Without a trace: Sexuality and the colonial archive

Journal of the History of Sexuality

Volumn 14, Issue 1-2, 2005, Pages 10-27

  Arondekar, Anjali ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 32244448934     PISSN: 10434070     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/sex.2006.0001     Document Type: Review

References (71)

1. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "History," in A Critique of Postcolonial Reasen: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, Mass., 1999), 242.
2. It is worth noting that this chapter on "History" extends the arguments of an earlier piece, "The Rani of Sirmur: An Essay in Reading the Archives," History and Theory 24, no. 3 (October 1985): 247-72. In the earlier piece Spivak ends with the promise that she will "look a little further, of course. As the archivist assured me with archivisdc glee: it will be a search" (270). The quotation cited at the beginning of this article illustrates the message of the earlier study, cautioning scholars once again about the dangers of reading the colonial archives as verifiable documents/signs of historical subjectivity.
3. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York, 1973), 15.
4. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago, 1995), 1-6, 7-23.
5. Carolyn Steedman, Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (New Brunswick, N.J., 2002), 19. There is much more to be said about Steedman's ambitious claims to reimagine cultural history through such readings of the archive.
6. For one trenchant critique see Jo Tollebeek, "'Turn'd to Dust and Tears': Revisiting the Archive," History and Theory 43 (May 2004): 237-48.
7. Ruth Vanita, ed., Queering India: Same-Sex Love and Eroticism in Indian Culture and Society (New York, 2002), 1-14.
8. See, for example, Lee Wallace, Sexual Encounters: Pacific Texts, Modern Sexualities (Ithaca, N.Y., 2003);
9. Licia Fiol-Matta, A Queer Mother for the Nation: The State und Gabriela, Mistral (Minneapolis, 2003). There is, of course, a rich body of scholarship on sexuality and diaspora/globalization studies, but such work overwhelmingly focuses on analysis of contemporary issues, with colonialism appearing more as a referent than a sustained period of study.
10. See, for example, Arnaldo Cruz-MgGalavé and Martin F. Manalansan IV, eds., Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism (New York, 2003).
11. In a related context Philippa Levine argues for an archival logic that offers "creative means to see past a dominant creed, not to uncover an impossible truth but to identify the very operations of power, both when it succeeds and, as interestingly, when it fails." See "Discipline and Pleasure: Response," Victorian Studies (Winter 2004): 325.
12. Agha Shahid Ali, A Nostalgia's Map of America: Poems (New York, 1991), 49.
13. Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Delhi, 1983).
14. See Dipesh Chakrabarty, Habitations of Modernity (Chicago, 2002);
15. Gyan Prakash, "The Impossibility of Subaltern History," Nepantla: Views from the South 1, no. 2 (2000): 287-94;
16. and Tony Ballantyne, "Archive, Discipline, State: Power and Knowledge in South Asian Historiography," New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies 3, no. 1 (2001): 87-105.
17. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" in C. Nelson and L. Grossberg, eds., Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Chicago, 1988), 271-311.
18. There is clearly much more to be said about the debates and differences within the Subaltern Studies collective. For more detailed readings of the early shifts in the Subaltern Studies group see Saloni Mathur, "History and Anthropology in South Asia: Rethinking the Archive," Annual Review of Anthropology 29 (2000): 89-106.
19. Bernard Conn, "History and Anthropology: The State of Play," Comparative Studies in Social History 22 (1980): 198-221.
20. Thomas Richards, Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire (London, 1993), 7.
21. Nicholas Dirks, "Annals of the Archive: Ethnographic Notes on the Sources of History," in Brian Keith Axel, ed., Historical Anthropology and Its Futures: From the Margins (Durham, N.C., 2002), 47-65.
22. Betty Joseph, Reading the East India Company, 1720-1840: Colonial Currencies of Gender (Chicago, 2004), 1-32.
23. Antoinette Burton, Dwelling in the Archive: Women Writing House, Home, and History in Late Colonial India (New York, 2003), 137-45.
24. Ann Laura Stoler, "Colonial Archive and the Arts of Governance," Archival Science 2 (2002): 87-109.
25. David Halperin writes: "Once upon a time, the very phrase 'the history of sexuality' 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 the History of Homosexuality [Chicago, 2002], 105).
26. Philip Holden, "Coda: Rethinking Colonial Discourse Analysis and Queer Studies," in Philip Holden and Richard Ruppel, eds., Imperial Desire: Dissident Sexualities and Colonial Literature (Minneapolis, 2003), 304.
27. Robert Aldrich, Colonialism and Homosexuality (London, 2003), 404.
28. D. A. Miller, The Novel and the Police (Berkeley, 1988), 199-200.
29. Eve Kosoftky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet ( Berkeley, 1990), 1-64.
30. Nayan Shah, "Sexuality, Identity and the Uses of History," in Rakesh Ratti, ed., A Lotus of Another Color: An Unfolding of the South Asian Gay and Lesbian Experience (Boston, 1993), 122-24.
31. See also Ruth Vanita and Saleem Kidwai, eds., Same-Sex Love in India: Readings from Literature and History (New York, 2000).
32. Indrani Chatterjee, "Introduction," in Indrani Chatterjee, ed., Unfamiliar Relations: Family and History in South Asia (New Brunswick, N.J., 2004), 6-9.
33. Kath Weston, Long Slow Burn: Sexuality and Social Science (New York, 1998), 1-28.
34. Rudi Bleys, The Geography of Perversion: Male-to-Male Sexual Behaviour Outside the West and the Ethnographic Imagination, 1750-1918 (New York, 1995), 1-16.
35. Elizabeth Povinelli, The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism (Durham, N.C., 2002), 71-75.
36. Norman Chevers, A Manual of Medical Jurisprudence for India: Including the Outline of a History of Crime Against the Person in India (Calcutta, 1870), 706.
37. Despite her claims, Stoler still stumbles over 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 soldiers, never about respectable Dutch men," only to withdraw and admit that "my silence on this issue . . . reflects my long-term and failed efforts to identify any sources that do more than assume or obliquely allude to this 'evil'" (Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things [Durham, N.C., 1995], 129 n. 96).
38. Oriental and India Office Collections (hereafter OIOC), L/PJ/6/26/1616 (1880).
39. Criminal Justice in the Punjab and Its Dependencies, 1869-81, 3 vols. (Lahore, 1892), apps. 2 and 9.
40. 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. For instance, 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 (Calcutta, 1851-59).
41. Queen Empress v. Naiada, ILR (Indian Law Reports) 1 (Allahabad, 1875-78), 43-47;
42. Jiwan v. Empress, PR (Punjab Reports) (Punjab, 1884), 4;
43. Queen Empress v. Khairati, ILR 6 (Allahabad, 1884), 204-6;
44. Sardar Ahmed v. Emperor, AIR (All India Reporter) (Lahore, 1914), 565;
45. and Ganpat v. Emperor, AIR (Lahore, 1918), 322.
46. The Khairati case continued to be cited past 1920 and, in fact, is still routinely referenced in current legal commentaries on Section 377. However, the post-1920 period in colonial India requires a more sustained discussion of Indian nationalism and its efforts at legal reform, which is beyond the parameters of this study. For more on contemporary debates in India on Section 377 see Suparna Bhaskaran, Detours of Decolonization (forthcoming).
47. While there has been a rich outpouring of scholarship on nineteenth-century homosexuality and criminality, most of it has focused on sites in the metropole. The critical difference of location makes the claims of that scholarship less applicable to colonial sites like India. For instance, Ed Cohen has written extensively about the Wilde trials, and William Cohen has provided deft readings of the failures of the Boulton-Parks sex scandals. However, both studies assume that in Victorian England homosexuality was regarded as aberrant and marginal, even though their own readings suggest the centrality of its presence. As I have previously mentioned, such a claim to "secrecy" and/or abnormality is untenable within the colonial context, where native sexual excess is assumed, even if archival evidence of that excess is ostensibly unavailable. See Ed Cohen, Talk on the Wilde Side: Towards a Genealogy of a Discourse on Male Sexualities (New York, 1993)
48. and William Cohen, Sex Scandal: The Private Parts of Victorian Fiction (Durham, N.C., 1996).
49. Queen Empress v. Khairati, ILR 6 (Allahabad, 1884), 204-6.
50. For more on the theory of the subject-effect see Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography," in Ranajit Guha, ed., Subaltern Studies IV: Writings on South Asian History and Society (New Delhi, 1985), 330-63.
51. Shahid Amin, "Writing the Recalcitrant Event," edited and abridged transcript of talk given on 5 July 2001 at Remembering/Forgetting: Writing Histories in Asia, Australia, and the Pacific (http://www.iisg.nl/ ~sephis/).
52. At this time, pederasty signified the larger terrain of sexual relations between men and did not rigidly denote intergenerational sex.
53. Richard Burton, "Terminal Essay," in The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night (London, 1886), 178-79. In this article I follow Burton's spelling of Karachi.
54. Morning Post, 19 June 1891.
55. Norman M. Penzer, An Annotated Bibliography of Sir Richard Francis Burton K. CM. G. (London, 1923), 291-97. Penzer describes the difficulties he had in even procuring Burton's collections for libraries after the death of Isabel Burton. One of Burton's executors, Mrs. Fitzgerald, "started to cause endless trouble, and actually wanted to burn all the MSS. and books."
56. Fawn Brodie, The Devil Drives: A Life of Sir Richard Burton (New York, 1967), 347.
57. See also Edward Rice, Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton: The Secret Agent Who Made the Pilgrimage to Mecca, Discovered the Kama, Sutra, and Brought the Arabian Nights to the West (New York, 1990), 128-30.
58. Christopher Ondaatje, Sindh Revisited: A Journey in the Footsteps of Captain Sir Richard Burton: 1842-49, the Indian Tears (Toronto, 1990). Ondaatje's efforts 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, sometimes 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 of Massey College, University of Toronto, as reported on www.ondaatje.com).
59. Jonathan Bishop, "The Identities of Sir Richard Burton: The Explorer as Actor," Victorian Studies 1, no. 2 (1957). 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 thorough, 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.
60. James A. Casada, Sir Richard F. Burton: A Bibliographical Study (London, 1990), 9.
61. Dane Kennedy, "Orientalist," in The Highly Civilized Man: Richard Burton and the Victorian World (Cambridge, Mass., 2005). I am grateful to Professor Kennedy for his informal comments on Burton in India and for sharing excerpts from his forthcoming book.
62. Z/L/MIL/5/21-22, 35, OIOC, L/MIL/12/73 (1842-51), OIOC.
63. Richard F. Burton, Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah & Meccah, ed. Isabel Burton, with an introduction by Stanley Lane-Poole (London, 1898), 29.
64. See Colette Colligan, "'A Race of Born Pederasts': Sir Richard Burton, Homosexuality, and the Arabs," Nineteenth-Century Contexts 25, no. 1 (2003): 1-20.
65. Lt. Gen. Sir W. Napier, The Life and Opinions of General Sir Charles James Napier (London, 1857), 28.
66. Spivak uses the term "metalepsis" to refer to the historiographical "substitution of an effect for a cause." The positing of a metalepsis is the primary discursive substitution that sanctions the reading of the subaltern as subject rather than as subject-effect. See "Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography," in Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, eds., Selected Works of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (New York, 1996), 211-13.
67. "Nagari nagari phira musafir ghar ka rasta bhul gaya / . . . kya hai mera kya hai tera apna paraya bhul gaya," in Miraji, Tin rang (Pindi, 1968), 151.
68. The cited translation of Miraji's poem is provided by Geeta Patel in her wonderful book, Lyrical Movements, Historical Haunting: On Gender, Colonialism, and Desire in Miraji's Urdu Poetry (Stanford, Calif., 2001), 32. Patel writes: "Miraji was an acclaimed Muslim male poet, who wrote under a Hindu woman's name, and whom contemporary 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" (3-15).
69. For more details on the textbook controversy see Romila Thapar, "The Future of the Indian Past," Outlook India, 1 April 2004.
70. Thomas Osborne, "The Ordinariness of the Archive," History of the Human Sciences 12, no. 2 (1999): 51-64.
71. Achille Mbembe, "The Archives and the Political Imaginary," in Carolyn Hamilton and Verne Harris, eds., Refiguring the Archive (Cape Town, 2002), 20-37.