For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India (review)

In the introduction to Rudyard Kipling's In Black and White (1888)—whose story "On the City Wall" Anjali Arondekar analyzes in For the Record—the fictitious servant Kadir Baksh proclaims: "Nabi Baksh, the clerk, says that it is a book about the black men—common people. This is a manifest lie, for by what road can my Sahib have acquired knowledge of the common people?" ([Sampson, Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, 1890], iii). The road by which India's colonial masters sought to obtain, fabricate, manufacture, and submerge knowledge about Indians and their sexual habits is the path that Arondekar travels in this well-crafted and intelligent investigation into India's imperial archive.

Like most academic books, For the Record consists of four chapters, an introduction, and a brief conclusion—in this case, an almost de rigueur coda linking the historiography that is the book's subject to the present day. Its main chapters touch on different aspects of the archive's engagement—and failure to engage—with sexuality in British India. After an initial discussion of Michel Foucault's place in the history of sexuality after the archival turn, Arondekar begins with a chapter on Richard Burton's "lost" report on male brothels in Karáchi. The chapter situates this report in terms of tensions surrounding the annexation of Scinde. It queries the purpose of colonial knowledge and the strategic functions that the loss and recovery of an archival object like the report plays both in Burton's self-mythologizing and in contemporary criticism. Arondekar also rebukes historians such as David Arnold for ignoring Burton's "Sotadic Zone" in their work on the subcontinent; she rightly proposes that sexuality mandates a more central place in the study of imperialism in India. "Subject to Sodomy," For the Record's second chapter, follows the large body of scholarship centering on legal and medical cases, which have proved a rich seam in a field without a sufficiently broad archival base. Building on William Cohen's work in particular, the chapter focuses on the remarkable case of Queen Empress v. Khairati (1884), exploring its rendering of native sexuality as "indeterminate and indefinite" and therefore always potentially perverse and untrustworthy (70). Arondekar also deftly scrutinizes the colonial and historiographic obsession with hijras (eunuchs), although the striking parallels to British ideas about thuggee demanded more explicit analysis.

Chapter 3 uses the allegory of the India-rubber dildo to examine the place of Indians in the Victorian pornographic imagination. Arondekar convincingly argues that "the Indian male, too, becomes an agent of access to pleasure, but never the subject or object of it" (118). Her discussion of advertisements for the dildo in two pornographic works demonstrates the strength of the book's union of historical and literary methodologies. This union is even more apparent in For the Record's final and best chapter, covering Kipling's engagement with what the Victorians called the Indian Mutiny of 1857. Arondekar's key intervention is the observation that "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" (135). This is a powerful reformulation of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's model of the triangulation of desire vis-à-vis the role of the text and reading practices.

The introduction, however, is less successful. In tying together the case studies that comprise the four chapters, Arondekar offers a theoretical overview of the archive's place in the humanities, especially in queer and postcolonial studies with a South Asian bent. "South Asian Studies/Queer Theory/Postcolonial Studies" are, in fact, the categories that Duke lists on the book's back cover. She asks trenchant questions, such as "Why does sexuality (still) seek its truth in the historical archive?" and "can an empty archive also be full?" (1). But the...