Epicene Intimacies: Towards a Shadow Canon of Postcolonial Indian Queer Writing, 1924-2008 Restricted; Files Only
Chakraborty, Rohit (Spring 2025)
Abstract
Can the “queer” life in postcolonial India ever truly decolonize itself from the spectre of the British Empire? This dissertation troubles a “decolonial” narrative of queer politics in India post-2018 when Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code (widely called India’s colonial-era “anti-sodomy law”) was read down. In this dissertation I curate queer writing of and from India across its post/colonial span (canonically contained within the 20th century) to showcase how mechanics of Empire are absorbed within and still echoed by varied processes that constitute what Nishant Upadhyay calls the “hinduhomonationalism” of contemporary Indian politics. Despite a posturing of Hindu nationalism, an ideology virulent in India today, as strictly anticolonial, nationalists’ agenda of reframing India as an exclusively Hindu state is violently enforced through various colonizing tactics like casteism, Islamophobia, military occupations of Kashmir and the “Northeast,” civil surveillance, and border control. This dissertation explores how “queer” literature can help us trace the lingering presence of colonialism through such practices in the postcolonial nationalism of India which, today, is singularly imagined by and for the Hindu, who was once, and may still be, both: collaborator to and antagonist of the English.
“Epicene Intimacies” is an interdisciplinary study of Indian queer writing that makes interventions in two prominent fields: world literature and queer studies. By deliberating selecting minor authors and minor texts in bibliographies of major authors in both queer and postcolonial canons of Indian writing, a major provocation of this dissertation is to trouble what David Damrosch categorizes as the “shadow canon” in his three-tier vision of world literature. Mining these texts’ (and, at times, their authors’) fickle, often promiscuous, subscriptions to a certain genre, a canon, or an intent, that relegate them, in the Damroschian sense, to the “shadow” of the canon wars, this project adopts triumphalist tenors of queer scholars, such as Heather Love’s formulation of the “politics of refusal” to release them from institutional and formal compulsions of “world literature.” I use these texts’ slippages to genre, canon, et cetera, as generative prompts that distend what “queer” can represent in postcolonial Indian writing and what function or ideation “postcolonial” can serve.
Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgments
List of Illustrations
Introduction
“Epicene Intimacies:” A Theoretical Biology
Queering India: A Legal History
Carnal Lingus: Our Postcolonial Language for Sex
Canon Panics: The Trouble with the Postcolonial/Queer
Looking At: The Colonial Gaze of Hindoo Holiday
Looking Back: The Nationalist Riposte of Chocolate
Looking Through: The Pastiche of Past Continuous
Coda
1.
Messy Misalignments: Taxonomic and Cartographic Troubling of Homosexuality in J. R. Ackerley’s Hindoo Holiday (1932, 1952, 1979, 2000)
Blurred Lines: Naming and Placing “Chhokrapur” and Its Maharajah
Bugeria in Britain: A Legal Survey
Franchising Buggery: Colonial Sexology and the “Sexual World-System”
Split Genetics: Semiperipheral Agents in Hindoo Holiday
The Avunculate, Archived
Colonial Aphrodisia: Manoeuvring Gastronomy and Sex in “Expansions” to Hindoo Holiday
A Greek Villa in “Chhokrapur:” Subverting the Architecture of the Locus Amoenus
The Trouble with “bugger:” Sexuality’s Messy Misalignments in “Chhokrapur”
Coda: Chhokrapur’s Ambivalent Ally
2.
Braiding Parast: Pandey Bechan Sharma’s Hindi Nationalism and his Macaronic Dictionary for Desiring Men in Chocolate (1927)
White/ning Saviors
The Worldly “Dandy”
Blooming Boys and Pleasure Gardens
Forked Tongues
Coda
3.
Foreign Exchange: Neel Mukherjee’s Queer(ed) Expats, and the Postcolonial Pastiche in Past Continuous (2007)
Shifty Market: India and its Foreign Economic Policy at the Poles of the 20th Century
Hinged Spaces: Twin(n)ing the Zenana and the Bathroom as Spaces for Half-Citizens
England’s Shadowland: Queer Migrants and London’s “Bigot Geography”
Coda: Towards the Double Genres of Past Continuous
Bibliography
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File download under embargo until 22 May 2031 | 2025-04-01 14:58:04 -0400 | File download under embargo until 22 May 2031 |
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