More often than not, in Kipling’s fiction, the Anglo-
Indian landscape resembles a version of Foucault’s asylum,π∫ with revolv-
ing doors that dizzyingly lead us in and out of the rational order of
things: ‘‘This stench, combined with that of native tobacco, baked brick,
and dried earth, sends the heart of many a strong man to his boots, for it
is the smell of the Great Indian Empire when she turns herself for six
months into a house of torment’’ (Indian Tales, 183). However, even as
the characters degenerate and collapse into incoherent beings barely
performing their roles in the empire’s machinery, Kipling’s narrators
appear to experience quite the opposite e√ect. Every calamity, every
emotional breakdown, is turned upside down, emptied of its horror, and
regenerated to fuel narratives that smuggle out of the collective torment
of everyday life some sense of the personal interior life of its partici-
pants. A new kind of masculinity emerges, one where the neglected sites
of repression and fear become a generating site for what John Kucich has
called ‘‘libidinal acts, forms of luxuriously self-disruptive and auto-erotic
experience.’’πΩ Colonial masculinity is now defined, valued, and under-
stood not through its brazen gestures of conquest or through its mastery
over the native landscape, but through its ability to record stories of its
own distress. The narrative gaze turns inward as the reader, like the
young subaltern, Bobby Wick, begins ‘‘to be instructed in the dark art
and mystery of managing men’’ in India. The narrator of ‘‘Only a Sub-
altern’’ forebodingly reminds us that even something as controlled and
ordered as a ‘‘regiment [of English soldiers] had as much right to its own
secrets as a woman’’ (Indian Tales, 93).

T O B E F I L E D F O R R E F E R E N C E : D E S I R E I N A B E YA N C E

You will treat it brutally, I know you will. Some of it must go; the public are fools
and prudish fools. I was their servant once. But do your mangling gently—very
gently. It is a great work and I have paid for it in seven year’s damnation.
R U D Y A R D K I P L I N G , ‘‘ T O B E F I L E D F O R R E F E R E N C E ’’

My e√ort in this chapter has been to read Kipling’s fiction in a textual

world marked by the stress and erotics of its own archival production

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and reproduction. While I have argued that Kipling repeatedly works to
settle archives of chaos, such as the memory of the Indian Mutiny, into
contained narratives of everyday Anglo-Indian life, it is also important to
bear in mind that his fiction simultaneously wrestles with the very fears
he attempts to exorcise. At the heart of Kipling’s Indian Tales is a story
that literalizes the narrative strategies I have been addressing thus far.
‘‘To Be Filed for Reference’’ maps the genesis of a friendship between
McIntosh Jellaludin (the only Kipling character to have successfully
‘‘gone fantee’’ and passed into the hybrid, sullied space of Eurasian
identity) and the ubiquitous male narrator. The friendship, and the story,
culminates in the form of a literary transaction, an exchange of a strange
body of narratives, a ‘‘hopeless muddle’’ of jumbled tales that Jellaludin,
on his deathbed, bequeaths to the narrator.
The narrator first stumbles on the drunken Jellaludin on a dark night
and befriends him with the enticement of tobacco and books in ex-
change for what he ironically calls ‘‘the materials of a new Inferno that
should make me greater than Dante’’ (Indian Tales, 377). Born out of his
drunken erudition, the ‘‘hopeless muddle’’ that Jellaludin finally hands
over to the narrator never quite reaches the smooth surface of narrative
completion. We are told, with foreboding irony: ‘‘If the thing is ever
published, some one may perhaps remember this story, now printed as a
safeguard to prove that McIntosh Jellaludin and not I myself wrote the
Book of Mother Maturin’’ (Indian Tales, 383–84). ‘‘To Be Filed for Refer-
ence’’ thus begins with expectation, with a promise of vicarious narra-
tive discovery, but it ends with a tale held in abeyance, as Jellaludin dies
and the narrator leaves the jumbled tales unpublished. We never learn
the complete contents of this mysterious ‘‘Book of Mother Maturin,’’
except for brief allusions to it as a ‘‘bundle’’ that ‘‘needed much expurga-
tion and was ‘‘full of Greek nonsense’’ (Indian Tales, 383). Stephen Arata
signals the importance of this story by reminding us that ‘‘Jellaludin is
the only character in all of Kipling’s Indian stories who is learned—the
only character whose literary education matches Kipling’s own.’’ Yet
unlike Kipling’s, Jellaludin’s erudition produces chaos, disorder, and an
undecipherable body of work that can only be ‘‘filed for reference.’’∫≠
Kipling, like Jellaludin, was rumored to have labored for years on the
definitive opus on his experiences in India, a book that he, too, called the

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‘‘Book of Mother Maturin’’ and one that similarly never saw the light of
publication.∫∞
For my purpose here, Jellaludin’s ‘‘uncompleted narrative’’ recalls my
earlier discussion of Kipling’s Mutiny stories. After all, Jellaludin does
write his secret tales, but only at the cost of a scarring and eventually
fatal ‘‘damnation.’’ Such damnation comes from his attachment to a
native woman, his silent wife, who exposes Jellaludin to the pressures
(and privileges) of cultural passing. ‘‘That book will make you famous,’’
Jellaludin poignantly adds, and in a gesture reminiscent of a parting
between lovers, Jellaludin hands over his ‘‘only baby’’ to the narrator, as
his native wife ‘‘bears witness’’ and approves of this transaction (Indian
Tales, 384). The script of heterosexuality and narrative closure surren-
ders to the pleasures of narrative lingering, extolling the possibility of a
text that returns more as tantalizing reference than as o≈cial record.
Like all of Kipling’s stories, the game ends grimly with colonial secrets
intact and the site of narrative bliss bequeathed to a new line of male
narrators.

NOTES

1. David Alan Richards notes that the most accurate and largest available bibliogra-
phy is James McGregor Stewart’s mammoth Rudyard Kipling: A Bibliographical
Catalogue (1959). Stewart’s manuscript, published after his death with the help of
an editor, A. W. Yeats, ‘‘weighs in at over three pounds, with 763 primary entries,
and 673 pages, including 108 of appendices, tabulating not only unauthorized
editions which were not first editions, but also such things as 15 pages of musical
settings.’’ Richards, ‘‘Collecting Kipling,’’ Kipling Society Annual Luncheon, May
5, 1999, http://www.kipling.org.uk/facts—collecting.htm, accessed May 4, 2002.
2. David Anton Randall writes that ‘‘rarity in another form than by suppression or
publication in India confronts the Kiplingite, centering around the copyright
pamphlets, an o√spring of his battles with the pirates.’’ For Randall, the many
problems of the Kipling piracies are far from solved, ‘‘but the di≈culty of the
chase has never deterred the pursuer.’’ Randall, ‘‘Kipling and Collecting,’’ 379–80.
3. See Chandler, Summary of the Work of Rudyard Kipling. In appendix 3, ‘‘The
Question of Authorship of Unsigned and Uncollected Items,’’ in a section entitled
‘‘Kipling in India,’’ Chandler writes that both E. Kay Robinson (Kipling’s superior
and the editor of the Civil and Military Gazette) and Kipling often signed their
pieces interchangeably either with ‘‘R,’’ ‘‘R. K.,’’ or ‘‘K. R.,’’ making it di≈cult to
allocate authorship with surety. The style and prose of the two writers also did not

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 di√er much, further complicating any clear distinction between ‘‘the work of the
one from the other’’ (330).
4. See Kemp, ‘‘The Archive on Which the Sun Never Sets.’’
5. Orwell, ‘‘Rudyard Kipling.’’
6. Andrew Lang, ‘‘Mr. Kipling’s Stories,’’ in Green, Kipling: The Critical Heritage, 71.
7. Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 97.
8. Quoted in Green, Kipling, 58, 182, 237.
9. See Chakravarty, The Indian Mutiny, 1–19; Singh, Novels on the Indian Mutiny; and
Hilda Gregg, ‘‘The Indian Mutiny in Fiction,’’ Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine,
February 1897, 218. For an astute reading of the Indian Mutiny as ‘‘trauma,’’ see
Herbert, War of No Pity.
10. Adams writes: ‘‘The events of the year 1857 were crowning proof of this [Kipling’s
success]. In that year we simplified even these simpler theories [about foreign
races] into the one simplest theory of all. ‘We gave ‘em hell’ to an extent that they
have never forgotten, and Mr. Kipling smiles cunningly over the still active native
prejudice against being blown away from the mouths of cannons. The foolish
person in search of a little disinterested information about things may find the so-
called Indian Mutiny an unexplained historical phenomenon. He will get little or
no information from Mr. Kipling.’’ Francis Adams, ‘‘Rudyard Kipling,’’ in Green,
Kipling: The Critical Heritage, 153. More than a century later, Teresa Hubel writes
on the multiple inscriptions of the Indian empire and further clarifies the impor-
tance of such imaginative shifts. Hubel argues that such deliberate historical
lacunae in colonial narratives are critical to Britain’s ownership of India, whereby
the ‘‘imperialist connotations traditionally implicit in the word ‘own’ are fur-
thered by the broadening of the epistemic boundaries of India: the potential for
appropriating India increases when it is recognized as the [safe] property of the
imagination.’’ Hubel, Whose India, 1.
11. I draw on the work of Thomas Richards who suggests that the nomadic status of
Kim’s character is central to his work of intelligence gathering: ‘‘In Kim the Secret
Service has become di√erentialized and deterritorialized, a system of knowledge
capable of pure circulation and indefinite proliferation; the novel is the first
sustained narration of state nomadology’’ (Richards, Imperial Archive, 22). Clearly,
such theorizations of the imperial archive are not unrelated to our present time.
The mobilization of (false) intelligence as a truth-producing technology was of
course key to the current U.S. occupation of Iraq.
12. Chakravarty, Indian Mutiny, 156–81. Chakravarty himself draws heavily from C. A.
Bayly’s foundational study on the relationship between British intelligence and
forms of indigenous knowledge. See Bayly, Empire and Information.
13. I borrow the concept of the ‘‘nonnarratable’’ from D. A. Miller’s well-known
formulation of the term. Miller writes: ‘‘The nonnarratable is not the unspeak-
able. What defines a nonnarratable element is its incapacity to generate a story.
Properly or intrinsically, it has no narrative future, unless, of course, its nonnarra-

164 | CHAPTER FOUR

 table status is undermined (by happiness destroyed, an incorrect solution, a
choice that must be remade).’’ Miller, Narrative and Its Discontents, 5.
14. See Ganguly, States of Exception. Ganguly’s reading of Kipling’s Gunga Din ad-
dresses the impossibility of escaping the archival e√ects of European construc-
tions about India. She is interested in what she terms the ‘‘afterlife’’ of the
historical narrative of colonialism, ‘‘with its own dynamics, e√ects, and expressive
capacities’’ (1–26).
15. I am indebted to Geeta Patel’s work on history, desire, and temporality here. See
her ‘‘Time to Tell.’’
16. I have deliberately chosen here to stay with the term mutiny instead of rebellion or
revolution to refer to the events of 1857. Mutiny, after all, is precisely about absent
loss. Rebellion and revolution constitute the archive in relation to present loss.
17. Aesthetics here refers generally to the domain in which ‘‘the notion of representa-
tion gets worked out as a unified terrain linking perceptive activity, general
representativity, and political representation and establishing cultivation as the
prelude to the capacity for political representation. It becomes a fundamental tool
of state formation or, in Foucauldian terms, a mode of subjectification. And
therefore both about containing the popular and excising the subaltern.’’ Lloyd
and Thomas, Culture and the State, viii. For more on the imbrication of aesthetics,
politics, and the imagination, see Adorno, Aesthetic Theory; and Redfield, ‘‘Imagi-
Nation.’’
18. Rudyard Kipling, ‘‘In the Year ’57,’’ Civil and Military Gazette, May 14 and May 23
1887, 4–5.
19. In May and June 1857, Nicholson led forces that tracked down hundreds of
mutineers and executed hundreds of prisoners to deter revolt in the Punjab. On
Nicholson’s death, Lawrence wrote: ‘‘Brigadier-General John Nicholson is now
beyond human praise and human reward. But so long as British rule shall endure
in India his fame can never perish. He seems especially to have been raised up for
this juncture. He crowned a bright, though brief, career by dying of the wound he
received in the moment of victory at Delhi. The Chief Commissioner does not
hesitate to a≈rm that without John Nicholson Delhi could not have fallen.’’ Van
Cortlandt of the Sikh army and Sandeman played similar but less visible roles in
the containment of the Mutiny in the Punjab. Edwardes, the commissioner of the
Peshawar province, was a more prominent figure during the Mutiny, and he
raised a large force of Afghan soldiers to help in the retaking of Delhi from the
mutineers. See Kaye, Lives of Indian O≈cers; and Allen, Soldier Sahibs.
20. It is thus hardly a coincidence that Kim is awarded ‘‘The Life of Lord Lawrence, tree
calf, two vols., nine rupees, eight annas’’ for his success in ‘‘mathematical studies
and map-making.’’ Kipling, Kim, 164.
21. For a range of readings on the role of Lawrence in colonial India, see Edwardes,
Necessary Hell; and Khilnani, Punjab.
22. For some key texts on the 1857 Mutiny, see Kaye, Kaye’s and Malleson’s History, xii;

RUDYARD KIPLING’S MUTINY PAPERS | 165

 Ball, History of the Indian Mutiny; Chaudhuri, English Historical Writings; Stokes,
Peasant Armed; Gubbins, Account of the Mutinies; Guha, ‘‘Prose of Counter-
insurgency’’; and Mukherjee, Mangal Pandey.
23. For further reading, see Randall, ‘‘Autumn 1857’’; Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness,
201.
24. Chakravarty, Indian Mutiny, 19–48. See also Burton, Sites of Memory; and Chaud-
hary, ‘‘Phantasmagoric Aesthetics.’’
25. Kipling, ‘‘In the Year ’57,’’ 4–5.
26. Kipling to Robert Underwood Johnson, December 14, 1895, in Kipling, Letters of
Rudyard Kipling, 2:219.
27. Ibid., 2:219. See also Hagiioannu, ‘‘Sentence for Mutiny.’’
28. St. John, ‘‘In the Year ’57.’’
29. Gilmour, Long Recessional, 15–29.
30. Annan, ‘‘Kipling’s Place.’’
31. Moran, Kipling and Afghanistan.
32. Kipling, ‘‘In the Year ’57,’’ pt. 2, 5.
33. Ibid.
34. Kipling, ‘‘The Little House at Arrah’’ (1888), in Harbord, The Reader’s Guide to
Rudyard Kipling’s Work, 1:1972–79. The story appeared first in the Pioneer on
February 24, 1888, and five days later in the Pioneer Mail.
35. Sir Colin Campbell, the leader of the British forces during the war, thus described
the Cawnepore massacre in his Narrative of the Indian Revolt from Its Outbreak to
the Capture of Lucknow: ‘‘Never was devised a blacker scheme than that which
Nena Sahib had planned. Our miserable countrymen were conducted faithfully
enough to the boats- o≈cers, men, women, and children. The men and o≈cers
were allowed to take their arms and ammunition with them, and were escorted by
nearly the whole of the rebel army. It was about eight o’clock a.m. when all
reached the riverside—a distance of a mile and a half. Those who embarked first
pushed o√ from the shore; but others found it di≈cult to get their boats o√ the
banks, as the rebels had placed them as high as possible. At this moment the
report of three guns was heard from the Nena’s camp. The mutineers suddenly
levelled their muskets, guns opened from the banks, and the massacre com-
menced. Some of the boats were set on fire, volley upon volley was fired upon the
poor fugitives, numbers of whom were killed on the spot. . . . A few boats crossed
over to the opposite bank, but there a regiment of native infantry (the 17th), just
arrived from Azimghur, was waiting for them; and in their eagerness to slay the
‘Ka≈rs,’ rode their horses belly deep into the river to meet the boats, and hack our
unhappy country men and women to pieces’’ (112).
36. Kaori Nagai speaks directly to the politics of memorialization in his excellent
piece, ‘‘The Writing on the Wall.’’ While my reading shares some of the concerns
raised by Nagai, it focuses more centrally on the structuration of archival desire
that founds Kipling’s narrativization of the siege of Arrah.
37. Hall, Two Months in Arrah, 51.

166 | CHAPTER FOUR

38. Kipling, ‘‘The Little House at Arrah,’’ 1976.
39. The siege of Delhi, as Nagai points out, was repeatedly summoned up as the key
site of post-Mutiny memorialization. The recapture of Delhi from the mutineers
was said to have turned the tide in British favor, making it possible for the British
to regain control and disperse the native rebellion. Lord Curzon’s lavish Delhi
Durbar of 1903 was meant to celebrate precisely such a past history, with the wall
at Arrah being chosen as one of the many post-Mutiny sites of memorialization
(Nagai, ‘‘Writing on the Wall,’’ 88–91).
40. Kipling, ‘‘The Little House at Arrah,’’ 1975.
41. George Trevelyan, Competition Wallah, 70–71.
42. Ibid. See also Trevelyan, Cawnepore, 91.
43. Trevelyan, Competition Wallah, 93.
44. Kipling, ‘‘The Little House at Arrah,’’ 1975.
45. Ibid.
46. Ibid.
47. Ibid., 1974–75.
48. See Sinha, Veer Kuer Singh. Similarly, names of key places in the Indian Mutiny
also appear under shifting names. For instance, Benares has become Varanasi,
Cawnepore is now Kanpur, and Arrah is spelled as Ara and Dinapore as Danapur.
49. Ibid., 47, 52.
50. Such skepticism around the ‘‘facts’’ of the Mutiny extends to current scholarship
on the subject. There is a veritable cottage industry of Mutiny historiography
(Anglo-American and postcolonial) that profoundly questions the very premise
and scale of the events of 1857. See, for instance, the lively debate in Past and
Present, vol. 142, February 1994, on the events of the infamous Cawnepore/
Kanpur massacre.
51. Sharpe, Allegories of Empire, 1–65.
52. Leckey, Fictions.
53. Ibid., 166–67.
54. Ibid., 168.
55. Trevelyan, Cawnepore, 299–300.
56. Leckey, Fictions, xi–xvi.
57. Kipling, ‘‘The Little House at Arrah,’’ 1977.
58. Ibid.
59. Kipling, Indian Tales, 301–302. All references in the running text will hereafter be
cited parenthetically as Indian Tales. This story was first published in In Black and
White (1888) and then collected and reproduced in Soldiers Three and Other Stories
(1889) and in Indian Tales (1899).
60. Kipling writes frequently about Lahore, a place of anxious familiarity to him. See,
for example, his graphic descriptions of the city and its back streets in ‘‘The City of
Dreadful Night,’’ in Indian Tales. Kim, as one recalls, opens in Lahore, with its
young protagonist poised at the beginning of a long historical adventure.
61. Jan Morris provides an extensive street description of the colonial city of Lahore

RUDYARD KIPLING’S MUTINY PAPERS | 167

 to make us see how Lahore is emblematic of colonial urban planning: the canton-
ment and fortified railway station are maintained at a safe distance from the
‘‘native’’ quarters. See Morris, Stones of Empire, 204.
62. For a more nuanced reading of Kipling’s interest in the subject of venereal disease,
see Vora and Lyons, ‘‘Medical Kipling: Syphilis,’’ 32. Vora and Lyons trace Kipling’s
lifelong interest in the history of medicine and list the many instances in which
Kipling directly engages with diseases.
63. Levine, Prostitution, Race, and Politics, 182–83.
64. Oldenburg, ‘‘Lifestyle as Resistance.’’
65. Kipling’s salutary description of the melting pot of religions here clearly draws
from his own brief flirtation with freemasonry. Shamsul Islam goes so far as to say
that Kipling’s interlude with the order at the Lahore Masonic Lodge in 1886 may
have in fact permeated his relationship to India and its forms of religiosity. See
Islam, Kipling’s Law, 65. I remain unconvinced of this claim.
66. Philip Mason points to Kipling’s fondness for self-possessed narrators, but he
describes the narrator on ‘‘On a City Wall’’ as a ‘‘marginally involved spectator,’’ a
claim that simply does not capture the events of the story. See his foreword to the
R. S. Surtees Society reprint of In Black and White (Somerset, UK: R. S. Surtees
Society, 1987).
67. In recent times, Zafar has experienced a wide revival within Indian historio-
graphical and popular circles. William Darymple’s much publicized The Last Mug-
hal covers the events of 1857 from the perspective of the multiple subjects (native
and European) who lived in prerevolt Delhi. Zafar is the focal point of the text.
See Darymple, Last Mughal. There have also been several films made to commem-
orate his role in the Indian Mutiny. In Bangladesh, the country of his exile and his
death, the famous Victoria Park in Dhaka has been renamed Bahadur Shah Zafar
Park.
68. Fredric Jameson defines the allegorical thus: ‘‘The fullest form of what Althusser
calls ‘expressive causality’ (and what he calls ‘historicism’) will thus prove to be a
vast interpretative allegory in which a sequence of historical events or texts and
artifacts is rewritten in terms of some deeper, underlying, and more ‘fundamental’
narrative, of a hidden master narrative which is the allegorical key or figural
content of the first sequence of empirical materials.’’ Jameson, Political Uncon-
scious, 28–29.
69. Kipling, Kipling’s India, 247, hereafter cited as ‘‘Shadows’’ parenthetically in the
running text.
70. Roland Barthes writes: ‘‘I must seek out this reader (must ‘cruise’ him) without
knowing where he is. A site of bliss is then created. It is not the reader’s ‘person’
that is necessary to me, it is this site: the possibility of a dialectics of desire, of any
unpredictability of bliss: the bets are not placed, there can still be a game.’’
Barthes, Pleasure of the Text, 4.
71. Kipling, Life’s Handicap, xvi, xii.
72. Ali Behdad argues that such narrative gestures are fueled by ‘‘the opposing poles of

168 | CHAPTER FOUR

 orientalist representation: obscurity surrounding the object of representation and
an insatiable desire for unveiling inherent in representation practice.’’ See Belated
Travelers, 19.
73. Apter, Feminizing the Fetish, xiv.
74. Freud, ‘‘The Sexual Aberrations,’’ 16.
75. Kipling, ‘‘The Ballad of East and West.’’ The complete stanza reads: ‘‘Oh, East is
East, and West and West, and never the twain shall meet, / Till Earth and Sky
stand presently at God’s great Judgement Seat; / But there is neither East nor
West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth, / When two strong men stand face to face,
though they come from the ends of the earth!’’ Kipling, Rudyard Kipling’s Verse,
268.
76. It is similarly significant that the two adult novels Kipling wrote, Naulahka (1891)
and The Light That Failed (1890), both deal rather centrally with the issue of male-
to-male collaboration. Naulahka was coauthored by Kipling and Wolcott Balestier,
while The Light That Failed has a major subplot that focuses on the intensely
homoerotic dynamic between the older Torpenhow and Dick, the main protago-
nist. Christopher Lane points out that in the writing of The Light That Failed,
Kipling vacillated between two very di√erent endings. In the first, ‘‘Dick Heldar
dies in the arms of his closest male friend Torpenhow; in the second, amended
version, Heldar forms a precipitous marriage to Maisie, a woman who has from
the novel’s outset expressed almost unmitigated hostility to him.’’ Lane, Ruling
Passion, 19.
77. Sedgwick, Between Men, 198.
78. Foucault in the preface to his Madness and Civilization argues that madness and
irrationality emerge in the constitution of current systems of knowledge as a
‘‘great motionless structure; this structure is one of neither drama nor knowledge;
it is the point where history is immobilized in the tragic category which both
established and impugns it.’’ Foucault, Madness and Civilization, xii.
79. Kucich, Repression in Victorian Fiction, 3.
80. Arata, Fictions of Loss, 167.
81. Kipling himself makes many references to his incomplete novel. In one such note
he writes: ‘‘Further I have embarked—to the tune of 237 foolscap pages on my
novel—Mother Maturin—an Anglo-Indian episode. . . . It’s not one bit nice or
proper but it carries a grim sort of a moral with it and tries to deal with the
unutterable horrors of lower class Eurasian and native life as they exist outside
reports and reports and reports . . . Trixie says it’s awfully horrid: Mother says it’s
nasty but powerful and I know it to be in large measure true. It is an unfailing
delight to me and I’m just in that pleasant stage where the characters are living
with me always.’’ See Kipling, Kipling’s India, 83.

RUDYARD KIPLING’S MUTINY PAPERS | 169

 CODA

Passing Returns

T he critical task of this book has been to consider why any

return to the archive constitutes exacting but crucial labor.
Such labor attempts to keep alive the idea of an archive that is
more fractious than cumulative, more a space of catachresis
than catharsis. I want to end here with some tentative reflec-
tions on the continued reliance on methods of archival re-
trieval in the liberatory logics of antisodomy movements in
(post)colonial India. More specifically, I want to turn to the
example of a rarely cited 1947 sodomy case to illustrate what
(post)colonial legal activists disappear to produce a more stable
archive of sustained presence in the Indian past. In doing so, I
want to stress first, the political limitations of thinking ques-
tions of sexuality and colonialism within the recursive circular-
ity of a lost-and-found archive, and, second, my own bounded-
ness in the very interpretative domains I seek to exceed.∞

NOT HERE, NOT NOW

In 2001, the Naz Foundation, a Delhi-based hiv/aids-preven-

tion ngo, with the assistance of a progressive legal reform
group, the Lawyers’ Collective, filed a petition against the
Union government seeking to declare section 377, the anti-
sodomy statute of the Indian Penal Code, as violative of the
right to equality (Article 14), the right to freedom (Article 19),
and the right to life and liberty (Article 21) of the Indian consti-
tution. The petition cautiously and strategically staged its argu-
ments through careful references to the mushrooming global discourse
of gay civil rights, alongside a more aggressive attentiveness to local
instantiations of homosexuality in the context of postcolonial India.
More significantly, the petition relied not on questions of gay identity
but rather on the relationality between sexual acts and civil rights,
developing its defense of a citizen-subject’s privacy as the organizing
constitutional right for the repealing of section 377.≤ Hence, for exam-
ple, the petition carefully mobilized the term msm (men having sex with
men) and not gay men, as the place holder for community actions ad-
versely a√ected by the continued enforcement of the law. That is, the en-
forcement of section 377 was read as a major obstacle to hiv/aids pre-
vention and outreach work in the msm community, as it arguably drove
high-risk behavior underground and beyond the reach of safe-sex inter-
ventions. This, of course, stands in marked contrast to the shift in the
United States, where gay civil rights legal activism has shifted from a fo-
cus on privacy issues to speaking more in the language of discrimination
—that is, a shift from the protection of acts to a protection of identity,
which often leads to the legal paradox of states that have both anti-
sodomy statutes and extensive domestic partnership laws.≥
Despite such carefully staged shifts in legal strategy, the central chal-
lenge for the petition lay in breaking the stranglehold of the Westerniza-
tion narrative: the familiar argument (not unique to India in many ways)
that ‘‘unnatural acts’’ (more specifically, sodomy) and/or homosexuality
were not part of an Indian past and were mimetic by-products, remain-
dered through the onslaught of an aberrant and contaminating Western
temporality and spatiality. To break such a stranglehold meant providing
the state with convincing evidence of sodomy’s indigeniety in the Indian
context—an indigeniety that needed to narrate a history of presence
markedly distinguishable from colonial figurations of ontological perver-
sity. To accomplish such a goal, the petition returns over and over again
to a di√use language of ‘‘history’’ as a site of recovery and legitimacy to
sanction its argument, where the historical turn is mandated through a
language of temporal breaks, with the late colonial period marking the
space of critical transformation in the shift from sodomy as ‘‘something
we did’’ to sodomy as ‘‘something we were criminalized for.’’
To bolster such a claim, sodomy is recovered amid a stretch of archi-
val evidence, threaded together by claims to diverse temporalities and

172 | CODA
spatialities that make it constitutively Indian and not an extension of
Western influence or behavior. Same-sex texts, subjects, and themes are
discovered amid a wide array of archival materials ranging from litera-
ture and anthropology to sociology, art history, and medicine, and the
process of queering Indian history is executed through corrective refor-
mulations of suppressed and misread colonial materials.∂ Such formula-
tions carefully reiterate an ironic reversal of the Indian state’s accu-
sations of Westernization: in the logic of historicity that the petition
attempts to stage, to criminalize sodomy is to embrace a judicial West-
ernization (the constitution of the Indian Penal Code by the British was
drafted, as the petition reminds us, within a Judeo-Christian frame of
temporality and morality that condemned not just ‘‘unnatural acts’’ but a
range of other native sexual and social behaviors). Thus, even as the
geopolitical ubiquity of same-sex behavior is acknowledged by the peti-
tion’s references to evidence from around the world, the emphasis re-
mains on its prevalence and acceptance in a landscape and archive that
is wholly Indian. For example, the petition pointedly cites excerpts from
texts understood as overdeterminately Hindu: the Upanishads, the Bha-
gavad Gita, the Kama Sutra, and so on, disrupting, quite methodically,
the logic of the Hindu Right, whose mobilizations, both before and after
the infamous Fire incident, have focused on attaching the sin of sodomy
to the coupling of Islamic bodies and texts.∑
Throughout the petition, the turn to the historical is deliberately used
to narrate a di√erent version of coeval temporalities, whereby we learn
that to outlaw sodomy is to represent an ‘‘outmoded’’ Christian colonial
state, making decriminalization of sodomy a decisively ‘‘modern’’ inter-
vention. Within such critical oscillations, India is both in time and out of
time, its modernity, its ‘‘in-time-ness’’ embedded in its past embrace of
sodomy, and its ‘‘outmodedness’’ attached to its current denial of its own
time, with the West (a geopolitical marker that shifts from including
England to including England and the United States) conversely folded
into the time lag of modernity. The Eastern past thus now becomes the
Western present. Yet such hermeneutical sleights of hand work un-
evenly, and they often replay the very temporal logic they hope to ex-
ceed. To claim sodomy and same-sex acts as traditional, as a historical
value, as part of who we essentially are as Indians, is to merely invert the
language of historical ontology (if one understands historical ontology as

CODA | 173
Ian Hacking does, as concerned with objects or their e√ects, which do
not exist in any recognizable form until they are objects of study) to
engage in a ‘‘dynamic nominalism’’ that fixes even as it tries to shift
meaning.∏ Thus one set of assumptions pathologizes the ontological
connection, while the other a≈rms it.
On September 2, 2004, after two years of delays and postponements,
the Delhi High Court brought up the petition, only to dismiss it sum-
marily. The grounds for the dismissal were clear and unambiguous:
There can be no petition, the court’s judgment stated, if there are no
alleged victims. Any public interest litigation (pil), the court added,
must be filed on behalf of persons. Hypothetical and academic archival
inquiries into the potential violation of constitutional rights enabled by
a continued enforcement of section 377 were not su≈cient grounds for a
repeal of that section. Without victims, without literal bodies seeking
redress, the petition had no legal standing—it was merely an academic
exercise, seeking redress for an imagined community of victims it had as
yet not managed to produce. Moreover, while the petition may have
marshaled interdisciplinary evidence to ‘‘naturalize’’ same-sex behavior,
the state argued that it provided no ‘‘convincing reports’’ that homo-
sexuality of other o√ences was acceptable in Indian society.π
The dismissal of this petition understandably came as an enormous
blow to the Naz Foundation and to members of the Lawyers’ Collective,
who are currently appealing the court’s judgment. Collective outrage
from various quarters of the Indian intelligentsia has also been on dis-
play on multiple fronts, from public protests to signed collaborative
statements of support. While such e√orts are clearly important and
worth sustaining, some gestures of outrage bear particular scrutiny. In
his widely circulated statement of support on the need to do away with
section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, Amartya Sen begins by stating that
‘‘even though I do not as a general rule, sign joint letters, I would like, in
this case to join my voice.’’ He goes on to add that the ‘‘criminalisation of
gay behavior goes not only against fundamental human rights, but it also
works against the enhancement of human freedoms in terms of which
the progress of human civilisation can be judged.’’ Sen then concludes
his brief statement by noting that the Civil War in the United States
began the same year as the establishment of section 377 (i.e., 1861), and
that while the United States had managed to abolish slavery as a result of

174 | CODA
the war, the Indian state had as yet not stepped up to its promise as a
modern democracy by refusing to abolish section 377.∫ Even as I am one
of the many individuals who signed and supported the statement, what
interests me about Sen’s tentative support of the petition is his mobiliza-
tion of the ‘‘gay case’’ as the limit case for India’s entry into modes of
civilizational progress. As such, he cannot but support the petition to
abolish section 377. His pat comparison of the abolition of section 377 to
the abolition of slavery notwithstanding (as if the United States has had
no recent antisodomy laws), what is worth noting is Sen’s absorption of
the colonial into a standardized paradigm of the modern without any
sense of historical irony.Ω
While much has been written about the flawed recourse to legal
reform, and the perils of the gay rights debate in sites such as India, I
want to leave those questions aside for a moment and assume that the
conceptual agon of the Spivakian invocation of ‘‘we cannot not want
rights’’ necessarily founds our political struggle.∞≠ What I want to do
instead is to speculate on the ideologies of historicity and causality that
animate both the petition and the language of its dismissal by the state,
and to focus in particular on the referent of the ‘‘colonial record’’ in such
formulations. Such speculations cannot, of course, be attempted with-
out attending to the larger shifts in historiography that animate the
political and intellectual landscape of contemporary India. To make
some space-clearing generalizations here, two forms of recuperative
historicizing appear to dominate: the first, a largely progressive and
expansive enterprise, has rigorously extended the categories that define
the historical, and the second, a more conservative project, has con-
tracted the historical form onto itself by returning to categories of static
identity and exclusion. The expansion model (exemplified in the work
of the Subaltern Studies Group, as well as feminist and queer historians)
recruits the language of a success-in-failure model to accentuate the
coming of Indian history into its own, whereby divergent historical
temporalities and spatialities exist within a model of a di√erentiated
politics. On the other hand, the contracted model (exemplified in the
recent textbook rewritings by the Hindu Right Sangh Parivar) celebrates
a past that stabilizes homogeneity and externalizes di√erence, as op-
posed to staging it as constitutive of Indian history.
For me, the critical challenge here lies in thinking about such models

CODA | 175
of historicity and causality in a historiography of sexuality of colonial
India that is attentive to the political exigencies and pitfalls of revisionist
history, even as it maintains the radical indeterminacy of sex. Some ques-
tions to consider here are: If revisionist history, to cite R. Radhakrishnan,
is always in some ways tautological, in ‘‘a hermeneutical time-lag, where
one returns to take a second look at what already was,’’ how do we
produce records of sexuality such that their repetition is both a return to
and a rupture of their founding indeterminacy?∞∞ How does the crime of
sodomy provide us with forms that do not emerge purely out of teleologi-
cal necessity? What categories remain fixed in a landscape of such histor-
ical rewritings? Can the colonial record be both the marker and erasure
of possible (radical) histories? Let me conclude with one such possible
interpretation.∞≤

THE PAST PRESENT

On August 13, 1946, a criminal appeal was filed in the Allahabad High
Court by Mirro, a resident of Agra. The archival materials available on
the case place us in medias res with Mirro, the accused, appealing his
sentencing to ‘‘rigorous imprisonment for seven years’’ under section
377 for having ‘‘committed unnatural o√ence upon a boy named Ram
Dayal.’’ The details of the appeal as provided in the summary judgment
are sketchy and follow a tangled temporal and spatial narrative: Ram
Dayal, a young Chamar boy, goes to the shop of a man named Sakoor, a
blacksmith, where he is accosted by Mirro, who attempts to take him
away. A series of strange altercations are described in which Mirro is
slapped around by Sakoor and yet somehow manages to forcibly whisk
Ram Dayal to the house of his brother-in-law, Ajmeri, where the o√ence
is then allegedly committed. Even as the o√ence is being committed,
at peak public activity hours, between 4:30 p.m. and 5 p.m., Sakoor runs
o√ to inform the members of Ram Dayal’s family and the larger Cha-
mar community. A motley crew of Ram Dayal’s supporters is gathered
(Sia Ram, Ghasi, Girander Singh, Ram Chand), which then proceeds to
Ajmeri’s house and ostensibly catches ‘‘the accused red-handed,’’ and
beats him severely with lathis. The assistant sessions judge who first
heard the case in 1945 found Mirro to be guilty of the crime, despite the
‘‘unanimous opinion of the assessors’’ who all found Mirro not guilty.
In his appeal of the sessions judge decision, Mirro’s advocate argued

176 | CODA
that the charge of ‘‘unnatural o√ence’’ was trumped up by the Chamar
community, of which Ram Dayal was a member, to punish Mirro for the
enmity that existed between the Chamars and the Muslim community.
His defense addressed the conflicting and contradictory nature of the
evidence submitted, all of which was equally available the first time the
case was brought before the court to bolster the appeal. For instance, the
medical evidence, the deciding factor of the colonial legal process in
such matters, produced no conclusive forensic traces of the crime: no
subtended anus in Ram Dayal and inconclusive marks of semen on
Mirro’s dhoti. To a large extent, medical jurisprudence became the most
reliable truth technology of a colonial legal system ravaged by disputes
over witness unreliability, codification, and orders of evidence. As legal
medicine crystallized as a discipline, it emerged as a powerful form of
colonial knowledge, allowing a distinctly ethnographic understanding of
native ontologies to acquire truth value in court.∞≥ The medical evidence
in this case, we are told, did not provide us with a truth narrative, and
‘‘does leave a gap in the story,’’ a gap that is barely filled by the other
evidence provided. Other confusing and absurd details also emerge:
Ram Dayal claims the o√ence took five minutes, while the eyewitnesses
to the account claim it took fifteen to twenty minutes. Yet we are told
that the learned judge at the time disregarded these evidentiary in-
coherencies and concluded that Mirro must have indeed committed the
crime solely on the basis that the ‘‘the station o≈cer, Imdad Husain, was
a Musalman and it was impossible that he should have brought a false
case against an innocent Musalman.’’ When addressing Mirro’s appeal
and reviewing the evidence the appeals judge overturned the earlier
judgment and concluded that while he wished no ill will against his
predecessor, ‘‘there was no warrant for introducing this communal tinge
in the case. Sakoor, the principal prosecution witness, is a Musalman.
All the assessors who found the accused not guilty, are Hindus.’’ In his
final assessment, the judge added that ‘‘a careful examination of the
entire evidence does leave an impression that the accused is an undesir-
able person who has made many enemies and the case is an outcome of
that enemity [sic].’’∞∂
Several significant historical details emerge in this 1945–46 dizzying
account of a case filed under section 377. Indeed, its appearance a mere
year or two before the brutal partition of India in 1947 and its complex

CODA | 177
narration of communal relations make it a case worthy of careful explo-
ration. As many historians of colonial India have previously noted, Agra
(and the larger region of what is now known as Uttar Pradesh) func-
tioned as a critical testing ground both for the emergence of Indian
nationalism and for that of Indian communalism. The rise of the Indian
National Congress, the Muslim League, and the Hindu Mahasaba made
the region a veritable hotbed of Indian politics, where the di√erences
between Hindus and Muslims became the representational playing field
for nationalists and colonial o≈cials alike. Yet as scholars such as Salil
Misra have carefully argued, the overdetermined focus on communal-
ism constituted a cover story needed for eliding unified caste and class
mass movements.∞∑ Others such as Sanjay Joshi, Sandria Freitag, and C.
A. Bayly have similarly noted that Uttar Pradesh’s key role in the early
stages of self-governance (produced through the famous Morley-Minto
enfranchisement reforms and the Government of India Act of 1935)
made it impossible to disarticulate mythologies of communalism from
structures of electoral politics.∞∏ As the Mirro case demonstrates, com-
munal di√erentiation, more than communal violence, appears attached
to the crime of sodomy. Chamars, while Hindu, were and are a lower-
caste dominant majority in the region and not easily folded into the
language of Hindu hegemony and Muslim minoritization. In fact, the
period between 1930 and 1947 marked the rise of various mass Adi-
Dharma movements wherein lower-caste Hindus, such as the Chamar
community, came together to found religious communities that openly
opposed the dominance of upper-caste Hindus.∞π In the Mirro case,
then, the scene of sodomy is one of profound exaggeration and estrange-
ment from the popular mythology of communal discord.
Yet despite such immense historical potential, no references to the
Mirro case appear either in the petition against section 377 or in any of
the available critical materials on sodomy. It is a narrative in which
sodomy’s presence and absence is both questioned and asserted. What
happens, one could ask, if the case is read less as another instantiation of
colonial legal bungling than as a challenging (and anamorphic) colonial
record? Located in its topography we find figurations of scattered vio-
lence (dangerous slapstick communal humor, mob mentality) that make
the crime of sodomy more a crime of narrative corroboration than one of
action. For sodomy to emerge, it must be corroborated, its form sedi-

178 | CODA
mented in a history of recall that neither the witnesses nor the evidence
can sustain. We must know and not know the colonial record, not once,
but twice. Such a reading radicalizes our understanding of the historical
turn by recording the ‘‘cognitive failure’’ at the heart of both our past and
present readerly attempts and by making the distinction between suc-
cess and failure indeterminate.∞∫ To archive such an account is to record
a di√erent history of sexuality.

NOTES

1. Frederick Cooper, for example, has most vociferously criticized postcolonial stud-
ies’ turn to a ‘‘backward looking history’’ that ‘‘leapfrogs’’ periods to find ‘‘causal
connection’’ with events of the present. Cooper, Colonialism in Question, 17. While
Cooper is decidedly cranky and occasionally shortsighted in his dismissal of
poststructualist theory in general, his point about a historically thin approach is
well taken.
2. Naz Foundation v. Govnt. of Delhi, Police Commissioner of Delhi, Delhi State aids
Control Society, Union of India, Civil Writ Petition 2001. I thank Sameera Khan
and members of the Mumbai-based Lawyers’ Collective for early access to these
materials. See also Fernandez, Humjinsi.
3. For a more extensive reading of this shift, see Katyal, ‘‘Exporting Identity,’’ 97.
4. Vanita, Queering India, 1–14.
5. Fire is a 1996 film, written and directed by the Indo-Canadian filmmaker Deepa
Mehta. The film explicitly explores the burgeoning relationship between two
women situated in the (post)colonial context of urban New Delhi. After its 1998
release in India, many Hindu Right groups staged violent protests, setting o√ the
beginning of a very public debate on issues of homosexuality, freedom of expres-
sion, and secularism. See Kapur, ‘‘Erotic Disruptions’’; and Menon, Recovering
Subversion.
6. Hacking, Historical Ontology, 1–27.
7. Counter A≈davit, Naz Foundation v. Govnt. of Delhi, Police Commissioner of Delhi,
Delhi State aids Control Society, Union of India, Civil Writ Petition 7455, 2001,
2004.
8. See South Asia Citizens Web, ‘‘Amartya Sen’s Statement on the Need to Do Away
with Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code,’’ The Hindustan Times, September 15,
2006, http://www.hindustantimes.com.
9. Even as this book goes to press, public outrage against section 377 has escalated.
Most recently, the Indian health minister, Anbumani Ramadoss, suggested that a
repeal of section 377 was necessary for aids outreach in India to function e√ec-
tively: ‘‘Section 377 of ipc, which criminalises men who have sex with men, must
go.’’ This statement was made at a well-publicized global event, the International
aids conference in Mexico City on August 7, 2008, and has predictably incited

CODA | 179
 major public reaction in India. See ‘‘Reports on the Statements by Union Health
Minister Anbumani Ramadoss at the Mexico International aids Conference,’’
http://qmediawatch.wordpress.com (accessed October 1, 2008). In response to
Ramadoss’s comment, the Law Ministry released a statement saying that ‘‘gays
had no legal rights in India’’ and that the removal of section 377 would ‘‘unsettle
the legal framework in the country,’’ as the section is ‘‘not merely confined to gay
rights’’ but acts ‘‘as an e√ective deterrant against paedophiles and those with sick
minds.’’ The statement appears in the Hindustan Times, August 28, 2008, http://
www.hindustantimes.com.
10. Spivak, ‘‘Righting Wrongs.’’ For specific critiques of legal scholarship in colonial
and postcolonial South Asia, see Elizabeth Kolsky, ‘‘A Note on the Study of Indian
Legal History’’; and Parker, ‘‘The Historiography of Di√erence.’’ See also Robert-
son, ‘‘What’s Law Got to Do with It?’’
11. Radhakrishnan, History, the Human, and the World Between, 34.
12. I have elaborated more substantially on the project of archival hermeneutics and
histories of sexuality elsewhere. See Arondekar, ‘‘Without a Trace.’’
13. A notable example of the tenets of medical jurisprudence is Chevers, Manual,
706. See also, Chevers, Commentary, 10–64.
14. Mirro v. Emperor, All India Reporter (Allahabad, 1947), (34) 97.
15. Misra, Narrative of Communal Politics.
16. Some select texts include Joshi, Fractured Modernity; Freitag, Collective Action and
Community; Bayly, Local Roots; Brass, Language, Religion, and Politics; and Pandey,
Ascendancy of the Congress.
17. Rawat, ‘‘Making Claims for Power.’’
18. Spivak, ‘‘Subaltern Studies.’’

180 | CODA
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INDEX
absence, 1, 11, 15, 21n7. See also presence
and absence
Acton, William, 106, 111
Adams, Francis, 133, 164n10
Adi-Dharma movements, 178
aesthetics of archival formation, 134–36,
165n17
Afghans/Afghanistan: Russian threats in,
139; Victorian depictions of, 121–22,
129n75, 129n77; wars against the Brit-
ish of, 34, 43–44, 137, 139
afterlife, 134, 165n14
Agra, 176–78
Ahmed, Sardar, 75
aids prevention, 171–72, 179n9
Aldrich, Robert, 8
Ali, Ameer, 86
alternative archives, 2. See also archives
of sexuality
Amin, Shahid, 3
Anthropological Society of London (asl),
49–50
anthropology: Burton’s contributions to,
47–54, 58–59, 64n59; the colonial real
in, 58–59; disappearing objects of, 56;
focus on sexuality and bodies in, 48–
51, 54, 64n68, 67; observation and
method in, 54, 64n68; role in colonial
development of, 50–51, 63n53
aporia, ix
Appadurai, Arjun, 93n26
Apter, Emily, 58, 158–59
Arabian Nights, The (tr. Burton), 27–28,
40, 59n2, 61n16, 62n41
Arata, Stephen, 162
archive-as-subject, 2, 9–10, 21n4, 171,
179n1
archive fever, 2, 21n4, 25n48
archives of sexuality, 1–5; Chevers’s doc-
umentation of, 10–15, 24n37, 71, 86–
87, 92n11, 96n57; in detritus and
debris, 20–21; on emergence of
homosexuality, 3; erasures and silences
of queer archives, 7–10, 14–15, 23–
24nn26–31; hermeneutic readings of,
16–17, 20–21, 25nn46–47, 98–99;
models of supplementarity in, 19, 123–
24; Naz Foundation’s use of, 172–73,
179n2; reading of traces in, 3–5, 21n8,
22n11, 22n13, 37, 76; salvage of, 8–9;
of sexual violence of the Mutiny of
1857, 147. See also Karáchi brothel
report; Kipling’s Mutiny stories; legal
case records; Victorian pornography
area studies, 5
Arnold, David, 46–47
Arrah siege, 141, 167n39; Coer Singh’s
role in, 145–47, 149, 167n48; Sikh
defense in, 143–44; unreliable
accounts of, 142–50, 166n36, 167n50
Ashbee, Henry Spencer, 98, 125n3,
126n20
Autobiography of the Flea, The, 126n26
Balestier, Wolcott, 169n76
‘‘Ballad of East and West, The’’ (Kipling),
160, 169n75
Baloch, N. A., 61n19
Bandar Gharra, 45
Barthes, Roland, 157, 168n70
Bayly, C. A., 164n12, 178
Behdad, Ali, 168n72
Benthamism, 78
Berlant, Lauren, 91n2
Bhagwan Das v. Empress, 75
Bibliotheca Arcana (Skilton), 107
Bishop, Jonathan, 60n9
Bishop, Private, 83–84
Blackwell, Elizabeth, 106
Bleys, Rudi, 23n28
‘‘Book of Brother Maturin’’ (Kipling),
163, 169n81
Boone, Joseph, 61n16
Bose, B. D., 74
Boudoir journal, 106, 113
Brancart, Auguste, 127n33
British Library’s Private Case, 98,
125nn3–4
British Rubber Industry during the Nine-
teenth Century, The (Woodru√), 100–
101
Brodie, Fawn, 30
Brooks, Peter, 158
brothels. See Karáchi brothel report
Buchanan, Robert, 132
Buckingham, T. J. B., 115
Burma (Myanmar), 117
Burn, Glenn, 30
Burns, Alexander, 43–44, 52
Burton, Antoinette, 23n21
Burton, Isabel, 28, 57
Burton, Richard, 4, 17, 59n1; anecdotes
of pederasty related by, 41–46, 59n2,
63n44, 63n46; The Arabian Nights
translation, 27–28, 40, 59n2, 61n16,
62n41; army career of, 28, 30–32, 35,
60n13, 61n19; concern with the ‘‘pecu-
liar’’ of, 57–58; contributions to
anthropology by, 47–54, 58–59,
64n59; death of, 28; on female nautch-
ing, 55–57, 65n71; handwriting of, 29;
invocation of Karáchi report by, 28,
40–41, 43, 59n2; language skills of, 27,
31; on legal reforms in Sind, 38–39; on
liaisons with native women, 62n38;
lost works of, 27–30, 60n5; on male
nautching in Larkhana, 37, 54–57,
61n30, 65n77; Mecca pilgrimage of,
29, 31, 58, 60n13, 64n67; participant
observation of, 30, 43, 58, 60n9,
64n67, 119; Sotadic Zone of, 45–47,
119, 129n69; travelogue writings of,
54–58, 65n77. See also Karáchi brothel
report; ‘‘Terminal Essay’’ of the Supple-
mental Nights
Bushire, Iran, 42–43
Buzard, James, 64n68
Campbell, Colin, 166n35
Campbell, George, 127n39
Campbell, John, 107
Cannon, George, 107
Captain Gadsby (Kipling character), 158
Casada, James, 30–31
Cawnepore massacre, 141, 148–49, 166n35
Cervantes, Miguel de, 98
Ceylon (Sri Lanka), 117
Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 25n42
Chakravarti, Uma, 56
Chakravarty, Gautam, 133, 137–38,
164n12
Chamars, 176–78
Chand, Tara, 75
Chandler, Lloyd, 163n3
Chatterjee, Indrani, 16, 93n18
Chatterjee, Partha, 25n42, 81

206 | INDEX
Chevers, Norman, 10–15, 24n37, 71, 86–
87, 92n11, 96n57
Childers, Joseph, 64n68
‘‘City of Dreadful Night, The’’ (Kipling),
167n60
Civil and Military Gazette (cmg), 139
civil rights, 171–72, 179n5
Clanchy, M. T., 24n38
Cleland, John, 111
climate, 46–47
Cockburn, Alexander, 107, 127n29
Cohen, William, 21n7, 32–33, 91n4,
125n2
Cohn, Bernard, 23n20
colonial India: absorption of Punjab into,
137; Anglo-Sikh wars of, 137, 151;
annexation of Sind by, 17, 27–28, 30,
33–39, 44–45; archives of, 2–3, 5–6,
13, 16–21, 21n7, 22n16, 24–25nn41–
43; British reforms in, 38–40, 52–53,
137; communal discord in, 178; Crimi-
nal Tribes designations in, 70–71;
Delhi Durbar of 1903, 143, 167n39;
demarcation of literature and history
in, 16–17, 25n43; empirical gover-
nance of, 12–13, 24n35, 33, 35–36;
exports of pornography from, 107–9,
127n33; founding preoccupations of,
41–42; Kipling’s literary production of,
132–36, 156, 164n11, 165n17; Kohlapur
Conspiracy of 1881, 139; Mirro v.
Emperor case in, 176–79; models of
racial di√erence in, 46–47, 77–79, 81–
83, 85, 109–11, 129n75; nationalism
project in, 93n19; native insurrections
in, 44–45; o≈cial language debates in,
52–53; rubber production in, 100–
101, 115–17, 119, 122, 125n12, 129n64;
subalternized historiography of, 6–7,
22–23nn19–21; subject creation in,
116; venereal disease in, 95n48, 151–
54, 168n62. See also Indian Mutiny of
1857; Indian Penal Code
Colonialism and Homosexuality (Aldrich), 8
colonial real, 58–59
colonial sexuality: anthropology’s focus
on, 48–51, 54, 64n68, 67; assumptions
of ontological perversity in, 18, 71–72,
76, 85, 87–89; forensic invisibility of,
67–68, 89–91; in Foucault’s ‘‘else-
where,’’ 104–6; of the harem (zenana),
157; interracial alliances in, 114–22;
in Kipling’s masculine homosociality,
132, 135–36, 140–42, 151, 153–63,
169nn75–76; legal codification of, 76–
85; medical forensics of, 85–90;
Napier’s references to, 40–41; racial-
ized portrayals of, 103–4, 106–7, 121–
22, 126n20, 126n24, 129n65, 129n75;
systematic objectification in, 106–7.
See also archives of sexuality
comparativist ethnology, 64n68
Competition Wallah (Trevelyan), 143–45,
148–49
Consecutive Tables (Worgan), 74
Contagious Diseases Acts, 152
contemporary India: Fire incident, 173,
179n5; Hindu Right, 5, 173, 175, 179n5;
Naz Foundation petition, 171–76,
179n2
Cooper, Frederick, 179n1
courtesans, 152
Cox, Edmund, 80
Crime in India (Edwardes), 82, 93n30
criminal law. See Indian Penal Code
Criminal Law of India, The (Mayne), 73–
74
Criminal Tribes Act of 1871, 70
Curzon, George, 143, 167n39
Customs Consolidation Act of 1853, 107
Darymple, William, 168n67
David, Dierdre, 101, 125n12
Dayal, Ram, 176
Death Rides a Camel (Edwardes), 62n43
Delhi Durbar of 1903, 143, 167n39
INDEX | 207
Denniston, J. L., 68–69
Derrida, Jacques: on the politics of the
archive, 2, 21n4, 25n48; spectrality
model of traces of, 3, 21n8; on supple-
mentarity, 123–24
Devereux, Charles, 106, 108, 120–22,
124, 129n77
dialectics of desire, 157, 168n70
Digest of Indian Law Cases, A (Bose), 74
Digest of Indian Law Cases, A (Woodman),
74
Digest of Indian Law Reports, The (Suther-
land), 73–74
dildos, 103, 114–15, 119, 124, 125–
26nn15–16, 128n48. See also india-
rubber dildos
Dirks, Nicholas, 22n16
disciplinary thinking, 16–17, 25n43
Dollimore, Jonathan, 109
Doniger, Wendy, 37–38
Don Quixote (Cervantes), 98
Dost Mohammed Khan, 137
Dugdale, William, 107
East India Company, 13; on the annexa-
tion of Sind, 34; Bahrain port of, 42–
43; gendered presences in, 6–7;
Hindu liaisons with, 44–45; Indian
Mutiny of 1857, 110; period of rule of,
36
Edwardes, Allen, 62n43
Edwardes, Herbert, 136, 165n19
Edwardes, S. M., 82, 87–88, 93n30
Eldridge, C. C., 127n39
ellipsis, 102, 125n14
Ellis, Havelock, 106, 128n48
Elphinstone, William, 44
‘‘End of the Passage, The’’ (Kipling), 158
erotic literature. See Victorian
pornography
ethnography, 64n68
Ethnological Society of London (esl), 49
ethno-nostalgia, 58
208 | INDEX
eunuchs (hijras), 71–73, 88–91, 92nn10–
12, 93n18
European Vagrancy Bill, 81–82
Evans-Pritchard, Edward Evan, 23n27
evidence, 68–69, 85–90
Eyre, Edward John, 50
Eyre, Vincent, 141
Fabian, Johannes, 56
Fanny Hill (Cleland), 111, 113
female nautch, 55–57, 64–65nn70–71
female prostitution, 151–56
fetishism, 125n15, 158–59
fiction e√ects, 4
Fictions Connected with the Indian Out-
break of 1857 Exposed (Leckey), 147–49
Field, C. D., 79
‘‘Finest Story in the World, The’’ (Kip-
ling), 160
Fiol-Matta, Licia, 24n29
Fire (film), 173, 179n5
Fletcher, C. R. L., 129n75
forensics: invisibility of sexuality in legal
case records, 67–68, 89–91; medical
forensics of sodomy, 85–90, 177–79
Forster, E. M., 8
Foucault, Michel, 9; on emergence of
homosexuality, 3, 21n7; on legal rec-
ords, 91n1; on madness and irra-
tionality, 161, 169n78; on mimesis,
97; on the politics of sexuality, 61n28,
104–7; on the politics of the archive,
21n4; on subjectification, 165n17
Fraxi, Pisanus, 98, 125n3
Freeman, Elizabeth, 25n46
Freitag, Sandra, 178
Freud, Sigmund, 158
Galeano, Eduardo, 22n11
Ganguly, Keya, 165n14
Ganpat v. Emperor, 75
gay civil rights movement, 171–72,
179n5
Geography of Perversion, The (Bleys),
23n28
Ghosh, Durba, 73
Ghuzni insurrection, 44
Goa and the Blue Mountains (Burton), 56
Goldberg, Jonathan, 22n11, 25n46, 94n31
Governing Pleasures (Sigel), 104
Government of India Act of 1935, 178
Greary, Grattan, 65n77
Great Trigonometrical Survey, The, 12
Gribble, J. D. B., 89
Gupta, Charu, 127n34
Hacking, Ian, 174
Hailey, William, 50
Hall, John, 142
Halperin, David, 9–10, 24n31
Hayler, Henry, 107
Heath, Deana, 108, 127n34
Hehir, P., 89
hermeneutic readings, 16–17, 20–21,
25nn46–47, 98–99, 135, 138–40
heteronormativity, 38–41, 73, 101–3,
126n17, 159
Hicklin test of obscenity, 107, 127n29
hijras (eunuchs), 71–73, 88–91, 92nn10–
12, 93n18
Hindu Mahasaba, 178
Hindus, 44–45, 51
historiography, 6–7, 16–17, 22–23nn19–
21, 25n43, 175–79
History of British India (Mills), 50–51
History of Sexuality (Foucault), 104–6
Hitchman, Francis, 31
hiv/aids prevention, 171–72, 179n9
Hobhouse, John, 40
Hogg, James, 62n43
Holden, Philip, 2
homosexuality, 3; in Burton’s Sotadic
Zone, 45–47, 119, 129n69; colonial
fears of, 95n48; erasures and silences
surrounding, 7–10, 14–15, 23–
24nn26–31; gay civil rights move-
ment, 171–72, 179n5; lesbianism, 89,
103, 119, 128n48, 173, 179n5; situa-
tional homosexuality, 40–41. See also
pederasty; sodomy
homosociality: Barthesian dialectics of
desire in, 157–58; in Kipling’s model
of colonial masculinity, 132, 135–36,
141–42, 151, 153–63, 169nn75–76;
liminal male desire in, 157–63
Hotten, John Camden, 112
‘‘House of Shadows, The’’ (Kipling), 156–
57, 159
Hubel, Teresa, 164n10
Hummil (Kipling character), 158
Hunt, Lynn, 104
Husain, Imdad, 177
Hutchins, Francis, 110–11
Hyam, Ronald, 127n28
Ilbert Bill, 81–82, 95n46, 139
Imperial Gazetteer of India, The, 12
Imperial Leather (McClintock), 24n41
imperial pornography, 104
India. See colonial India; contemporary
India
Indian Evidence Act, 86
Indian male sexuality, 117–22
Indian Mutiny of 1857, 19, 31–32, 133–
63, 165n16; Cawnepore massacre, 141,
148–49, 166n35; debates and skepti-
cism about, 167n50; documentation of
sexual violence of, 147; heroic fictional
accounts of, 137–38; inscriptions on
walls from, 141, 143, 147–48, 150; Kip-
ling’s omissions of, 133–35, 138–39,
164n10; nonnarratability of, 134, 139–
40, 164–65nn13–14; o≈cial archives
of, 133, 144–45, 147; in tropes of per-
verse otherness, 110–11, 122. See also
Kipling’s Mutiny stories
Indian National Congress, 139, 178
Indian Penal Code, 18, 93n27; anti-
sodomy statute (section 377) of, 73–
INDEX | 209
Indian Penal Code (continued)
85, 171–78, 179n9; embodied di√er-
ence underlying, 77–79, 81–83, 85,
94n31; habitual criminals under, 69,
92n6; illustration and language of, 79–
81; jurisdiction over Europeans of, 78,
82–85, 95n48, 96n54, 139; Macaulay’s
secularization goal in, 77, 81, 94n36;
on medical evidence, 68–69, 85–90;
property-subject nexus of law in, 72–
74; as weapon of force, 81–82
Indian Tales (Kipling), 167nn59–60
india-rubber dildos, 19, 97–106, 122–24,
126n16; appearance of, 112, 115–16,
128n48; as avatar for Indian males,
117–22; as colonial transaction, 100–
101, 115–17, 119, 122; instructions for
use of, 99–101, 112; sales of, 114–15;
The Story of a Dildoe, 106, 111–17, 124
India Rubber World journal, 114–15
India Survey, 133
In Search of Richard Burton (ed. Jutzi), 29
interdisciplinary thinking, 16–17, 25n43
‘‘In the Year ’57’’ (Kipling), 136–40
Invention of Pornography, The (Hunt), 104
Islamic law of evidence, 86
James, Hugo, 65n71
Jameson, Fredric, 168n68
Jiwan v. Empress, 75
Johnstone, J. Wilson, 88–89
Jones, William, 36, 50–51
Joseph, Betty, 6–7, 13, 24n38
Joshi, Sanjay, 178
Jutzi, Alan, 29
Kama Sutra, 56, 106–7, 173
Karáchi brothel report, 17, 27–31, 98;
context of conquest of, 33–34; debates
on existence of, 32–35; fictional biog-
raphy of, 62n43; implications for
anthropology of, 49–57, 63n53;
implications for Orientalism of, 36–
210 | INDEX
37; invoked in Burton’s ‘‘Terminal
Essay,’’ 28, 40–41, 43, 59n2; Ondaatje’s
search for, 30, 58–59, 60n8; promise
of scandal in, 32–33, 35–36, 61n16;
repeated citations of, 36–37; as trace
of pederasty, 37
Keane, John, 44
Kearney, Patrick J., 125n4
Kendrick, Walter, 104, 112
Kennedy, Dane, 60n13
Kew Gardens, 101, 125n12
Khairati, 72–73, 85, 88–91. See also
Queen Empress v. Khairati
Khuhro, Hamida, 34
Kim (Kipling), 133, 164n11, 167n60
kinship relationships, 73, 76
Kipling, Rudyard, 4, 19, 121; freemasonry
of, 168n65; literary archive of, 131–33,
163nn1–3; literary production of colo-
nial India by, 132–36, 156, 164n11,
165n17; narrators of, 159–63, 168n66;
o≈cial duties of, 139; omission of
Mutiny of 1857 by, 133–35, 138,
164n10; portrayals of colonial mas-
culinity by, 132, 135–36, 140–42, 151,
153–63, 169nn75–76; racial theories
of, 129n75; unfinished ‘‘Book of
Brother Maturin’’ of, 163, 169n81
Kipling’s India (Kipling), 168n69
Kipling’s Mutiny stories, 19, 131–56, 162,
168n68; ‘‘In the Year ’57,’’ 136–40;
Lalun as source of fictional knowledge
in, 151–56; ‘‘The Little House at
Arrah,’’ 141–50, 166nn34–36; ‘‘On a
City Wall,’’ 150–56; as refigured lost
objects, 149–50; reproducible narra-
tives in, 137–38; unreliability of
archives in, 138–40, 142–50, 163,
166n36, 167n50
Kohlapur Conspiracy of 1881, 139
Kolsky, Elizabeth, 81, 86
Kucich, John, 161
Kulick, Don, 48
Lahore, 151–52, 167n60
Lal, Vinay, 71, 92n12
Lalun (Kipling character), 151–56
Lambrick, H. T., 39, 64n59
Lane, Christopher, 169n76
Lang, Andrew, 132
Last Mughal, The (Darymple), 168n67
Law of Evidence Applicable to British India
(Woodru√e and Ali), 86
Lawrence, Henry, 137, 165nn19–20
Lawrence, John Laird, 136–40
Lawyers’ Collective, 171–72, 174
Leckey, Edward, 147–49
Leeson, Lieutenant, 39
legal case records, 67–91, 98; case-
making in, 67–68, 91n2; forensic
invisibility of sexuality in, 67–68, 89–
91, 177–79; medical evidence in, 68–
69, 85–90; property-subject nexus of
law in, 72–74; Queen Empress v.
Khairati, 17–18, 67–76, 85–91, 93n19;
of sodomy convictions, 74–75, 93n27,
93n30. See also Indian Penal Code
Legman, G., 125n4
lesbianism, 89, 103, 119, 128n48, 179n5
Levine, Philippa, 40–41, 95n48, 152
Light That Failed, The (Kipling), 169n76
literature, 16–17, 25n43
‘‘Little House at Arrah, The’’ (Kipling),
141–50, 166nn34–36
Lotus of Another Color, A (ed. Ratti),
23n26
Love and Safety or Love and Lasciviousness
with Safety and Secrecy, 99–101, 106,
112
Ludden, David, 51
Lustful Turk, The, 119–20, 126n20
Lyrical Movements (Patel), 24n40
Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 52, 77–79,
94n36
Macdonald, Hector, 111
Macnaghten, William, 43–44, 52
Maine, Henry, 79
Malaysia, 117
le mal d’archive, 2, 21n4, 25n48
male brothels. See Karáchi brothel report
male nautch, 37, 54–57, 61n30, 65n77
Malinowski, Bronislaw, 23n27
Marcus, Steven, 103–4, 112, 126n20
Markham, Clements R., 101
Martin, James Ranald, 46–47
Marx, Karl, 110
Mason, Philip, 168n66
Mayne, John, 73–74
Mbembe, Achille, 20
McClintock, Anne, 24n41, 104, 109
McIntosh Jellaludin (Kipling character),
162–63
medical evidence, 68–69, 85–90
medical jurisprudence, 85–90
Mehta, Deepa, 179n5
Memory of Fire (Galeano), 22n11
Menon, Madhavi, 25n46
metalepsis, 16–17, 37
Miller, D. A., 7, 164n13
Mills, James, 50–51
mimesis, 35, 58, 97–100, 172–73
Miraji, 15, 24n40
Mirro v. Emperor, 176–79
Mirza Abdullah (Burton’s persona), 43
Misra, Salil, 178
Morley-Minto reforms, 178
Morris, Jan, 167n61
Muslim League, 178
Muslims, 44–45
Mutiny of 1857. See Indian Mutiny of
1857
My Secret Life, 126n26
Nagai, Kaori, 141–43, 166n36, 167n39
Naiada, 75
Napier, Charles, 27–28, 30; conquest of
Sind by, 33–34, 44–45, 61n22; gover-
nance of Sind by, 38–40, 53, 61n25;
missing documents of, 34–35; on
INDEX | 211
Napier, Charles (continued)
native pederasty, 40–41; ‘‘Peccavi’’
anecdote of, 37–39, 62n34; trials of,
35–39, 61n22
Nasr, Shayk, 42, 63n46
Naulahka (Kipling and Balestier), 169n76
nautch, 37, 55–57, 61n30, 64–65nn70–71
Naz Foundation petition, 171–76, 179n2
New Ladies’ Tickler, The, 113
Nicholson, John, 136, 165n19
Niranjana, Tejaswini, 51
Nizamut Adawlut, 93n27
Notes on the Medical Topography of Cal-
cutta (Martin), 46–47
Noyes, William, 83–85, 96n54
Obscene Publications Act of 1857, 107
O’Connor, Erin, 124
‘‘On a City Wall’’ (Kipling), 150–56,
167nn59–61, 168nn65–66
Ondaatje, Christopher, 30, 60n8
‘‘Only a Subaltern’’ (Kipling), 161
ontological perversity, 18, 71–72, 76, 85,
87–89
Orientalism: focus on foundational texts
in, 50–51; in Indian Mutiny readings,
110; Karáchi report’s impact on, 36–
37, 51–52; merger of translation with
ethnology in, 51–52; Said’s construct
of, 48, 51
Orwell, George, 132
Other Victorians, The (Marcus), 103–4
Outbreak of 1857. See Indian Mutiny of
1857
Outlines of Medical Jurisprudence for India
(Hehir and Gribble), 89
Outram, James, 34
Parker, Kunal, 73, 78
Parry, Benita, 111
participant observation, 64n68
partition of India, 177–78
Patel, Geeta, 24n40, 52, 91, 165n15
212 | INDEX
Pearl journal, 106, 113–14, 115, 118–19,
127n33
Pease, Allison, 107
‘‘Peccavi’’ anectote, 37–40, 62n34
pederasty, 33, 59n1; in ancient erotic
texts, 40; Burton’s anecdotes of, 41–
46, 59n2, 63n44, 63n46; legal records
of, 93n30; myth of ethnic specificity
of, 44–45; Napier’s reference to, 40–
41; in the Sotadic Zone, 45–47, 119,
129n69
Peel, Lawrence, 79–80
Pels, Peter, 50–51
penal code. See Indian Penal Code
Penzer, Norman, 28–29, 60n5
Perfumed Garden, The (tr. Burton), 28
Persian language, 53
perversion, 18, 71–72, 76, 85, 87–89,
158–59
photography, 13
Pinney, Christopher, 12–13
Police O≈cer’s Companion, The, 69
politics of the archive, 2–3, 20–21
pornography. See Victorian pornography
postcolonial studies, 179n1
Potter, William, 111, 126n20
Pottinger, Henry, 61n22
Povinelli, Elizabeth, 20, 25n47, 48
precolonial history, 16
presence and absence, 15–18; in archives
of india-rubber dildos, 102–4, 117,
123–24; in Barthesian dialectics of
desire, 157–58; in ellipsis, 102, 125n14;
in fetishism, 125n15; of the Karáchi
brothel report, 32–37, 58; in Kipling’s
omissions of the Mutiny, 132–35, 138–
39, 164n10; logic of supplementarity
in, 19, 123–24; of medical evidence of
sodomy, 68–69, 85–86, 88; of Mirro v.
Emperor case, 178–79; in nonnarra-
tability of the Mutiny, 134–36, 139–
40, 149–50, 164–65nn13–14; of vice
among British troops, 45
Preston, Laurence, 71–72
Principles of Hindu and Mahomedan Law
(Macnaghten), 52
privacy rights, 172
prostitution: by eunuchs (hijras), 71–73,
88–91, 92nn10–12, 93n18; by females,
151–56; by males, 17, 27–46, 59n2,
63n44, 63n46, 98
Punjab, 136–40
Queen Empress v. Khairati, 17–18, 67, 85–
91, 93n19; charges in, 68; collective
nature of crime in, 70–71; logic of
ontological perversity underlying, 71–
72, 76, 88–89; medical evidence in,
68–69, 85–86, 88; as precedent, 73–
75, 80–81; property-rights readings of,
72–73; verdicts of, 69–70
Queen Empress v. Naiada, 75
queer archives, 7–10, 14–15, 23–
24nn26–31; hermeneutic readings
of, 16–17, 20–21, 25nn46–47, 98–
99; reading traces in, 3–4, 21n8,
22n11, 22n13. See also archives of
sexuality
Rabelais, 107
Race and the Education of Desire (Stoler),
105
racial di√erence, 50; colonial models of,
46–47, 77–79, 81–83, 85, 127n39; in
female prostitution, 152; sexualization
of, 109–11, 117–22, 129n65, 129n75; in
Victorian pornography, 103–4, 106–7,
109–11, 126n20, 126n24
Radhakrishnan, R., 176
Rahman, Abhul, 139
Ramadoss, Anbumani, 179n9
Raman, K. Ravi, 129n64
Randall, David Anton, 163n2
readings: of archival traces, 3–5, 21n8,
22n11, 22n13; hermeneutic readings,
16–17, 20–21, 25nn46–47, 98–99;
subaltern consciousness in, 6–7, 22–
23nn19–21
recalcitrant events, 3
Reddy, Gayatri, 90–91, 92n10
Rice, Edward, 30
Richard Burton, k.c.m.g. (Hitchman), 31
Richards, David Alan, 163n1
Richards, Thomas, 22n16, 164n11
Risley, Herbert, 12
Robinson, E. Kay, 163n3
Romance of Lust, The (Potter), 111,
126n20, 126n26
Roy, Parama, 43, 54, 58
Royal Geographical Society, 49
rubber dildos. See india-rubber dildos
Rudyard Kipling: A Biographical Catalogue
(Stewart), 163n1
Rushdie, Salman, 62n34
Said, Edward, 48, 51
salvage, 8–9
Sandeman, Robert, 136, 165n19
Sangh Parivar, 175
Sardar Ahmed v. Emperor, 75
Scented Garden, The (tr. Burton), 28
Scheiner, C. J., 127n33
School History of England, A (Fletcher and
Kipling), 129n75
Scinde; or, The Unhappy Valley (Burton),
52, 55, 58
Scott-Smith, J., 75
secrecy to disclosure, movement from,
7–8
Secret Museum, The (Kendrick), 104
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 7–8, 25n46, 161
Selections from the Vernacular Newspapers,
94n32
Sen, Amartya, 174–75
Sen, Satadru, 70–71
Sen, Sudipta, 90, 96n67
Sénac, Jean, 8
Sengoopta, Chandak, 12
‘‘Sexual Aberrations, The’’ (Freud), 159
INDEX | 213
sexuality. See archives of sexuality; colo-
nial sexuality; homosexuality
sexuality studies, 1–10, 14–16, 97. See
also archives of sexuality
Shah, Nayan, 8, 23n26
Sharpe, Jenny, 38, 110, 147
Shortt, John, 23n27
Sigel, Lisa, 104, 112
Sind/Sindhis, 27–28, 30, 61n19; British
conquest of, 17, 33–40, 44–45, 61n22,
62n41; education reforms in, 52–53;
failed colonial governance of, 35–36,
38–39, 61n25; legal reforms in, 38–
40; o≈cial language debates in, 53;
‘‘Peccavi’’ anedote regarding, 37–40,
62n34; racialized depictions of, 47;
sexual violence and conquest of, 38–
40; Talpur Mir claims of, 34. See also
Karáchi brothel report
Sindh Revisited (Ondaatje), 30, 60n8
Sind Revisited (Burton), 55–58, 65n77
Sing, Ramchurn, 44
Singh (Kipling character), 155–56
Singh, Jyotsna, 109, 127n34
Singh, Kunwar (Coer/Kuer), 145–47,
149, 167n48
Singha, Radhika, 81
Sinha, Mrinalini, 95n46
Sinha, S. K., 146–47
situational homosexuality, 40–41
Skilton, Charles, 107
Skuy, David, 78–79
slavery, 21n3, 63n44, 117, 129n64
Society for the Suppression of Vice, 107,
113–14
sodomy: bodily traces of, 70; Chevers’s
documentation of, 10–15, 24n37, 71,
86–87, 92n11, 96n57; Indian Penal
Code on, 73–85, 171–78, 179n9; legal
records of, 74–75, 93n27, 93n30; med-
ical forensics of, 85–90, 177–79; Mirro
v. Emperor, 176–79; Moradabad Zila
School suicide case, 94n32; as native
214 | INDEX
habit, 18, 71–72, 76, 85, 87–89, 94n31,
121–22, 129n75; Naz Foundation peti-
tion on, 171–76, 179n2; pornographic
portrayals of, 121–22; Westernization
narratives of, 172–73. See also Queen
Empress v. Khairati
Sotadic Zone, 45–47, 119, 129n69
South Asian studies, 5–6
Spankie, Justice, 75
Spivak, Gayatri, 175; on the absent rani of
Sirmur, 4, 7, 22n10, 25n48; on archival
continuity, 5; on subalternizing of his-
toriography, 22n19
Stack, George, 53
Statement Exhibiting the . . . Condition of
India, 74
Steedman, Carolyn, 21n4
Stephen, James, 81
Stewart, James McGregor, 163n1
St. John, Andrew, 138–39
Stocking, George, 48–49
Stoler, Ann Laura, 9–10, 14, 104–5,
126n24
Story of a Dildoe, The, 106, 111–17, 124,
128n47
‘‘Story of the Gadsbys, The’’ (Kipling),
158
Straight, Judge, 69
Sturman, Rachel, 73
subalternized Indian historiography, 6–7,
22–23nn19–21, 25n42, 175
Subaltern Studies Group, 6, 22n19, 175
Sudder Foujdaree Adawlut, 93n27
Suleri, Sara, 38
Supplemental Nights, The (tr. Burton), 28.
See also ‘‘Terminal Essay’’ of the Sup-
plemental Nights
supplementarity, 19, 123–24
Sutherland, D., 73–74
Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 107
Talpur Mirs, 33–34
Taunggyi case, 88
‘‘Terminal Essay’’ of the Supplemental
Nights (Burton): Burton’s marginalia
in, 59n2; invocations of the Karáchi
report in, 28, 40–41, 43, 59n2; on ped-
erasty, 41–46, 59n2; on the Sotadic
Zone, 45–47, 119, 129n69
Thackeray, William Makepeace, 114
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
(Freud), 159
‘‘To Be Filed for Reference’’ (Kipling),
162–63
Toulalan, Sarah, 103
traces, 4–5, 22n11, 22n13; bodily traces
of sodomy, 70; Derrida’s spectrality
model of, 3, 21n8; left by the Karáchi
brothel report, 37; of the Mutiny in
Kipling’s fiction, 135–36, 140
translation, 51–52
Traub, Valerie, 103
Trevelyan, George, 143–45, 148–49
tribadism, 89
Tribes and Castes of Bengal (Risley), 12
truth e√ects, 4
Tylor, E. B., 64n68
‘‘unnatural’’ acts. See homosexuality
Ups and Downs of Life, The, 106, 113
U.S. textbook revisions, 5
Uttar Pradesh, 178
Vagrancy Bill, 81–82
Van Cortlandt, Henry, 136, 165n19
venereal disease, 95n48, 151–54, 168n62
Venus in India (Devereux), 106, 108,
120–22, 124, 129n77
vernacular language debates, 52–54
Vernacular Society, 52
Victoria, Queen of England, 110
Victorian pornography, 18–19, 97–98;
Ashbee collection of, 98; avoidance of
interracial contact in, 117–22; canon
of texts in, 113–14, 126n26; censorship
of, 107–9; colonial adventure themes
in, 111; in Foucault’s colonial ‘‘else-
where,’’ 104–7; heteronormative focus
of, 101–3, 126n17; Indian exports of,
107–11, 127n33; india-rubber dildos in,
99–104, 106, 111–17, 122–24, 128n48;
logic of supplementarity in, 123–24;
portrayals of sodomy in, 121–22;
racialized sexuality in, 103–4, 106–7,
109–11, 121, 126n20, 126n24, 129n65,
129n75; The Story of a Dildoe, 106, 111–
17, 124
Vishwanathan, Gauri, 116–17
Wallace, Lee, 24n29
Westernization narratives, 172
Weston, Kath, 23n27, 48, 58
Wilson, Ara, 22n13
women: lesbianism, 89, 103, 119,
128n48, 179n5; prostitution, 151–56
Woodman, Joseph Vere, 74
Woodru√, William, 100–101, 114–16
Woodru√e, John, 86
Woolf, Virginia, 132
Worgan, J. B., 74
Wressley (Kipling character), 160
Yang, Anand, 70
Young, Keith, 61n25
Young, Robert, 104
Zafar, Bahadur Shah, 154–55, 168n67
Žižek, Slavoj, 33
INDEX | 215
Anjali Arondekar is an associate professor of feminist studies at the University of
California, Santa Cruz.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Arondekar, Anjali, R., 1968–
For the record : on sexuality and the colonial archive in India / Anjali Arondekar.
p. cm. — (Next wave)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-8223-4515-2 (cloth : alk. paper)
isbn 978-0-8223-4533-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Postcolonialism in literature. 2. Postcolonialism—India. 3. Literature
and history. 4. Colonies in literature. 5. Homosexuality in literature. I. Title.
II. Series: Next wave.
pn56.c63a76 2009
820.9%35380954—dc22 2009013118