The Hole That Wasn’t There

At a memorable moment in Todd Haynes’s tender “history” of glamrock, Velvet Goldmine (1998), the protagonist muses on a vanished rock star: “Yesterday upon the stair / I met a man that wasn’t there / He wasn’t there again today / Oh, how I wish he’d go away.” The Victorian verse “Antigonish” (Hughes Mearns, 1899) serves as mise-en-abyme for the film’s luscious rendition of an overlooked episode in queer audiovisual history, effectively producing a sumptuous genealogy of unspeakable love from Oscar Wilde to Ziggy Stardust. Haynes’s playful imaginative audiovisual romp provides a poignant parallel to Anjali Arondekar’s superbly researched and theoretically sophisticated For the Record, for both are original contributions to emerging histories of sexuality. In search of the pleasures of the asshole unspoken in the British colonial archives—vividly embodied by the illustrious Khairati, a “sexual deviant” convicted in 1884 for “singing dressed as a woman” (69) following the legal confusion over the bodily evidence of his trumpet-shaped anus—Arondekar provides an engaging and elegant reading of the colonial records of sexuality in British India. The supplement, the queer “who wasn’t there,” brings in his wake a formidable theoretical apparatus for mining existing written records for the story of their retelling. If Velvet Goldmine was a “must-see” for its investigative force and its singular style, For the Record is just such a “must-read” for queer scholars of all cloths. In both, retelling is the truest labor of love.

If I begin elsewhere, it is with the intention of plunging readers into a scholarly work that could be too quickly pigeonholed as a work in South Asian sexuality studies. More importantly, to begin elsewhere is to follow Arondekar’s lead: for what first appears as a (positivist) recuperation of an invisible queer history is actually a conceptually sophisticated argument on historical method in sexuality studies. It recalls Ann Stoler’s rigor in Race and the Education of Desire (1995); Elizabeth Povinelli’s dexterous interlacing of sexuality and subalternity in The Cunning of Recognition (2002); and the assiduous historicism of Ian Baucom’s Specters of the Atlantic (2005). Each chapter is tightly organized around a loss at the origin: Richard Burton’s report on male brothels in Karachi, J. L.’s accounts of the Great Mutiny of 1857, the missing body of Khairati. Arondekar explains such loss in virtuoso readings of colonial history, following its traces (in law, anthropology, pornography, and literature) with catholicity. Arondekar’s well-told story speculates on the historical reasons for this loss, leading to original and striking propositions about the colonial archive of sexuality and, by extension, about historiography. Her harnessing of the Derridean premise—the archive is a will-to-knowledge production, and the historian is ever in feverish search of truth-effects where there are only traces/texts—intervenes via Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (and more generally, subaltern studies) in the additive model of historical recuperation where one more marginal community is “found” through exemplary historiographical antics. What if the origin of a discourse is loss, asks Arondekar? How might we understand discourse on “unnatural conduct” as a series of recursive traces energized by historical anxieties and fears? Her questions foreground the instrumentality behind unreconstructed historical recuperation and serve as a refreshing corrective to any unmitigated celebration of the archive.

Arondekar renders the larger critical stakes of the book accessible to the general reader by concretizing For the Record’s historical tapestry, a work replete with meticulously excavated, nuanced, and detailed materials drawn from the colonial record. Hogtied to history, little-known figures (like the obscure Khairati) and well-known ones (such as the hoary colonial, Rudyard Kipling) yield refreshing insights. We come to know Kipling anew, for instance, when Arondekar places him against the phantasmic backcloth of the Great Mutiny. The mutiny as a collective trauma, she maintains, leads to the repression of certain kinds of sexual evidence (such as the presence of Eurasian prostitutes in military camps). The logical corollary...