‘Forbidden Desire’: Indian queer history cannot be decolonised by ignoring the violence of caste

“They would make the Mangs and Mahars drink oil mixed with red lead and bury our people in the foundations of their buildings, thus wiping out generation after generation of our poor people. The Brahmans have degraded us so low; they consider people like us even lower than cows and buffaloes.”

In 1855, a young Dalit girl wrote these words, exposing a society structured by caste violence – quite literally on the burial of Dalit bodies. More than a century later, Sindhu Rajasekaran’s Forbidden Desire: How the British Stole India’s Queer Pasts seeks to recover India’s lost queer histories. Yet in its attempt to decolonise, it overlooks the caste histories that structured the material realities of people in both the past and the present.

At the outset, the book is a remarkable project, venturing into areas that Indian writing sometimes hesitates to touch: gender, sexuality, intimacy, and the myths that tie them together through colonial histories. The book raises an important and timely question: how did colonialism shape the way we think about desire and intimacy? Simply raising that question is an achievement in itself.

Beyond its central thesis, the book offers several strengths. It opens up a conversation about sex and sexuality in India with a clarity...

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