Abundance

theory q
A series edited by
Lee Edelman, Benjamin Kahan,
and Christina Sharpe
 anjali arondekar

Abundance
Sexuality’s History

duke university press · durham and london · 2023

​© 2023 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of Amer­i­ca on acid-­free paper ∞
Proj­ect Editor: Jessica Ryan
Designed by Matthew Tauch
Typeset in Garamond Premier Pro by Westchester Publishing Services

Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data

Names: Arondekar, Anjali R., [date] author.
Title: Abundance : sexuality’s history / Anjali Arondekar.
Other titles: Theory Q.
Description: Durham : Duke University Press, 2023. | Series: Theory Q |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: lccn 2022048860 (print)
lccn 2022048861 (ebook)
isbn 9781478019909 (paperback)
isbn 9781478017240 (hardcover)
isbn 9781478024484 (ebook)
Subjects: lcsh: Sex—Historiography. | Sexual minorities—Historiography. |
Decolonization—Social aspects—South Asia. | Devadāsīs—India—Velha Goa—History. |
Queer theory. | bisac: history / lgbtq | social science / Gender Studies
Classification: lcc hq12 .a76 2023 (print) | lcc hq12 (ebook) |
ddc 306.7—dc23/eng/20230302
lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022048860
lc ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022048861

Cover art: Cover page of the Samaj Sudharak, September 1940.

Gomantak Maratha Samaj Archives, Mumbai, India.
​For Aai, Baba, and all
the kalavantins . . .
This page intentionally left blank
 contents

introduction ​· ​1
Make. Believe. Sexuality’s Subjects

chapter one ​· ​33
In the Absence of Reliable Ghosts: Archives

chapter two ​· ​63
A History I Am Not Writing: Sexuality’s Exemplarity

chapter three ​· ​90
Itinerant Sex: Geopolitics as Critique

coda ​· ​112
I Am Not Your Data. Caste, Sexuality, Protest

Acknowl­edgments ​· ​129
Primary Sources · ​135
Secondary Sources · ​139
Index · 163
This page intentionally left blank
 introduction

Make. Believe.
Sexuality’s Subjects
To “write” a history of sexuality, or so the story goes, is to embrace the
chimeric prose of paucity and plentitude. If the pre­sent is marked by an
inescapable surfeit of evidence, the past is haunted by an unremitting loss
of materials.1 Marginality and loss, paucity and disenfranchisement: ­these
are the hermeneutical forms that have become the common currency of
histories of sexuality. The missing amphora of sexuality is recovered from
the archival detritus of hegemonic histories of slavery, colonialism, and
nationalism to showcase more liberatory narratives of emancipation, lib-
eration, and rights.2 Even scholars of precolonial histories of sexuality in
South Asia, for example, who rightfully bemoan the temporal focus on
nineteenth-­century Eu­ro­pean colonialism, call on a similar language of
loss as they lament the postcolonial erasure of a historical archive resplen-
dent with evidence of sexuality’s past.3 This orientation to loss, mutatis mu-
tandis, surfaces most vividly within sexuality studies in the Euro/American
acad­emy, where the current invocation of negativity, failure, even utopia,
still tethers histories of sexuality to forms of loss, lack, and failure in the
face of, or rather b­ ecause of, our embattled po­liti­cal horizons.4 The appeal
to psychoanalysis as the privileged language of critique further solidifies
an attachment to sexuality as loss, phantasmatic, protean, or other­wise.5
Tropes of loss especially abound in historiographical work where sexuali-
ty’s (putatively) pathologized pasts and archives are recuperated as repar-
ative sources of sanctuary/jouissance rather than despair.6 Sexuality thus
endures as an object of historical recovery, it follows, through a recursive
and iterative poetics of melancholia, an irresolvable longing for loss that
eschews all forms of consolations.7
To note the orthodoxy of such theorizations about histories of sexual-
ity is not to dismiss the considerable productivity of such thinking, or to
re-­create yet again the (false) divide between historicist and psychoanalyt-
ical thinking; if anything, it is more gestural of a larger and robust critical
ecol­ogy, as evidence and evocation of the collective pull of loss across geo/
po­liti­cal landscapes. Indeed, any effort to chart or critique such a broad
swath of intellectual currents is, as one well knows, ipso facto reduction-
ist. ­After all, narrative economies of loss are always already at work in the
worlds we seek to enter, as an excruciating double bind that indentures us
to the very historical holdings we seek to release.8 We redeem the deficit
of our minoritized histories through concerted acquisitions of lost pasts.
Queer/trans subjects (especially in elusive subaltern pasts) remain in the
stranglehold of such constant loss even as they stumble ­toward pragmatic,
entrepreneurial (often l­ egal) structures of survival.9 In the face of the ca-
sual brutality of dispersed global suffering, t­ here is, as Elizabeth Povinelli
writes, “nothing spectacular to report” about loss anymore. Indeed, any
epistemological privileging of loss (past or pre­sent) assumes an “event-
fulness” that flounders in the face of the “ordinary, chronic and cruddy”
syncopations of everyday subaltern life.10 As Geeta Patel reminds us, the
alluring double bind, that “ethical habit we refuse to release,” is also “the
ultimate place where recursivity resides,”11 where our attachments to loss
return and reset in an endless spiral of recuperative historiographies (from
savage to salvage).12
My book challenges such an epistemological preoccupation with loss as
the structuring mode of narration for histories of sexuality. Instead, I call
for a historiography of sexuality that pushes against the binding energies
of such “melancholic historicism,” of an origin-­mythos, as Stephen Best
notes, that anchors us to scripted itineraries of loss and recovery.13 To fix
sexuality within such vernaculars of loss (while po­liti­cally exigent) is to
refuse alternative historiographical models, to bypass imaginative histories
of sexuality, full of intrepid archives and acts of invention. I wish to set
the two terms—­history and sexuality—­both alongside and athwart one an-
other to stage a dif­f er­ent story, one that seeks to discover what each of ­these
terms might do to the other, without assuming a position of negation from
the outset. At its most ambitious, my book invites two sets of ruminations:
(1) What if we shift our attention from the recuperation of sexuality as loss
to understanding it as a site of abundance? (2) What archival forms and

2 · introduction
effects emerge from such a coupling of sexuality and abundance? To enter
histories of sexuality through an imaginary of abundance is not to invest in
and stabilize a new knowledge economy of plenitude, or to slide into plod-
ding literalization (ah, ­there is more, more, more), mislaying in the pro­cess
the messy misalignments the concept of abundance lugs along. Bypassing
salvific modes, underwritten by loss as value, abundance serves more as
a theoretical than descriptive supplement, as a concept-­metaphor that
moves us away from the incessant shuttling between the sated fulfillment
and avid impoverishment of historiographical ambitions. Simply stated,
the concept of abundance I am proposing does not replace paucity with
overflow but, rather, unravels a set of archives that are fertile ground for
producing and contesting attachments to history-­writing.14 Rather than
resolve abundance into a concept that w ­ ill be portable to other geopo­liti­
cal contexts, I propose a messier experiment, an open-­ended inquiry that
travels between a difficult pre­sent and an unfinished past, a reeling spiral
of flight and return, approaching histories of sexualities aslant. To speak of
a history of sexuality from the Ansatzpunkt of abundance is to emphasize
both the efflorescence of the past and to attend to its strategic and active
mobilization within the politics of the pre­sent. One way to parse the con-
cept of abundance I am proposing ­here is to see it as inextricably linked
to the histories of subordinated collectivities, as a historiographical orien-
tation that challenges the narratives of their constant devaluation. What
historical forms does abundance take when we turn to subaltern p­ eoples
and pasts? How do such forms of abundance fall outside historical interest
and preservation? How might a turn to abundance work against the im-
perative to fix sexuality within wider historical structures of vulnerability,
damage, and loss?
In my previous work, I have grappled with ­these thorny concerns by
writing about a pressing impasse in our recuperation of the historical ar-
chive, about the hermeneutical demands placed on histories of sexuality
such as those in South Asia, which are entangled with questions of colo-
nialism and race, and about the multiple double binds and possibilities
that emerge from it. I have argued that the promise of archival presence
as ­future knowledge is always circulated in relation to historical desire, a
desire for lost bodies, subjects, and texts, and for the evidentiary models
they enable.15 My efforts h ­ ere, however, are drawn especially to how such
recuperative historiographical methods assume their more salutary forms
of loss precisely in the ser­vice of collectivities tallying up what they do
not yet have in relation to other constituencies. Far from repudiating such

Make. Believe · 3
salvific historical forms (instantiated as they routinely are in the language
of lost rights and repre­sen­ta­tion), I would like to ask (1) how minoritized
conclaves wrestle with the evidentiary genres that such models of devalu-
ation demand, and, in ­doing so, (2) how they assem­ble historical archives
that self-­consciously activate the compensatory mechanisms that such
losses should or ­will produce. More broadly, I am interested in thinking
through how the absence and/or presence of archives secures historical
futurity, and what proceeds from an unsettling of that attachment, from a
movement away from the recursive historical dialectic of fulfillment and
impoverishment. The challenge ­here is to engage a historiography of sex-
uality that paradoxically adds value to a sedimented historical form (lost
archives must be resurrected, found, produced for ­future gains) precisely
by staging interest in its modes of reproduction (found archives must be
disseminated, digitalized, and memorialized).
Such challenges are especially heightened, as I have suggested above,
when geopolitics enters the diversified holdings of such historical work
through languages of capitalization that shift the value of loss into the
content of incommensurability. Thinking sex with geopolitics makes it a
concept ineluctably linked to asymmetry, whereby a geo­graph­i­cal location
garners (lost) historical value through its (untranslatable) relationship to
the West—in other words, through the ­labor of incommensurability.16
Even as histories of sexuality appear provisional, open to transformation
and to the velocities and inscriptions of other worlds, geopo­liti­cal sites
(particularly in the global South) continue to be hailed as obdurately
and enticingly incommensurate—­literally ungraspable, undecipherable
forms. Incommensurability generates a positive value h ­ ere by promising
to carry meanings beyond the failures of the pre­sent, to transport histories
of sexuality into the f­ uture.17 Indeed, the seductions of such incommen-
surability (often cast in the broad languages of divergent spatialities and
temporalities) accrue a further po­liti­cal value where you cede to geopo­
liti­cal difference precisely to lay aside the epistemic work such difference
does.18 Thus, as scholars repeatedly gesture ­toward the vastness of geopo­
liti­cal landscapes (the required self-­reflexive move that marks a reading
as l­ imited to the West while more knowledge awaits us in the “Rest”),
or to the per­sis­tence of geopo­liti­cal asymmetries, ­little effort is made to
translate t­ hose gestures to the content of episteme. References to knowl-
edge elsewhere may abound in the requisite listings and biblio­graphies
that accompany most studies of/on sexuality, but they remain largely a
noninterventionist counterpoint to Euro-­American epistemologies.19 As

4 · introduction
Neferti Tadiar reminds us, “In this endeavor, anti-­European, anti-­colonial
critiques have not lost their pointed relevance”; rather, they have become
suitably bracketed, akin to “third-­string guests in a crowded party, nodded
to in passing,” while academic shareholders make their way to topics with
“the highest profit margin.”20 In so ­doing, we recast, as it w ­ ere, over and
over again, the early debates inaugurated by Gayatri Spivak’s seminal essay
“Can the Subaltern Speak?” as histories of elsewheres perform necessary
scenes of nonrepresentability and reprieve (recall her opening invocation
of the conversation between first-­world intellectuals, Deleuze and Fou-
cault). What is often elided in readings of Spivak’s essay is her emphasis on
forms of learning from below that must flourish precisely b­ ecause of such
incommensurability.21
Given such a conceptual quagmire, then, how do we harness the tre-
mendous generative potential of incommensurability, and think sex with
geopolitics, without ceding meaning and value?22 How do we mark the
incommensurability of geopolitics with the simultaneous plaint that such
opacity is irrevocably compromised, interrupted, even staged? How do we
generate geo/histories of sexuality through dif­fer­ent economies of pres-
ence, through sight lines of abundance?23 Given this book’s indebtedness
to knowledge formations in South Asia, how does one then translate the
richness of a region’s myriad politics, theoretical nuances, and multilingual
aesthetics without falling prey to historical habits of legibility? To answer
­these questions and more, I want to step away from the acrimony of cur-
rent debates, or from narrative conventions that impute “radical” critique.
I want to bypass (or at least attempt to) settler-­colonial habits of analy­sis
that emphasize “new” discovery and capture, even as we tread shared, in-
herited modes of reading. Indeed, if the rich efflorescence of scholarship in
transgender studies can be our guide, we are now more than ever in need
of an ethos of theoretical and po­liti­cal generosity. For example, translation,
decolonization, and trans/historicity are just some of the themes that an-
imate recent special issues of tsq: Transgender Studies Quarterly, all foci
that call for theoretical vernaculars bold enough to galvanize and evoke
situated knowledges.24
Setting aside privileged citations and methods, as well as critical pri-
orities that have accrued to historical practices founded on the recuper-
ation, reproduction, and reparation of a lost and/or erased past, let us
commit instead to thinking sex and geopolitics not just as abstract con-
cepts but as the substance and condition of our engagements.25 To do so,
I draw ­here from intellectual traditions within two entangled and often

Make. Believe · 5
segregated historiographies, one in South Asian/area studies and the other
in sexuality studies, to ask: What would histories of sexuality look like if
interrogated as histories of regions and/or “areas”?26 As Keguro Macharia
trenchantly asks, How does thinking in place, thinking with a geo/history,
produce knowledge?27 Such an invocation would, eo ipso, attempt to perform
at the level of text the myriad epistemological forms such engagement can
take. To that end, I have also deliberately turned to the term sexuality in
lieu of queer to gather epistemologies and interlocutors across geopo­liti­cal
sites that are not always poised to offer po­liti­cal salvation, or even config-
ure as “queer.” “Sexuality” ­here is not staged as a counternarrative or correc-
tive to “queer”; rather, it serves more as an itinerant heuristics that gathers
a density of narrative genres across divergent histories and spatialities.28
To flesh out ­these compacted observations and more, let me turn to
some pos­si­ble pathways to such abundance.

RIP: Return(s) If Pos­si­ble

July 14, 2009.29 “Tumhi kai karta, madam?” (What are you d­ oing, madam?)
This was the question that the caretaker of the Gomantak Maratha Samaj
archives in Panaji, Goa, quizzically asked me as I painstakingly placed a
fragile document into one of many ziplock bags. The Gomantak Maratha
Samaj (henceforth the Samaj) is a prominent lower-­caste devadasi collec-
tivity hailing from colonial Portuguese and British India. Devadasi is a
Sans­krit term literally meaning “slave” (dasi) of a god/master, often falsely
read as interchangeable with terms such as courtesan, sex worker, and pros-
titute. Gomantak speaks to geo­graph­ic­ al roots in Goa, Maratha is both
a caste and regional term, and Samaj translates to “collectivity,” “society,”
and/or “community.” Bemused by my attempts to preserve rare archival
materials that I perceived as being damaged or open to loss, the caretak-
er’s question signaled an unforeseen twist in my orientation to archival
research. For her, the preservation of ­these rare archival materials was of
­little consequence; a­ fter all, as she sternly reminded me, this was an over-
saturated archive, so full at its seams that it strug­gled to manage the con-
stant production of new and diverse materials. ­Here the return to a history
of sexuality was not through a call to loss (of object and/or materials) but,
rather, through ordinary surplus. When asked about the potential loss of
valuable historical materials, the response from the archival custodian was
one full of mirth and consternation. For her, the risk of loss is more ek

6 · introduction
hasaichi gosht (a laughable m ­ atter), where the preservation of rare archival
materials is of l­ ittle consequence. We have more materials than we need
(zaroori peksha jasht), she added, shaking her head in amused exasperation
at my continued insistence on the looming dangers of archival loss. To this
day, she reminded me proudly, new materials continue to enter the Samaj
archives, with ­little effort being expended to ­either digitalize or republish
older, more fragile materials.
July 20, 2014. On a rainy monsoon after­noon, a ­woman rushes into the
Mumbai branch of the same Gomantak Maratha Samaj, where I am again
busy wading through boxes of archival materials. A sheaf of papers in hand,
the w ­ oman frenetically approaches the general factotum on call and de-
mands to see the institution’s chitnis (secretary). She is in urgent need of a
written affidavit from the Samaj, an evidentiary marker, she states, that can
then be used to procure an obc (Other Backward Caste) certificate for her
son to attend university on a seat reserved for lower-­caste communities. The
secretary arrives, listens patiently to her request, and g­ ently reminds her that
a letter from the Samaj no longer carries much ­legal weight, due to stricter
regulations on caste verification materials. The rise in cases of false caste
certificates, he tells her, has made collectivities such as the Samaj suspicious
recordkeepers of caste histories, open to charges of caste fabrications. A ­ fter
all, he tells her with some amusement, we have trou­ble proving who we
are.30 Yet the ­woman insists that a letter authenticating her son’s lower-­
caste status ­will help, so the secretary pulls out the requisite form and be-
gins to fill out the necessary information. But surely, the ­woman asks, you
must want to see my son’s birth certificate. Surely, she asks, you must want
some evidence of my claims. Ah, says the secretary, we d­ on’t need to see
any evidence, nor your papers. All we ask, he adds, is your permission to
list your name in our annual published rec­ord of members. “Aamche karya,
tumcha vishwas” (We make, you believe), he notes, with a wry smile. The
­woman listens to the secretary’s request, pauses, gathers her papers, and
quietly walks out the door. No caste certificate is exchanged.31

Translation as Transaction

The two archival encounters described above animate, in many ways, the
historiographical ambitions of this book: What are the evidentiary man-
dates that provoke histories of sexuality into presence? And what hap-
pens when such mandates go awry, flouted by the radical pragmatism of

Make. Believe · 7
subaltern evidentiary practices? Bear in mind that in both scenes, t­ here
is no renunciation or refusal of the evidentiary value of archives, or of the
historiographical demands placed on minoritized communities. ­After all,
the caretaker of the Goa branch acknowledges the Samaj’s commitment to
archival production (we keep producing, she states), just as the secretary
of the Mumbai branch cannily speaks to the necessary visibility that such
evidentiary forms can produce (the published list of Samaj members in
exchange for the caste certificate). Together the archival events foreground
(1) the compensatory economies of archival formations (archives as guar-
antors of presence, rights, repre­sen­ta­tion), (2) the conventions of eviden-
tiary genres (the caste certificate that we need to garner contractual rights
and freedoms, a caste certificate that we have already noted is constantly
­under siege as a verifiable marker), and (3) the imaginative yet transactive
refusal of such prescriptions (the epistemological liveness of the two scenes
that speaks to riskier sorts of historical engagement).
In the first scene, we have the story of a collectivity that stubbornly
refuses to move on from the ordinary plenitude of sexuality. Shorn of
the aura of loss, we are confronted with a historiography that refuses to
give up the paradoxes instantiated in its self-­archiving: presence without
preservation, production without reproduction. The very abundance of
the archives directly kindles the nonrecuperation of its materials. As the
caretaker of the Samaj archives reminded me, ­there is no dearth of materi-
als and, as such, no inheritance of loss. Rather than safeguard against the
(inevitable) destruction of fragile archival materials, the caretaker’s obi-
ter dicta folds archival surplus into an unexceptional consistency: more
materials, we are told, keep coming in. Archival abundance ­here does not
merely signify a surfeit of materials; it points more ­toward a deliberately
embraced historical and pragmatic proj­ect. In all its ostensible substance
(we have so much), the Samaj archive displays an errant materiality that
remarkably eschews the exigency of preservation.
The caretaker’s disinterest in the reproduction of the Samaj archives
through digitalization equally stanches cherished archival routes of aspi-
rational value. The digitalization of minoritized archives, we are endlessly
reminded (and, for the most part, rightly so), safeguards against the risk
of lost value, especially within the treacherous landscapes of post/colonial
worlds.32 As such, the Samaj’s lack of investment in digitalized pasts and
­futures speaks further to an almost counterintuitive embrace of archival
abundance: a refused relation to the valued reproductive imperative. In
contrast to the imperative to immure and preserve materials through

8 · introduction
digitalization, the Samaj archives appear instead to be focused on the sus-
tenance of a history of sexuality whose abundant productions negotiated
an unexpected pathway to futurity. What remains instead is the promise
and failure of archival recuperation, the looking for, and a queer historiog-
raphy about, found archival objects that are so plentiful that one must look
askance.
In the second archival encounter, conventions of verification are cast/e
aside, the uncertainty of the “original” evidentiary value-­form writ large,
even as claims to the f­ uture are sought (by the secretary) and refused (by
the w ­ oman). As Lawrence Cohen and Amrit Rai, have variously argued,
the logic of the jugaad (flexible form) and the “duplicate” founds the very
evidentiary models of the colonial/postcolonial state in South Asia. Even
as colonial/postcolonial subjects recognize themselves through the eviden-
tiary regimes of the bureaucratic “stamp-­state,” they equally understand
­those regimes to be flexible and inherently provisional. For Cohen, the
copy/duplicate of the original evidentiary marker (instantiated in the sign
of the birth certificate, the ration card, e­ tc.) crucially becomes the b­ earer
of value such that the distinction between the proper and the spurious is
always held in abeyance. The original opens itself to the threat of destruc-
tion, whereas the copy, the duplicate, the jugaad, continues to accrue in
value through its constant reproduction.33
In the second archival event, the secretary’s caution around the inherent
“falseness” of the caste certificate (we have trou­ble proving who we are, as the
secretary notes) does not summon unreliability as a salvational resolution;
rather, his provocation (we make, you believe) captures the transactive value
immanent in the evidentiary form. As such, the call to make.believe seeks
less to ­free the caste certificate from its evidentiary referent (caste) than to
corrupt the referent with a mimicry that can then, when the Samaj asserts
itself as lower caste, be revealed as a ruse. Caste emerges as an open-­ended
fiction, not of bounded life but of an ongoing oppressive pre­sent, full of
imperfection and fantasy. It is solely through such an understanding that
the desired caste certificate can perform its proper transactive function,
which is to signify not just alliance but the deeper and more contradic-
tory attachments to the institutions exemplified in that alliance: f­ amily
and reproduction. When the secretary invites the w ­ oman into an i­ magined
collectivity brokered through sexuality (we make, you believe), he scripts
presence outside the bureaucratic forms of judicially sanctioned life. No
proof needed—we make it up as we go. ­These observations take hold of caste
in a new way: caste is achieved now by dissolution, by the very annulment of

Make. Believe · 9
its form. The caste certificate becomes a radical invention of solidarity, an
attachment to community, and an experimental vernacular of self-­making.
The two archival events also speak directly to the ways that minoritized
collectivities assem­ble archival technologies of presence and absence (what
I am calling make.believe) to bypass our attempts to make coherent the
heady confluence of uneven imaginings and longings that comprise the
lives of caste and sexuality. ­After all, we live in a moment (especially in
South Asia) where the 2018 repeal of Section 377 (the so-­called antisodomy
statute) and the 2014 nalsa (National L ­ egal Ser­vices of India v. Union of
India) judgment highlights the complex journey of gay, lesbian, and trans
emergence.34 That is, the success of t­ hese l­egal judgments foregrounds
once more the maligned yet desired access-­for-­progress model (to have
­these rights we must cede to made-up judicial verities of identity (gay, les-
bian, trans) that are rarely commensurate with lived experiences.35 Juxta-
pose ­these efforts with the rising ranks of lower-­caste/obc communities
(from the Bhandaris in Goa to the Marathas in Maharashtra and the Jats in
Haryana, mockingly marked as the “haves who want more” or the “creamy
layer”) who clamor for rights that are currently reserved for esbc classes
(i.e., economic and socially backward classes) who in turn may or may not
also be classified as obc.36 At the heart of ­these strug­gles is an uncertainty,
a foundational unreliability in how evidentiary regimes guarantee forms
of ­legal, economic, and social freedom. If we cannot prove (without
­legal doubt) the exchange value of caste and sex, how can we then trans-
act a liberatory proj­ect? But before I delve any further, I need to first bring you
closer to the historical stage on which my questions unfold. What and where
is this subaltern archive of sexuality that promises abundance and courts the
freedom of make.believe?

Come. Again.

Even the most thorough historical study fears getting into trou­ble, less
with the histories it is displacing or decentering than through what might
be perceived as an overall lack of “proper” evidence. Nothing expresses
this convention better within a history of a minoritized collectivity than
an inherently paradoxical archival economy, at once empty and therefore
full. An essential characteristic of such conventions is that the history far
exceeds the official archives within which it is circumscribed. That is, the
“absence” within official archives attests to the collectivity’s enduring

10 · introduction
historical “presence” and necessitates the concomitant search for missing
and lost archives. In what follows, I hope to recalibrate such habits of his-
torical writing, to shift the emphases away from what is missing ­toward a
recognition of what is. The history of the Samaj, I ­will offer ­here, satisfies
a double exigency: how to produce abundance entirely outside any official
and/or state archive and, at the same time, how to preserve the effects of
that archive within its own productions.
Members of the Gomantak Maratha Samaj, also referred to as kalavants
(literally, carriers of kala [art]), are a devadasi diaspora that shuttled be-
tween Portuguese and British colonial India for over two hundred years, chal-
lenging Eu­ro­pean epistemologies of race and rule through their inhabitation
in two discrepant empires. For scholars such as Rosa Maria Pérez, ­there
is much confusion around what constitutes a devadasi u­ nder Portuguese
rule, especially given the variegated and often competing references to
“bailadeiras” (dancing girls) and “devadasis” within largely Catholic Goan
sources including ecclesiastical and administrative documents, travel ac-
counts, essays, lit­er­a­ture, and poetry.37 Central to such formulations is the
force of Portuguese conversion campaigns that often collapsed all Hindu
ritual practices into a larger arena of excess and eroticism. However, in her
rush to rescue devadasis from the detritus of Portuguese colonialism and
to return them to their former (Hindu) histories and cultural formations,
Pérez con­ve­niently glosses over similar atrocities committed against deva-
dasis by Hindu and other local elites.
Interestingly, one of the few substantial accounts of the Goan baila-
deiras appears not in a Portuguese source but in an 1851 travelogue by the
infamous British spy/ethnopornographer Sir Richard Burton. Burton’s
interest in the “beautiful Bayaderes” situates them in the famed town of
“Seroda” (now Shiroda), within a climate of Portuguese imperial decline
and moral excess.38 ­These “Bayaderes” are lapsed “high caste maidens,” who
interestingly have no ostensible ties to deity or creed. As Burton writes:
“Having been compelled to eat beef by the ‘tyrannical Portuguese in the
olden time,’ [they] had forfeited the blessings of Hindooism, without ac-
quiring ­those of Chris­tian­ity.”39 Yet “Seroda” then (as ­today) is described
as a “Hindoo town,” containing “about twenty establishments, and a total
number of fifty or sixty dancing girls,” some of whom read and write “San-
scrit shlokas” and speak a “corrupt form of Maharatta called Concanee.”40
Throughout his descriptions of the “Bayaderes,” Burton routinely uses the
terms bayadere, “nautch” girl, and dancing girl interchangeably, thus effacing
the distinctions between the dif­fer­ent terms in Goa. Bayadere is a term

Make. Believe · 11
exclusively used to describe Goan “dancing girls,” whereas the terms nautch
and dancing girl function more as pan–­British Indian categories, covering
a range of regions and linguistic cultures.41
On the one hand, Burton’s account of the Goan “bayaderes” can be
written off as yet another instance of his prurient interest in all t­ hings car-
nal and exotic. On the other hand, Burton’s description of t­ hese “bayad-
eres” could also provide us with a complex prehistory to the emergence
of the devadasi Gomantak Maratha Samaj in Goa. “Seroda”—or Shiroda,
as the city is now known—­was and continues to be one of the central lo-
cations for devadasi congregation in colonial and postcolonial India. At
the center of this “Hindoo town” lies the t­ emple of Kamakshi or Shanta
Durga, the goddess of peace, which h ­ oused on its premises many gener-
ations of devadasis. Unlike the noted “bayaderes,” the devadasis in Shi-
42

roda ­were not known for their dancing skills but ­were instead lauded for
their prowess as musical kalavants (artists) and ­were never lapsed “high
caste maidens.” W ­ hether the devadasis of Shiroda w ­ ere distinct from the
“bayaderes” of Burton’s Seroda is of less consequence than their historical
entanglement within a diverse range of colonial texts and sources.43
Postcolonial histories of Goan devadasis rarely engage with the nom-
inal replacement of devadasi with more fraught terms such as nautch girl
and/or dancing girl. Instead, the focus is more on constructing genealogies
of caste and l­ abor that fix devadasis within a longer history of Brahminic
despotism. As the story goes, the Goan Saraswats (a Brahmin subgroup-
ing) w­ ere historically the primary patrons of the devadasis and devised a
structure that demarcated kalavants who ­were ­either ghanis (singers) or
nachnis (dancers) or both, bhavnis (­women who attended to t­ emple rit-
uals), or fulkars (flower collectors). Of significance h ­ ere is that both men
and w­ omen did menial and physical l­ abor on the farmlands of the Saraswat
Brahmins and the Mahajans (elders associated with religious institutions)
and w­ ere named chede or bande, literally bodies tied to the land. Included
within the Goan devadasi structure w ­ ere also Chadde farjand or frejent, a
Persian term that literally means “boy” but is principally applied to sons
of single m­ others who had sex with their employers. Th ­ ese latter groups
of boys ­were referred to as deuli (male members of the Bhavin class) and
­were situated lower than the kalavants within the devadasi substructures.44
According to one theory, Goan devadasis w ­ ere no dif­fer­ent from their
counter­parts in the Deccan region in function and history. Another ac-
count provides a dif­fer­ent history of enslavement and ­labor by suggesting

12 · introduction
that the devadasis w ­ ere brought to Goa by the migration of Saraswat
Brahmins who came in search of fertile lands and sustenance. The term
Gomantak, for instance, is the Sankritized toponomic of the state of Goa
and denotes the prosperity of its ­cattle herds. The irony, however, is that the
region of Goa is geo­graph­i­cally and topographically not suited for ­cattle
rearing, and the term clearly references the nomadic Brahmins who came to
its shores in search of lands and resources. Within the latter theory of en-
slavement and ­labor, devadasis ­were primarily “chattel,” enslaved workers,
whose ser­vices shifted into regimes of sex and art a­ fter their migration into
foreign lands. The earliest official mention of the existence of devadasis as
a social group appears in the Goa census of 1904. Of note is the careful
demarcation of subgroups within the larger community; the first figure
lists the number of males recorded ­under the category, and the second lists
the number of females:

Males: Females
Kalavants 305: 420
Devlis 4615: 4051
Bhandis [Slaves] 3752: 4099
Adbaktis [half slaves] 900: 188145

The Gomantak Maratha Samaj, the focus of our study h ­ ere, draws its
members from such complex groupings of Goan devadasis. If the resto-
ration of the devadasi archive has relied on a lost or maligned avatar of
sexuality, the archive of the Gomantak Maratha Samaj, by contrast, denat-
uralizes any such presumptive understanding of the devadasi’s customary
forms, particularly ­under colonialism. In many ways, the Samaj turns to
its own archives to articulate the question of sexuality, not by displacing it
but by folding sexuality into the lineages through which it travels. Tracing
its roots back to early eighteenth-­century Goa, the Gomantak Maratha
Samaj is an obc (Other Backward Castes) community and was established
as a formal organ­ization in 1927 and 1929 in the western states of Goa and
Maharashtra, respectively. It officially became a charitable institution in
1936. The Samaj continues its activities to this day and has from its incep-
tion maintained a community of ten thousand to fifty thousand registered
members. Unlike oft-­circulated histories of devadasis in South Asia that
lament the disappearance or erasure of devadasis, the history of the Samaj
offers no telos of loss and recovery. Instead, the Samaj, from its inception,

Make. Believe · 13
has maintained a continuous, copious, and accessible archive of its own
emergence, embracing rather than disavowing its past and pre­sent attach-
ments to sexuality.
­Counter to well-­documented histories of reform, particularly in south-
ern India, this community’s story in Portuguese Goa underwent very ­little
transformation and exposure ­until the early part of the twentieth ­century.
Members of the Samaj, unlike the devadasi figurations in southern India,
rarely wed deities and ­were not “prostitutes” in any conventional sense of
the word. Rather, ­these devadasis ­were mostly female singers, classically
trained, placed through ceremonies like hath-­lavne (touching hands) into
companionate structures with both men and w ­ omen. Only occasionally
do we find references to dedications to deities through rituals such as the
shens ceremony. And even then, the ceremony appears more as a proxy
wedding in which a girl who is to be dedicated to a god or goddess is wed
to a (surrogate) groom, always represented by another girl dressed as a man
and holding a coconut and a knife.
Portuguese colonial officials also granted Samaj members exemption
from antiprostitution laws, primarily b­ ecause they remained in structures
of serial monogamy, supported by yajemans, both male and female, who
functioned as patrons and partners through the life of the Samaj subject.
The Samaj members ­were also crucially sworn to remain in the spatial
proximity of t­ emples, w ­ hether or not they performed ritual t­ emple roles.
One curious feature of such arrangements was that ­children born to Goan
devadasis ­were often given gender-­neutral names that made accession of
inheritance (particularly land) less judicially contentious, especially a­ fter
the death of a par­tic­u­lar yajeman, or patron. With the passage of the anti-­
devadasi acts, many members gradually made their way to urban spaces like
Bombay in search of work in the newly emergent Hindi film industry. The
success of the Samaj was not restricted to the arts; it extended to fields of
science, lit­er­a­ture, and philosophy.46
Often referred to as Bharatatil ek Aggressor Samaj (an aggressive com-
munity in India), this devadasi diaspora is now routinely lauded (by the left
and the right in India) for its self-­reform and pro­gress. From the immortal
Mangeshkar s­ isters (Lata and Asha) to the first chief minister of in­de­pen­
dent Goa, Dayanand Bandodkar, t­ here are few sectors of Indian society
where the presence of Samaj members cannot be felt.47 In obvious ways, the
presence of this vibrant devadasi diaspora in western India (spliced as it is
between the borders of two competing colonial proj­ects) disrupts estab-
lished histories of sexuality through its survival and geography and holds

14 · introduction
g­ reat potential for a differentiated model of historiography. Devadasis are
studied more in southern India, and rarely in western India. We have h ­ ere
the regional twist: studies of sexuality and colonialism have overwhelm-
48

ingly focused on the affective and temporal weight of British India, with
Portuguese India lurking as the accidental presence in the landscape of co-
lonialism (despite the startling fact that the Portuguese occupied Goa for
nearly 451 years), so we have h ­ ere a South-­South colonial comparison.49
And last but not least, Goan historiography itself, long written off as an
underdeveloped and undertheorized kin of Indian historiography, could
find new flesh within the lineaments of the radical history of the Samaj. As
one scholar writes, it is time for Goan history to move beyond a “kind of
absence,” to brush aside the “shadows that obstruct our attempt to access,
retrieve and understand” our past.50 Yet even as such comparative modes
(regional, South-­South) enrich our understanding of sexuality’s pasts, they
could equally function in ways that are perilously additive, minoritizing
the very histories they seek to make vis­i­ble. That is, the story of the Samaj
must not function as a singular parable of cathartic potentiality, nor of
an abjured geopolitics, resolving historical ambivalence or loss through its
success and emergence. Rather, I w ­ ill argue, the archives of the Samaj must
be read as examples of catachresis, as incitements to analytical reflection
that produce more robust idioms of the historical.
It is impor­tant to note first that ­there are multiple registers of archival
repre­sen­ta­tion at work within the history of the Samaj. On the one hand,
­there are public archives of vocal per­for­mances (many Samaj members have
been classical singers, and the group continues to constitute an impressive
who’s who of classical singers in South Asia) that are available and widely
disseminated.51 Yet such archives are largely generated by non-­Samaj mem-
bers and rarely include information or references on the membership of
­these singers to the Samaj, and they routinely elide any attachment to his-
tories of sexuality. Mostly hagiographical in nature, t­ hese archives of voice
and sound have been routinely utilized to address the centrality of the
kalavants within traditions of Hindustani classical m ­ usic. Indeed, the en-
ergetic circulation of ­these archives by scholars of South Asian classical
­music and m ­ usic aficionados in general has guaranteed that the presence
of the Samaj endures in public view.52
Alternatively, the Samaj’s own archives are massively messy, and contain
multiple genres of archival rec­ords in Marathi, Konkani, and Portuguese,
ranging from minutes of meetings to journals, private correspondence,
flyers, and programs, replete with the minutiae of everyday life in the Samaj.

Make. Believe · 15
Such efflorescence appears startling, almost jarring, pushing against archi-
val expectations of absence and erasure. The Samaj archives are h ­ oused in
open collections in brick-­and-­mortar buildings in Bombay and Panaji and
have always been available for public viewing since their formation in 1929.
I have spent the last fifteen years or so reading and sitting with the materials
in the Samaj archives and have as yet read, at most, about 50 to 60 ­percent
of the available materials.53 In fact, the Samaj’s incitement to archive, as pre-
viously mentioned, is surpassed only by its startling disinterest in the pres-
ervation and circulation of the very materials it continuously produces.
A researcher’s or even a curious visitor’s request for rare materials is met
with relative ease (a feat for anyone working in archives in India!), as one
is directed to the archives without fanfare, and often with a cup of hot chai
to accompany one’s reading.54
A second key feature of the Samaj archives is the relative paucity of “ve-
racity” genres such as memoirs, testimonials, and biographies. Indeed, the
only available biography, to this day, remains Rajaram Rangoji Paigankar’s
Mee kon (Who Am I?) (1969), whose storyline (as we s­ hall see in a l­ater
chapter) is itself mired in the production of a foundational fiction.55 The
privileged archival genre is fiction, written by Samaj members, in the form
of short stories, serialized novels, and novellas that take center stage in the
Samaj’s self-­fashioning proj­ect. Fiction provides the vitalizing properties of
the archive, deliberately rerouting the demand for archival presence, from
conventional evidentiary forms to more imaginative modes of repre­sen­
ta­tion. H
­ ere the “truth” of the Samaj is not what is at stake; rather, what
­matters are the genres of self-­fashioning. Th ­ ese writings (mostly anony-
mous) appear in the monthly journal Samaj Sudharak (1929 to this day)
and are heavi­ly didactic in content, encompassing issues such as education,
marriage, devadasi reform, the perils of prostitution, caste shame, travel,
contraception, sports, and even the evils of gossip.56
More confounding still is the Samaj’s relationship to princi­ples of ar-
chival provenance and circulation. That is, how does the Samaj’s archive
become vis­ib­ le and gather value, mediating the imaginative leap, as David
Squires points out in a dif­fer­ent context, from “historical rec­ord to his-
torical truth”? For Squires, even as histories of sexuality embrace the mu-
nificent returns of the archival turn, less attention is paid to the material
organ­ization of archives, their evidentiary genres, and the multiple prob­
lems of access and circulation.57 As I noted e­ arlier, the archives of the Samaj
have not been read, circulated, or memorialized beyond a repeated refer-
ence to the glories of the Samaj’s success as an aggressive, self-­reforming

16 · introduction
collectivity. Such a historical elision is particularly telling ­because ­there is
no mystery surrounding access to the archives, no governmental bureau-
cracies to accommodate. In the story of the Samaj, archival surplus repeats
itself in a historical calculus so minor, so unspectacular, that it does not ap-
pear to excite historical recuperation. As a historian colleague once asked
me with g­ reat exasperation, Why is this not just a failed archive? If it has
not been read and is so evidently available, surely t­ here must be nothing
­there. The Samaj’s provenance thus marks both archival abundance and
historical minoritization: it is both removed from the archival mandates
that govern minoritized histories and, at the same time, intimately ac-
quainted with them and their most subtle efforts on history-­writing.

Keeping Com­pany

My efforts amplify recent scholarship within caste, slavery, and Indigenous

studies that has also chosen to refuse the mandate of a “show and tell” and/
or “lost and found” historical script. That t­ hese trenchant challenges to
our consumption of times past have overwhelmingly come from scholars
working on histories of minoritization that are attentive to archival econ-
omies of loss, paucity, and/or devaluation is hardly surprising. Echoing
early postcolonial and anti-­imperial critique, much of this scholarship has
pushed back against the repeated demands of a Manichean perspective by
drawing attention to the dangerous consolations of a rhe­toric of blame, or
of a salvific nativism and/or identitarianism. The sterility of established for-
mulations is jettisoned for an intellectual renewal that aspires to supplant
a politics tied to structures of paucity and recovery. A runaway poetics is
needed, Fred Moten writes, that challenges ascriptions of impoverishment,
crafts “a re­sis­tance to constraint and instrumentalization,” and refuses the
constant demand to “perform how mad you are.”58
At this point, I must underscore that my effort in bringing ­these di-
vergent strains of scholarship together is openly directed at pushing us to
examine our own critical genealogies, along with t­ hose we leave aside or
dis/engage even in seemingly shared po­liti­cal proj­ects. My assemblage of
thinkers and field-­formations is thus not meant to suggest compatibil-
ity between the works I cite; more than anything, one must mark the
convergences and divergences within such an amalgam. For instance, histo-
ries of sexuality and slavery in North Amer­i­ca engage unevenly with histories
of sexuality and slavery in South Asia, despite the obvious convergence of

Make. Believe · 17
historical and po­liti­cal antecedents. By this I mean not that ­there has been
no acknowl­edgment of Indian Ocean histories of slavery and sexuality but
more that such acknowl­edgment participates more in a structural econ-
omy of affiliation than in a robustly epistemological one. In other words,
we understand that slavery existed across spatialities and temporalities, even
as we elide what differences in form and content t­ hose variegated histories
make to the very idea of who and what constitutes a slave. As Indrani
Chatterjee reminds us, historians of slavery and sexuality need to liberate
themselves from a Eurocentric racial imagination and cultivate “a vision
larger than that which takes the plantation as its starting point for imaging
slave lives.”59 To not do so is to surrender to the imperialist rhe­toric of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, whose Orientalism literally colors our
narratives of the non-­West.60 Such an elision is equally seen within South
Asia itself, whereby the Atlantic Ocean model of slavery still holds sway
within much con­temporary mobilizations of slave histories, complex local
histories of slave emergence notwithstanding.61 All this to say, let us not
forge false equivalences between minoritized citational practices and ig-
nore the asymmetries at work within and without.
Within South Asia, such pushback against the demand to proffer evi-
dence of one’s historical self is most notably seen within the vibrant field of
Dalit studies. Dalit historiography, ­whether of Dalit actors or their archives,
remains scripted, Milind Wakankar writes, as a heroic transition from silence
(the horror of caste discrimination) to speech (empowerment as caste com-
munities in electoral stakes). What happens, asks Wakankar, if we think
instead on or/of “the cusp,” of historiographical traditions? To think on
the cusp is to catch a “a form of po­liti­cal ­will on the make,” alluding to the
retrospective movement that captures a moment of rupture “that was as yet
open to transformation and change.”62 On the one hand, Wakankar argues,
the recuperation of the Dalit radical medieval poet—­Kabir, for example—­
installs him as a god, as an original prehistory that grants Dalit pasts a
mighty presence, well before the emergence of colonial and/or nationalist
caste formations. On the other hand, even as claims to Kabir restore Dalit
histories, what falls away are Kabir’s attachments to the now-­defunct sect,
the mythical Kapalikas, who, as ­silent figures of mourning, vio­lence, and
death, provide a more textured prelude to historical genealogies of caste.
For Wakankar, to do Dalit historiography on the cusp is to suture speech
and silence, to ask for divergence at the very moment of historical rupture
and recuperation.

18 · introduction
 For more polemical scholars such as Kancha Ilaiah, the ascription of
loss to Dalit histories derives more stridently from an upper-­caste, hege-
monic historiographical model that fosters elitist vernaculars of research
and legibility, bypassing Dalit modes of historical writing. Illiah refuses
such mandates of elitist nationalist historiography in most direct terms:
“The methodology and epistemology that I use,” Illiah writes in one of
his oft-­cited essays, “being what they are, the discussion might appear ‘un-
believable,’ ‘unacceptable,’ or ‘untruthful’ to ­those ‘scholars and thinkers’
who are born and brought up in Hindu families. Further, I deliberately
do not want to take precautions, qualify my statements, footnote my ma-
terial, nuance my claims, for the ­simple reason that my statements are not
meant to be nuanced in the first place.”63 That Illiah’s essay appeared in
volume 9 of the heralded Subaltern Studies Series is hardly a coincidence,
as its mocking foregrounds the disciplining and disciplinary proclivities of
even that po­liti­cally progressive intellectual proj­ect. To that point, Dipesh
Chakrabarty (a founding member of the Subaltern Studies Collective and
coeditor of that volume) acknowledges the difficulties the collective had
in taking Illiah’s work seriously: “I still remember the debate among the
editorial members of Subaltern Studies that preceded our decision to pub-
lish this essay that deliberately—­and as a po­liti­cal gesture—­flouted all the
disciplinary protocols of history and yet claimed to represent the past in a
series that was, a­ fter all, an academic enterprise.”64
A second key feature of Illiah’s critique (which may in some ways pose
even more of a disciplinary threat to Indian historiography) is his indict-
ment of nationalism as the aspirational antidote to the evils of colonialism.
Nationalism becomes the desired historical script that promises to restore
and redeem the losses incurred (especially by subaltern subjects) through
the brutalities of colonialism. Such a binary, Rawat and Satyanarayana
remind us in their recent introduction to Dalit Studies, discourages any
historical study of the vibrant Dalit social and religious reform move-
ments that mobilized the promise of colonial modernity. From “anti-­
untouchability agitations to t­ emple entry movements, to strug­g les for
access to public space and repre­sen­ta­tions,”65 Dalit collective action (par-
ticularly in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries), they note, fore-
grounds anticaste discrimination, often utilizing the colonial state and its
frameworks to fashion its demands. Archives of such Dalit mobilizations
and more exist across multiple registers, yet they remain unreadable within
the annals of nationalist history. Thus, if Dalit histories are now produced

Make. Believe · 19
as untold or lost in modern Indian history, it is more b­ ecause they cannot
be easily assimilated into the folds of a dominant anticolonial nationalist
narrative. Instead, their abundance complicates our narration of the move-
ment of a colonial to postcolonial history, provoking a dif­fer­ent and diffi-
cult shift in our historiographical orientations to the past.66
In a similar vein, scholars of Adivasi and/or tribal historiography in
South Asia, such as Prathama Banerjee, signal the paradox of even claim-
ing such a lost history within current nationalist historiographical practices.
­Here the Adivasi appears as the missing link within narratives of counter-
insurgency and policy, or to dis­appear within the folds of a flawed ethno-
graphic imaginary. While such a historical calculus may well account for the
“disappearance” of most subaltern subjects, Banerjee notes that the figure
of the Adivasi and/or the tribal (distinct from the Dalit) poses an even
more foundational agon. That is, if Adivasis or tribals are “an archaic em-
bodiment of authenticity and radicality, outside of the realm of the mod-
ern, who is the subject around which a field such as adivasi studies might
coalesce in the first place?”67 What is ­there to recover or recuperate if the
very historical category of the Adivasi was cultivated to fuel missionary
and nationalist discourses of improvement and education? For the colonial
and postcolonial state proj­ects to flourish, the Adivasi must remain lost in
time and space, enabling the reproduction of the modern as the tribe’s nec-
essary other. Yet Banerjee is quick to point out that it is no longer sufficient
to simply invoke such a genealogy of construction. ­After all, construction
or not, Adivasis or tribals have been disciplined and governed for over two
centuries and have mobilized within the terms of the very category that
erased them in the first place.
Similar imperatives surface within Indigenous histories (specifically in
North Amer­ic­ a and Asia Pacific) where the recuperation of “Native” loss
is seen as merely reproducing and replicating the homogenizing forces of
settler colonialism. As Joanne Barker writes, it is time to suspend deluded
forms of historical reading, to rail “against the idea of an indigeneity that
was au­then­tic in the past but is culturally and legally vacated in the pre­
sent.” Such ideas of indigeneity, Barker warns, hypostatize a modernist tem-
porality whereby the cele­bration of a glorious past permits the dismissal and
disavowal of a vivid and vast living pre­sent. As she says, “It is a past that even
Indigenous p­ eoples in headdresses are perceived to honor as something
dead and gone.”68 Expanding on such pernicious historical fictions, James
Clifford further cautions against the seductions of returns that incite
claims of owner­ship to a past via a “logic of priority.” To narrate Indigenous

20 · introduction
history, within such a logic of priority, is ironically to decenter Indigenous
historical practices that “give shape to time that question and expand con-
ventional assumptions.”69
While Clifford’s study roams over broader networks of what he calls a
global “présence indigène,” he foregrounds the urgent need for a dif­fer­ent
mode of historical “realism” (of ritual, memory, and affect) that engages
the living pre­sent, provincializing, as it ­were, the dead language of lost rec­
ords and archives.70 Further to this proj­ect, scholars such as Audra Simp-
son have advocated for more foundational shifts in the very ethnographic
and historical forms through which we articulate and recover allegedly lost
Indigenous knowledge and lands. “To fetishize and entrap and distill in-
digenous discourses into memorizable, repeatable rituals for preservation
against a social and po­liti­cal death that was foretold but did not happen,”
she writes, is to tread the territories of the (dangerously) familiar. Instead,
Simpson invokes a dif­fer­ent order of knowing, or what “no one seems to
know,” where the demands for recognition, po­liti­cal life, and identity w ­ ere
all instantiated in refusals. 71

Nowhere has the recuperation for a lost past seemed more palpable
than within histories of Atlantic slavery. As the editors of a recent Social
Text special issue on the question of recovery and slavery note, the limits
of recovery in “the field of Atlantic slavery and freedom” have reshaped the
very par­ameters of historical methods and debate.72 Indeed, nearly e­ very
theoretical account of Atlantic slavery stages the historiography of slavery
as the place where absence and archive meet.73 A similar reading of archi-
val loss, paucity, and erasure even animates scholarship that challenges the
foundationalism of Atlantic slavery as the “origin story” for the African di-
aspora.74 For scholars such as Jennifer Morgan, the enduring seductions of
statistical empiricism concatenate such attachments to loss. Even as Mor-
gan lauds efforts to develop crucial research databases such as the Trans-­
Atlantic Slave Trade Database (tstd) that have led to new research on the
contours and dimensions of the slave trade, she also remains “troubled by
this kind of archival construction.”75 ­After all, data accumulation and modes
of quantification in general, Morgan cautions us, remain enmeshed within
the logic of the very “technology by which Africans are rendered as out-
side the scope of Man.” That historians still remain continually struck by
the difficulty of accessing counterfactual “evidence” of the slave past puz-
zles Morgan, especially as the rec­ords we do have w ­ ere created primarily
to shore up the commercial aspects of the slave trade. Morgan reminds us
that histories of gender and slavery are further erased in databases such as

Make. Believe · 21
tstd ­because ship captains rarely kept rec­ords according to sex ratio. As
such, the multitude of experiences w ­ omen had on t­ hese slave ships remains
unmapped, undocumented, and thus transacted as archival loss.76
The historical inheritance of loss, as is now obvious, is formidably re-
cursive and iterative. Loss and paucity provide the warp and woof of a bet-
ter ­future, all the more so when they carry the promise that if such deficits
are erased, we, who are subjected to both, can somehow be redeemed. And
in e­ very plangent iteration of this promise, the burdens of minoritization
paradoxically demand archives and histories that must equally proffer ar-
guments for their own survival. U ­ nder ­these conditions, when minoritized
subjects have so effectively absorbed and strug­gled with the lineaments of
loss, it becomes even more urgent to ask: What kind of historiography do
we want? A historiography, I would respond, that breaks with such mor-
ibund conventions and summons more abundant and joyful lineages of
possibility and freedom.

Made to Order

My book refuses the conventional reading of South Asia as a region that

provides local historical avatars for Euro-­American histories of sexuality.
Instead, I ask, what would histories of sexuality look like if interrogated
as histories of regions and/or “areas”? As such, the book equally offers a
broader meditation on the politics and poetics of sexuality, geopolitics, and
historiography. Even as South Asia, a fabular geography, provisions the pos-
sibility of archival abundance, it remains convened through epistemology
rather than exemplarity. Individual chapters thus are composed through
the ambit of the archives of the Gomantak Maratha Samaj, its torsioned
histories, summoning us into worlds of make.believe, than to readings of
geopo­liti­cal certitude. Each chapter speaks to the places where historio-
graphical conventions and genres get stuck, go awry, or simply fold back
into recursive habits of search and rescue. The structure of the book is or­
ga­nized around three concepts that have increasingly become the foci of
debates within histories of sexuality: archives (what constitutes historical
evidence), exemplarity (how we read evidence), and geopolitics (where we
read from).
My first chapter, “In the Absence of Reliable Ghosts,” serves both as a
summation of the issues outlined thus far and as a lead-in to the broader
trajectories of the book. For anyone who works within historical archives,

22 · introduction
it would come as no surprise that any hegemonic text making confident
claims to historical truth ­will be destabilized and exceeded by the oper-
ations of counter-­archives, counter-­stories that disrupt any and all ideo-
logical proj­ects being advanced. Such a critical understanding, however,
does not as easily extend to minoritized archives, where the “subversion/re­
sis­tance hypothesis” (despite or perhaps ­because of the contaminations of
Foucault and Subaltern studies) continues to function as difference’s most
consequential and enticing effect. The aura and/or seduction of re­sis­tance
stubbornly lingers, suturing subaltern archives to an oppositional impera-
tive. Even the most rigorous intentions to the contrary have not prevented
the demand for a veracity archive that promises such desired radicality for
histories of minoritized collectivities. What happens, I ask, if we are con-
fronted instead with an archive of sexuality that eschews the consolations
of veracity genres (such as memoirs, testimonials, and biographies), for the
promise of more imaginative genres of repre­sen­ta­tion? The orchestrated
refusal of the Samaj to conform to repre­sen­ta­tional archival forms, even
as it continues to produce an efflorescence of materials, embraces the very
paradox it engenders: the archive remains a central value-­form, even as its
radical transformation is continually demanded. The revelatory veracity of
the archive gives way to a revelatory ­labor that eschews transparency and
celebrates its own continuous (non)production.
My second chapter, “A History I Am Not Writing,” explores what ex-
emplifying readings of the Samaj rec­ords mean for the way we encounter
archives, particularly archives of sexuality. What makes something an ar-
chival exemplar, adequate to the challenge of repre­sen­ta­tion and study?
Why does the writing of a history of sexuality take a par­tic­u­lar narrative
form (specifically in British and Portuguese India), and what creates ob-
stacles to its seamless storytelling? I focus on one such narrative ritual that
continues to inaugurate most historiographical proj­ects of sexuality: the
prob­lem event, the detail, the l­ egal case—in other words, an archival trace
that compresses or even obfuscates historical content, legible only through
reconstructive hermeneutics. For scholars working at the interstices of
sexuality and subalternity, such as myself, the prob­lem event could offer
glimpses of a lost history, the scarcity of historical evidence countered by
the hermeneutical per­for­mance of plenitude as you mine the archival trace
for the promise of historical pre­ce­dence and futurity. The incitement of my
chapter title, “A History I Am Not Writing,” calls for a more paradoxi-
cal ­labor: to read the archival exemplar precisely for what it cannot hold.
What is on offer h ­ ere is not a stabilizing recuperation of historical detail

Make. Believe · 23
but more an exhortation to think the archival exemplar as an absorbing
and abundant discursive presence, reassembled through our ­every reading.
Bypassing the seductive heroics of recuperative historiography, this chap-
ter proffers a dif­fer­ent pathway to historical presence.
My third chapter, “Itinerant Sex,” interrogates how histories of region
constitute robust histories of sexuality and what critical lessons are to be
learned from such a shift in historical orientation. How do histories of
sexuality trou­ble the heightened divide between the de/colonial and the
post/colonial turn? Eschewing the conventional segregation of spatialities
(Latin American studies versus South Asian studies) that often undergirds
the force of the decolonial turn, this chapter engages the emergence of the
Samaj in the fraught contexts of colonial Portuguese India. In so d­ oing, I
pose one central historiographical question: How do the vernaculars, tem-
poralities, and spatialities that make “sex” intelligible as object and archive
summon itinerant geopo­liti­cal forms (Portuguese in South Asia) that are
often left ­behind? Itinerant sex calls for historiographical forms that mud-
dle the theoretical pathways that suture geopolitics to forms (refused or
other­wise) of region, area, nation.
Spatially split between British India and Portuguese India, the available
archival rec­ords of the Samaj outline the peculiar geopo­liti­cal challenges
its members face as sex workers who travel between regions. Samaj mem-
bers express concern with the demands for national belonging and wrestle
more with their place within and outside such regional formations. Even as
Samaj rec­ords (minutes, editorials, judicial and property rec­ords) demon-
strate a re­sis­tance to upper-­caste/Brahmin hegemony, t­ here is no evidence
of any involvement in the burgeoning liberation movements in British or
Portuguese India (India gains in­de­pen­dence in 1947, and Goa is liberated
in 1961). Indeed, the early absence of any collective involvement by the
Samaj in the re­sis­tance movements outside of their local interests speaks
to yet another twist in the tale of the Samaj. In fact, one of the recursive
and fascinating features of this Samaj’s history of sexuality is its refusal or
rather sidelining of any regional attachment, outside of its own formation.
Instead of laying claim to geography as established historical value, the
Samaj, as I ­will demonstrate, strategically mobilizes the politics, desires,
and identities made pos­si­ble by the reach of geopolitics.
The book ends with a short coda, “I Am Not Your Data: Caste, Sexual-
ity, Protest,” an experimental fragment that excerpts three scenes of abun-
dant reading in postcolonial India: from recent protests by trans/queer
activists in India against the 2019 discriminatory Citizens Amendment

24 · introduction
Act, to the radical attenuation of caste amid the dogged brutality of the
current pandemic. Each scene translates histories of caste and sexuality
as remaindered evidentiary forms, ongoing refutations of clarity and easy
categorization.

Imperative

My meditations do not focus, as is clear by now, on archives that can be

considered explic­itly homosexual or transgender. Neither am I invested in
extracting queer value from lost histories of sexuality within the sprawling
landscape of an ever-­changing South Asia. Rather, my turn to abundance
as heuristic speaks to a nonrecuperative history of sexuality that embraces
presence without return or the fear of loss. To theorize a history of abun-
dance is not to be restored to value but, rather, to be set adrift upon more
intrepid economies of meaning—­sometimes harmonious, sometimes
dissonant—­that come together to upend genealogies of historical recuper-
ation and repre­sen­ta­tion.
And fi­nally, this book, more than anything I have previously written, is
the thick subjective effect of a history as it has been lived. The past is not
only usable h ­ ere but always somewhere close at hand. I grew up within
the bawdy, colorful, and expansive lower-­caste politics of the Gomantak
Maratha Samaj, and it is t­ hose familial genealogies that first opened me
up to the urgencies of archives and politics. My questions thus emanate
from t­ hose intimacies; they are of them, but not about them. Contraven-
ing the protocols of reproduction (­whether of collectivity, f­ amily, caste)
was not just a familiar feature of my Samaj life but also a profoundly po­liti­
cal ­matter. One’s history was not a place of capture; it was a compositional
lexicon of self-­making, to be continuously taught, modulated, inhabited,
and shed. I can do no better than to tell that story.

notes

1 I borrow the phrase “inescapable surfeit” from Teju Cole’s focus on the
constant incitement to photo­graph, to document the surfaces of the worlds
we inhabit. “Take lots of photo­graphs,” he writes, is the man­tra of a good
account. See Cole, “Finders Keepers,” 176–80.
2 Some sample texts include Arunima, ­There Comes Papa; Kapur, Erotic
Justice; and Dave, Queer Activism in India.

Make. Believe · 25
 3 See Chatterjee, “When ‘Sexualities’ Floated F ­ ree of Histories in South
Asia.”
4 I am imputing a certain relationality to the thinkers named, even though
they may not always conceive themselves as constituting a cohort. I do
not mean to suggest ­here that Edelman, Love, and Halberstam are uncrit-
ically recuperating languages of loss, lack, and failure, or that they are to
be read as simply fungible within my conceptual formulation. Edelman,
for instance, continually emphasizes a nonredemptive understanding of
sex through his theorizations of negativity and the antisocial. My point
­here is each of their proj­ects speaks (with varied degrees of success) to
new imaginaries within queer theorizations of temporality and affect.
I mean to draw attention more to the per­sis­tence of dominant forms of
queer reading circulating around structuring tropes of loss, lack, and
failure. See Edelman, No ­Future; Edelman, “Ever ­After”; and Halberstam,
Queer Art of Failure. José Muñoz’s landmark Cruising Utopia, for example,
draws on queer of color critique to fashion imaginaries of reparation and
renewal, distinct from a teleology of redemption, that would allay the
injuries of the past through a “utopian” memorialization. See Muñoz,
Cruising Utopia.
5 ­There is a literal cottage industry of texts on the potentiality of melan-
cholia as a productive conceptual structure for thinking gender, sexuality,
and difference. For example, see Eng and Kazanjian, Loss.
6 See Goldberg and Menon, “Queering History”; Love, Feeling Backward;
Freeman, Time Binds and “Still ­After.”
7 Fuss, ­Dying Modern, 4.
8 When I first began to give public talks on this proj­ect, I was often re-
minded by well-­meaning and often concerned colleagues in the US acad­
emy that I was speaking from a privileged position—­that as a tenured
professor in a research institution, I had no idea of how p ­ eople suffered in
­those distant elsewheres. To dismiss loss was to dismiss the very per­sis­
tence of economic inequities, I was told. The irony of such presumptions
about myself notwithstanding, I was struck by how the very insistence of
such reminders was precisely the point I was trying to make. But more on
that ­later . . .
9 Berlant, Cruel Optimism. Berlant’s opus, among many other weighty
questions, speaks to the ethical conditions of nonpossibility u ­ nder
which minoritized subjects carve their relationship to the world. For a
careful genealogy of the proliferation of the concept of precarity, see also
Nyong’o, “Situating Precarity between the Body and the Commons.”
10 See Povinelli, Economies of Abandonment, 3–4, and “The ­Woman on the
Other Side of the Wall.” See also Deer, “Beyond Recovery.”
11 Patel, Risky Bodies and Techno-­Intimacy, 18, 48. Patel writes that “double
binds . . . ​show up with such assiduous, diligent, banal consistency, like

26 · introduction
 the old ­uncle who always arrives at ­every wedding with the same parcel of
ageing hoary jokes.”
12 I am of course drawing from James Clifford’s impor­tant argument around
modes of “salvage ethnography” in his essay “On Ethnographic Allegory.”
13 Stephen Best makes an exemplary case for pushing against the melan-
cholic attachments to the history of slavery. See Best, “On Failing to
Make the Past Pre­sent.” See also Crawford, “The Twenty-­First-­Century
Black Studies Turn to Melancholy.”
14 Hannu Salmi calls for a “princi­ple of plenitude” within historiographi-
cal writing, inspired through scientific models of “black-­hole research.”
Drawing from such a model, a historian must speculate about the infinite
traces surrounding a (lost but pre­sent) object that cannot be seen, but
which must in many ways be “in­ven­ted.” See Salmi, “Cultural History, the
Pos­si­ble, and the Princi­ple of Plenitude.”
15 For an excursus on the relationship between sexuality and archival
hermeneutics, see A. Arondekar, For the Rec­ord.
16 For more on the work of race, sexuality, and incommensurability within
the United States, see Muñoz, “Race, Sex, and the Incommensurate.”
17 For Subaltern studies scholars, such as Dipesh Chakrabarty, the subal-
tern’s incommensurability emerged from their unreadability, from their
“archaic” and “religious/mythical” attachments to nonelitist modes of
historical survival. To attribute value to subaltern historiography was to
make way for multiple modes of historical writing that would take such
attachments seriously. See Chakrabarty, “Subaltern Studies in Retrospect
and Reminiscence.”
18 See A. Arondekar, “Thinking Sex with Geopolitics.” The piece is a re-
sponse to Traub, Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns.
19 Hayot, On Literary Worlds.
20 Tadiar, “Ground Zero,” 174.
21 Spivak, Critique of Postcolonial Reason.
22 Arondekar and Patel, “Area Impossible.”
23 Povinelli, “Radical Worlds.”
24 See Gramling and Dutta, “Translating Transgender,” special issue, tsq,
3. See also DeVun and Tortorici, “Trans, Time, and History”; and Rizki,
“Trans-­, Translation, Transnational.”
25 Reiter, Constructing the Pluriverse. See also Chen, Asia as Method.
26 See Chiang and Wong, “Asia Is Burning.”
27 Macharia, “Queer African Studies.”
28 I am thinking ­here of early feminist work in South Asia, which provided
many of the theoretical vernaculars that have become the mainstay of
histories of gender and sexuality for con­temporary scholars. See, among
­others, Sinha, Colonial Masculinity; Visweswaran, Fictions of Feminist
Ethnography; Tharu, “The Impossible Subject-­Caste and the Gendered

Make. Believe · 27
 Body”; Oldenburg, “Lifestyle as Re­sis­tance”; John and Nair, A Question
of Silence?; Sangari and Vaid, Recasting ­Women; and Mani, Contentious
Traditions.
29 ­There is a (bracketed) prehistory to my lifelong tussle with the logic of
returns. As a child I often visited a Catholic cemetery near my grand­
mother’s ­house in Girgaum in South Mumbai. Given the paucity of open
spaces for ­children to play freely in that area, my cousins and I often
wandered over to the cemetery, which provided us with the rare luxury
of space and exploration. We ­were surrounded by headstones, marked
by scattered details of the lives of strangers, always framed with the in-
vocation “rip.” As lower-­caste Hindus (lapsed or other­wise) and staunch
converts to the doctrine of reincarnation, rip always read to us as an
active “Return If Pos­si­ble,” not the sanctuary of a place of rest!
30 Saksena, Seth, and Biswas, “Study on Issue of False Scheduled Caste /
Scheduled Tribe Certificates,” 102.
31 Gatade, “Phenomenon of False Caste Certificates.”
32 ­There is of course much more to be said about debates around the push
­toward digitalization. On the one hand, as Brian Connolly asks (partic-
ularly in research on nineteenth-­century North American history), does
the digital availability of multiple archival genres of evidence produce a
new and more problematic empiricism? Does the access to archives over-
determine the value ceded to written materials and more? On the other
hand, literary scholars of early modern Eu­rope, such as Elizabeth Wil-
liamson, speak to the limits of digitalization within early modern histo-
ries of accumulation and access: How does it cover over the gaps, or erase
the abundance of multiple reading practices? While both Connolly and
Williamson make sound cases for the limits of digitalization, I do have
to note with some irony ­here that for most archives in the global South,
digitalization is not even an option open for consideration. See Connolly,
“Against Accumulation”; Williamson, “Abundance and Access”; and
Balachandran, “Documents, Digitisation and History.” For a discussion
of the challenges of digitalization and access in South Asia, see “State of
the Archive,” Archive and Access (blog), https://­publicarchives​.­wordpress​
.­com​/­state​-­of​-­the​- ­archive​-­2​/­.
33 Navaro-­Yashin, “Make-­Believe Papers, ­Legal Forms and the Counterfeit.”
34 The 2014 NALSA case judgment led to the recognition of transgender
­people as the “third gender” by the Supreme Court of India, affirming
that the fundamental rights granted ­under the Constitution of India
would equally extend to them. However, the terms of such judicial
recognition have yet to translate materially for most transgender subjects
who continue to survive in conditions of economic and social precarity.
See https://­thewire​.­in​/­gender​/­over​-­two​-­years​- ­after​-­landmark​-­judgment​
-­transgender​-­people​- ­are​-­still​-­struggling.

28 · introduction
35 For excellent analyses, see Bhan, “For All That We May Become”; and
Dutta, “Contradictory Tendencies.”
36 To understand the complications of caste verifiability and discrimination
in postcolonial India, see, for example, Daniyal, “As bjp mp Mounts ‘Creamy
Layer’ Revolt against His Party, What Is Modi Government Thinking?”
37 Pérez, “The Rhe­toric of Empire.”
38 R. F. Burton, Goa and the Blue Mountains, 118–35.
39 R. F. Burton, Goa and the Blue Mountains, 119.
40 R. F. Burton, Goa and the Blue Mountains, 125.
41 See entries for “bayadere,” “nautch girl,” and “dancing girl” in Yule and
Burnell, Hobson-­Jobson.
42 Amita Kanekar provides a detailed demystification of the so-­called
pillage and rescue of Goan ­temples during Portuguese colonial rule and
beyond. See Kanekar, “Architecture, Nationalism, and the Fleeting Hey-
day of the Goan ­Temple.”
43 Sarkar, “Dedication to the Altar,” 145–51.
44 Kakodkar, “The Portuguese and Kalavants.” I am grateful to Dr. Kakod-
kar, se­nior librarian (retired) at Goa University, for her invaluable help in
locating crucial sources on Kalavants in the Historical Archives of Goa.
She is the only scholar who has yet worked extensively on cata­loguing the
history of the Gomantak Maratha Samaj.
45 Sa, “­Here Lived Batabai.”
46 Kakodkar, “Devadasis of Goa.” While female singers such as Moghubai
Kurdikar, Kesarbai Kerkar, Lata Mangeshkar, and Kishori Amonkar remain
the best-­known Gomantak Maratha Samaj members, ­others of note
include the first composer of Marathi musical drama, Hirabai Pednekar;
a former chief minister of Goa, Shashikala Kakodkar; and Sulochana
Katkar, retired president of the Goa Congress.
47 For more historical detail on the emergence of the Samaj, see A.
Arondekar, “Subject to Sex.” Other texts that gloss briefly on the
history of the Samaj include Bhobe, Kalavant Gomantak; Khedekar,
Gomantak Lok Kala; and Satoskar, Gomantak Prakriti ani Sanskriti.
For the most recent hagiographical study of the Samaj, see Verenkar,
Prerarna Rukh.
48 ­There is a small and well-­cited set of writings on the cultural history
of devadasis in southern India. Some key texts include Srinivasan,
“­Temple ‘Prostitution’ and Community Reform”; Kersenboom-­Story,
Nityasumańgalī-­Devadasi Tradition in South India; Kamble, Devadasi
ani Nagnapuja; Shankar, Devadasi Cult; Marglin, Wives of the God-­King;
Chakraborthy, ­Women as Devadasis; Ramberg, Given to the Goddess; and
Soneji, Unfinished Gestures.
49 Goa’s official liberation came on December 19, 1961, when the Indian
army moved in against the Portuguese garrisons as part of Operation

Make. Believe · 29
 Vijay. Yet this late “liberation” by and into the Indian state did not come
without a fair share of controversy and resentment. For many Goan
historians and nationalists, Prime Minister Nehru’s “soft policy” against
the dictatorship of Portuguese rule provided late relief and relegated Goa
to an extended state of historical stasis and neglect. See Shirodkar, Goa’s
Strug­gle for Freedom; Deora, Liberation of Goa, Daman, and Diu; and
Rubinoff, India’s Use of Force in Goa.
50 Trichur, “Politics of Goan Historiography,” 268. For a further sense of
the peculiarity of Portuguese colonialism and its afterlife within Goan
historiography, see de Sousa Santos, “Between Prospero and Caliban.”
51 A small sampling of notable singers from the Samaj between 1930 and 1959
(all ­women) would include Saroj Welingkar, Tarabai Shirodkar, Saraswati
Rane, Kumodini Pednekar, Kesarbai Kerkar, and Mogubai Kurdikar.
52 An excellent example of such elisions is Bakhle’s Two Men and ­Music.
53 My first serious research forays into the Samaj archives began in early
2008. I was ­eager to collect all necessary permissions and authoriza-
tions to quote from and/or reprint archival materials as needed. When
I brought this question up to the Samaj’s board of trustees, the response
was again one of consternation. The question of owner­ship and copyright
was not one they had considered, and as such, they w ­ ere pushed to think
of some pro­cess that would satisfy academic protocols. ­After some delib-
eration, I was asked to submit a letter of request to the Samaj collectivity
at large, which would then be published in the monthly Samaj news-
letter. The letter (written in Marathi) sought permission to work on the
Samaj archives and clearly stated that if any member had objections to my
research efforts, he/she/they should notify the board of trustees immedi-
ately. ­After three months had passed and no letter or call of objection was
filed, the board of trustees drafted an official note of authorization on their
letterhead, granting me permission to read, cite, and reprint any and all part
of their archives. My letter of request and the Samaj’s letter of permission
acceding to my request are now both part of the extant Samaj archives.
54 Historians routinely and understandably expend much energy speak-
ing to the torturous difficulties of accessing materials as they negotiate
innumerable bureaucratic po­l iti­cal and communal challenges to archival
research, specifically in sites such as postcolonial South Asia. See, for in-
stance, A. Burton, Archive Stories; and Blouin and Rosenberg, Archives,
Documentation, and Institutions of Social Memory. In an effort to combat
such difficulties, ­t here has been an increasing push among scholars
based in South Asia to encourage more open-­access and digitalized
archives. Such efforts purport to not just remedy questions of access
but also endeavor to create an entire alternative imaginary for archival
composition. The website Archives and Access, launched by scholars such

30 · introduction
 as Rochelle Pinto et al., is a wonderful example of such efforts: https://­
publicarchives​.­wordpress​.­com​/­.
55 Henry Scholberg’s exhaustive and much-­cited work Bibliography of Goa
and the Portuguese in India lists Paigankar’s text as the only available
published biography on the social lives of devadasis in Goa (121, listing
D148). However, even such an appearance in an erstwhile authoritative
bibliography of Goan texts seems staged to garner attention (the entry
occupies ten lines—­more than any other entry), given the name of the
Scholberg’s research collaborator in Goa: Mrs. Archana Kakodkar. Kako-
dkar has spent many years as a se­nior librarian at the University of Goa
and is herself a member of the Gomantak Maratha Samaj.
56 The bulk of the archives are ­housed at the Gomantak Maratha Samaj
Society building in Mumbai, India. In 2004, the Samaj offices w ­ ere
moved from Gomantak Maratha Samaj Sadan, 345 V.P. Road, Bombay
400004 to Sitladevi Co-op. Housing Society Ltd., 7–16/B Wing, D. N.
Nagar, New Link Road, Andheri (W), Mumbai 400053. A partial archive
can be found at the Gomantak Maratha Samaj, Dayanand Smriti, Swami
Vivekanand Marg, Panaji 403001, Goa.
57 Squires, “Roger Casement’s Queer Archive,” 596.
58 Moten, “Black Optimism / Black Operation.” This talk contains many of
the observations that were published ­later in the oft-­cited essay “Black
Operations.”
59 Indrani Chatterjee, “Decolonizing the History of Slavery,” work in progress.
60 Chatterjee has made this point repeatedly and poignantly in all her writ-
ings. Yet her challenges have not been sufficiently taken up. The sentence
cited ­here is excerpted from a work in pro­gress that provides an overview
of slavery and its histories of difference in South Asia.
61 ­There are, of course, groups like the Dalit Panthers to highlight histories
of the Black Panthers and histories of black re­sis­tance that draw from
the strug­gles of “untouchables” in India. But as of now, t­ here is no extant
scholarship on the longer historical intersection of the two fields. See A.
Arondekar, “What More Remains.”
62 Wakankar, “The Question of a Prehistory.” Kabir, the feisty progenitor of
Dalit politics and protest, gifts a much-­desired individuality to the non/
human, untouchable Dalit subject through his singular achievements as
bard and mystic.
63 For a defining account of the challenges posed by Dalit historiography,
see Ilaiah, “Productive ­Labour, Consciousness, and History,” 127–64.
64 Quoted in Chakrabarty, “The Public Life of History,” 158.
65 Rawat and Satyanarayana, “Dalat Studies,” 10.
66 For a broader review of the shifts in Dalit historiography, see also Jangam,
“Dalit Paradigm”; Rege, “‘Real Feminism’ and Dalit ­Women”; Paik, “Am-

Make. Believe · 31
 chya jalmachi chittarkatha (The Bioscope of Our Lives)”; and Pawar and
Moon, We Also Made History.
67 Banerjee, “Writing the Adivasi,” 132. See also Pandey, Unarchived
Histories.
68 Barker, Critically Sovereign, 3.
69 Clifford, Returns, 15.
70 Clifford, Returns, 13.
71 Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus, 99. See also Rifkin’s excellent study, When
Did Indians Become Straight; and Byrd, “ ‘In the City of Blinding Lights.’ ”
72 Helton et al., “The Question of Recovery,” 1.
73 Saidiya Hartman and Tavia Nyong’o, for example, have brilliantly argued
(albeit in dif­fer­ent registers of fiction and per­for­mance) for the sustain-
ing narrative of critical/Afro fabulation. For both, fabulation, in its multi-
ple avatars, emulates, fashions, and enlivens lost “wayward” gendered and
performing subjects. For both scholars, the historical inheritance of loss
and absence remains the structural force b ­ ehind any kind of rewriting.
See Hartman, “The Anarchy of Colored Girls Assembled in a Riotous
Manner”; and Nyong’o, Afro Fabulations.
74 Best, “On Failing to Make the Past Pre­sent.”
75 Morgan, “Accounting for the ‘Most Excruciating Torment,’ ” 188.
76 Morgan, “Accounting for the ‘Most Excruciating Torment,’ ” 188–91. For
further reading on the entanglements of archival hermeneutics, gender,
and histories of slavery, see Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives.

32 · introduction
 chapter one

In the Absence of
Reliable Ghosts
Archives

In the absence of reliable ghosts I made aria,

Coughing into emptiness, and it came
A west wind from the plains with its arbitrary arsenal:
Torn sails from the Ganga river,
Bits of spurned silk,
Strips of jute to be fashioned into lines,
What words stake—­sentence and make believe
A lyric summoning.
—­meena alexander, “Birthplace (with Buried Stones)”

One can no longer broach the idea of the archive without a few rehearsals
of some settled axioms. We know altogether too well, for instance, that
nowhere are the shifts in histories of sexuality, or in historiography writ
large, more forcefully displayed than in the recent debates around archives.
The archive is the value-­form of our history of the pre­sent. No longer con-
fined to brick-­and-­mortar state edifices, the revitalization of the archive
or the archival turn has meant “more” materials and/or evidence, and a
summoning of alternative archival imaginaries. For histories of sexuality of
the global South, more significantly, the archive has become a figuration
of such allure that it has produced an explosion of materials that roam over
genres, geopolitics, histories, cultural experiences, and more. Archives are
now collective ambitions, the primary placeholders of futurity and rights.1
This chapter arises from my commitment to, and frustration with, the
current archival turn.2 My commitment is to an archival hermeneutic
that sutures histories of area to histories of sexuality, without recourse to
analogy or structural affiliation. My frustration is that such an enterprise
may well be seen as too ambitious, too geopo­liti­cally diffuse, to produce
any practical method or theory. ­After all, loss, scarcity and erasure are still
metonymically coupled with historical archives of sexuality in the global
South—­more specifically, in South Asia, as is the case ­here. Such a cou-
pling has become, if anything, even more emphatic in the postcolonial/
decolonial moment. Even the recent efflorescence of scholarship around
histories of sexualities in elsewhere geographies has done l­ ittle to remedy
such a coupling of archival loss with anachronistic geographies (Anne
­McClintock sharply reminded us of such formulations all ­those years ago).3
As my coeditor Geeta Patel and I noted in our special issue for glq: A Jour-
nal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, histories of subaltern sexuality remain an
“area impossible,” worthy exemplars of itinerant archival forms but bereft
of epistemological value.4
I have now spent over two de­cades deliberating on the continued recu-
peration of the historical archive, grappling throughout with the height-
ened hermeneutical demands placed on conjoined histories of sexuality
and region. It is not just that we read for the lost and devalued archives
of sexuality in the global South but that, in the very act of reading, we
continue to keep them as such. As I noted in my introduction, if, in my
previous work, I focused more on the seductions and occlusions of lost
and found archives within subaltern geographies such as South Asia, I am
drawn ­here more to the per­sis­tence of archival loss as an origin story for his-
tories of sexuality.5 Indeed, much of what I ­will argue invites a movement
away from the recursive archival dialectic of fulfillment and impoverishment
as the pathway to historical futurity. Two questions are at stake: What
happens if minoritized collectivities anticipate such accretions of loss and
therefore curate archives that activate the profits that such losses should
or ­will produce? What archives do we summon, I want to ask, “in the ab-
sence of (such) reliable ghosts?” Rather than dismiss the pull of loss within
sexuality studies, I am pushing for a more strategic and subaltern archival
pragmatism, one where we extract value from the hegemonic historical
form (lost archives must be resurrected, found, produced for f­ uture gains)
precisely as we attenuate the very modes of its re/production.

34 · chapter one
 To be sure, such an interest in alternative archival modes of re/produc-
tion can be seen most vividly within scholarship that mediates histories
of slavery and colonialism, and not as much within histories of sexuality.
From the re/possession of archives of the enslaved,6 to archiving the un-
speakable, and the dead,7 to name a select few, t­ here is a discernible shift in
the ways we now recuperate and/or materialize minoritized archives of the
historical past. The analytics of recursive diagnosis (we know why our histo-
ries are not vis­i­ble) gives way to more generative histories of emergence, most
notably within histories of regions and/or areas.8 Even as Achille Mbembe’s
oft-­cited “chronophagy of the state” (i.e., the state both destroys and cre-
ates selective archives of colonial/postcolonial memorialization) contin-
ues to hold sway, t­ here is now a more concerted effort to think beyond
the damning circularity of that diagnosis.9 If the colonial state (in all its
varied geopo­liti­cal and temporal forms) was marked by forms of archival
destruction, then one is urged to think post/decoloniality as the promise
of reconstruction and reparation. The question of the archive continues to
serve as a paradigmatic exemplar both of the abuses of the colonial rule and
of the promise of reform its abolition offers.
That archives of minoritized collectivities are often called on to materi-
alize histories of difference in preselected genres and lineages of evidence,
in the language of “reliable ghosts,” is made even clearer when it comes to
“vexed” geopo­liti­cal markers such as the ­Middle East. For historians, such
as Omnia El Shakry, the perils of such a colonial “history without docu-
ments” in decimated geographies such as the broader ­Middle East require a
closer look at the “compositional logics” of the idea of the archive itself. To
script histories of the ­Middle East is to script histories of archival destruc-
tion. Decolonizing such archival imaginaries of perpetual destruction, El
Shakry writes, requires that we reassemble and refute the very logics that
found an archive’s intelligibility to historical analy­sis. Within “vexed” ge-
ographies, such as the ­Middle East, El Shakry argues, secular nationalism
and radical Islamism equally partake of and produce decolonial archival
imaginaries. To refuse the centrality of Islamist writing and thought, and/
or to imagine the pro­cess of decolonizing archives as a purely “secular”
proj­ect, is to literalize the very logics of Mbembe’s “chronophagy.” In other
words, even as we attempt to reconstruct histories of colonized pasts, it is
equally urgent that such efforts fully and inventively incorporate nonsec-
ular (in this case, Islamist) writings about subjecthood and freedom. Such
writings, as El Shakry reminds us, w ­ ere never quite lost or dis­appeared;
more precisely, they w ­ ere routinely written out of a more conventional and

In the Absence of Reliable Ghosts · 35

secular history of the ­Middle East.10 ­Here the destruction of archives is
less about the absence of historical evidence and more about the strategic
devaluation of one set of materials over the other. As Ariella Azoulay writes
(when speaking specifically on histories of Palestine), one must precisely
unlearn such habits of the imperial archive to make room for more radical
and potential histories.11
In what follows, I w­ ill turn to an archive of sexuality where the language
of loss has slipped into the granular smoothness of the everyday, breaking
with its centrality as heuristic origin story. If, at first glance, the ethical
responsibility of an archive is to host wor(l)ds that may other­wise be lost,
in the end its central obligation may be to provide wor(l)ds that may never
have left. What to make, then, of an archive that resists recuperative his-
toriography’s most cherished man­tra: recover, restore, redress? Rather, the
archive I w­ ill proffer h
­ ere is an abundant ecosystem, at once imaginative
and real, less a recordkeeper of lost lives, more a potential epistemology for
how we know, translate, and amplify our relationship to the past.

That Thrilling Dark Night

“Bundachi tee romanchkari kaari raatr (A thrilling dark night of insurrec-

tion). May 25, 1921. It is 10 p.m., and we are ­under attack. Our ­house has
been surrounded on all four sides, and I can hear loud cries and whistles
as stones and rocks pummel our doors and rooftop. I run to the courtyard
to see all the w­ omen and c­ hildren huddled together in fear. As the attack
escalates, the ­children begin to lose control and defecate on themselves in
fear. The ­women scream till their throats run dry, only to realize that ­there
is no w­ ater left in the h
­ ouse. My wife, who is very ill, unable to bear the
stress, falls to the ground in shock. I run to the rooftop, with my gun in
hand, and shoot aimlessly into the darkness of the night, unsure ­whether
I am killing or ­will be killed. I scream out into the night, and suddenly the
attackers retreat, and an eerie calm returns.”
Thus goes my translated summary of an account written by R ­ ajaram
Rangoji Paigankar, the son of a kalavantin—­l iterally, a term used
for ­women with kala (art), a subgrouping within the Goan devadasi
­structure—in the first volume of his much-­heralded autobiography, Mee
kon (Who Am I?).12 The attack takes place in Paigin, a small village in the
taluka (area) of Cancona, southern Goa, a key stronghold of the Goan

36 · chapter one
devadasi community. Once morning breaks, Paigankar recounts the events
to the village headman, who accompanies him back home to inspect and
corroborate the damage done to his h ­ ouse­hold. In due course, Paigankar
and his extended ­family of twenty-­five ­women and ­children abandon their
home and seek shelter in a neighboring village.
­There is, of course, as is to be expected in any narrative retelling, a pre-
history to the halla (attack). Four days ­earlier, on May 21, 1921, Paigankar
and his comrades hold a general Satyanarayan pooja (a religious ritual that
celebrates Lord Satyanarayana, an avatar of Lord Vishnu, and is often held
to commemorate an auspicious occasion or to ward off impending evil),
calling for a refusal of caste hierarchies and religious differences. An en-
thusiastic crowd of over a thousand ­people from five neighboring villages
gathers, composed primarily of the Deuli and Bande castes (the lowest
subgroupings of the Devadasi community), a smattering of curious Por-
tuguese officials, and a few breakaway Saraswat Brahmins. Enraged by the
repeated caste humiliation and sexual exploitation suffered by the Deva-
dasi families at the hands of the Saraswat Brahmins, Paigankar demands an
end to Brahmin hegemony and speaks passionately at the pooja about the
need for education and reform. Yet despite all the excitement and support
of the gathered crowd, the pooja remains unfinished. No purohit (priest) is
willing to step forward to complete the rites, fearful of incurring the wrath
of the power­ful Saraswats. And the wrath of the Brahmins does follow.
Paigankar and the larger Devadasi community in Paigin are immediately
banned from all social functions, their lands confiscated, their businesses
shut down, and a general sanction is imposed against all of their interac-
tions. Paigankar is seen as the key protagonist in an escalating drama of
anti-­Brahmin sentiment and is asked to appear before the ruling Brahmin
council. Even worse, hundreds of Brahmin youth are rumored to have
taken up arms in retaliation and threaten to attack and destroy Paigan-
kar and his followers. Th ­ ere are signs that such anti-­Brahmin activities are
spreading apace in southern Goa: similar poojas are said to be taking place
in nearby Lolegaon, a second stronghold of Saraswat Brahmin hegemony.
The scene is set for the inevitable events of that thrilling dark night.13
­After the attack, another extraordinary set of events follows. Paigankar
and twenty-­five kalavantins from his village travel to Panjim, acquire l­egal
repre­sen­ta­tion, and submit a writ appeal to the governador-­general (governor
general) of Portuguese Goa, Jaime Alberto de Castro Morais (1920–25). In
the appeal, Paigankar et al. write,

In the Absence of Reliable Ghosts · 37

 We, a Gayak Kalavant Samaj [community of singers and artists], based
in Paigin, are endeavoring to f­ ree ourselves. We aspire to be worthy cit-
izens of Portugal by emancipating our w ­ omen from prostitution and by
advocating education and marriage. The Saraswat Brahmins find our goals
objectionable and have attempted to punish us by confiscating our lands,
levying fines, refusing us access to all basic ser­vices, and by attacking the
­houses we live in. They have done so in the name of the Portuguese state.
If this is indeed your law, then we wish to leave our village and ask permis-
sion to migrate to British India. If we are asked to stay, we would like
to petition the Saraswat Brahmins for damages and compensation.14

In many ways, such a strategic appeal to the patronage of the Portuguese state
is hardly surprising given the progressive po­liti­cal climate of the pre-­Salazar
era in Goa, and the protracted geopo­liti­cal claims of the so-­called Velhas and
Novas Conquistas (Old and New Conquests) in Portuguese Goa. Often re-
ferred to as the Republican period in Goan history, the period between
1900 and 1926 has been heralded as a time of re­nais­sance for Goan arts,
culture, and politics.15 Such a re­nais­sance, however, must be understood
within the economic, social, and po­liti­cal demarcations of the more de-
veloped coastal talukas of the “Old Conquests”: Ilhas, Bardez, Salcete, and
Mormugao, conquered first by the Portuguese in the sixteenth ­century, and
impacted more directly by the advent of Portuguese colonialism. The “New
Conquests,” acquired from the Marathas in the eigh­teenth c­ entury, in-
cluded the talukas not directly along the coast, namely, Pernem, Bicholim,
Satari, Ponda, Sanguem, Quepem, and Paigankar’s taluka, Cancona. ­These
talukas lacked the density of population and economic heft of the areas
­under the Old Conquest. One positive by-­product of such geopo­liti­cal de-
marcations, some scholars argue, was that the New Conquests ­were less af-
fected by the brutal proj­ect of Portuguese conversion (1560–1812) and ­were,
by and large, left alone to flourish or perish at their own peril, at least till the
discovery of raw materials and the rise of the mining industry. This differ-
ence in rule also translated to language acquisition, as the New Conquests
had more Marathi speakers, while the Old Conquests had the mono­poly
on Portuguese and En­g lish speakers.16 Goan devadasis ­were to be found
more predominantly in the New Conquests, where Hinduism (allegedly)
thrived with less persecution and where ­temples remained relatively un-
scathed.17 The census of 1920, for example, the year before this halla (at-
tack) takes place, notes that Goa officially had 405 bailadeiras (dancing
girls), mostly located within the talukas of the New Conquests.18

38 · chapter one
 Thus, it would come as less of a surprise that Governor Morais responds
positively and in an unpre­ce­dented fashion to the submitted appeal. So
moved is Morais by the plight of the distraught ­women accompanying
Paigankar that he immediately censures the Saraswat Brahmin commu-
nity of Paigin and ­orders official protection for the kalavants. News of the
appeal and its aftermath spread like wildfire all across Goa, and editorials
appear in both the Portuguese and the vernacular press, as the kalavantins
appear to have incited the beginning of a grassroots re­sis­tance against Brah-
min hegemony. And last but not least, the governor’s judgment founds the
basis of the first alleged l­egal case filed against Brahmins by a lower-­caste
community in Portuguese Goa. I say “alleged” h ­ ere b­ ecause t­ here are no
available archival rec­ords of the case, ­either in the Goa state archives or in
the Portuguese colonial archives in Lisbon. However, the case, Kalavantin
Bhima versus the Saraswat Council of Paigin, is repeatedly referenced in
Paigankar’s biography as a mark of the community’s successful campaign
for reform. The Brahmins, we are told, are asked to return the seized lands
and monetarily compensate the kalavants for lost revenue and damaged
property.19

1.1 and 1.2 Front cover and title page of Rajaram Rangoji Paigankar’s Mee kon,
vol. 2 (1971). A signed copy of the text is archived in the Gomantak Maratha Samaj,
Mumbai, India. Courtesy of the samaj

In the Absence of Reliable Ghosts · 39

 But just as his readers are ready to ­settle into this rousing account of
brave re­sis­tance, Paigankar reveals an even more thrilling twist to the tale.
In the opening gambit of the second volume of his autobiography, titled “Mee
gharavar halla ka ghadvoon aanla?” (“Why Did I Stage the Attack on My
House?”), Paigankar explains that the attack was in fact “ek saubhadr natak”
(a strategic drama), directed precisely to protect and advance the interests
of kalavantins. Recall h ­ ere that the description of the attack appears in the
first volume of Paigankar’s biography. His words underscore the constant hu-
miliation experienced by the male and female members of his community, a
humiliation that precipitates the ritual of the reformist Satyanarayan pooja.
For example, Paigankar recounts his degrading experiences at the residence
of a local Saraswat Brahmin where he is invited for a meal, only to then be
asked to partake of the food on a soiled plate used to feed animals.20 Such
experiences are compounded by the fact that the yajemans (patrons) who
frequent kalavantin h ­ ouses are themselves Saraswat Brahmins. Paigankar’s
own bio-­father, a well-­known Saraswat businessman in the village, aggravates
the situation further by urging Paigankar to appear before a Brahmin village
council and pledge contrition for his actions. Paigankar even attempts to
contest a l­ egal claim against the seizure of kalavantin lands by the Brahmins,
but his efforts are thwarted by a lack of funds and a general fear of Brahmin
reprisal. With the sanctions against the kalavantins worsening each day, a
sense of urgency and desperation defines their ­every word and action.
It is at this point in the drama, we are told, that Paigankar, at the behest
of his best friend and lover, the kalavantin Bhima, and in complete secrecy,
persuades six comrades to attack his home on that fateful night. The com-
rades are given detailed instructions about when they should attack, from
which vantage point, and for how long. Each individual is asked to re-
cite prepared lines explaining their whereabouts at a neighbor’s residence,
should any of them be questioned a­ fter the attack. Not a soul is told of
the carefully orchestrated attack, except ­those directly involved, and (as
we have seen through the extreme physical discomfort experienced by all)
even Paigankar’s ­family members remain in the dark. Such secrecy, writes
Paigankar, guarantees the narrative heft of the attack as the heinous work
of frenzied Saraswat youth. Bhima, the young kalavantin, who serves as
the director ­behind the scenes, sets the stage perfectly for that fateful night
of insurrection. Mobilizing established economies of rumor, fear, and hu-
miliation, Bhima, along with her ­sister kalavantins, ensures that the larger
village community truly embraces and anticipates the fiction of the attack.
Guns are mysteriously set off around kalavantin homes previous to the

40 · chapter one
night of the attack, and a general fear of Saraswat retaliation suffuses all
conversation.21 An attack on Paigankar’s home thus provides the necessary
climax to such calculated and frenzied fear, so perfectly scripted are the
conditions of its production. And the staging, as we already know, does
produce its desired effects. In addition to the alleged case against the Saras-
wats, a school is also established for the kalavantin community in Paigin
(through the support of the Portuguese state) that exists to this day.22

The Kala of the Archive

Does the revelation that the halla (attack) was so deftly staged denude it
of salvific historical value, or does its narrative veracity (but, in fact, an
event was being staged . . .) inaugurate a dif­fer­ent orientation to archival
production? Let me explain what I mean. This staged event provides an
alternate historiographical model that refuses the stability of a spectacle, to
hold or destroy, and focuses more on the salvific forms archives are asked
to assume. That is, the halla opens up an archival space of radical repre-
sentability, self-­consciously replete with the figurations necessary to event-­
making and loss. For if a minoritized collectivity aspires to a memorable
and memorializable history, the best qualification that it can acquire is an
event of native re­sis­tance. In the case of the staged attack, Paigankar him-
self exhibits a keen understanding of such expectations as he situates his
repre­sen­ta­tional tactics within a longer, routinized, and mythical/po­liti­cal
demand for salvific forms. Comparing himself to Subhadra (in the famous
staged kidnapping of Arjun by Subhadra), Shivaji, and a long line of histor-
ical dupers within received Indian (read Hinducentric) history, Paigankar
asks his readers to recapitalize our po­liti­cal commitment to compensation
through an understanding of the staging of archives. The architecture of
the mob halla, too, reprises a set of repre­sen­ta­tions that are central to any
subaltern history of opposition or re­sis­tance.23 Turning to canny mimicry,
Paigankar’s staged halla brings with it a growing recognition that signature
events may have been much less monumental than ­imagined. Within the
lineaments of the story, Paigankar accesses e­ arlier, stylized repertoires of
repre­sen­ta­tion that render the languages of empire through the revered ar-
chitecture of Hindu mythologies. Thus, ­there can be no refusal of Paigan-
kar’s archive, nestled, as it is, within established histories of méconnaissance
and hoax. ­These archival repertoires (to play with Diana Taylor’s formu-
lation) disinvest from the plots of social realism’s truth telling, instead

In the Absence of Reliable Ghosts · 41

inviting us to reenact the archival event through the craft and craftiness of
survival—­this is the kala (the art, the aesthetics) of the archive.
In so ­doing, Paigankar subjects the veracity archive of sexuality to a cru-
cial modification; he produces repeated evidence of the staging of the halla
(in the second volume, as noted above) such that we are, as readers, asked
to retool our foundational epistemologies undergirding historical recuper-
ation. Much as it may resemble a refusal of the archive, and of history’s in-
vestment in it, Paigankar’s revelation (“Why did I stage this attack?”) may
be extending a more strategic attachment. Far from signaling the death of
the archive, Paigankar’s revelation may represent instead a much more in-
genious archival ruse: we are asked to negotiate the modalities of archival
repre­sen­ta­tion and recognition, to document, as it ­were, the staging of a
rec­ord. The ethical burden shifts away from the literal translation of the
historical rec­ord to thinking more of its literariness, its kala in making
a history pos­si­ble. H
­ ere the archive defines itself through a deliberate
hermeneutics of perfidiousness, through what Rey Chow has called a
“situation, dramatization, staging, picture frame, win­dow, and above all
as the assemblage, or installation of a critical aperture, a supplemental
time space.”24 Cautioning his readers against the seductions of a memo-
rable archival event (the orchestrated attack with a full cast of characters),
Paigankar intimates instead that the caste humiliations of the Samaj ges-
ture ­toward a more ordinary, relentless, and brutal ecosystem—­the very
opposite of a dramatic, scripted, and highly vis­i­ble attack.
Such a supplementary archive equally draws attention to the weight of
origins as places of commencement within liberationist histories of sex-
uality (individual and/or collective). The challenge ­here is to not suture
the place of origins to a landscape of repetitive loss, to a set of recursive
displacements or suspended beginnings. Rather, as Elspeth Probyn writes
(quoting Foucault), what would it mean to play with the “solemnities of
origin,” particularly when it comes to the histories of sexuality?25 ­After all,
Paigankar’s ultimate disclosure of the fake halla, and the ease with which
he provides details of the staging, deploys the very weight of the origin it
undoes, and attests to the tenacity of such repre­sen­ta­tional conventions.
Paigankar’s revelation (“Why did I stage this attack?”) is meant to ward
off the debunking of an archive that he at once promotes and resists. His
disclosure deftly stops short of impugning the form from which it draws
its historical authority; rather, Paigankar’s belated “veracity” expands the
idea of an archive by anticipating its compensations. Even as we examine
the epistemological techniques that transform Paigankar’s halla into an

42 · chapter one
apocryphal event (how do we know something is an event?), its archival
status as resistive event shifts focus away from broader structures of caste
oppression onto t­ hose who suffer within it.
Any concerns about the success of Paigankar’s archival kala are easily
diffused through the lavish praise his biography garners from reviewers
within the Samaj. In place of consternation or even outrage at Paigankar’s
revelation, the reviews express gratitude for Paigankar’s strategic historical
sense, urging their readers to learn from Paigankar’s craft and commitment
to the betterment of the Samaj. One reviewer, Sushil Kavlekar, writes pas-
sionately that Paigankar’s staging of the halla provides an exemplary model
for f­ uture action. For Kavlekar, Paigankar’s success at promoting the Sam-
aj’s goals “without recourse to vio­lence, hate-­spewing” is to be lauded rather
than lambasted, reproduced rather than repudiated. Indeed, if anything, the
(non–)origin story of the Samaj’s history expands its kala, its mastery, from
the regimes of ­music and dance to the workings of historical drama.26
As we have already seen, initial efforts to or­g a­nize the community
­were primarily led by Rajaram Rangoji Paigankar as early as 1902. Paigan-
kar particularly rallied youth members of the community and staged mul-
tiple successful conferences all over Goa and Maharashtra. Based primarily
in Panaji, Shiroda, Malvan, and Bombay, the Samaj championed itself as
caste reformist (if you w ­ ill), describing its shift in name—­from Gomantak
Kalavant Samaj (Goan Artist collectivity/group) to Gomantak Maratha
Samaj (Goan Maratha collectivity/group)—as a primary indication of its
commitment to a progressive pan-­caste politics. The term Kalavant privi-
leged a specific professional identity (linked to the arts), whereas Maratha
engaged a field of membership that encompassed all subcastes of devadasi
­labor, emphasizing more affiliations of language and culture (Marathi).
The shift in name occurred in 1927 ­after much heated debate over other
pos­si­ble names, such as Neethivardhak Samaj, Gayak Samaj, and Pragati
Samaj, all of which focused solely on the proj­ect of reform rather than
caste and region.27 For example, the name Neethivardhak Samaj called
forth the idea of truth (neethi) as the guiding princi­ple b­ ehind the Samaj’s
emergence, eschewing any reference to the Samaj’s attachments to sexuality
and/or to Portuguese India, evident in “Gomantak” (from Goa). In many
ways, the Samaj’s early strug­g les around self-­nominalization anticipate
many of the paradoxes that have now become the mainstay in discussions
of rights and repre­sen­ta­tion. At issue ­here is the reification of a name such
as Gayak (Singer) that at once secures visibility even as it strengthens the
very category that founds its marginalization.28

In the Absence of Reliable Ghosts · 43

 In the first official conference, held on May 5, 1929, in Shiroda, a small
village in central Goa, 750 delegates from all over Goa, Maharashtra, and
Karnataka gathered to discuss the f­ uture of the Samaj—an extraordinary
event given the difficulties of traveling between the borders of Portuguese
and British India. Speech a­ fter speech made at the conference highlighted
a commitment to education, caste reform, and the abolition of the sexual
exploitation of the Samaj ­women. Sexuality featured heavi­ly in all discus-
sions of reform as the structuring mode through which to forge ­futures, as
a space of radical possibility for opening up larger ave­nues for the Samaj’s
development. Members w ­ ere urged to strategically mobilize their devadasi
histories as pedagogical tools, to create much-­needed societal discussions
on sexuality and morality, and, in so d­ oing, to sudhaar (improve) not just
themselves but society at large. Despite such expressed zeal for large-­scale so-
cial change, no salutary reference or connection was made to the ongoing
liberation strug­gles, ­either in British or Portuguese India.29 Indeed, the early
absence of any collective involvement by the Samaj in the re­sis­tance move-
ments outside of their local interests speaks to yet another twist in the tale
of the Samaj. For a large part of their emergence in Portuguese India, the
Samaj relied on the benevolence of the Portuguese state for a wide array of
­causes, from the building of schools and libraries to the funding of small
businesses. But given that this chapter is also a rumination on the unmoor-
ing of attachments to revered lineages (­whether of loss, opposition, or re­
sis­tance) within histories of sexuality, the Samaj’s refusal to join liberation
strug­gles—­a refusal that frustrates con­temporary expectations of subaltern
oppositionality—is hardly surprising. The Samaj, for example, had and still
continues to have no interest in aligning with any other proj­ect of social
reform. Its members are now largely and resolutely ­middle class, with the
Samaj offices in Bombay and Panaji now being used to host monthly meet-
ings as well as accrue revenue through wedding cele­brations. In fact, one of
the recursive and fascinating features of this Samaj’s story is its refusal or,
rather, sidelining of any social proj­ect outside of its own historicity.

Radical Abundance

At this point, one may well ask: How does an archival story of a staged halla
in a remote part of colonial Portuguese India provide both the mass and
the patina for a nonmelancholic historiography of sexuality? Th
­ ose readers
wishing to find queerness in this chapter through the materiality of lost

44 · chapter one
subjects aspiring to gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender identity forms,
or even through archives that might somehow fold back into an identi-
tarian form, w ­ ill find few trea­sures h
­ ere. Rather, the Samaj archives offer a
challenge to the lineages through which reproductive futurities constitute
their authority, attending more to what t­ hose instances of becoming entail.
­Here the return to a history of sexuality is not through a call to loss (of ob-
ject and/or materials) but, rather, through radical abundance, through an
archive that is incommensurable and quotidian, imaginative and ordinary.
Far from coupling archival accumulation with straightforward historical
visibility, the Samaj’s story challenges and indeed undermines the very idea
and entelechy of an archive.
Bypassing the hermeneutical demands for recuperation, reproduction,
revision, and reparation, the Samaj’s archives stubbornly enact queer read-
ings that unsettle the foundational link between historical reproduction
and archival preservation. Radical abundance h ­ ere is presence without
return, without the fear of loss. Keenly aware of what archives “cannot
not” deliver, what their evidentiary forms foreclose in their celebrated
endorsement of rights and repre­sen­ta­tion, the plenitude of the Samaj ar-
chives opens up the question of how we rec­ord histories of sexualities in
many dif­fer­ent keys.30 The archive remains the aspirational value-­form,
even as its cherished repre­sen­ta­tional forms are retooled. Composed at a
strategic remove from the affective maelstrom of lost and erased histories, as
I noted in the introduction, the Samaj archives are instead abundant, ac-
cessible, and continuous to this day. They grow and add to their content,
even as I put pen to paper. The sheer proliferation of the Samaj archives, in
contradistinction to their absence in official colonial and/or postcolonial
state archives, stages the central problematic at play ­here: ­After all, if mi-
noritized subjects craft their own scenes of repre­sen­ta­tion (the speaking
for, and the speaking about), then what exactly is subaltern or oppositional
about them?31
An examination of the Samaj’s massive, self-­fashioned archives (housed
in Panaji and Mumbai) reveals a wide range of archival genres—­novels,
short stories, minutes, property deeds, flyers, ­legal case rec­ords, programs,
membership lists, and annual reviews, to name a select few. Any visitor
walking into ­these archives ­will find no semblance of order or design in
the placement of materials, which are strewn haphazardly across multi-
ple rooms within the Samaj buildings. ­There is no central gathering space
for reading or study. Instead, one is invited to wander and peruse the ma-
terials, and even “discover” some gems tucked away in unmarked boxes,

In the Absence of Reliable Ghosts · 45

cupboards, shelves, trunks, or dusty attics. Indeed, in ­every visit to ­these
archives, I have been introduced to materials that I have not seen or known
about in the past. The staff and trustees of the Samaj regard my efforts
to or­ga­nize or, more precisely, to discipline the materials as amusing, de-
nuded of particularity and distinction, redolent more of elitist concerns
with preservation and access. Instead, the spatial logic of the archive is
much more renegade: materials are never lost ­because they are paradox-
ically never found. Through constant rediscovery (as it w ­ ere), the archive
lives on, conferring compositional responsibility and authority on anyone
who accesses the materials.32
Perhaps the greatest sign of the Samaj’s remaking of evidentiary forms
is its per­sis­tent recourse to fiction, spread across hundreds of short sto-
ries and serialized novellas within its archives. As deliberately imaginative
modes of repre­sen­ta­tion, t­ hese archives of fiction operate less as testimo-
nials to the enduring past of the Samaj than as circulating tales that live to
tell. The absence of veracity genres such as testimonials, biographies, and
memoirs is even more telling; when a rare biography does appear, as with
Paigankar’s biography, Mee kon (1969), it unfolds more as archival hoax,
flipping the script of minoritized subjects who emerge into historical view
through the legitimizing arc of subaltern re­sis­tance.33 Paigankar’s two-­
volume biography, as we have already seen, strives to refurbish the tropes
and allusions of the archive into a new evidentiary avatar. In so d­ oing, it
provides an occasion to rethink the value of the archive itself: its elasticity
and its status as a rec­ord of constant demystification. Much of the writ-
ing (mostly anonymous) appears in the monthly journal Samaj Sudharak
(1929 to this day) and covers a startlingly wide range of issues, from ed-
ucation and marriage to devadasi reform, the perils of prostitution, caste
shame, travel, contraception, sports, and even the evils of gossip. Bearing
morally charged titles such as the serialized novella She Had Her ­Mother’s
Heart ( January 1947–­June 1949), or short stories such as “A Letter from
God” (November 1943) and “Justice” ( June 1941), t­ hese fictional modes
exhort their readers to take action and self-­reform through a language of
sexuality. Readers are asked, for example, to set aside their moral discom-
fort with their m ­ others’ professions (as devadasis) and embrace instead the
legacies of art and affect that found such lineages of sexuality.34
It is of course impossible to do justice to the sheer volume and complex-
ity of issues covered within the pages of the Samaj Sudharak. Given the
­limited scope of this chapter, I have chosen to focus more on the early issues
of the Samaj Sudharak (1929–61), where the challenges of self-­fashioning

46 · chapter one
1.3 Cover page of the Samaj Sudharak, January 1933. Gomantak Maratha Samaj
Archives, Mumbai, India
and self-­archiving are more pressingly articulated. One arresting example
of such exhortations is a short story, “Kala-­Sangeet” (“Kala of M ­ usic”)
( June 1937, 99–101), that deftly mobilizes allegory, irony, and a good dose
of humor to capture the Samaj’s variegated history. The story (written by
Y. N. Tipnis) carefully assem­bles a recognizable collection of characters
who effectively allegorize the dif­fer­ent stages in the Samaj’s history. They
include Miss Kala (a word that, as we have already seen, literally means
“art”), a gifted singer, accompanied by her friends, Miss Veena (also the
name of a plucked stringed instrument) and Miss Nanda (meaning “joy”
or “joyful”). The story opens with a heated discussion between Kala and
Veena, airing their divergent views on the value of m ­ usic. For Kala, m
­ usic
is a pursuit worthy of all sacrifice, a divine gift; for Veena, the pursuit of
­music promises no rewards, only exhausting hours of rehearsals that can
be easily avoided through the ­simple purchase of a “Columbia rec­ord and
a gramophone!” For Nanda, who arrives ­later in the story, the seduction of
­music looms as a cautionary tale; as she laments, “What use is the kala of san-
geet if we remain degraded Kalavantins or Devadasis, or move to Bombay,
and become actresses and singers in the film industry?”35 The story ends
with Kala sternly reminding her friends that it is kala that has funded their
lives and afforded them the daily comforts they now take for granted. In
fact, the kala of their Samaj is so sought a­ fter, she adds, that even Lokmanya
Tilak, the ­great freedom fighter, has publicly praised their talents, tethering
their history of sexuality to the history of a nation’s emergence. Chastened
by Kala’s words, Veena and Nanda agree to continue their singing lessons
and head to their respective homes.36 Strategically and playfully mixing
past and pre­sent readings of the Samaj’s kala, the story argues for a protean
understanding of the Samaj that resists any stable or purely positive form.
The images and advertisements accompanying the text of such stories fur-
ther open out into a dif­fer­ent register of kala; even as Samaj actresses are
celebrated for their roles as unwed ­mothers, prostitutes, and mistresses in
Hindi and Marathi theater and cinema, it is their paid ­labor that guaran-
tees the respectability and growth of the Samaj. In fact, almost ­every issue
of the Samaj Sudharak between 1932 and 1949 carries an homage to the
­labors of such actresses by carefully listing their philanthropic contribu-
tions t­ oward reform efforts within the Samaj.
Many covers of the Samaj Sudharak also carry lively, bold images
of Samaj w ­ omen. Far from courting aesthetic innovation, t­ hese images
partake of a well-­established, even hackneyed repre­sen­ta­tional proto-
col. Take, for example, this series of cover images from issues in 1940

48 · chapter one
(see figure 1.4). Some are clearly professional headshots of Samaj ­women;
­others are suffused more with the informal intimacies of private pictures.
­These are recognizably studio portraits, their aesthetic textures clearly
composed: studied makeup; clothes, poses, gazes askance. Even the most
demure image is made up carefully, with touches that w ­ ere recognizable en-
hancements (the eyelashes in figure 1.6, for example). Each portrait is cued
to proclaim its repertoire of visual references, sometimes overtly, some-
times more subtly. Some references are lineages of ethnographic repre­sen­
ta­tion, translated through legacies in South Asian photo studios used for
­family portraits, meant to grace a wall in a home. But they equally draw on
con­temporary film magazine portfolios for female stars, or headshots from
fashion magazines that invite aspirational forms of identification.37 Each
of them is not merely a repre­sen­ta­tion but perhaps also proffers a template
into which a viewer can be hailed. None of them are action shots; each is
deliberately still, carry­ing within them, such as the tennis shot, a prom-
ise of ­future action. None of them are particularly nationalist; rather, they
suggest sight lines, shorn of any discernible politics.38
Akin to most of the Samaj’s archival content, t­ hese images too refuse to
follow the script—­they neither reject the animating properties of the colo-
nial image nor surrender to it. Colonial photography, as Zahid Chaudhary
and Malek Alloula have argued, is structured around the exhibitionism
of the image and the voyeurism of the spectator.39 ­Here t­ here is a shift in
spectatorial address, as the photo­graphs solicit new ­orders of meaning, for
a new kind of gaze in which looking as plea­sure may be the only pathway
into archival presence. Even as we shift from the scopic register of colo-
nial (and upper-­caste) repre­sen­ta­tion to ­these images of lower-­caste self-­
representation, we continue to know very l­ ittle about the w ­ omen moving
through ­these images. No attribution accompanies the images, and their
presence is left untouched in the contents of the issues. Unlike portrayals
produced u­ nder colonial auspices, for whom recognition was unimportant
and in fact had to be shed, such as Herbert Risley’s infamous representa-
tive typologies, t­ hese images from the Samaj Sudharak moved among an
audience of familiars.40 As Bishnupriya Ghosh observes, to focus primarily
on the truth value of the biography ­behind an iconic image is to bring
it into equivalence within a standardized mode of view, almost didactic
in purpose. To refuse this iconic message, to refuse to tell the story of a
singular life, Ghosh writes, requires us to attend to the “creative force of
figuration” that volatizes the image and puts it “up for grabs.”41 A call to
such figuration generates the epistemological frisson: we move away from

In the Absence of Reliable Ghosts · 49

1.4 Cover page of the Samaj Sudharak,
February 1940. Gomantak Maratha
Samaj Archives, Mumbai, India
1.5 Cover page of the Samaj Sudharak,
March 1940. Gomantak Maratha
Samaj Archives, Mumbai, India
1.6 Cover page of the Samaj Sudharak,
May 1940. Gomantak Maratha Samaj
Archives, Mumbai, India
1.7 Cover page of the Samaj Sudharak,
July 1940. Gomantak Maratha Samaj
Archives, Mumbai, India
1.8 Cover page of the Samaj Sudharak,
August 1940. Gomantak Maratha
Samaj Archives, Mumbai, India

1.9 Cover page of the Samaj Sudharak,

September 1940. Gomantak Maratha
Samaj Archives, Mumbai, India

1.10 Cover page of the Samaj Sud-

harak, November 1940. Gomantak
Maratha Samaj Archives, Mumbai,
India
the mandates of biographical certainty (tell us who ­these ­women are) to
the invitation of an archival form that nudges image and meaning into a
dif­fer­ent order of liveness.42 Their stories are literally left to one’s imagina-
tion, as histories that are at once singular and unverifiable, the marker, as
Gayatri Spivak reminds us, of the literary and the figurative.43
My meditations on the Samaj archives have thus far sought to draw
attention to evidentiary forms (like the origin story, the attack) that offer
an alternative po­liti­cal or historical response, even—or especially—in
the face of their per­sis­tent invocation. Far from constituting an unethical
response (we make, you believe) to the demand for historical evidence, the
Samaj archives perform a more vital function: reconstructing and rein-
venting sundered lineages of history and sexuality. An archival genre that
continues to garner heightened attention within histories of sexuality
is of course the lost letter. Across a range of queer histories, lost letters
(and diaries) invariably incorporate the central distinguishing genre of
evidence: a personal account, borne with g­ reat fortitude and equanimity,
meaningful words where one last expects to find them.44 For readers of
the Samaj Sudharak, especially in early to mid-­twentieth-­century India,
lost letters ­were also the recognizable genre for extended musings on
sexuality and gender roles, as well as caste and class formations. ­After all,
the Samaj Sudharak was published alongside the increasing popularity of
the Indian sexologist, novelist, reformer, and eugenicist Narayan Sitaram
Phadke.
Phadke’s novels (especially from 1920–50, the period often known as
“the Phadke era” in Marathi literary-­cultural history) w ­ ere mostly sexo-
logical treatises garbed in the realist aesthetics of the new Marathi novel.45
Each novel—­and he wrote more than seventy formulaic novels by the end
of his c­ areer!—­circled around the romantic t­ rials and tribulations of the
modern Indian c­ ouple. Most novels featured elaborate correspondences
between the hero and the heroine, or between the hero and his ­family,
where the virtues of chastity, sexuality, and gender formations w ­ ere avidly
discussed.46 For example, Phadke’s first and most popu­lar modern ro-
mance, Kulabyachi dandi (The Light­house at Colaba), the founding “love
story” in Marathi fiction, features a young male protagonist, Jagdish, and
his ill-­fated romantic interest and “new w ­ oman,” Manik. It is Jagdish’s over-
blown letter-­writing (patra-­v yavahar), his repeated efforts to send love
letters that remain unanswered or lost, that characterizes the novel’s most
effective pedagogical tool. Jagdish writes and rewrites several drafts of pas-
sionate letters to Manik, and in each letter sent or refused, we are schooled

52 · chapter one
in the appropriate languages of sexual intimacy.47 Even as Manik is eventually
jettisoned from the marriage plot (she is too sexual, too bold, too non-
conforming), the letters in abeyance (what if she had read the letters?)
hint at sexual knowledge that the novel must eventually forgo. The letters
(not sent) are printed verbatim in the novel, cautionary blueprints for sex-
uality’s maligned forms.48 Such a turn to letters as sexuality’s confessional
elsewhere appears with equal frequency in the popu­lar Marathi-­language
journal Samaj Swasthya (1927–53). Douglas Haynes and Shrikant Botre
argue that the letters written to the journal’s editor, R. D. Karve, a major
advocate of birth control and sex education in western India, “constitute
perhaps the earliest sex-­advice column in Indian print media.” Written pri-
marily by middle-­class males in mid-­twentieth-­century India, the letters
address anx­ie­ ties around “masturbation and seminal emissions, the nature
of the female body and pro­cesses of conception, birth control and same-­sex
sexual practices.”49
It would seem no won­der, then, that the genre of “lost letters” appears
with some frequency within multiple issues of the Samaj Sudharak. The
lost letter’s always ambiguous epistemological enticements, its infinitely
malleable features, appears ideal for the Samaj’s archival proj­ect.50 Like
Paigankar’s biography of a fiction, ­these letters too reiterate a singularly
nonrecuperative relationship to the archive. To be found is not to be re-
stored to value but, rather, to be set adrift on more inventive economies of
meaning. From August 1940 to December 1940, a curated five-­part series
titled “Harvelele patr” (“Lost Letters”) appears with g­ reat fanfare in the
monthly Samaj Sudharak. The collector of the letters, Shashishekhar, ap-
pends a long introductory paragraph to the letters, situating their discovery
and publication within a broader mandate of historiographical responsi-
bility. To explain his publication of the letters, Shashishekhar asks, “What
if you run into letters that are lost but call out to be read and received?”51
The temptation of looking, he adds, far exceeds the gunha (crime) of in-
trusion and any claims to owner­ship. We are told the package of letters is
found abandoned in Victoria Gardens, near the Samaj buildings in Bom-
bay, carefully tied together with string, and all addressed to a young man
named Anil. The letters appear to be a correspondence between Dada
(older ­brother) and his younger ­brother, Anil, even as we only have Dada’s
letters, with Anil left to the reader’s imagination. Preserved and published
without revision or censorship, the letters are reproduced with the hope of
finding the elusive Anil, and for the edification and learning of the readers.
­After all, writes Shashishekhar excitedly, we have been fortuitously gifted

In the Absence of Reliable Ghosts · 53

an “amrutacha pela [cup of ambrosia], and it would be foolish not to drink
its contents and learn how to produce our own.”52
And the letters do manifest much of the promise of Shashishekhar’s
opening gambit. Each of the published letters exhorts its addressee, Anil,
a university student, to reflect on the temptations and possibilities of up-
ward mobility, in terms of both class and gender. Dada, the voice of the
letters, cajoles Anil and cautions him against the perils of too much sex,
too many distractions, and ultimately the enticements of urban life in
Bombay. Dada casts himself as uneducated, poor, and lower caste, yet his
prose exceeds the limitations of his self-­production. Using a mixture of
Portuguese, Marathi, and some misplaced En­glish phrases, Dada uses the
letters to reiterate conventional and heavi­ly Brahminical storylines of fe-
male chastity and sexuality. By the time we get to the third installation of
the lost letter series, a short editorial note is appended to the letters: “We
know that many ­women ­will not agree with the content of the letters. But
we are committed to publishing them in their original found form. If you
are angry with what t­ hese letters say, use this opportunity to write and send
us letters of your own.”53 ­Here the incitement to formulate “letters of your
own” is not a call to excavate, detect, or unearth a corrective truth. Rather,
the editorial note exhorts its female readers to give life to more telling and
fictionalized ripostes.
Another extraordinary feature of the Samaj Sudharak’s early writings
is its concerted effort to refuse reproductive futurity through proprietary
kinship structures. A ­ fter all, as we have seen through the evidence of
Paigankar’s biography and other available historical rec­ords, the kalavan-
tins ­were seen as distinct from the category of “prostitute” by the Portu-
guese colonial state primarily ­because ­these ­women maintained coercive
and noncoercive monogamous relationships with Saraswat Brahmin men
(and occasionally ­women). As the ­children of such ­unions ­were rarely rec-
ognized as legitimate heirs to their ­fathers’ caste status and/or properties,
various creative forms of kinship ­were developed to survive and prosper. In
some cases, the c­ hildren took on their f­ athers’ Saraswat Brahmin surnames
(without consent), such that t­ here are now Samaj members in both Goa
and Maharashtra with deceptively upper-­caste surnames such as Kakodkar,
Shirodkar, and Welingkar. While ­these members are clearly not received as
Brahmins in larger society, their acquisition of Brahmin surnames has cre-
ated sufficient confusion within normative kinship structures. Given the
primacy of blood and laws of primogeniture within Hindu l­ egal and reli-
gious formations, such sleights of caste (if you ­will) are more than efforts

54 · chapter one
at upward mobility.54 Rather, they gesture t­ oward an astute anticipation of
sexuality’s compensatory economies, entangled as they are with regimes of
profit and plea­sure.
A similar discomfort with the compulsory script of kinship can be seen
in the poignant writings of a sixteen-­year-­old Samaj member, Ramakant
Arondekar. Published in the July 1949 issue of the Samaj Sudharak, almost
two years a­ fter the liberation of British India, Arondekar’s short opinion
piece is intriguingly titled “Matrudevata aani matruprem” (“­Mother as
God and Love for One’s M ­ other”). The text opens with an elder, Ram-
bhau, commanding the author to love and worship his ­mother. Finding
such a proposition troublesome, Arondekar argues that it is irresponsible
and unethical to follow such a dictum, given its flawed and unrealistic
logic. Surely, Arondekar writes, one must be able to choose whom one wor-
ships and whom one loves, especially given the murky genealogies of the
Samaj’s own f­ amily histories. Refuting the claim that to love one’s m ­ other
is “natu­ral” and divinely ordained, Arondekar proposes that the Samaj ad-
vocate for families forged through choice rather than mere blood relations.
Nestled within the laments of this short piece is a startlingly radical script
of kinship: even as the authority of bio-­fathers (read: Saraswat Brahmins)
is challenged, one must extend the same ambiguity of affect to the author-
ity of one’s bio-­mother (read: kalavantins). Within such a refusal of nor-
mative kinship structures, no biological determinism can prevail, even if
it means decentering the presence of the very ­women the Samaj seeks to
valorize. While it may be pos­si­ble to dismiss Arondekar’s young voice as
overly speculative and inexperienced (or even ashamed of his bio-­mother’s
profession as a devadasi), his questions still echo the extant kinship struc-
tures within the Samaj. Available rec­ords of kalavantin families from
­Paigin, for example, clearly point to c­ hildren (both male and female) being
raised and/or ­adopted by a diffuse set of relatives, with bio-­mothers rarely
occupying central parenting roles. In fact, the thread of straight kinship is
so undone that few ­children of Arondekar’s generation ­were fully aware of
their bio-­parentage. Of equal import is that Samaj members continue to
express ­little or no interest in tracking or privileging the origin stories of
their birth.55 It may thus come as ­little surprise that when Arondekar him-
self becomes editor of the Samaj Sudharak in 1969 (twenty years l­ ater), he
reiterates his difficulty with any efforts to smooth Samaj kinship structures
into normative kin formations. In a biting editorial titled “Lagn zurvene:
Ek manastap” (“Arranging Marriages: An Irritation”) (November 1970), he
speaks to the contradictions inherent in the efforts of the Samaj to arrange

In the Absence of Reliable Ghosts · 55

marriages within its own ranks. Even as marriage provides the sanitized
resolution to the Samaj’s checkered history of sexuality, Arondekar ques-
tions the need for such conventional arrangements.56

What More Remains

I have thus far elaborated on the textual nature of the Samaj archive—­its
overflow of writing, if you w ­ ill—as a supplement (in the Derridean sense)
to the overprivileging of the visual or the acoustic when it comes to the
consumption of kalavantin bodies such as ­those of the Goan devadasis.57
My emphasis h ­ ere on the multiple genres of written materials h ­ oused
within the Samaj highlights the difficulty of narrating a history drawn
from such dif­fer­ent, incommensurate, and textured archives. My reading
centers, instead, the dialectic between the banality of the written form
(­here the copious content of the Samaj Sudharak) and the recourse to the
hagiographical (something transformative is happening in the pages). I
have strug­g led to read the history of the Samaj neither as a seductive ex-
emplar nor as an exceptional case study that needs decoding (which is, of
course, the preferred form). ­After all, ­there remains the enduring allure
of a virtuoso reading (in which I too am mired) that ­will somehow unravel
the secrets of sexuality. Rather, the Samaj archives speak more to a history
of sexuality that is unfinished, messy, upending sedimented genealogies of
recuperation and repre­sen­ta­tion.
I began this chapter with a summoning of a historiography of sexuality
that eschews the language of loss as the structuring mode of its narration.
What we have ­here in the archives of the Samaj is a story that stubbornly
refuses to move on from the ordinary plenitude of sexuality. ­Here the story
of sexuality estranges settled readings of recuperative scrutiny, drawing us
more into the queer forms of an archive’s becoming, angled through lin-
eages of the nonreproductive and the unfinished. Almost from their incep-
tion, the Samaj archives thus embrace the fully contradictory status of
any archive: ­whole enough, on the one hand, to cohere to a set of iden-
tifiable concerns, yet partial enough to frustrate and unmoor the form
itself. As such, t­ hese archives succeed precisely by habituating their readers
to displacements, fictions, reinvestments in a historical script that works
all the more effectively at the very moment of its undoing. Taken together,
­these archives constitute a kind of lyrical abundance that comes fully to life
through genres of critical and rhetorical invention.

56 · chapter one
 notes

1 Instead of providing a more conventional listing of the many excellent

monographs and special issues published in the past de­cade on new/
found archives of sexuality in Asia, Latin Amer­i­ca, Africa, and the
­Middle East (which ­will feature ­later in the bibliography of this book),
I want to turn to a slightly dif­fer­ent exemplar of the explosion of such
archives. I recently served as a regional editor for Asia for a new encyclo-
pedia on lgbqti histories of sexuality. Together, the six editors of the
encyclopedia reviewed over six hundred entries on new archival research
on queer history across the world, with topics ranging from more familiar
topics such as sodomy and ­human rights, to more unfamiliar ones on
issues such as queer working-­class bars and homosexual blackmail. See
Arondekar and Chiang, Global Encyclopedia of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual,
Transgender, and Queer (lgbtq) History.
2 “Archival turn” is a term first coined by the anthropologist Ann Stoler
to foreground the shift to archive as subject, over a repository for
research, especially in the 1990s. See Stoler, “Colonial Archives and the
Arts of Governance.” See also Eichorn, The Archival Turn in Feminism.
Of note ­here, however, is that scholars within archival studies, such as
Michelle Caswell, have been quite critical about the embrace of the
archival turn, especially within the disciplines of history, lit­er­a­ture, and
anthropology. In a biting and insightful essay, “ ‘The Archive’ Is Not an
Archives,” Caswell rebukes historians in par­tic­u­lar for their complete
erasure of the epistemological and material l­ abors of fields such as
archival studies. For Caswell, archival studies (at least in its postcolonial
and decolonial avatars) has continually decentered and decomposed the
imperial archive well before the current enthusiasm around the innova-
tions of the archival turn.
3 McClintock, Imperial Leather, 40.
4 Arondekar and Patel, “Area Impossible.” I ­will take up the conceptual
quagmire of “geopolitics” in more detail in my last chapter.
5 Vilashini Cooppan astutely cautions against set temporalities of origin
stories and loss. As she writes: “Which is worst? Slavery, colonialism,
apartheid, the Holocaust? Which is first? To avoid the fatal logic of
origin and priority, a logic through which Eurochronology can never be
dismantled, I have found it instructive to think t­ hese ­things together.”
See Cooppan, “Time-­Maps,” 412.
6 Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives.
7 Caswell, Archiving the Unspeakable; Weld, Paper Cadavers. For other crit-
ics, such as Jenny Sharpe, the “poetics of loss” has not meant an absence
of archives; rather, Sharpe argues for an ethos of “immateriality.” See
Sharpe, Immaterial Archives.

In the Absence of Reliable Ghosts · 57

 8 Some provocative pushback against such an extractive analy­sis can be
seen in Barak, “Archives and/as Battlefields”; Bsheer, Archive Wars; and
Seikaly, “How I Met My Great-­Grandfather.”
9 See Mbembe, “The Power of the Archive and Its Limits,” on the archive as
a materialization of power and imagination.
10 El Shakry is referring ­here specifically to the work of Sayyid Qutb
(1906–66), who has often been reductively viewed primarily through
the lens of Islamism and not as the central figure of Egyptian radical and
decolonial thought. El Shakry is clearly also drawing from the pioneering
work of Saba Mahmood, who cautions against the reductive and imperial
ambitions of a Western secular historicism. See El Shakry, “History with-
out Documents.” See also Mahmood, Politics of Piety.
11 Azoulay, Potential History. Of note is the chapter “Archives.” See also
Stoler, “On Archiving as Dissensus.”
12 Paigankar, Mee kon. The translated summary I provide ­here covers over eight
pages of text in Marathi. Part of the challenge h
­ ere is to render the affective
tone of the description of the attack within the limitations of translation.
13 Paigankar, Mee kon, 1:73–80.
14 Paigankar, Mee kon, 1:84–87.
15 R. Pinto, Between Empires.
16 De Mendonça-­Noronha, “The Economic Scene in Goa, 1926–1961.” See
also Ferreiro-­Martins, Historia da misericordia de Goa.
17 Newman, Of Umbrellas, Goddesses, and Dreams; Axelrod and Fuerch,
“Flight of the Deities.”
18 Censo da populaçao do estado da India, 1920. See also Boxer, “Fidalgos
portugueses e bailadeiras indianas (seculos XVII e XVIII).”
19 In addition to multiple references in Paigankar’s Mee kon, the case is also
mentioned in Radhakrishnan, Purushatra (55, 63, 79). Radhakrishnan
was a reputed Brahmin journalist who took it upon himself to write what
he saw as one of the most revolutionary histories of Goan society.
20 Such invocations of caste shame and humiliation routinely appear in
available biographies and life histories of lower-­caste subjects in South
Asia. Th
­ ere is much work still to be done in the continuities of content
within the writings of Other Backward Caste (obc) communities such as
the Samaj and Dalit communities. See Guru, Humiliation.
21 Paigankar, Mee kon, 2:43–56.
22 References to the land awarded for the establishment of the school can be
found in “Matriz Poinguinim,” unpublished land documents at the Sub-­
Treasury Office, Chauri, Canacona, Goa, and Paigini T ­ emple Documents
(in Marathi, Modi, and Portuguese) located at the Parashuram T ­ emple,
Paigini, Goa.
23 R. Gu­ha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in India Colonial
India.

58 · chapter one
24 Chow, Entanglements, 12.
25 Probyn, “Suspended Beginnings of Childhood and Nostalgia.” See also
Morris, In the Place of Origins. For more on biography as a genre within
South Asia, see Arnold and Blackburn, Telling Lives in India.
26 Paigankar, Mee kon, 2:13.
27 The term Marathas denotes a collective (and heavi­ly debated) reference
to Indo-­Aryan groups of Hindu, Marathi-­speaking castes of warriors
and peasants hailing largely from the present-­day state of Maharashtra.
Through their creation of a substantial empire in the late seventeenth
and eigh­teenth centuries, the Marathas occupied a major part of India.
Of note ­here is that the “Marathas” ­were known by the term primarily
­because their native tongue was mostly (though not always) Marathi.
Thus, the terms Marathi ­people and Maratha ­people are not interchange-
able and should not be confused for each other. See Deshpande, Creative
Pasts. Marathas as a caste in con­temporary India have now become part
of the prob­lem of caste oppression. As Suryakant Waghmore notes,
Marathas are the new “oppressors,” the new landowners/zamindars, who
claim victimhood and class poverty despite their obvious capital gains
and wealth. While such characterizations are indeed accurate, they apply
unevenly to the Samaj and its collectivities across Maharashtra, Goa, and
Karnataka. Samaj members are rarely landowners, and their caste status
(as ­will be discussed in ­later chapters) remains malleable and divergently
precarious. See Waghmore, “The Dominant Victim?”
28 In many ways, the Samaj’s debates around self-­naming anticipate the
paradoxes that Wendy Brown invokes around the limitations of rights
discourses for minoritized communities (in her case, w ­ omen and/or
queers). See Brown, “Suffering Rights as Paradoxes.”
29 See Kamat, Farar Far.
30 I am of course referring ­here to Spivak’s attentiveness to the perilous de-
mands of a liberal proj­ect as “that which we cannot not want.” See Spivak,
Outside in the Teaching Machine, 44.
31 Pandey, “Can ­There Be a Subaltern ­Middle Class?” Pandey focuses “on
specific assemblages that have historically been seen as communi-
ties of lower-­class and underclass individuals and families. His essay
examines the history of members of ­these ‘communities’ who come to
inhabit not the positions of the down-­and-­out, where they allegedly
belong, but ­those of the more comfortable, educated, professional m ­ iddle
classes. Thus it asks what the history of the strug­gles of ­these subaltern
­middle classes tells us about the limits of the middle-­class idea and about
the conditions necessary for the consolidation of par­tic­u­lar groups as
middle-­class, modern, and unmarked” (322–23).
32 In an early talk I gave on this proj­ect to a group of archivists and librari-
ans at ucla in 2006, I was asked a question about the arrangement of the

In the Absence of Reliable Ghosts · 59

 materials in the archives. For many in the room, committed as they w ­ ere
to preserving minoritized histories, one of the major concerns was what
one did with the materials ­after one had a chance to look at them. I was
pressed to explain if I put the materials back where I found them, so as
to preserve the “originary” order of the materials, instead of displacing
them into new arrangements. At that time, I was flummoxed by the ques-
tion, as such concerns ­were not part of my relationship to ­these archives.
Since then, I have had time to return to that question and speak more
directly to its extraordinary potential.
33 Miller’s Impostors may be of interest ­here. Miller speaks to the rise of
literary hoaxes, specifically within intercultural communities in France,
as modes of minority repre­sen­ta­tion. For Miller, literary hoaxes call atten-
tion to the paucity of minority voices and the ease with which they can
be ventriloquized into presence (1–6).
34 All issues of the Samaj Sudharak are currently ­housed in the Mumbai
branch of the Samaj. The publication continues to appear on a monthly
basis to this day but is now called Gomant Shardha.
35 Tipnis, “Kala-­Sangeet” [Kala of ­music], 100.
36 Tipnis, “Kala-­Sangeet,” 101; Balachandran, “Documents, Digitisation and
History.”
37 ­There is a robust corpus of scholarship that speaks to the stylizations
of gender and visuality in colonial and postcolonial South Asia. I am
grateful to Geeta Patel and Benedito Ferrao for alerting me to t­ hese
genealogies of repre­sen­ta­t ion. See specifically ­t hese texts: Pinney, The
Coming of Photography in India; Thapan, “Embodiment and Identity
in Con­temporary Society”; Rizzo, “Gender and Visuality”; N. Ma-
jumdar, Wanted Cultured Ladies Only! See also Masood, “Catering to
Indian and British Tastes”; Gadihoke, “Selling Soap and Stardom”;
Freitag, “Consumption and Identity”; and McGowan, “Modernity at
Home.”
38 Tambe, “From Romance to Reproduction.”
39 Chaudhury, Afterimage of Empire; Alloula, The Colonial Harem. See also
Rice-­Sayre, “Veiled Threats.”
40 Sir Herbert Hope Risley was the infamous British civil servant, an-
thropologist, and linguist who published widely on the customs and
social structures of India. Risley is arguably most heralded as the architect
of the 1901 census of India and his subsequent publication The ­People of
India (1908), based on the survey information gathered for the census.
Following in the footsteps of his pre­de­ces­sors, John Forbes Watson and
John William Kaye’s photographic collections, Risley’s book similarly
contained illustrations of tribes and ­peoples and an ethnological map of
India, all of which became prototypes for taxonomical repre­sen­ta­t ions
of “the ­people of India.” See Risley, The ­People of India. For further read-

60 · chapter one
 ing and the continued force of such taxonomical practices in postcolonial
India, see Jenkins, “Another ‘­People of India’ Proj­ect.”
41 For more on the relationship between biographies, images/icons, and
figuration, see B. Ghosh, Global Icons, 183. I am indebted to Bishnu for
her timely reminders of the gendered intercalations of iconicity and the
popu­lar in South Asia.
42 When I first encountered ­these images, I spent many hours in the Samaj
archives, looking for any biographical rec­ords that would help me “iden-
tify” ­these ­women, but to no avail. I also spoke to many living elders (the
images ­were taken circa 1939–40, as far we can tell) to see if anyone re-
membered the w ­ omen featured in the images. Almost every­one I spoke to
(and I spoke to over fifty Samaj members between the ages of seventy and
eighty-­seven) had no specific recollection of any of the images. Instead,
they all claimed a kind of general kinship with the figures; some said one
or more of the ­women reminded them of an aunt, or a distant cousin, or a
relative they could not quite put their fin­ger on. As Adhik Shirodkar, one
of the more prominent figures in the group I spoke to, quizzically said to
me: “They all look familiar. But then ­wasn’t that the point?”
43 Spivak: “Notwithstanding all the legalistic efforts of literary criticism, lit­
er­a­ture remains singular and unverifiable.” Spivak, Critique of Postcolonial
Reason, 174–75.
44 ­There is, as has been much discussed, a much-­revered place for lost-­and-­
found letters within queer histories as pathways into the private lives of
figures written out of history’s front page. More recently, the discovery
of the private letters and diary of a working-­class farmer in ­England
has fi­nally confirmed what historians of sexuality have always believed:
that ordinary ­people did not reject alternative sexualities, and all we
had to do was find evidence to prove that was just the case. The historical
challenge ­here was that ordinary folks ­were largely illiterate and did not
keep collections and private cases of letters and memorabilia. As such, this
discovery is deemed even more “au­then­tic” and valuable. See Coughlan,
“The 200-­Year-­Old Diary That’s Rewriting Gay History.” For a broader
sampling of texts within queer history that speak to the pivotal eviden-
tiary value of lost-and-found queer letters, read Garlinger, Confessions of
the Letter Closet; Dever, “Greta Garbo’s Foot”; and Clarke, “ ‘I Am Your
Loving Boy-­Wife.’ ”
45 See Kosambi, ­Women Writing Gender.
46 See Phadke, Kulabyachi dandi [The light­house at Colaba]; Phadke, Sex
Prob­lem in India; Phadke, Jadugaar [The magician]; Phadke, Sex Prob­
lems in India; Phadke, Ajace tarun stree-­purush va tyanpudhil prasna
[Con­temporary youth and the prob­lems before them]; and Phadke,
Manas-­mandir [The ­temple of the mind].
47 Phadke, Kulabyachi dandi, 51.

In the Absence of Reliable Ghosts · 61

 48 Phadke, Kulabyachi dandi, 22. Of note ­here is how Jagdish, in one of his
letters, collapses Manik with an image of a “dark-­skinned dancing girl
with a shriveled face” (ek kaali kulkuleet khappad tondachi natvi bai)
when he is describing her sexuality, and then writes how he is embar-
rassed to have had such vile thoughts.
49 Botre and Haynes, “Sexual Knowledge, Sexual Anx­i­eties.” For more on
the relationship between caste and sexual politics and their effect on the-
ories of self, see Omvedt, Cultural Revolt in a Colonial Society; and Mi­tra,
Indian Sex Life: see particularly the chapter “Veracity” (176–202).
50 For more on letters as malleable and epistemologically ambiguous genres,
see Jolly and Stanley, “Letters as/Not a Genre.”
51 Shashishekhar, “Harvelele patr” [Lost letters] (August 1940), 151.
52 Shashishekhar, “Harvelele patr” (August 1940), 151.
53 Shashishekhar, “Harvelele patr” (October 1940), 198.
54 Kakodkar, “The Portuguese and the Kalavants.” I am grateful to Dr. Ka-
kodkar, se­nior librarian (retired) at Goa University, for her invaluable
help. See also C. Pinto, “­Women’s Inheritance Rights.”
55 See chaps. 2–4 in Prakash, “The Social and Cultural Dimensions of Mi-
gration.” Prakash’s study continues to be the only available so­cio­log­i­cal
study of the Gomantak Maratha Samaj.
56 ­There is a robust set of lit­er­a­tures in kinship studies that explores more
substantively the questions Arondekar stages around collectivity, be-
longing, and affect. Some representative texts include Carsten, Cultures
of Relatedness; Strathern, Relations; McKinnon, Vital Relations; and
Garroutte, Real Indians.
57 To recapitulate the well-­rehearsed Derridean argument ­here in a slightly
dif­fer­ent tenor: supplementarity performs multiple functions of plenti-
tude. On the one hand, the supplement cumulatively “adds itself, it is a
surplus, a plenitude enriching another plenitude, the fullest mea­sure of
presence.” As such, “it is thus that art, techne, image, repre­sen­ta­tion, con-
vention, ­etc. come as supplements to nature and are rich with the entire
cumulating function.” But the supplement also “adds only to replace . . . ​
as if one fills a void [so that] . . . ​something can be filled up of itself, can
accomplish itself, only by allowing itself through sign and proxy.” Der-
rida, Of Grammatology, 144–45.

62 · chapter one
 Chapter two

A History I Am
Not Writing
Sexuality’s Exemplarity

If my previous chapter introduced us to an archive of sexuality, so widely

calibrated in tone and content that any number of readings could be woven
out of the sheer diversity of its subject m
­ atter, this chapter is about the
errant tales, the historical lessons, and the possibilities of amplification
afforded by such archival materials.1 While the pursuit of alternatives to
Euro-­American histories has certainly re­oriented the critical priorities
and geopo­l iti­cal stakes of sexuality studies, we continue to want his-
tories whose anticipated recuperation bypasses the narrative-­stopping
doom of an always impending loss. Such attempts to diversify histories
of sexuality have now engaged me for almost two de­cades, and I have re-
turned over and over again to the modes by which we gather archival evi-
dence and the fault lines on which we produce queer readings.2 Inseparable
from t­ hese preoccupations is an awareness that histories (including of sex-
uality) are an always imploding narrative genre, only ever a reading and/or
archival “find” away from dissolution.
Perhaps this awareness may in part explain why so much ink (toxic
and other­wise) has been expended over the past few years on how to
read and extract meaning from historical archives. Diatribes against the
hermeneutics of suspicion or reading against the grain (where all readings
are necessarily symptomatic readings of something that is missing and/or
erased) have become the new hegemony, leading to a rallying call for surface
readings and/or readings along the archival grain (where the surface of the
texts bears witness to the vio­lence of the moment). ­There is now a shared
sense that how and why we make meanings out of the past must constantly
be debated.3 Yet for all the exegetical flair around the practice of reading
and its concomitant revelations, less has been said about how we read
historical archives of “distant” elsewheres and/or lit­er­a­tures. As Nirvana
Tanoukhi pointedly avers, such diagnostic, prescriptive, and even repar-
ative (pace Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick) forms of reading rarely engage with
the challenges of geopolitics, relegating such reading more to a citation
of cultural and historical exemplars than to a live space of hermeneutical
transformation.4 Through his work on colonial Egypt and world lit­er­a­
tures, Michael Allan expands further on the limits of such extant reading
practices. He trenchantly reminds us that t­ here is always a history of read-
ing, an entire way of being in language that undergirds any encounter with
archives and lit­er­a­tures. To enter into a history of reading is to enter into
a relationship with words and worlds. What would it mean, Allan asks,
for example, if we w ­ ere to refuse the opposition between “a practice of
reading based on memorization, embodiment and recitation in Qur’anic
schools, and another practice based on reflection, critique, and judgment,
increasingly central to what gets defined as literacy in the modern Egyp-
tian state?”5 What worlds do we devalue through the absence of such his-
tories of reading?6 Allan’s embrace of the simultaneous primacy of multiple
practices of reading is what interests me ­here. To seek such equivalence, to
value worlds within words, is a kind of unlearning, a way of reading with
“distant” archives and not just about them.
It is thus hardly surprising that the most trenchant challenges to our
readings of times past and spaces distant have overwhelmingly come from
scholars working on histories of slavery, sexuality, and colonialism, acutely
critical of archival economies of loss, paucity, and/or devaluation. Schol-
ars such as Jennifer Morgan, Indrani Chatterjee, and Elizabeth Povinelli,
to name a select few, have foregrounded the fervent born-­again historical
materialism (if you ­will) that has plagued, indeed haunted, the recupera-
tion of histories of slavery and colonialism, contrasting it with more robust
informal and imaginative economies of survival that are often ignored or
elided in such readings. For t­ hese scholars, the past has become the prop-
ertied subject of critique, gathering value through triumphant readings of
conventional economic histories (even if they are directed to emancipatory
ends) that preserve rather than trou­ble the vexed calculus of gender, ­labor,
and capital.7 But I am getting ahead of myself h ­ ere, proffering critical claims

64 · Chapter two
without first hailing the worlds and words from within which I begin. Let
me turn to my history of reading ­here.
Even as I write, historical vernaculars of reading feature prominently
within con­temporary South Asian history. State-­sponsored campaigns to
purify South Asia, more specifically India, of sanskritik pradushan (cultural
pollution) have become the mainstay of a Hindutva-­fueled polity. Within
such state formulations, the pollution of the Indian populace derives from
its historical amnesia, from its refusal and/or erasure of proper historical
readings, cast in the loss of Sans­krit as ­mother tongue, or in the aspiration
of a swachh bharat (pure/clean India), emptied of the corrupting forces of
minority lives (read Muslim, Dalit, queer, and more). The historical past,
now more than ever, founds the moral authority of the Indian nation-­
state where all forms of difference are coercively shunted aside to make
way for a new “India shining.” When it comes to historical evidence, any
shoddy travesty of research appears to pass muster, as the recent appoint-
ment of Professor Y. Sudershan Rao as chairperson of the Indian Council
for Historical Research (ichr) so clearly demonstrates.8 For Rao and his
ilk, Indian historians need to abandon their Marxist and Western histo-
riographical ways, to make way for a Hindutva-­infused empiricism that
would eschew archival ambivalences and establish historical dates for the
“factual” events of the Ramayana and Mahabharata.9 Aiding and abetting
such twists of historical knowledge are strategic claims to “decolonization
and democ­ratization,” whereby the glories of ancient India are rescued
from the denigrations of a blinkered and dominant academic left. To “de-
colonize” Indian history, Vikram Sampath (the author of a two-­volume
biography of V. D. Savarkar) argues, is to rediscover an impressive Indic
past and, at the same time, to confront the trauma of the so-­called Islamic
conquest.10
Such concerns with the manipulation, erasure, and/or refusal of diverse
pasts are especially pressing for the lives of sexual minorities, as the ­legal
and economic right to be h ­ ere and now is often authorized by the evidence of
histories past. One only has to recall the past ­legal challenges around the re-
peal of the so-­called antisodomy statute, Section 377, which remained em-
broiled in debates around the presence/absence of alternative sexualities
in India’s past.11 As scholars of sexuality and South Asia, we are thus called
on to insist on a protean and diverse past that rejects an instrumentalist
and triumphalist Hindutva worldview.12 To put it more bluntly, the reading
of sexuality’s past(s) (in South Asia and elsewhere) has now clearly become
a complicated affair: a balancing act between an embrace of sexuality’s

A History I Am Not Writing · 65

munificent diversity (divergent temporalities and spaces are fodder for
theories of difference) and a capture of its genealogical sameness (the past
surrenders lineages of our queer pre­sents). The cornerstone of such efforts
is of course the archival exemplar, the preferred critical object, through
which we accrue and restore meaning to lost pasts. Even as it is almost
commonplace, particularly for t­ hose of us who work within colonial ar-
chives, to argue that historical archives must be read as registers more of
se­lection than of empiricism, t­ here is less debate around forms of archival
consumption and dissemination, particularly as they unfold in minoritized
historiographies.13 To write good histories of sexuality is to seek out that
perfect, elusive archival trace, the vastness of a history glimpsed and com-
pacted in an enticing, fragmentary form. Most times, such an archival trace
coheres as a narrative form precisely when it contains the stories we want to
hear, stories that restore presence and vitality to an often-­diminished past.
I want to begin, then, with one such critical object that continues to
inaugurate most historiographical and/or ethnographic proj­e cts: the
prob­lem event, the detail, the ­legal case, the anecdote—in other words,
an archival trace that is often a tantalizing obstacle to clarity, which then
comes alive through our reconstructive hermeneutics.14 In t­ hese history-­
swamped times, the archival trace appears to be working overtime, as an
infinitely malleable tool for scripting dramatic and heroic readings. Most
often than not, the turn to such an inaugural prob­lem event becomes a story
of exemplarity, where the critical encounter opens up potentialities that we
as scholars want to and usually do figure out. A history worth telling, one
might even insist, depends on exemplary and representative readings of
such archival traces: narrative weavings of particularity and ­wholeness,
of details erupting into insights, insights into veracity. For scholars work-
ing at the interstices of multiple minoritized historiographies, such as my-
self, the prob­lem event often becomes a crucial way of resolving the crisis
of marginality, where the scarcity of historical evidence is refused by the
hermeneutical per­for­mance of plenitude—­where you recover the archival
trace for the promise of historical pre­ce­dence and futurity. The ineluctable
feature of a good archival exemplar is that it w ­ ill tell us a story, preferably
a compelling story, a story worthy of repetition and citation. To imagine
other­wise is to strip the exemplar bare.
In what follows, I want to meditate on what exemplifying readings
of prob­lem events means for the way in which we encounter archives—­
particularly, as is the case h ­ ere, archives of sexuality. Simply put, what
makes something an archival exemplar and not merely a gesture, illustration,

66 · Chapter two
or historical footnote? That is, why does the writing of a history of sexuality
take a par­tic­u­lar exemplary form, and what creates obstacles to its lithesome
storytelling? What are the hermeneutic demands placed on its revelations?
As Lauren Berlant so sagaciously asks in her work on the idea of the case/
event, how do we decide which critical objects are worthy of, and adequate
to, the weight of repre­sen­ta­tion? And how do such se­lections sustain and
even vitalize our sedimented habits of reading?15 As she notes in a second
brilliant essay, aptly called “Genre Flailing,” is it even pos­si­ble to “control
the object enough to say a ­thing about it and to change it enough that it
comes to or­g a­nize surprising kinds of exemplary association”?16 Are his-
torical exemplars of sexuality preselected, an effect of what Kadji Amin
has called “attachment genealogy,” where incon­ve­nient histories (like ped-
erasty) fall away?17 Or, alternatively, are sexuality’s exemplars more “alea-
tory conjunctures,” as Jonathan Goldberg noted all ­those years ago, chance
seeds of an analy­sis that extends in­def­initely and infinitely?18
The provocation of my title, “A History I Am Not Writing,” is an invita-
tion to move with t­ hese rich deliberations on the archival exemplar, without
presuming it as a mode of historical stabilization or recuperation. When
I first started research on the Gomantak Maratha Samaj (the intellectual
archive that founds this book), I was routinely pressed on the message and
use of my work, as it engaged a collectivity whose history was mired in
the messy discomforts of sexuality, caste, and region.19 For an archive as
unexamined as the one I am writing about, the exemplar becomes even
more key, freighted as it is with the weight of an allegedly erased history.
Exemplars materialize the variegated patinas of loss; we excavate facts that
allow us to participate in what Alisa Lebow (in the context of documen-
tary realism) terms a recursive “epistephilia,” an excessive, relentless preoc-
cupation with veracity that becomes the only value invested in an archive.20
Both­ered by what was then, and what remains, the per­sis­tent demand for a
historical value-­in-­the-­making (which would leverage the elusive archival
detail to memorializing and/or truth effect), I wanted to make room for
a more paradoxical possibility: to read the archival exemplar precisely for
what it cannot hold. To find a way to craft a history that would speak to
the conundrum of the archival trace, not to decode it (­because we cannot)
but more to embrace its roving and fractal complexity. Let me reiterate
­here (as I noted in my introduction) that this is not a call to the ungraspa-
bility or incommensurability of the critical object, too routinized a claim
in encounters with geopo­liti­cal elsewheres.21 ­There is, as I ­will demonstrate
in the second half of the chapter, plenty to learn, know, and let go. Bear in

A History I Am Not Writing · 67

mind also that the Samaj archives (with their attachments to Portuguese
India) are as foreign to South Asianists as they would be to anyone within
Euro-­American circles of reference.22
What I want to do instead is to proffer a dif­fer­ent sight line for the
consumption of archives, of times past. I want to think of a way to read
archives that bypasses lineages of reproduction or value, of loss or absence.
I want to imagine a relationship to archives that is about loitering, stalling,
digressing, and defamiliarizing the very pro­cess of writing history. What I
want to think about, tout court, is “timepass.” Belonging to the postcolonial
vernacular of Hinglish (a potent cocktail of the queen’s and the p­ eople’s
En­g lish), timepass is a concept peculiar to the natives of South Asia. It
encompasses a range of meanings, from killing time to engaging in casual
(often sexual) activities that defy time’s value.23 To do or invite timepass is to
unmoor oneself from the value chain, from the weight of time, to surrender
(for better or worse) to the pro­cess; all that m ­ atters is that time passes and
we along with it. Even the etymological mappings of the Oxford En­glish
Dictionary (oed) cata­logue the promiscuous leanings of the concept, dat-
ing back to its official print appearance in the 1980s and 1990s.24 “Time-
pass” designates, on the one hand, an activity of mindless distraction,
chosen by illiterate masses, and, on the other, a more general assessment of
taste and value, crossing class and linguistic divides.25 What is clear is that
it is a term whose meanings routinely elude textual capture. Scant schol-
arly research can be found on the topic, beyond a few socially responsible
studies that point to the concept’s presence in disgruntled, bored youth
(who are unemployed and have too much time on their hands), or in urban
collectivities where the inclination to timepass has led to an increased pro-
clivity for casual sex. I am of course being ironic ­here.26
For the purposes of this chapter, I am interested more in thinking of
timepass as an epistemology for queer historiographical work that reroutes
our orientation to the past.27 How might we approach the issue of sexuality
and exemplar askance, without revisiting routinized habits of analy­sis, even
as we attend to the generation of value that is implicit in the act of reading
itself ? What would it mean to think of our encounters with times past as
timepass, as spaces of delight, boredom, distraction, dynamism, and even
nothing?28 Timepass ­here is immanent to history’s becoming: it contains,
akin to Vinay Gidwani’s ­theses on capital and waste, both historical “value-­
in-­waiting” and “an omnipresent logic of dissipation” that attenuates the
legitimacy and exercise of history-­writing.29 Timepass incorporates and im-
plicates the l­ abor of time into its referent, even as it remains disorderly and

68 · Chapter two
distinct from it. To do timepass history is not to devalue the critical object
(as one of the definitions in the oed would have us believe!); rather, it is
to access archival moments where the demands of repre­sen­ta­tion are out-
lived, canceled, evaded, and reanimated.30 If you recall, I began this book
by asking us to consider why the history of the Samaj has not been written,
despite the overwhelming availability and accessibility of its archives. Was
it, I asked, ­because the Samaj archive did not summon the more reliable
ghosts of an oppositional and lost history of sexuality and region?31 As such,
timepass as heuristic comports with the intimate and immanent logics of this
archive’s form, extricating our reading from the more burdensome repro-
ductive protocols of message and use. We need not worry, then, about the
hoary machinery of persuasion and purpose when we find ourselves d­ oing
timepass with this Samaj’s archival exemplars. No peeling of critical layer
upon layer ­here, but more an exhortation to think the archival exemplar as
an absorbing and abundant discursive presence, reassembled through our
­every reading.32

More I­ magined Than Real

Imagine, then, finding an archival exemplar that has all the ele­ments
needed to sustain clarifying historical reclamation. Now imagine that ex-
emplar torquing away from the askesis of such readings. Let us begin our
foray t­ here. A public meeting of the residents and ratepayers (taxpayers) of
Girgaum (in South Bombay) is hastily convened on July 16, 1911, with the
express purpose of protesting “against the growing evil of ­women of bad
repute coming to reside in increasing numbers in Girgaum.” A petition
is drafted, and four unan­i­mous resolutions are passed (­under the leader-
ship of Sir Bhalchandra Krishna) and in turn forwarded to the secretary of
government ( Judicial Department papers), Bombay. The resolutions in the
petition argue (1) that it is “highly objectionable that ­women of ill-­fame
should at all be allowed to occupy ­houses even on main roads and thor-
oughfares, and generally in quarters inhabited by respectable families and
they emphatically deprecate the recent increase of this evil in Girgaum,”
(2) that “effective steps should be taken to induce house-­owners to refuse
to let their h­ ouses or premises be used for immoral purposes,” (3) that the
“Commissioner of Police should use all the powers given to him by law to
reduce this evil” and “fresh legislation” should be passed to further “em-
power him,” and (4), last but not least, that a committee consisting of the

A History I Am Not Writing · 69

gentlemen from the association should be appointed to take any steps nec-
essary to “carry out the object of the meeting.”
Responding with some testiness, the secretary to the government, C. A.
Kincaid, writes a long and disciplining letter (dated November 13, 1911)
to the ratepayers of Girgaum. In the letter, Kincaid applauds the “spirit”
of the petition against the “evil of prostitution” but cautions against the
inflammatory rhe­toric used by the ratepayers, arguing that “he has reason
to believe that the growth of the evil is more apparent than real.” He further
adds that in the “absence of definite statistics,” ­there is no indication that the
evil of prostitution has in fact increased in Girgaum—­the more obvious
explanation for the threat being that “ill-­houses of fame” had been shut
down in North Girgaum and forced the “­women to scatter and invade the
southern part of the ward.” In case the ratepayers still think it is incum-
bent on the commissioner of police to take action, the secretary further
adds that the commissioner cannot use the “power invested in him by the
law” to take action against the large proportion of t­ hese immoral w ­ omen
who are more “kept mistresses” (devadasis) than “common prostitutes.”
And further, even if the ­women are redistributed and moved to other
parts of the city, it would interfere with the goals of the City Improvement
Trust, which does not have a par­tic­u­lar investment in providing “harlot’s
quarters.” To do so would be to endorse such vice, and perhaps, the letter
snidely questions, is that what the ratepayers want?
The letter ends with a final flourish, saying that “prostitution in Gir-
gaum is a subject which usually comes in for publicity during the monsoon
season when ­there is not much ­going on in Bombay and the Government
are away in Poona.” Castigating the ratepayers for their own involvement
in the “apparent” evil of this vice, Kincaid adds that the ­houses where the
­women reside are owned and supported by the very ratepayers advocating
­these resolutions. And, moreover, in his own “experiences” of Bombay, “the
very gentleman who presided over the meeting recommended to Govern-
ment the other day for an honour an individual who counts among his
nearest female relations three ladies who according to my Criminal Investi-
gation Department must be classes among ­those who, in Census parlance,
are following dishonourable professions.” In a last note, he also reminds
the ratepayers that the government must act “with ­great caution,” espe-
cially as the commissioner of police is still recovering from “being hauled
into court by a w
­ oman upon whom he has served a notice and be told that
he had acted ultra vives and that the ­woman is not a common prostitute.”
And in an effort to erase any doubts on this question, Kincaid writes that

70 · Chapter two
he himself has visited similar ­houses accused of being “disorderly broth-
els” in response to like complaints, only to find that one of the members
who visits the ­house is “a member of a Parsi Purity Brigade or Vigilance
Committee.”33
At the heart of the debate between the two sides is a rather peculiar
crisis of reading, embedded in an even more fascinating and humorous
palimpsest of arguments. T ­ here is always an uptick in petitions in the
monsoon, the colonial official notes, a time of less “real” action and more
“apparent” commotion. The hermeneutical demand on e­ ither side is to
make vis­i­ble and/or eradicate an object of sexuality that is for all consid-
ered “apparent”—­a paradoxical term that traffics equally in the realm of
the obvious and of the elusive (we know the “evil ladies” exist, but the force
of their threat may or may not be real). For someone like myself who is
writing a book on ­these “evil ladies of Girgaum,”34 this exchange inevitably
becomes an archival exemplar, laden with the challenges and possibilities
of historical value. Surely, I must insist, fueled by a restorative historio-
graphical impulse, that what is lost in the back-­and-­forth of this exchange
is the material histories and contexts of the very object of knowledge u­ nder
debate. The slipperiness of the arguments made on both sides (are they
or are they not prostitutes, are they “kept mistresses” or devadasis?) could
become the perfect foil for the “real” history of sexuality that needs tell-
ing: that to reduce t­ hese w
­ omen to the confines of this debate is to limit
our analytical horizons, to forget that ­these so-­called evil ladies founded,
in the de­cade or so ­after this event, one of the most successful devadasi
collectivities in Bombay, the Gomantak Maratha Samaj, earning them the
mighty moniker Bharatatil Ek Aggresor Samaj. As we have already seen in
the previous chapters, the Samaj endures neither the pitfalls of archival loss
nor the indignities of historical erasure.35
In what follows, I want to amplify the two registers of critical reading
that lead us to the exemplar ­here: one that sees histories of sexuality as ab-
sent, lost, and miscast, and another that views them as abundant, vital, and
available. Rather than emphasizing the disjuncture between the two reg-
isters, this juxtaposition means to highlight their differences with regard
to inflection and epistemology. Indeed, any historical reading (of loss and/
or abundance) oscillates between the conceit of recovery and the aware-
ness of a history that punctures any such recuperative imperative.36 What
happens when we approach the archival exemplar through the history of
make.believe I outlined in my introduction? What if our critical energies
are directed not solely at explicating the historical trace (through historical

A History I Am Not Writing · 71

context and more) but more at anchoring it in modes of “timepass” and
the stories we cull? Even as sexuality’s capital in the abovementioned ex-
emplar takes shape through a dispute over ­legal authority, the force of the
exemplar is or­ga­nized more around the question of narrative owner­ship.
That is, the evil ladies enter the archive as an exemplar of a dispute that ad-
dresses the threats of a nonmonogamous conjugal form. This epistemology
of the narrative (how do we know what to know and circulate?) determines
the means by which information about sexuality is si­mul­ta­neously conveyed
and held back—in short, the means by which it becomes an exemplar of
sexuality’s history.
My task in this chapter is thus twofold: First, I have furnished you with
an archival trace that clearly has, as I ­will demonstrate, robust historical
and genealogical content. The story of the evil ladies of Girgaum ­will inevita-
bly deepen our attachment to past identities and histories, as t­ here is much
to learn and hold on to. Yet as we learned in the previous chapter, the Sam-
aj’s archive anticipates and indeed relies on ­these well-­worn critical habits,
leaning in to their prescribed purpose to fresh and surprising ends. As we
have seen, the Samaj’s archive accepts the imperative of exposure, staging
scenes of recognition (as in the case of the “fake” halla) that deliberately
allow it to be seen. The dynamism inside the archive—­past, pre­sent, and in
between—­comes from observing seemingly staple archive genres (letters,
biographies, photo­graphs) rearranged and refurbished in myriad and un-
expected ways. How, then, do we take ­these lessons in archival formation
to the reading of an archival exemplar?
Second, how do we approach divergent historical readings of sexuality’s
exemplars as noncompetitive, not as exercises in exposure or critique but
as an invitation to “timepass,” to extend the complex encounter with the
exemplar into a language of ­others? How do we activate a history that does
not partake of the pendulum, of an oscillation between recovery and a
punctuation of the recovery imperative? Even as the archival rec­ord of the
evil ladies appears perfectly crafted for storytelling, with inbuilt ele­ments
of mystery and mayhem, how do we move away from the enticements of its
exemplarity? As Carolyn Steedman cautioned many years ago, the constant
reiteration and recuperation of “missing” exemplars in minoritized histo-
ries (in her case, ­labor history and ­women’s history) does not necessarily
intervene in the disciplinary and disciplining scripts of history-­writing.37
Rather, it creates a paradoxical sense that t­ here must be l­ ittle to recover if
much discursive effort is needed to signal such historical absences. In what
follows, I want us to think of the collective constitution of the archival

72 · Chapter two
exemplar, as other narratives are continuously added to a rec­ord always
partially recoverable in itself, where meaning is generated not as much by
singling out as by what Hortense Spillers calls “an opening in the chain of
necessity.”38 ­Every reading of the exemplar’s historical context, e­ very ren-
dition of its minutiae, demands a recalibration of its overall meaning. The
force of the exemplar thus rests not in its revelation, which is so scripted as
to be antidramatic (we must look for evil ladies!), but in the waywardness
of its composition. In coming to such observations, I have also had to dis-
sent from my ­earlier thinking on this subject, where I remained enamored
of sexuality’s archival trace as an agonistic space of absence and presence.
I wanted to queer the historical rec­ord, even though the rec­ord was never
stable to begin with.

The Properties of Evil

Several historical accounts from the period set the stage for the recupera-
tion of the evil ladies of Girgaum as the progenitors of the successful and
celebrated Gomantak Maratha Samaj. From the outset, ­there is a concerted
effort to fix their value as maligned subjects—­unruly, corrupt, dangerous,
sexual, or other­wise. And for the most part, ­those efforts remain thwarted
as more and more conflicting information on ­these troublesome evil ladies
continues to surface. Padma Anagol, for example, outlines early twentieth-­
century public reform initiatives to read the evil ladies as morally con-
tagious within a larger respectability movement orchestrated by largely
middle-­class (and mostly upper-­caste) ­women. Within such narratives of
reform and pro­gress (primarily in western India), the evil ladies become
purveyors of a curiously fecund set of cultural threats. ­Here the evil of the
ladies shifts from the corruptions of sex to the debasement of kala (art), a
shift that needs to be rerouted (and stabilized) through a more heteronor-
mative marriage economy. On the one hand, the evil ladies trou­ble cherished
distinctions between kalavants/naikins/artists and prostitutes; a­ fter all, if
they are primarily repositories of arts (kala), then their growing presence
cannot be regulated within antiprostitution regulation, and the petition
of the Girgaum ratepayers holds no ground. On the other hand, the rise of
such evil ladies and their clientele demonstrates the need for a more robust
cultivation of arts (kala) within middle-­class w­ omen themselves. In this
vein, middle-­class men become clients of evil ladies in search of artistic
enrichment, not sex, a turn that rouses middle-­class w ­ omen to claim the

A History I Am Not Writing · 73

domain of the arts (kala) for themselves. For Anagol, groups such as the
Maharashtra Mahila Mandal (Maharashtra W ­ omen’s Association) (1902)
embody the tensions of such concerns as they plot efforts to both train
in the arts and or­ga­nize against the presence of the evil ladies. Vernacular
newspapers of the day, such as Bodh Sudhakar and Subodh Patrika, Ana-
gol writes, equally register the scale of ­these efforts, carry­ing accounts of
middle-­class w ­ omen trying to oust the evil ladies from their residences,
even as ­others, such as Indu Prakash and Dnyan Prakash, run editorials
extolling the naikins’ bravery in resisting eviction.39
Lest we s­ ettle into ­these florid accounts of the evil ladies, their alleged
moral turpitude and theft of native (middle-­class arts/kala), ­there are other
historical details that erupt onto and further muddle the historical plot. As
Ashwini Tambe and Stephen Legg remind us, the social geography of the
sex trade in colonial Bombay rarely conformed to any settled organ­ization
of race, class, or spatiality.40 Simply put, t­ here is no stable referent for the
specter of evil ladies within archival rec­ords in terms of their racial, spatial,
or class status. Tambe, for example, pointedly argues that the spatial strati-
fications of Bombay required white Eu­ro­pean prostitutes to live alongside
and even eco­nom­ically align with native w ­ omen, especially in dense areas
of sex trade, such as Kamathipura, that ­were adjacent to Girgaum. Such
racially complex urban geographies often meant that Eu­ro­pean prostitutes
(of Polish, Italian, and German origins) ­were ironically depicted as more
“evil” than Indian prostitutes: they w ­ ere too “bold,” “­going about in a state
of semi-­nudity,” and catering to mostly working-­class men (of all races).41
Indeed, petitions filed as early as 1871 by residents of Girgaum and its vi-
cinity rec­ord similar calls as the 1911 petition, albeit for the removal of Eu­
ro­pean prostitutes from congested thoroughfares in neighborhoods such
as Girgaum.42
Ethnographic and travel accounts of colonial Bombay register other
twists and turns in the vexing history of the evil ladies. Govind Narayan’s
Mumbaiche varnan (1863) documents the author’s migration to Bombay
from Madgaon through a series of lush accounts of the city’s shifting urban
landscape. In a chapter describing the rise of arts and theater in Bombay
(circa 1861), Narayan writes with g­ reat disgust about the rise of “dancing
girls” who appear to have garnered clientele across the city, their “num-
bers increasing daily.” Of g­ reat concern to Narayan is the successful danc-
ing girl’s acquisition of properties and her vulgar display of wealth. As he
writes, “She spent nearly four thousand rupees” on an initiation ceremony
for her ­daughter to become a devadasi, reminding him of the “stories of

74 · Chapter two
the matriarchates [sic] mentioned in the Puranas.”43 K. Raghunathji ex-
presses a similar articulation of shock and awe in his documentation of the
rise of “Bombay Dancing Girls.” Writing for the Indian Antiquary (1884),
Raghunathji provides detailed descriptions of ­these dancing girls (who are
“both Hindu and Musalman”) and their practices, noting that a large per-
centage of the Hindu girls appear to have migrated “from Goa and the
places around it.”44 He notes that the “Hindu dancing girls are of four sects,
viz:—­Naikins, Bhavins, Murlis and Kasbins. Of ­these the first two belong
to Goa and villages round it, being natives of that district.” Unlike Narayan,
Raghunathji paints a more flattering picture of ­these ­women, extolling
their beauty and their generally “intelligent pleasing appearance.”45 While
they arrive in Bombay speaking “Goanese” (which we are mysteriously told
differs from the “language of Bombay”), they quickly acclimatize and soon
read, write, and even compose songs in Marathi. As in Narayan’s account,
Raghunathji too emphasizes the perplexingly “large sums of money” that
the ­women appear to have access to, describing in excruciating detail the
gold ornaments the ­women routinely wear.46 Although such anthropolog-
ical accounts are to be consumed with some trepidation (­after all, we are
rarely provided with any sources for the information that is provided!),
references to the w ­ omen’s growing presence and appetite for wealth can
also be found in other genres of archival rec­ords.47
Of equal interest are several ­legal appeals filed on behalf of ­these evil la-
dies petitioning the state for support in their claims for maintenance from
the families of dead patrons, or yajemans, residing in or around Girgaum.48
As in the accounts discussed above, the focus continues to be on the acqui-
sition of ill-­gotten wealth by the evil ladies and the threat it poses to the
sanctioned circulation of capital within ­family formations. One series of
appeals, in par­tic­u­lar, stand out in their detailed listing of monies acquired
and requisitioned from the ­family of an upstanding member of society (a
member of the Girgaum ratepayers association I began with) a­ fter his un-
timely death in 1919. In Bai Monghibai v. Bai Nagubai (August 11, 1922),
Bai Monghibai (­widow of the deceased Vasanji Madhavji Thakar, who
died on November 21, 1919) appeals a previous judgment of Mr. Justice
Kanga that awarded monthly maintenance of four hundred rupees to Bai
Nagubai Manglorkar as “the permanent concubine of the deceased.” Ac-
cording to the details of the previous judgment, the deceased, “possessed of
moveable and immoveable property of a very large value,” had abandoned
his ­family domicile in Vadgadi and had come to reside with Bai Nagu-
bai, a Goan naikin, “in her ­house in Girgaum and that he continued to

A History I Am Not Writing · 75

reside ­there ­until the day prior to his death.” Bai Nagubai claimed monthly
maintenance and “alleged that a sum of Rs. 25,000 was specially promised
by the deceased” for the benefit of her and her d­ aughter a­ fter his death. In
the series of l­ egal skirmishes that followed the original judgment of Justice
Kanga, much effort is made to determine ­whether Bai Nagubai was the
“exclusive mistress” of the deceased and ­whether she maintained sexual
chastity even a­ fter his death. Bai Monghibai, the deceased’s w ­ idow, argues
that the deceased merely visited Bai Nagubai in her Girgaum residence and
was permanently domiciled elsewhere. Acting Judge Lallubhai Shah, who
reviewed the w ­ idow’s appeal, concurs with her claim, even as he is “willing
to admit that Bai Nagubai used to live in a h ­ ouse near Kennedy Bridge at
Girgaon where the deceased Vasanji used to visit her regularly . . . ​prior to
his death and used to pay her some monthly allowance.”
The crux of the appeal relies on the status of Bai Nagubai’s residence in
Girgaon/Girgaum: Is it or is it not the primary residence of the deceased?
For Shah, the true nature of the deceased’s relationship with Bai Nagubai
cannot be ascertained without “knowing the nature of his visits” to the Gir-
gaum residence. True companionship, for Shah, can be determined only
through open and continuous cohabitation with Bai Nagubai, something
that the facts of the case do not appear to corroborate. Shah’s judgment is
appealed further by Bai Nagubai; she provides evidence that the deceased
had rented the Girgaum residence “in her name . . . ​and that he was nursed
­there during his last illness and only removed shortly before his death.”49
As the story of t­ hese evil ladies unfolds in multiple historical accounts
of the period, it becomes “apparent” that the “real” archival substance of
their evil unfolds in variegated scenes of capital. From their ostentatious
displays of wealth to their corruption of the f­ amily form as value, the evil
ladies appear to play exemplary roles in what Mariam Dossal has called
Bombay’s “theatre of conflict.”50 At the time of the ratepayers’ complaint
against the evil ladies of Girgaum, the city of Bombay appears mired in
vari­ous strug­g les around land expansion and reclamation, gentrification
and the increasing demands of native franchise. Prashant Kidambi reminds
us that this is also the period when the Bombay Improvement Trust (bit)
emerges as the central force in shaping the city’s physical landscape. bit was
an ambitious colonial enterprise that was largely a response to the sanita-
tion risks of overcrowding that had come to the forefront in the devastating
aftermath of the Bombay plague. One of its key proj­ects was the construc-
tion of thoroughfares such as the Princess Street Scheme II and the Sand-
hurst Road Scheme III that opened up a wide corridor in the other­wise

76 · Chapter two
crowded locality of Girgaum. But such efforts w ­ ere continuously mired
in multiple property disputes around land acquisitions as native landlords
and homeowners rushed to capitalize on the increasing value of their as-
sets.51 Preeti Chopra, for instance, argues that the expansion debates pivot
around the “joint public realm” where native elites collaborate with the co-
lonial state (with varying degrees of success) to create public institutions of
finance.52 One key stage of t­ hese financial ventures circles precisely around
the acquisition and control of lucrative land, such as the properties the evil
ladies of Girgaum inhabit.53
For Kidambi, Bombay’s transformation (from the 1890s onward) from
a quiet coastal town to a bustling industrial colonial metropolis was ac-
companied by a rise in mi­grant collectivities, spanning diverse discursive,
religious, and class/caste status. ­These mi­grant collectivities created more
flexible and hybrid understandings of the category of native elites, evident
from the motley collection of ratepayers in the Girgaum association. Such
an ethos of urban transformation, Kidambi suggests, further paved the way
for what he terms petitioning culture. The evidentiary genre of the petition
(like the one that produces our critical object, the evil ladies of Girgaum)
constitutes a resistive “event” in colonial Bombay, an interstitial space of
opposition, complication, and even aporia. The petition, Kidambi argues,
is more than a state regulatory practice that solidifies hierarchies of sup-
plication between the native subject and colonial state. Rather, it becomes
an arena of po­liti­cal, oppositional, and often transformative action within
the confines of a state-­sanctioned bureaucratic ritual. Other scholars too,
including Bhavani Raman, note that while the petition is used as a state
disciplining apparatus (in southern India) to model dissent into more state-­
sanctioned forms, it still gathers a diverse group of merchants, producing
cross-­communal and collective bargaining, often against the intrusive ex-
pansions of the colonial state. Hence, the petition that produces the archival
rec­ord of the evil ladies is itself embroiled in a paradoxical narrative of refusal
and compliance. No pabulum ­here!54
Another f­ actor elided in our focus on the evil ladies of Girgaum is
their emergence in the context of a precarious and controversial period
of property tax legislation in Bombay Presidency. The crux of the contro-
versy revolved around the famous Girgaum Memorial Memorandum of
1870, which called for the abolition of occupier’s and h ­ ouse taxes, and what
more reformist newspapers at the time such as Native Opinion derisively
called the “landlord’s movement.” The memorandum, as Christine Dobbin
argues, principally involved the tax levied on ­house property by the colonial

A History I Am Not Writing · 77

state and asked for a reduction of the taxes from 7 to 4 ­percent. The Bom-
bay Municipal Act of 1872 further complicated ­matters by allowing the
upper echelon of ratepayers (primarily landlords and businessmen) to be
elected members of the Municipal Corporation.55 S. M. Edwardes too, in-
veterate colonial chronicler and Special Collector for the bit, attributes
the boom in land values in areas such as Girgaum between 1904 and 1907
to efforts such as the “landlord’s movement.” For Edwardes, the expansion
of the municipal membership, along with more native involvement in land
acquisition and tax reform, also provided the catalyst for more large-­scale
investment ­after the years of the plague pandemic.56
Leading up to 1911, the year in which the Girgaum residents and rate-
payers association files the public resolutions against the evil ladies of
Girgaum, the tax rate legislation on property continued to be heavi­ly dis-
puted, with property values escalating (as mentioned above) thanks to the
re­distribution of lands due to the institution of the City Improvement Trust.
In such a context, the evil ladies’ occupation of homes in the main thorough-
fares of Girgaum needs to be examined more carefully. According to the
census of 1901, the number of prostitutes in Girgaum had significantly di-
minished in numbers (dropping from more than 1,200 or so in the late
1890s to about 235 in 1901—­figures cum grano, of course, given the un-
reliability of census reports at the time).57 So the secretary to the state is
right in arguing that a statistical case cannot be made for the rise of evil
ladies in Girgaum. Alternately, what the private archives of the Gomantak
Maratha Samaj (which contain many property deeds and genealogies of
inheritance and distribution) reveal is that the evil ladies of Girgaum oc-
cupied and then gradually took possession of the multiple residences they
­were inhabiting, thanks to their complex negotiation with their yajemans
of a payment system that bypassed cash payments for property deeds.58
The association of the Girgaum residents and ratepayers lists as its
members prominent Saraswat shetias (commercial elites), “Mohammedan”
merchants, and a few converted Christians and Eurasians, a motley crew
of caste and races that is reflected in the current geography of Girgaum.59
In the back-­and-­forth between the members of the Girgaum association
and the secretary to the government, no such skirmish over tax rates and
property values is made vis­i­ble.60 The repeated and “apparent” invocation
of “vice” and prostitution seamlessly covers over the economics and exi-
gencies of the Samaj ­women’s day-­to-­day survival. It is therefore with no
small mea­sure of historical irony that I note ­here that the economic success
of the Samaj is also largely built on their acquisition in the early 1900s of

78 · Chapter two
prime property all over Bombay Presidency, particularly in the area of Gir-
gaum, Gamdevi, and Chowpatty.61
As is “apparent” by now, all ­these readings of return clearly enjoy a wide
disseminative force, more po­liti­cally enabling than an accessible transpar-
ency or an uninterrupted linearity of action. The evil ladies emerge over
and over again, albeit for a dif­fer­ent vice of collective reform, within the
Samaj archives. From 1910 to 1912, concerted efforts are afoot to provide
access, education, and repre­sen­ta­tion to the collectivities of evil ladies inhab-
iting Girgaum and its environs. In his history of the emergence of the Samaj
and its activities in Goa and Bombay, N. A. Marathe writes of extended
meetings or­ga­nized by Rajaram Rangoji Paigankar (the author of Mee kon,
and one of the principal forces b­ ehind the establishment of the Samaj, as
we have already seen) along with multiple associates (Sudharamji Man-
drekar, Tukaramji Kamulkar, et al.) from the area. Meetings ­were held at
the residence of Mukundraj Engineer in Kandewadi, Girgaum, to garner
support for an initial organ­ization, Kalavant Samuh/Group/Collectivity,
which also led to the establishment of circulating libraries and tutorial ser­
vices for members of the kalavant community.62
More recent scholarly studies on the migration into Bombay of “pros-
titutes” (with a “reference to f­ amily background”) and their rehabilitation,
such as a key one published in 1962, applaud the positive efforts of the evil
ladies of the Samaj and contrast them sharply with other organ­izations,
such as the Association of Tawaifs and Deredars, that continue to use
“singing girls” as a “shield” to propagate more “unscrupulous” and unlawful
activity. The authors, Punekar and Rao, conducted extensive ethnographic
research, as the long lists of ­tables, surveys, and data confirm. But the study
notes (with some irony) that “the majority of their respondents” are mi­
grants from Goa, whose m ­ other tongue is Konkani, so their input is there-
fore to be taken with a grain of salt!63
Even as I write this, I continue to “discover” new archival evidence
that can further unpack the telling tales of this prob­lem event. Generous
colleagues working on histories of policing and surveillance in colonial
Bombay reference (with ­great confidence, I would add) the presence of
numerous classified files on t­ hese evil ladies of Girgaum that still lie outside
the realm of public consumption. As of now, such files remain sequestered
within the bureaucratic walls of police archives, though their content, like
the material of this prob­lem event, offers the promise of multiple read-
ings.64 We also know, from available archival rec­ords, that ­there exists
correspondence between British and Portuguese police on the criminal

A History I Am Not Writing · 79

activities of female mi­grants from Goa, resulting in a report that chroni-
cles their po­liti­cal and entrepreneurial interests.65 Such invocations of clas-
sified (and therefore potentially explosive) evidence further concatenate
the value accrued around the prob­lem event. ­After all, any new historical
reading, especially of sexuality’s pasts, surely benefits from the continued
promise of archival evidence. To hold such evidence in narrative abeyance
makes pos­si­ble further heroic reconstructions of the event, bypassing any
closure of an ever-­possible “real” history.
In light of such concerns, the scandal now shifts from an evaluation or
disputation of the “evil” of the ladies of Girgaum to the “apparent” entan-
glements b­ ehind their invocation. Let me be clear: to read sexuality h ­ ere as
a cover story is not merely to make the familiar but necessary argument for
sexuality’s material contexts. It is more an attempt to think of t­ hese con-
texts themselves as being equally locked in the dialectic of the apparent and
the real. Within such imaginaries, the ­matter of the evil ladies of Girgaum
works not as an exemplary case that resolves historical ambivalence or loss
through its successful recognition and emergence but, rather, as a narrative
that inserts epistemic discontinuity in how and why we write histories of
sexuality.66 The supplementarity of each reading (and we have many at play
­here) is the currency through which the archival exemplar accrues value. A
prob­lem event becomes a fiat of fictions, where each reading of its content
becomes a form of currency, underwritten by what becomes necessary for
the instance. ­There is no settled abundance of meaning; meaning accumu-
lates in a multitude of keys, none of which hold more or less value than any
other, except for their par­tic­u­lar circulatory value at any one time.67
Even as the story of the evil ladies morph­ing into the successful emer-
gence of the Gomantak Maratha Samaj is a crucial and inspiring one, it is
more than just yet another exercise in recuperative and redemptive historiog-
raphy. It pushes us to consider the archival trace, less as a marginalized, erased
archival trace of sexuality, and more as a ware­house of the imaginaries of
property, caste, and sexuality. The exemplar of the evil ladies does not af-
firm or erase their liminality as archival objects; rather, it simply presses
against our desire for an archival hermeneutics that ­will recover to restore
value to a lost form/collectivity. In this case, the collectivity, as I have
noted, is never lost or erased or missing an archive. As is clear by now, t­ hese
evil ladies not only exist in multiple archival forms; they also maintain and
sustain an archive of their own making. The evil ladies of Girgaum func-
tion (then and now) as a scene of exemplarity whereby we return over and
over again to the vice of sexuality as the familiar place of historical redress

80 · Chapter two
and reform. How can we fashion new habits of reading that disarticulate
sexuality from its inevitably “evil” form, to move ­toward its ordinary plen-
itude within the conventions of capital, caste and, historiography? What
would it mean to archive the “evil ladies” not as an alluring exemplar nor
as an aspirational problem-event that will somehow unravel the secrets of
sexuality? As we have seen, the exemplar of the “evil ladies” speaks more
to a history of sexuality that is in defiance against over-zealous mandates
of historical recuperation; as if to say, if you keep reading, there will be
no end to representation. As readers of the exemplar, and of my multiple
narrations of the exemplar, we are d­ oing “timepass” as we move through
cue and clues without falling prey to the so-­called true value of the event.
Bypassing the heroics of recuperative historiography, the exemplar h ­ ere is
less an exceptional rec­ord of lost lives than an open horizon for reading and
gathering. Let us try to imagine that history together.

notes

1 ­These formulations of the Samaj’s variegated archive are lessons learned

in reading and writing from one of my earliest teachers of the En­glish
language at Cornell University: Lydia Fakundiny. Fakundiny’s remarkable
“On Approaching the Essay” (1991) remains to my mind one of the best
mediations on the craft of writing and inhabiting the confines of an essay.
I have turned to it often in my own deliberations on the contours of this
archive. See Fakundiny, The Art of the Essay, 1–21.
2 I borrow the term fault lines from Alan Sinfield’s provocative early work
on dissident reading and lit­er­a­tures of sexuality. See Sinfield, Faultlines.
3 See Best and Marcus, “Surface Reading”; Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy;
Stewart, “The Hermeneutics of Suspicion.” As Cannon Schmitt writes, “It
is as though we are so accustomed to straining our ears for faint whispers
of the non-­dit beneath or ­behind the obvious, the loudly dit, that affirm-
ing that texts say what they mean and mean what they say takes on the
force of a revelation.” See Schmitt, “Interpret or Describe?”
4 Tanoukhi turns to a critique of the term distant reading to speak to the
limitations of current approaches to world/comparative lit­er­a­tures (pace
Franco Moretti et al.). See Tanoukhi, “Surprise Me If You Can.” Ta-
noukhi’s invocation of the term distant reading emerges from the critical
lexicon of comparative literary studies and is not to be confused with
work being done within digital humanities. The idea of “distant read-
ing” in digital humanities uses natu­ral language pro­cessing and artificial
intelligence to “read” a corpus of Eu­ro­pean texts, across time and space,
especially within medieval and early modern studies. For further reading,

A History I Am Not Writing · 81

 ­ ere are some sample texts: Jänicke et al., “On Close and Distant Reading
h
in Digital Humanities”; Underwood, “A Genealogy of Distant Reading”;
and Bode, “The Equivalence of ‘Close’ and ‘Distant’ Reading.” I thank
Durba Mi­tra for alerting me to this set of lit­er­a­tures.
5 Allan, In the Shadow of World Lit­er­a­ture, 3.
6 Allan, In the Shadow of World Lit­er­a­ture, 2–21.
7 See Chatterjee, “When ‘Sexualities’ Floated F ­ ree of Histories in South
Asia”; Povinelli, Economies of Abandonment; and Morgan, “Accounting
for the ‘Most Excruciating Torment.’ ” Within South Asian studies in par­
tic­u­lar, the early work of the Subaltern Studies Collective attended to the
elitist compositional and distributive logics of archives in colonial and
postcolonial India. Yet for the most part, the focus of the collective has
still largely been recuperative and reparative, and only more recently sup-
plemented by the work of feminist historians such as Indrani Chatterjee,
Tanika Sarkar, Janaki Nair, and their emphasis on more discrepant and
gendered histories of ­labor, governmentality, and affect.
8 For a prescient reading of this appointment, see Thapar, “The Appoint-
ment of a Historian Whose Work Is Unfamiliar to Most Historians
Shows Scant Regard for the Impressive Scholarship That Now Character-
ises the Study of Indian History and This Disregard May Stultify F ­ uture
Academic Research.” The litany of ­mistakes, backflips, controversies, and
denials of India’s diverse past by the ruling Bharitiya Janata Party (bjp) is
by now well known and too extensive to be rehearsed h ­ ere in its entirety.
9 fp Staff, “Historians Raise Questions about ichr’s New Boss Prof Y Sud-
ershan Rao.”
10 See Bhattacharya, “How Historian Vikram Sampath Uses Decolonisation
Rhe­toric to Make Hindu Domination Sound Reasonable.”
11 For an extended exegesis on the use of historical archives in the efforts
to repeal Section 377, see A. Arondekar, “Time’s Corpus”; and Kapur,
“Unruly Desires, Gay Governance, and the Make­over of Sexuality.” For
further reading, see Nagar and Dasgupta, “Public Koti and Private Love.”
12 When I first conceived of this chapter, it was 2017, and we lived in a
pandemic-­free world. Since then, much has changed for all of us, but the
authoritarian manipulation of our pasts continues unabated in Naren-
dra Modi’s India. Now, Modi’s propaganda machine routinely merges
historical fiction with scientific facts, arguing for the primacy of a Hindu
science amid the unfolding health drama in the world. See pti, “ ‘Cow
Urine Is Pure Elixir.’ ”
13 Stoler, Along the Archival Grain, 32–33.
14 Berlant, “On the Case.” See also Damousi, Lang, and Sutton, Case Studies
and the Dissemination of Knowledge.
15 My thinking on the idea of event-­making, events in emergence, and all
­things event-­making has benefited from the work of Lauren Berlant. See,

82 · Chapter two
 more specifically, “History and the Affective Event” (chap. 2) in Cruel Op-
timism, 51–94. See also Stewart, Ordinary Affects and A Space on the Side
of the Road, as well as the more recent collaboration between Berlant and
Stewart, The Hundreds. I was also fortunate enough to be invited to think
with Berlant, Stewart, Andrew Causey, Susan Lepselter, Barbara Brown-
ing, Renee Gladman, Stephen Muecke, Fred Moten, and Erica Rand at a
mini-­seminar on experimental writing held at the University of Chicago,
Experiment in Critical Practice, June 1–2, 2018. I found the seminar to be
in equal mea­sure, exasperating, challenging, and meditative in its engage-
ments with historical writing.
16 Berlant, “Genre Flailing.”
17 Amin, Disturbing Attachments, 19.
18 Goldberg, The Seeds of ­Things, 1–10.
19 The first of many iterations of the question of use and message came at
an early pre­sen­ta­tion I gave on the proj­ect at the fiftieth-­anniversary cele­
brations of Goan Liberation in 2011. I was one of a small group of activ-
ists and scholars working on caste, and the only one working on sexuality
at the conference held in Panjim, Goa. I was repeatedly pushed to speak
to how I would use this research to “better” Goan history or produce
much-­needed hagiographies of the lost ­women of the Samaj. Much of
the critical energy for this chapter came from a de­cided discomfort with
­those early demands.
20 Lebow, “Faking What?”
21 I develop this point more carefully in my response to Valerie Traub’s
work on histories of sexuality. See A. Arondekar, “Thinking Sex with
Geopolitics.”
22 To reiterate a key point I made in my introduction—­for most scholars
of South Asia, British colonialism remains the lodestone of all histor-
ical critique, and Portuguese India serves as an afterthought or mere
background material. One has simply to scan the publications of the past
few de­cades or so in colonial South Asian history to notice this trend.
The lit­er­a­tures that are available on Portuguese colonialism in South
Asia tend to focus more on pre-­nineteenth-­century histories of trade and
­labor. Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s oft-­cited opus ­Career and Legend of Vasco
Da Gama would be one good example.
23 My invocation of “timepass” always takes me back to a conversation
with one of my queer kin in gradu­ate school. As new and enthusiastic
acolytes of queer studies, we ­were often impatiently asked by suspicious
students: “What is a queer poem?” Our answer would be: “A queer poem is
a poem that fancies other poems. So it never wishes to s­ ettle down.” Neither
of us can still recall whose words we borrowed in this response, but they
­were certainly coined by someone infinitely wiser and more prescient than
­either of us!

A History I Am Not Writing · 83

 24 While print usage of the term in En­glish may indeed only date back to
the 1980s, I can easily recall its usage from my own childhood in the
1970s. It is a term whose circulation, like its usage, remains an ever-­
changing story.
25 For example, we find a reference in 1997 to “a smiling businesswoman
who turned a ‘timepass’ interest into a roaring enterprise.” See oed On-
line, 3rd ed., s.v. “timepass, n. and adj,” accessed July 5, 2020, https://­oed​
.­com​/­view​/­Entry​/­60968659.
26 See Bedi and Ebrahim, Timepass; Jeffrey, Timepass; and Fuller, “Timepass
and Boredom in Modern India.” Protima Bedi’s memoirs invoke “time-
pass” to speak to the perils and pleasures of gendered embodiment as a
Hindi film star and actress. Fuller and Jeffrey, on the other hand, proffer
more conventional accounts of the homosocial worlds of (largely unem-
ployed) young men who waste time in value/less activities. They rarely
address, for example, the postcolonial state’s mobilization of “timepass”
activities of sexuality and loitering to harass sex workers and queer/trans
subjects in public spaces.
27 For more on “timepass” and genres of Hindi cinema, see Rai, Untimely
Bollywood.
28 The allusion to “nothing” ­here is of course a nod to Lee Edelman’s won-
derful essay “Learning Nothing.”
29 Gidwani, “Six ­Theses on Waste, Value, and Commons,” 773. In his third
thesis, Gidwani writes: “This antithetical aspect of waste, as a logic
that stymies the accumulation of property qua capital, is mirrored in
the vari­ous ways it comes to connote not only merely the uncultivated
or untended but also the pointless, the misdirected, and the futile; the
ineffectual, the foolish, and the worthless; the idle and the improvident;
the excessive, prodigal, the improper, the inefficient. As history reveals:
time, money, words, ­things, actions, and nature—­all may be wasted, and
are disciplined accordingly” (776).
30 Sianne Ngai’s formulations on the uncertain value and time of the “gim-
mick” as object/material are useful to think with h ­ ere as well. Ngai too
pushes us to imagine what deviations from settled practices and readings
of productivity would be like, and how we would inhere value other/wise.
See Ngai, Theory of the Gimmick.
31 Carla Freccero’s work on queer spectrality comes to mind h ­ ere, where
the specter is less a force of subversive potential or containment, more a
per­sis­tent ethical and historical demand. ­Here the demand, as I alluded
to in my introduction, continues to be around refusal and re­sis­tance,
the resolute man­tra of minoritized historiography. Freccero, “Queer
Spectrality.”
32 ­After all, as Jacques Derrida reminds us, ­every example must necessarily
fail to do its job (1982, 27).

84 · Chapter two
33 All rec­ords of the event ­were found in an unmarked file at the Mumbai
offices of the Gomantak Maratha Samaj. The file was buried in a box con-
taining paperwork on the acquisition of the Samaj building in Girgaum.
The available rec­ords contain typewritten letters from the Residents and
Ratepayers of Girgaum (July 16, 1911) and a response from the Judi-
cial Department (dated November 13, 1911). What is curious about the
contents of the file is that the letters contain corrections that have been
penciled in, with no indication of ­whether the letters ­were revised and
re-­sent. The official rec­ord can be located in the papers of the Judicial De-
partment, Maharashtra State Archives and is titled “Protest by the Rate
Payers and Residents of Girgaum, Bombay against the Evil of ­Women of
Bad Repute, 1911,” 235.
34 For ease of reading, I have omitted the scare quotes around the term evil
ladies henceforth, though they are always implied.
35 The select brief invocation of the Samaj I provide h ­ ere, and in ­every other
chapter, is one that I narrate repeatedly and verbatim in all work that
touches on the Samaj’s exemplarity. Part of the challenge of writing about
a collectivity that is si­mul­ta­neously known and not known is that histori-
cal details become routinized only through their constant repetition.
36 Stephen Best speaks brilliantly to the relationship between such readings
in his work on histories of slavery. Drawing from Frances Ferguson’s work
on tort law, he writes of the pressing desire to recover the subject who
existed (or had value) before the injury of slavery. As he writes: “­These
sorts of historical and po­l iti­cal investments (the acquisitive urges, strong
claims making, perfective activity) have been hard-­baked into the struc-
ture of agonistic critique” (39). See Best, None Like Us.
37 Steedman, “La théorie qui n’en est pas une.” See also Supriya Chaudhuri’s
wonderful rereading of the Steedman essay in her “Significant Lives.”
38 Hortense Spillers invokes this phrase in her juxtaposition of the work of
Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi in a short, evocative piece,
appropriately titled “Discomfort.” Spillers deliberates on “protocols of
non-­violence” in the face of an increasingly carceral and slave American
nation-­state and summons “an opening in the chain of necessity” as a
pos­si­ble way out (6, 7).
39 Anagol, The Emergence of Feminism in India, 1850–1920, 123–37.
40 Tambe, “Social Geographies of Bombay’s Sex Trade”; Legg, “Stimulation,
Segregation and Scandal.”
41 Tambe, “Social Geographies of Bombay’s Sex Trade,” 156.
42 I was able to locate this archival source thanks to Ashwini Tambe’s brief
reference to it. See Petition Submitted to the Governor and President in
Council, Bombay, by Residents of Girgaum and Its Vicinity, 1871, 125.
43 Ranganathan, Govind Narayan’s Mumbai, 261–62. The original Marathi
text utilizes more lavish and efflorescent language.

A History I Am Not Writing · 85

 44 Raghunathji, “Bombay Dancing Girls,” 166.
45 Raghunathji, “Bombay Dancing Girls,” 167.
46 Raghunathji, “Bombay Dancing Girls.”
47 The Portuguese colonial archives too contain many stories of the wealth
of Goan devadasis or bailadeiras. In a small but remarkable essay on the
history of merces (gifts) within the Portuguese empire in India, Dr. Ag-
nelo Paulo Fernandes tracks the references to bailadeiras and their
wealth. He notes, for example, the rich (in all senses of the word) late
nineteenth-­century history of Caxy Bailadeira, a resident of Goa, who
possesses properties and wealth far beyond the imagination of most
colonial subjects. See Fernandes, “Curious Case of Goan Orientalism,”
8–26.
48 The early rec­ords of the National Vigilance Association—­keeping
an eye on their colonial holdings—­mention brothels in Girgaum,
near the French bridge, though their focus is more on the presence
of white slaves. See National Vigilance Association, The Vigilance
Rec­ord, 150.
49 Bai Monghibai v. Bai Nagubai (1922) 24 bomlr 1009 and Bai Nagubai
v. Bai Monghibai (1926) 28 bomlr 1143. Other cases that deal with
questions of maintenance and similar evil ladies include Bai Appibai v.
Khimji Cooverji (1936) 38 bomlr 77 and Yashvantrav v. Kashibai (1888)
ilr 12 Bom 26. Kunal Parker, writing on similar questions, proposes that
colonial courts in India augmented devadasi reform through innova-
tive and often unpre­ce­dented translations of the law. ­Legal norms that
previously applied to dif­fer­ent castes represented within Brahmanical
taxonomies ­were extended to include an innovative set of patriarchal
norms with re­spect to the sexual be­hav­ior of Hindu ­women. For example,
the devadasi was cast less as a “­temple dancing girl” and more as a “Hindu
girl” engaging in sexual activities outside of marriage. Such a shift from
the “tradition” of devadasis to the aberration of their sexual practices al-
lowed the courts to legislate against the devadasis as prostitutes without
engaging their more complex functions as repositories of art, culture,
and religion. According to Parker, ­these concerns substantially impacted
the interpretation of the 1861 Indian Penal code with reference to the
devadasis. By focusing on the prostitution of minors dedicated to
­temples, Parker suggests that devadasi reform groups rerouted provi-
sions intended to protect minors, to nullify adoption by devadasis, and
to outlaw any and all dedications of girls to deities. Such a turn to the
protection of minors became a crucial part of judicial reform movement
aimed at eliminating devadasis. See Parker, “ ‘A Corporation of Superior
Prostitutes.’ ”
50 Dossal, Theatre of Conflict, City of Hope. See specifically chap. 7, “Urban
Planning or Crisis Management?”

86 · Chapter two
51 “Housing the Poor in a Colonial City.” See also Kidambi’s Making of an
Indian Metropolis, 40–47, 70–76.
52 Chopra, A Joint Enterprise.
53 In a similar vein, Padma Anagol notes that “residents of vari­ous towns
and cities often sent complaints to police authorities to remove kalavan-
tins from what they considered respectable neighborhoods and to h ­ ouse
them outside the city or town limits.” See Anagol, Emergence of Feminism
in India, 125–26. Anagol cites the example of a complaint carried by Ah-
madnagar residents against prostitutes. See Nagar Samachar, February 23,
1878, and Dandio, March 22, 1879, Vernacular Newspaper Reports (vnr).
54 Kidambi, “Petition as Event.” See also Raman, Document Raj.
55 Dobbin, “Competing Elites in Bombay City Politics in the Mid-­
Nineteenth C ­ entury.” For a broader history of the rise of urban housing
in Bombay and more, see Rao, “Community, Urban Citizenship,
and Housing in Bombay, ca. 1919–1980.” See also Rao’s House but
No Garden. I am grateful to Nikhil for providing early feedback on
property disputes in Bombay. For a broader historical view of the twists
and turns of the ratepayer/landlord’s movement, see also Dossal, “A
Master Plan for the City” and Imperial Designs and Indian Realities;
Batley, “The Need for City Planning”; Haynes, Small Town Capitalism
in Western India; and Wacha, Rise and Growth of Bombay Municipal
Government.
56 Edwardes and Campbell, The Gazetteer of Bombay City and Island,
1:327–28. For further reading, see Wacha, Rise and Growth of Bombay
Municipal Government; and Masani, The Law and Procedure of the Munic-
ipal Corporation of Bombay.
57 Tambe, Codes of Misconduct, 60, 168. See also Legg, Prostitution and the
Ends of Empire.
58 Available property deeds of three such evil ladies—­Nandabai Narayan
Thakkar, Chandrabai Durgaram Shirodkar, and Mogabai Dattaram
Shirodkar, all kalavantins/devadasis and members of the Gomantak
Maratha Samaj—­indicate properties within the environs of colonial
Girgaum. ­These archives are available as open-­access files in the office of
the Samaj in Mumbai.
59 Dobbin, “Competing Elites in Bombay City Politics in the Mid-­
Nineteenth ­Century,” 89.
60 S. M. Edwardes provides the following detailed description of the
topography of Girgaum in The Gazetteer of Bombay City and Island,
1:41–42: “The Girgaum section is bounded on the North by Girgaum
Back road, on the south by Thakurdwar road, on the east by Girgaum
Back road and Bhuleshwar road, and on the west by Back Bay and Charni
road. Like Chaupati and Phanasswadi its interior portion has arisen upon
the side of ancient parts, such as Borbhat and Mugbat, with the old

A History I Am Not Writing · 87

 Girgaum village as its original nucleus. Its most noteworthy buildings
are the Muhamadan sanitarium at the corner of Queen’s road, the
old Police Court on Girgaum back road, the Allbless Bagh on Charni
Road and the Portuguese Church opposite the Trans terminus. The
latter building which actually lies just outside the sectional limits was
founded in 1773 and rebuilt in its pre­sent form in 1836. The neighbour-
hood of Charni road has of late years been taken up to some extend to of
the building of middle-­class Parsi flats; but the bulk of the section still
retains its old character as a Brah­man settlement.” For one of the most
viewed images of colonial Girgaum, see “Bombay, Girgaum Road,” cig-
arette card, George Arents Collection, New York Public Library Digital
Collections.
61 A recently curated exhibition by Tejaswini Niranjana and Surabhi
Sharma, Making M ­ usic, Making Space, documents musical histories of
Girgaum, giving their audiences a small glimpse of the rich and net-
worked worlds of ­these naikins and kalavantins. In the exhibition, the
audience is also provided with an annotated map of Girgaum that marks
all the residences and buildings occupied by collectivities such as the evil
ladies. For broader cultural histories of Girgaum, see Adarkar, “Marathi
Ma­nus in Girgaon,” 145–51; Chandavarkar, “The Perils of Proximity”;
Quinn, “Marathi and Konkani Speaking ­Women in Hindustani ­Music,
1880–1940.”
62 Marathe’s account of key events within the emergence and success of
the Gomantak Maratha Samaj was in a special issue published in 1980
to commemorate the opening of Dayanand Smruti, a new building
dedicated to Samaj meetings and affairs in Panaji Goa. Of note h ­ ere is
that the building ­housed one of the first ­women’s hostels dedicated to
mi­grant and single ­women working in Goa. See Marathe, “Gomantak
Maratha Samajane Kayleli Samajatli Charvar V Meervlele Yash,” esp. 2–3.
63 Punekar and Rao, Study of Prostitutes in Bombay, 169, 160. See also Olden-
burg, “Lifestyle as Re­sis­tance”; and Thatra, “Contentious (Socio-­spatial)
Relations.” For a broader understanding of late-­colonial debates on
prostitution in Bombay, see Tambe, “Brothels as Families.”
64 I am grateful to Shekhar Krishnan, a wonderful chronicler of the varied
histories of Bombay, and his deep familiarity with police and municipal
archives. Krishnan, for some time, has been attempting to help me gain
access to ­these notorious classified files that, he tells me, have been seen
but not cata­logued. For a taste of Krishnan’s wide-­ranging knowledge of
colonial Bombay, see http://­shekhar​.­cc​/­.
65 Relatório da Comissao de Inquérito à Situaçao dos Emigrantes Indo-­
Portugueses na India Britannica. My thanks to Rochelle Pinto for the
reference.

88 · Chapter two
66 Durba Mi­tra has brilliantly reminded us that the exemplarity of pros-
titutes / evil ladies and their kin is constitutive to the very making of
colonial epistemologies and the structure of the archive itself. For more
detailed analy­sis, see chap. 2, “Repetition,” in Mi­tra, Indian Sex Life.
67 For more on fiat money and literary forms, see Lindstrom, “Coda.”

A History I Am Not Writing · 89

 chapter three

Itinerant Sex
Geopolitics as Critique

Consider this geo/history.1 It is 1947, a year of in­de­pen­dence, futurity, vio­

lence, genocide, and, yes, fulsome commemoration. The British have left,
Pakistan is born, and India breaks ­free, all in the aftermath of a bloody Parti-
tion in the subcontinent. Even as the vagaries of state and faith threaten,
the promise and gains of national belonging beckon. Liberation for Goa,
Portugal’s last stronghold in India, also looms, though a de­cade or so in
the ­future.2 For the Gomantak Maratha Samaj, the collectivity at the center
of our investigations ­here, such new geopo­liti­cal forms activate a unique set
of challenges and choices. Writing in the September 1947 issue of the Samaj
Sudharak, B. D. Satoskar reflects on the aftermath of Indian in­de­pen­dence for
Samaj members and pointedly asks, “Aazchya Hindustanaath gomantakache
sthaan kaay?” (What is the status of Goans within ­today’s Hindustan?).
The Goans referred to ­here are specifically Samaj members residing in the
territories of Portuguese India. In this editorial, Satoskar, the celebrated
author of Gomantak Prakruti aani Sanskriti (1951), one of the few widely
circulated texts in Marathi encompassing six hundred years of Goan his-
tory and culture (1300–1900), details the Samaj’s geopo­liti­cal “quagmire”
(chakravyuh).3 Goa ­will not become part of in­de­pen­dent India ­until 1961,
and the pressing question of f­ uture allegiances looms large ­here.
To begin with, Satoskar reminds his readers that their Goa-­based Samaj
is often hailed as a collectivity “asleep” (nidrit) to the potential of po­liti­cal and
regional belonging. In his travels to Maharashtra and Karnataka, for example,
he is often asked why a devadasi collectivity as “intelligent” (budhimaan)
as the Samaj refuses to capitalize on its access to social and economic
networks within the higher echelons of Goan society. A ­ fter all, their di-
verse portfolio of yajemans and benefactors (spanning from landowning
Brahmins to Portuguese officials) affords them equal access to both the
burgeoning liberation movement growing in Goa and Portuguese gov-
ernmental bureaucracies—­two structures, he notes with biting irony, that
are completely in contradistinction to one another! Waves of reform and
revolution are crashing on ­every shore, he writes, from the newly in­de­pen­
dent lands of Hindustan and Pakistan to the fledgling, struggling territory
of Goa itself. Yet somehow the Samaj as a sanstha (organ­ization) remains
detached, uncontaminated by such po­liti­cal energies—­driven, it appears
to outsiders, primarily by its own self-­promotion and reform. Such char-
acterizations of the Samaj, Satoskar avers, can no longer be ignored, espe-
cially as the demand for regional belonging grows within and outside Goa.
If the Samaj does not choose fidelity to one nation or the other, Satoskar
warns, it w ­ ill be seen as opportunistic, fickle, and inherently untrustworthy
as ­future citizenry.
For Satoskar, Samaj members must thus carefully deliberate on the
geopo­liti­cal ­futures that lie ahead of them. Samaj members have the option
to continue to migrate not only to the newly in­de­pen­dent states of Ma-
harashtra and Karnataka (in western India/Hindustan) but also, he em-
phasizes, to cities in the newly formed Pakistan. ­After all, the Samaj’s kala
(art)—in sexuality and more—­traverses religious and territorial hostilities.
Yet such mobility, while desirable, also comes at a cost, as t­ here is no guar-
antee that the in­de­pen­dent states of India and Pakistan ­will continue to
endure, or to re­spect the rights of outsiders. If turmoil ­were to arise within
­these newly formed states, Satoskar argues, Samaj members would be vil-
ified as dangerous outsiders—­vassals of the Portuguese state in India and
Pakistan, or lower-­caste devadasis in an independent-­but-­Brahmin Goa.
A second pressing issue of concern is the financial stability of Samaj
members. The sending of remittances back to Goa or to ­family elsewhere
can also be threatened, he sternly reminds his readers, for ­after all, which
­free state would like its revenue to flow outward? Last but not least, t­ here is
always the option of leaving Goa and embracing the (false) promise of Por-
tuguese citizenship in foreign lands, even as such fidelity demands a painful
abdication of culture and language, and their histories of sexuality.4 And in
case his readers, by this point, have settled into the idea of Goa as chosen
home, Satoskar quickly dissuades them of that salvific possibility as well.
For Satoskar, any “attachment” (nishta) to Goa (in its current colonial or
­future postcolonial form) must be understood against the hegemony of the

Itinerant Sex · 91
ruling Brahmin community and the escalating repression of the António
de Oliveira Salazar–­led Portuguese colonial state.5 The Samaj’s strength,
he writes, is that it can be ikde aani tikde (­here and ­there), and it must, he
continues, resist the aakarshan (seductions) of pranth kiva rajya (nation or
state). Satoskar ends his editorial by urging his readers to wrestle with the
rhetorical and po­liti­cal weight of regional forms, not to surrender to their
demands, but to examine their place within and without them.6
Satoskar’s editorial is remarkable on many fronts as it strategically nav-
igates the chakravyuh of sexuality, geopolitics, and history. For a collectiv-
ity such as the Samaj that is nonmonogamous and outside of endogamous
caste and social forms, the geopo­liti­cal too must function less as a locus
of containment than as a live landscape of futurity. First, selective itiner-
aries of migration are held up as passages of possibility (India, Pakistan,
Portugal), with Luso outposts in Africa (specifically, Mozambique) held
carefully at bay. ­After all, as we know from the many histories of Goan
migration across the Indian Ocean, much of the mass migration to African
outposts was composed of Catholic subjects (converted and other­wise)
and did not include collectivities such as the Samaj. Even sought-­after
Goan entertainers who flooded venues in Mozambique and Zanzibar, for
example, w ­ ere rarely drawn from devadasi or kalavant traditions.7 Second,
caste lineages are equally maintained and disrupted through references to
Brahmin yajemans who allow access and influence (through blood), even
as caste status is not guaranteed. That is, Samaj members can claim Brah-
mins as bio-­fathers if needed (as we have seen in previous chapters) with-
out the privilege of the caste status they occupy. Third, the importance
of trade is carefully tracked through the references to remittances into
and out of Goa, to precisely concatenate the languages of capitalization
through which geopolitics enters the holdings of histories of sexuality.
By resisting the historico-­political demand for geopo­liti­cal allegiance,
Satoskar’s editorial does not give us access to some bold po­liti­cal gesture. In-
stead, it re­orients our expectations, forging a critical sensibility that signals
the value and burden of a promissory geopolitics for sexuality’s subjects.
Geopolitics (in all its iterations) h
­ ere provides an inventory of what might
be rather than what is or what must be. To be ikde/tikde (here/there) is to
eschew the staged lineages that suture subjects to region, to emphasize the
vio­lence of (national) origins and to bypass the demands for geopo­liti­cal
certitude. Scripting a history of sexuality in relation to place, in this in-
stance, is to move past the placations of mi­grant or citizen, drawing atten-
tion instead to a nonrecuperative geopolitics that is abundant, mislaid, and

92 · chapter three
even cagey. Place, region, nation, becomes an origin put into place ­after the
fact, even as such aspirations, as we have seen in the Samaj’s own writings,
carry no genealogical or historical freight.8
Suppose, then, we take Satoskar’s editorial not as disruptive but more
as constitutive of the ideations of geopolitics as instantiated in histories
of sexuality.9 Geopolitics hangs over any narration of sexuality, like an
unreliable ghost. It changes vernaculars, constrains movement, and in-
deed complicates any fantasy of shared liberation. If ­there has been a sea
change across South Asian studies and sexuality studies in the past few
de­cades, it has been the embrace of more robust geographies of affiliation,
instantiated in the languages of networks, oceanic/archipelagic imaginaries,
connected histories, and more.10 Such shifts have troubled the saturated re-
silience of geopo­liti­cal, temporal, and epistemological formations, adding
much-­needed historical heft to what used to more broadly be described
as the “transnational” turn.11 As I noted in my introduction, t­ hese new
vernaculars of the geopo­liti­cal have equally reordered the grammar of his-
tories of sexuality. No longer content with marking the stifling centrality
of geopo­liti­cal asymmetries (the oracular status of Euro-­American queer
studies, for example!), scholars working in/on the global South are now
crafting more generative South-­South conversations.12 In their power­ful
introduction to a special glq issue on the “queer customary,” for example,
Kirk Fiereck, Neville Hoad, and Danai Mupotsa demand a queer theory
“elaborated from Africa” that refuses any beleaguered “fantasy of repre-
sentativity.” Instead, they call for a critical dispensation that relies less on
the liberatory promises of sex and more on “a usable past.” Such a turn
to a usable past vitalizes and repurposes maligned colonial concepts such
as the “customary” and “traditional” within the idea of Africa.13 A recent
collection on “pluriversality” (Walter Mignolo’s well-­known coinage) and
the “geopolitics of knowledge” similarly presses for urgent epistemological
transformation. Tired critiques of Western intellectual tradition are to be
jettisoned and replaced with place-­bound ontologies, epistemologies, and
technologies that directly address “questions of development, economic
growth, identity, democracy, po­liti­cal power, and self-­rule” from within
South-­South dialogues.14
For South Asian studies in par­tic­u­lar, it would be difficult to account
for the historical commotion the heightened focus on oceanic networks
and regions in par­tic­u­lar (failed or other­wise) has created. Regions and
networks eschew the language of state territoriality; rather, they are seen
more as spatial, material, and technological frontiers, effects of porous

Itinerant Sex · 93
cross-­border counterflows that create informal worlds of peril and possibility.
Even as such networked geographies have been fervently (and occasionally
shallowly) recuperated through histories of trade, capital, religion, and ­labor,
­there has been an equal emphasis on understanding this turn to affiliation
as at once novel and familiar. If networks and regions are to be broadly
understood as economic, social, religious, and po­liti­cal practices that de-
fuse fictions of bounded nation-­states and temporalities, for example, then
their emergence can hardly be termed “new,” given that such practices have
existed for many centuries.15 On the other hand, ­there is, as many scholars
have argued, something extraordinary and “new” about the current erasure
and embrace (in equal mea­sure) of such practices in a post-­Fordist, rabid
Hindutva era, where nation-­states such as the United States and India both
cede and appropriate networked technologies and histories. Digital India
is also Vedic India.16
For sexuality studies, this heightened focus on geographies of affiliation
has created more epistemological turbulence than historical analy­sis. It has
served more as a cautionary tale, a reminder that sexuality is always already
“a surface network,” and “a dense transfer point,” legible only through lan-
guages of relationality—an effect of an effect, as it w­ ere.17 Within such a
well-­established Foucauldian vernacular, sexuality has, at its center, episte-
mes of movement and uncertainty, epistemes that are generative forces of
emergence precisely b­ ecause of the perverse pathways they travel. Bruno
Latour, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari, in par­tic­u­lar, have emerged as
favored theorists within Europe-­and US-­based queer studies, through
their emphasis on networks as destabilizing assemblages that refuse the
causality of forms, focusing more on linkages between objects, bodies, and
discourses.18 Yet even as such an understanding of sexuality has become
axiomatic and disruptive of how we think and historicize sex, it can often
map geographies of sexuality through more literal forms such as homo­
sexuality that invoke sexuality through the language of rights and repre­sen­
ta­tion in fixed places and times.19 We return to familiar objects, places, and
temporalities, forgoing uncertainty, dispersed histories, and contradictory
ontologies.
What happens if we refuse to ser­vice geopolitics to this end, fore-
grounding more the critical ­labor undergirding its emergence? What if
the force of geopolitics lies more in its critique than its rehabilitation?
The enduring asymmetries of knowledge economies, we well know, have
hardly been reversed. The incon­ve­nience of too many languages, too many
histories, too many divergent objects of studies colors much of what we

94 · chapter three
continue to do t­ oday. As a scholar who works in South Asia, I am always
nudged (however ­gently) to provide glossaries, translations of terms that
at least one billion folks e­ lse/where inhabit and understand. We still live
inside of monolingual and/or metrolingual landscapes, populated by an
appetite for geopo­liti­cal diversity that nevertheless returns us to the gift
of the master language. To be clear, such monolingualism (epistemic and
literal) exists as much in the Rest as it does in the West. ­There remains a
dearth of scholarly writing in nonmetropolitan languages across all hemi­
spheres, even as queer/trans subjects flourish and proliferate each and
­every day. While it is laudable to have scholarship on India, Egypt, Phil-
ippines, Brazil (pick your favorite queer e­ lse/where) take center stage for
a special issue or two (as I cited above), how can such scholarship become
central—­and not “special”—­for queer knowledge? A ­ fter all, epistemol-
ogies of sexuality are always spaced forms, familiar lexical imaginaries,
­housed within the languages of geopolitics and difference. Reproductive
futurism is always geopo­liti­cal futurism; queer utopia is equally queer ge-
ography, where other worlds are continually reproduced as contexts, ex-
emplars, at best interruptions in a journey that inevitably and necessarily
shepherds us back into the diversified holdings of an American studies
proj­e ct. If sexuality’s difference is always marked by gender, race, class,
caste, and more (jettison that white child, please), it is equally a story
of spatialized difference. To put it more ambitiously, could our voyages
out forge a queer/trans geopolitics? Or, as my coeditor Geeta Patel and I
asked in our special issue, could histories of area be histories of sexuality?20
I have called this chapter “Itinerant Sex: Geopolitics as Critique”
­because I want to imagine a geopolitics that neither salvages nor erases the
locational and historical transactions enabled through sexuality. Rather,
my meditations call on a figuration of geopolitics that produces epistemic
catachresis in the welding of place, focusing more on what precisely makes
geographies so worthy of recuperation. I have chosen to go with “itinerant”
as the agent provocateur to point to alleys that may also muddle some of
the more routinized passages through which divergent geopo­liti­cal forms
have been recuperated in global histories of sexuality: migration or dias-
pora, refuge or displacement. Itinerant sex proffers less reliable passages
into repre­sen­ta­tion: itinerant as in the sense of ­those wondrous mendi-
cants in South Asia, such as the fifteenth-­century Dalit poet-­saint Kabir
or the early twentieth-­century renegade writer-­progressive Miraji, who
traversed cross-­hatched lineages of geopolitics, gender, and aesthetics
troubling the historical seductions of exile and nativism. 21 ­Here the

Itinerant Sex · 95
cele­bration and/or recuperation of geopolitics holds no purchase, its value
as constantly resurrected episteme/object dispersed. Itinerant sex is also
a form of capitalization, as suggested by J. C. Van Leur’s hoary 1930s re-
search on the Indian Ocean and trade (I’m using him cum grano, of course,
merely to make an allegorical point), where he attempts to grapple with
Indigenous concepts and bring ­those concepts into extant discussions. To
this end he activated the idea of the peddler, the itinerant merchant, who
carried high-­value goods from place to place, accruing access and wealth in
the very commodification of mobility.22
Itinerant sex calls for a historiographical hermeneutics that refuses the
seductions of homing devices, of theoretical pathways that suture geopol-
itics to forms (refused or other­wise) of region, area, nation. The logic of
knowing-­to-­prove we exist (elsewhere), as Katherine McKittrick reminds
us, is unsustainable.23 The Gomantak Maratha Samaj, our geo-­history ­here,
is neither familiar nor identitarian nor salvageable. It is more a sprawling,
geo-­epistemology (­here and ­there) that animates the spaces we seek to
occupy. It is knowable less through heroic exemplars—­however moving
or nimbly organized—­than within archival economies that are restless,
experimental, and pragmatic, aimed more at the unraveling of space and
time. Itinerant sex as heuristic summons attentiveness to places that are
ikde aani tikde (­here and ­there), inherently nonrecuperative, not discov-
ered (again). To be ikde aani tikde, as we have seen through the Samaj’s
history of sexuality, is to focus more on the analytical and po­liti­cal itiner-
aries historiographical methods follow, and the lessons of geopolitics they
bypass or leave ­behind.24

Ikde aani Tikde: H

­ ere and ­There

I have modeled this final chapter in attunement to the broader imperatives

of this book, veering to an understanding of geopolitics that deliberately
strays from a literal understanding of sexuality in/and South Asia. The
comportment of my argument thus eschews the repose of place and asks:
How can histories of sexuality also be histories of area/region, and what
critical lessons are to be learned from such a shift in historical orientation?
In lieu of belonging—­the seduction that geopolitics so often summons as
it incites histories of sexuality—­I am interested more in the dispersal of
that very provocation. My opening discussion from the Samaj archives pro-
vides one such instructive lesson where the abundant sociopo­liti­cal kala

96 · chapter three
of an itinerant sex enables myriad geographies of affiliation, even as ­those
affiliations are placed u­ nder erasure. The Samaj’s sexuality/kala forges a his-
torical lexicon in which genealogies of the past and the f­ uture merge into
a pragmatic poetics that reads geopolitics anew. Instead of laying claim to
geography as established historical value, the Samaj, as I w ­ ill demonstrate,
strategically mobilizes the politics, desires, and identities made pos­si­ble by
the reach of geopolitics.
What does this kind of geopo­liti­cal thinking look like? And how is its
itinerancy marked within the languages of sexuality and region? By now
we have established, for example, that primogeniture/descent, cherished
lineages through which histories of kinship and region are scripted, have
been thoroughly upended by the Samaj. Given their status as devadasis,
Samaj w ­ omen ­were, as I noted in my ­earlier chapter on archives, rarely
categorized and criminalized as prostitutes by the Portuguese colonial
state. Devadasis in Goa ­were “given to the goddess,” to use Lucinda Ram-
berg’s wonderful formulation, lodged in the messy interstices of sexual-
ity and religiosity, and maintained coercive and noncoercive sexual (and
largely monogamous) relationships with Saraswat Brahmin men (and oc-
casionally ­women). Their offspring ­were given Brahmin surnames, without
Brahmin caste privilege, spawning a structural intransigence and confu-
sion that remained at odds with normative caste hierarchies. Such a cor-
ruption of caste as value (the “make.believe” I began with) calls attention
to the evidentiary forms that mark sexuality, orienting it ­toward area and
region. Setting the stage for a nonrecuperative historiography of sexuality,
the Samaj rends fetishized figurations of caste and ­family, reaching for
what they might yet obtain in geographies accessed through mythologies
of origin and belonging.
In obvious ways, the colonial and postcolonial context and content of
Goa, as we have also noted, is equally itinerant, the effect of unsettling
histories, moving unevenly between the Portuguese and then Indian co-
lonial state. One must contend, for example, with the continued (and, I
would venture, startling) narration of Portugal as a “subaltern empire”
(in the words of the renowned Portuguese scholar Boaventura de Sousa
Santos), as a somewhat benign imperial presence that limped its way into
extinction, its histories of exploitation, religious vio­lence, and sheer greed
notwithstanding.25 Speaking on the fiftieth anniversary of Goa’s decoloni-
zation in 2011, Teotonio de Souza (a renowned historian of medieval Goa)
reflected on the former Portuguese enclave’s peculiarity, saying that it “had
a dif­f er­ent colonial experience” in comparison with formerly British India.

Itinerant Sex · 97
De Souza noted that beginning in the sixteenth c­ entury, Goa was the nu-
cleus “of a truly global empire that extended from Brazil to Timor to Aden
and back to Lisbon; Goans w ­ ere . . . ​g lobalized centuries before the first
British merchant showed up in the [Indian] subcontinent.”26 Other elab-
orate meta­phors employed by scholars of the Portuguese empire equally
describe Goa lavishly as “a Portuguese outpost, as an island of ‘Western
civilization’ in an Indian sea . . . an Indian region with a rather unusual
past.”27 What becomes apparent is that the geopolitics of Goa combines
histories of colonization and con­temporary globalization as comparable
trends, where the connections between the Indian and Atlantic Oceans, as
well as the worlds betwixt, are unavoidable. The Portuguese state’s exten-
sion of citizenship to Goans born before 1961 further consolidates Goa’s
vexed geopo­liti­cal status: it is both goa dourada (golden Goa from the Por-
tuguese era) and goa indica (Goa of the Indus from the precolonial era).
That very same preoccupation with the itinerancy of Goa as geography
extends into extant discussions of its history and citizens. It continues to
create “existential anx­i­eties within the locals,” we are warned.28 ­After all,
can Goans also be read as Portuguese—­Europeans of another color—­ask
R. Benedito Ferrao and Jason Fernandes, two Goan scholars, instead of
traitors to their newly formed relationship with the Indian state?29
In the face of such a storied and/or maligned geopolitics, we return
once more to Satoskar’s editorial from 1947, the year of Indian in­de­pen­
dence. What happens to the Samaj in the de­cades that follow, especially
in the period leading up to Goa’s liberation from Portugal in 1961? How
does the Samaj’s history of sexuality appropriate, disperse, and survive the
apotropaic and propitiatory lure of a geopolitics birthed through free-
dom strug­gles? The most salient example of such efforts can be seen in the
journey of the much-­heralded lower-­caste demo­cratic revolution in Goa.
Headed by a leading Samaj member, Dayanand Bandodkar and his Bahu-
jan Samaj Party (bsp), lower-­caste groups from all over Goa or­ga­nized to
elect the first demo­cratic government of liberated Goa. Within Indian
historiography, the rare election of a Bahujan chief minister (Bahujan
literally means “many, multiple, varied” and is used to designate a broad
swath of lower-­caste or obc/Other Backward Castes in India) of a newly
liberated state would ordinarily make for riveting scholarly analy­sis.30 In-
stead, with the rare exception of hagiographies commissioned by Bandod-
kar’s own ­family, ­there is very l­ ittle discussion of this other­wise remarkable
historical figure.

98 · chapter three
 Such an elision of Bandodkar’s contributions to anticaste strug­gles and
the broader history of nationalism within India must be parlayed through
the Samaj’s itinerant kala. ­After all, once again ­there is no easy oppositional
cataclysm on offer h ­ ere. From what we know from the state archives of Goa
and the archives of the Samaj, Dayanand Bandodkar was first and fore-
most a trader who used Samaj lineages of sexuality, kinship, and geopolitics
to carve out a business that traversed across South Asia.31 To simply read
his celebrated collaboration with the multiple and often divided Bahujan
groups within Goa primarily as the first lower-­caste revolution would by-
pass the convoluted densities of his emergence and merely reinstate the
Samaj as exemplary or exceptional. In a recent monograph on Bandodkar,
for example, Parag Parabo ­counters the dismissal of Bandodkar’s radical
re­sis­tance within Indian historiography by applauding his efforts as a cap­
i­tal­ist. Parabo avers that “lower caste movements in Goa” ­were successful
precisely b­ ecause they w ­ ere led by “cap­i­tal­ists such as Gomantak Maratha
Samaj leaders, Rajaram Paigankar and Bandodkar. Such a proximity to
trade and capital founded their ability to challenge feudal [Brahmin] set-­
ups in Goa.”32 While Parabo is right to signal the relevance of Bandod-
kar’s status as a successful trader to his rise as a po­liti­cal leader, he typically
flattens the history of the Samaj to a caricature of reform and revolution.
Histories of sexuality are expunged from the my­thol­ogy of Bandodkar’s
success, even as the very capital undergirding Bandodkar’s success comes
from the intimacies of sexuality’s trade and networks. Equally absent from
Parabo’s study is Bandodkar’s advocacy of a complicated Hindutva nation-
alism that moved caste primarily through networks of trade, language, and
religion, producing the Bahujan who was as resolutely anti-­Catholic as
anti-­Brahmin. The historical irony ­here is that ­today many Goan members
of the Samaj aggressively disarticulate themselves from any Bahujan past,
claiming upward mobility through their success in arts and industry.
For scholars such as Fernandes, the story of Dayanand Bandodkar’s
success is complicit with the very promiscuity of Goa’s histories of linguis-
tic and regional dissent. Goa, Fernandes writes, remains in a continuous
crisis of geo-­history, whereby its identity as state/region is unverifiable,
embroiled in raucous debates around language, religion, and caste. Noth-
ing in and from Goa appears legible within settled evidentiary regimes
of historicity. The mi­grant upper-­caste Brahmins who arrive in Goa are
fish-­eating “Shenoi Goembab,” corrupt versions of their more established
Saraswat Brahmin kin in states such as Maharashtra, and as such cast/e in a

Itinerant Sex · 99
dif­fer­ent mold. And if states are created on the basis of a shared language,
Goa refuses even that foundational arrangement as b­ attles rage on about
the relationship between dialect, religion, and citizenship. Fernandes re-
minds us that the Goan Antruz dialect (drawn from Hindu sources) of
Konkani in Devanagari script is listed as the official script even as Catholic
groups such as the Romi Lipi Action Front argue for official recognition
of the Roman script of Konkani. Indeed, Fernandes makes a compelling
case for the import of such linguistic wars within the caste history of
the Samaj itself. For Bandodkar and the Samaj, the inclusion of the term
Maratha in their self-­nominalization, Fernandes argues, is an alignment
with Marathi, a language spoken by multiple Bahujan groups, and a stri-
dent refusal of Konkani, seen primarily as a Brahmin Antruz dialect. In a
startlingly evocative aside, Fernandes speaks to a skirmish from his field
notes that invokes the messiness of such linguistic debates: a member of
the Samaj, and an activist for the Devanagari script, is viciously humiliated
for his (surprising) allegiance to the script by opponents from the Roman
side. To desire Devanagari, the Samaj activist is told, is to desire sexual un/
freedom, to submit once again to Brahmin vernaculars of accumulation
and extraction.33 In lieu of a settled geography, we have a geopolitics that
is many ­things at once: an itinerant po­liti­cal form, a language broken and
brokered, and an opening into co­ali­tions of solidarity and reform.

Geo/objects

If it seems, by this point, gratuitous to stress sexuality’s ongoing thralldom

with geopolitics, I must nonetheless emphasize that the force of geopoli-
tics, which in the aftermath of the Cold War facilitated the very formation
of area studies, has not at all abated. This chapter began with a moment
of fulsome commemoration—1947—­the year of Indian in­de­pen­dence,
and its afterlives in the lineaments of the Samaj’s history in colonial and
postcolonial Goa. In what follows, I want to take a historical detour to
another equally commemorative moment within global histories of sex-
uality, to syncopate familiar habits of reading through a subaltern history
of itinerant sex. To ask more broadly, how can the Samaj’s vast intellectual
archive animate a broader history of geopolitics as critique? It is not just that
the Samaj’s myriad histories bring in something unforeseen about a precise
place and time in South Asia. Rather, the Samaj’s geopo­liti­cal ikde aani
tikde stages the movement of the entire book: the epistemic method is not

100 · chapter three

formalized, does not follow quests, does not search for answers or fill in,
does not track propitiatory lures, but allows historicist intuition to proffer
affiliations, only to then let them go. Thus, one may think of t­ hese pages as
laying claim to ­these lessons of geopolitics that inescapably, unavoidably go
amiss, in the most generative ways pos­si­ble. Let me now turn to that story.
In April 2019, as I was in the throes of writing this book, I was invited
by the History Workshop Journal to write a brief meditation on the impact
and legacy of Stonewall from a global perspective. Rec­ords of the past pro-
vide anthems of the pre­sent, and the charge seemed relatively straightfor-
ward: speak to the reverberations Stonewall has had as a historical event
on the histories of sexuality that animate your scholarship. The oft-­cited
1969 Stonewall riots, as has been well documented, continue to occupy a
central role in the history of US lgbtqia movements, even as the event
itself has become a multipronged historical character, its script rewritten
through erased plot twists around race, transgender, class, and ­labor con-
cerns. Th
­ ere is no singular historical account of Stonewall, as Americanists
and sexuality studies scholars routinely remind us; rather, it is more an
event whose afterlives found the conditions of possibility and solidarity for
what is often understood as the modern US queer/lgbtqia movement.
On receiving the invitation, my first response was ungenerous, as I
noted to myself that the Stonewall riots had no significant impact on the
narration of histories of sexuality in South Asia, beyond their generalized
role as an ­imagined event through which some approximation of global
strug­gles for queerness can be managed. In other words, Stonewall served
more as a site of historical metalepsis, I thought, an effect that was mis-
cast as cause within global histories of sexuality. And further, I noted that
I was also loath to provide, in saying so, a local historical supplement to
Stonewall, to flag historical events of import in South Asia that had been
predictably and routinely overlooked by the Euro-­Western tilt of queer/
sexuality studies. Surely my task must be more complex than merely adding
historical events and details that have hitherto been ignored in the his-
torical narratives of sexuality. As I have repeatedly argued for years now,
the much-­touted scholarly ebullience about the globalization of histories
of sexuality has rarely, if at all, shifted the epistemological orientations of
Euro/American history. Histories of sexuality in the non-­West still serve
as exemplars of sexuality’s difference/s, their geohistorical and geopo­liti­cal
locations providing much-­needed evidentiary fodder for the global march
of sexuality’s empire. To fold histories of sexuality in South Asia back into
the lineages of Stonewall was surely to reproduce the very asymmetry of

Itinerant Sex · 101

geopolitics of the West and the Rest. In other words, I was stonewalling
.

the invitation to think Stonewall globally.

Are We ­There Yet?

It is March 14, 2019, and I am in Lahore, Pakistan, on the beautiful and

eerily bucolic campus of lums (the Lahore University of Management
Sciences). lums is a privately funded, highly respected, and ultra-elite
university in Pakistan, with a surprisingly robust focus on the humanities
(its name notwithstanding), nestled within the heavi­ly militarized zones
that make up the complex urban landscape of Lahore.34 It is my second
trip to Pakistan; the first one came many years ago when I was working
in the Sindh archives in Karachi. This time I am ­here at the invitation of
my friends and comrades, the dean of humanities, Kamran Ali, and co-­
organizers, Omar Kasmani and Nida Kirmani, to give a keynote on my
work on the Gomantak Maratha Samaj. The Samaj, as I noted ­earlier in
this chapter, had considered Pakistan as one of its desired destinations of
refuge, so ­there is a poignant symmetry to my return. Boldly conceived as
a deliberation titled “Queer ­Futures: Politics, Aesthetics, Sexualities,” the
three-­day event is being heralded as the first queer conference to be held in
Pakistan and promises an invigorating and wide-­ranging conversation on
Pakistan’s myriad queer modalities.35 The stage is set, and I am raring to go.
The journey to Lahore has been beset (unsurprisingly) by a concatenation
of histories and collaborations. Indo-­Pak relations are once again implod-
ing; airports are hard to get to, and visas even harder to procure. Yet I am
fi­nally h
­ ere, and all that remains now is my short walk to the conference
venue. Map in hand, I step outside my guest­house, hail a “woke”-­looking
student, and ask him if he can direct me to the venue. Nodding confidently,
he says, “You are ­going to the musafir sex conference? Yes, I can show you
where that is.” I turn to him again, slightly bemused, and say, “No, I am
­going to the queer conference.” Without missing a beat, he rolls his eyes,
and says, “Musafir sex, queer conference. Same ­thing, na?”
That playful, throwaway, yet resplendent figuration, “musafir sex,” stayed
with me, akin to “ikde aani tikde,” proffering a sight line for an alternate and
potentially radical historical orientation: musafir means “traveler,” “guest,”
“visitor,” “itinerant” (in Arabic, Hindi, Persian, Urdu, and even Roma-
nian, Turkish, and more—­though spelled as misafir), and coupled with
the cruising, moving body of sex, more precisely, queer sex, it summoned

102 · chapter three

a geo/epistemology, a challenge to the historical imagination that surely
merited further exploration. What would it mean to “musafir” sex as his-
torical object, to conjure it through a hermeneutics of protean and playful
translation? Was musafir sex itinerant sex?

Re/directions

I end with ­these two scenes ­because they make differing hermeneutical de-
mands on our settled habits of theorizing and even politicizing histories
of sexuality. Both deploy what Gayatri Spivak and Lauren Berlant have
described (albeit in divergent geopo­liti­cal contexts) as an acute collective
historical sense, a historicist intuition that compels the object of gender
and sexuality to be summoned at the precise moment of its disappearance
or memorialization (which is also, ­after all, a renewed repetition of loss
and absence).36 In the case of the mandate to think Stonewall as global
historical event, the invitation to engage the archival behemoth that is
Stonewall within South Asia necessitates a difficult act of translation. Was
my goal as a historian of sexuality and South Asia to decenter the primacy
of Stonewall with local historical events of import, such as the historical
emergence of the Samaj? Or was it more epistemological, to parlay the les-
sons learned from the Samaj’s history to question precisely why historical
causality and memorialization works differently within the fabular geogra-
phy that is South Asia? Did the history of the Stonewall riots create more
of a po­liti­cal demand on subaltern collectivities to produce their own seis-
mic historical event, or did it foreground even further the epistemological
divide between the West and the Rest? And how did the queer conference
in Lahore fit into that conceptual chakravyuh (quagmire)? Was it an origin
story that needed to be built up as a moment of repetition and rupture?
Was it the local refurbished site of strug­g le that summoned the spirit of
Stonewall? We ­were on familiar territory (another conference on queer
formations) and yet on unfamiliar ground (in a heavi­ly Islamicized space
such as con­temporary Pakistan).
In the case of the Pakistan conference, we ­were invited to think of queer
­futures in locations where they ostensibly have no collective pull. ­After all,
are queer rights Pakistani rights? Are they musafir rights in that they ar-
rive, s­ ettle in, commingle, remainders of a per­sis­tent sex that can only be
configured through chancy deliberations and encounters? As historical
event, is the conference the radical archival trace for queer f­ utures, or more

Itinerant Sex · 103

emblematic of the quagmire of archival repre­sen­ta­tion? We know that the
conference was held at an expensive, elite institution, lums, that very few Pa-
kistanis can afford or have access to; yet it was the elitism and protectionism
of the institution that allowed for like-­minded musafirs to arrive, cohabit,
and exchange sex/objects without fear of persecution and censure. I was
able to get a visa (despite being a person of Indian origin) ­because the lar-
gesse of the institution procured governmental f­ avors that bypassed my
sex/work and focused on my musafir status. I was, as the consul general
at the Pakistani embassy in Los Angeles told me, a welcome mehmaan
(guest), a scholar of Karachi and Sindh, even if my work on Sindh was
about homo­sexuality and its sins.
At stake in both ­these scenes of reading is the narration of a geopolitics
of sexuality, one from within and one from without. At stake also are rendi-
tions of subaltern and global histories of sexuality that continually harden
certain historical habits of visibility that need to be rethought and traveled
anew. How does one break out of such stagings, where the provincial/ver-
nacular clarifies or corrupts the global and/or the hegemonic? ­After all,
Pakistan is as much the minoritized/fetishized geography within South
Asia as South Asia is within globalized histories of sexuality, of Stonewall
or beyond. How, then, does one translate the richness of a region’s myriad
politics, theoretical nuances, multilingual aesthetics, without falling prey
to historical habits of legibility? To do so, I want to reverse the order of
questions at hand. Instead of speaking to the global impact of the Stone-
wall riots within South Asia, what would it mean to consider the global
impact of the first queer conference in Pakistan on our memorialization
of the events of Stonewall? If Stonewall has served as a global allegory for
a rousing history of sexuality, what does the Pakistan event teach us about
sexuality as historical object? How can the vernaculars, temporalities, and
spatialities that make “sex” intelligible as object and archive summon itin-
erant geopo­liti­cal forms that are often left ­behind?
As such, can the Queer ­Futures conference held in Lahore, Pakistan,
serve to model the very historical questions that animate the critical
energies of this book? To put it more vulgarly, how can this historical
non-­event allow us to think histories of region as histories of sexuality?
Can the history of a queer event in musafir land become the archival trace
for global histories of sexuality? How does the memorialization of the con-
ference “teach” scholars to enter global histories of sexuality? Surely, the
Pakistan conference has now become my history without a cause, situated
as it is alongside the figuration of Stonewall. Let me end, then, with four

104 · chapter three

readings of musafir sex at the Pakistan conference that should be consti-
tutive historical method for any engagement of sexuality, geopolitics, and
abundance.
Location, logistics, and l­ abor: As mentioned at the outset, the con-
ference was mediated through a machinery of bureaucratic, intellectual,
and affective ­labor. Lahore, a piece of a broader geo­graph­i­cal puzzle that is
Punjab, is a city of myriad histories, idioms, and intellectual genealogies.
To stage a conference within such contexts is to embrace the mutable and
explosive forms of shifting learning that is South Asia.
Contradictions as promise: The contradictions of holding a con-
ference that heralded queer vernaculars in a place ( lums ) and time
(militarization) of peril ­were neither eschewed nor erased nor naively cel-
ebrated. ­Here the paradox of queer emergence can become the very ver-
nacular through which any history of sexuality must be articulated: a mad
balancing act between the forces of censorship, pop­u­lism, surveillance,
and the relentless march of dissident energies. The conference was (as the
final wrap-up session acknowledged) equally a success and a failure, yet
friendships w ­ ere forged, sex was had (one hopes), and alliances of profit
and plea­sure negotiated.
Multi/linguality as comfort: Baloch, Sindhi, Urdu, Punjabi, and En­
glish ­were the languages afloat at the conference. Translations w ­ ere offered
on demand but, more interestingly, rarely accessed. For example, I sat
through multiple recitations of verse whose cadences I heard and enjoyed
but whose literal meanings eluded me. Th ­ ere was comfort in not knowing,
in accepting our contact as a source of constant and uneven multilingual
learning. The task of translation ­here, and as it has always been in South
Asia, signified less as proj­ect of literalism and more as a proj­ect of recom-
position and rendition.37
Boys are out, or a map for queer (and South Asian) f­ utures: Last
but not least, most surprisingly, the central protagonists (or villains) of the
conference w ­ ere not gay men (as I had falsely assumed). No centrality was
given to cis/gay men; instead, feminists, lesbians, and trans/subjects took
on key roles, not in any orchestrated summoning of safe spaces (as is the
practice h
­ ere in the United States, or even in India) but more as an organic
instantiation of the worlds outside the sanitized space of the academic
conference. ­After all, even in terms of the sparse ­legal rights afforded to
sexual minorities in Pakistan, the khwaja sira (a term that must be mul-
tiply understood as “alternative/third sex,” “transgender,” and more) have
emerged at the forefront of many such ­battles. We w ­ ere constantly pushed

Itinerant Sex · 105

to imagine khwaja sira lives as origin stories of queer emergence, emanat-
ing through messy, rich, and complex genealogies of religion and practice.
Queerness h ­ ere was an embodied, religious, and governmental form—­the
khwaja sira challenging our very modes of thinking queer f­ utures alongside
hitherto unmarked histories and affects.38
If ­these observations read as an excoriation of Euro/American lineages,
they are not intended to do so. Rather, I remain focused on the analytical
assumptions that forge the grammar of histories of sexuality, on the en-
deavors to keep sexuality studies attuned to the task of geopolitics, not as
exegetical method for clarifying or redeeming asymmetries but as a space
of discontinuous, and often impossible learning. However difficult that
task may be, it must remain the itinerary of our ­labors. In this case, instead
of acceding to the demand to think a historical event (Stonewall or the
Lahore conference) globally, I would like us to rethink the very geo/epis-
temology founding that invitation. To retune my young Pakistani guide’s
words from my opening scene in a slightly dif­fer­ent tenor: Musafir sex,
histories of sexuality? Same ­thing, na?

notes

1 Many of the observations in this chapter are culled from the introduction
I co­wrote with Geeta Patel for a special issue on geopolitics and queer
studies. We called our issue “Area Impossible” to speak to the conversa-
tions that ­were seemingly segregated and unimagined within t­ hose two
field-­formations. The geopo­l iti­cal then, as it is ­here, was never summoned
to restore meaning to a dif­fer­ent place and time. See Arondekar and
Patel, “Area Impossible.”
2 For a broader review of the violent history of Partition and the establish-
ment of India and Pakistan, see, among ­others, Gilmartin, “The Historiog-
raphy of India’s Partition”; Butalia, The Other Side of Silence; Jalal, The Sole
Spokesman; Rawat, “Partition Politics and Achhut Identity”; and Zamin-
dar, The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia. Goa, for the
most part, remained a tricky and complicated geography for the broader
Indian in­de­pen­dence movement. As Jawaharlal Nehru (the first prime
minister of in­de­pen­dent India) was known to have famously remarked,
“Ajeeb hai ye Goa ke log” (Strange are the ­people of Goa). It is unclear
if and when he uttered ­these damning words of dismissal. Rumor has it
that Nehru muttered ­these words soon ­after his Congress Party suffered a
humiliating defeat in the first Goa elections; see Keni, “Nehru and Goa.”
For the variegated history of Goa’s liberation strug­gles, see Cunha’s Goa’s

106 · chapter three

 Freedom Strug­gle; Kamat, Farar Far; Kunte, Goa Freedom Strug­gle vis-­à-­vis
Maharashtra 1946–60, vols. 1–8; Risbud, “Goa’s Strug­gle for Freedom,
1949–1961”; Kelekar, Panthasth.
3 Satoskar, Gomantak Prakriti ani Sanskriti, vol. 1. See also Dhondo
Shirsargar, Gomantak Suddhicha Itihas. Chakravyuh can also be trans-
lated from the Sans­krit and/or Marathi as “labyrinth,” a multilayered
defensive formation. In this case, I have chosen to go with “quagmire” as
my chosen translation for the term as it fits more closely with the broader
claims of the editorial.
4 As Thomas Metcalf has argued, the shift from “colonial subject” to “im-
perial citizen” produced a dif­fer­ent worldview, of hybrid positionalities
within other­wise rigid colonial hierarchies. Portuguese Goa was a case in
point of such shifting positionalities. See Metcalf, Imperial Connections.
5 The Acto Colonial passed in 1930 clamped down on the freedoms that
had been previously enjoyed by Goans ­under the Republic. Censorship
on all fronts, excessive police surveillance, and an extreme response to
any anticolonial sentiment became the rule of the day. Many scholars
have argued that it was such escalated levels of po­l iti­cal and social re-
pression that led many Goan liberation fighters to look to the Indian Na-
tional Congress for orga­nizational and financial support. However, it is
equally impor­tant to note ­here that the eventual liberation of Goa is still
seen by many as an invasion by an overly aggressive and rapacious Indian
state. ­There is no singular history of liberation ­here. See Cunha, Goa’s
Freedom Strug­gle; and Benedito Ferrão, “Thinking Goa Postcolonially.”
6 Satoskar, editorial, 134–37.
7 To read more on the history of Goan migration to Mozambique and
Zanzibar, see P. Gupta, “Disquieting of History” and “Visuality and Dias-
poric Dynamism.” As Gupta carefully points out, Goan migration to Mo-
zambique functioned ­under the aegis of the Lusophone umbrella, where
attachments to a Portuguese Goan Catholic way of life w ­ ere preserved
and recycled. Goan migration to Zanzibar, on the other hand, Gupta re-
minds us, was less attached to such colonial histories, and more robustly
entrepreneurial, invested in imagining new economic and cultural vistas.
See also Prinz, “Intercultural Links between Goa and Mozambique”;
Frenz, “Transimperial Connections.”
8 For historians such as Sumathi Ramaswamy, the origins of place and
place-­making are fictions of colonial knowledge structures. To re-
fuse such geographies, Ramaswamy argues, is to undo geographies of
occupation, making way for more imaginative and po­l iti­cal landscapes
of possibility. See Ramaswamy, The Lost Land of Lemuria. On a related
interrogation of belonging and place, see also Sinha, “Premonitions of
the Past.”

Itinerant Sex · 107

 9 In its most basic terms, geopolitics still describes a relationality to global
structures of politics, territory, and environment, underwritten by
histories of racial capitalism and its afterlives. A broader history of the
development of the concept of geopolitics across disciplines can be found
in the following texts: Agnew, Geopolitics; Coleman, “Geopolitics as a
Social Movement”; Hyndman, “Mind the Gap”; and Ó Tuathail, Dalby,
and Routledge, Geopolitics Reader.
10 Some sample texts marking the shift to geopo­l iti­cal models of affiliation
within South Asian studies and/or sexuality studies: Gupta, Hofmeyr,
and Pearson, Eyes across the ­Water; Subrahmanyam, Explorations in
Connected History and Setsuzoku sareta rekishi [Explorations in connected
history]; Ho, Graves of Tarim; Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents;
Gopinath, Unruly Visions; Boelstorff, Gay Archipelago; Amar, The Security
Archipelago.
11 See A. Arondekar, “Geopolitics Alert”; Grewal and Kaplan, “Introduction.”
12 A wonderful example of such endeavors can be seen in a recent call for
papers for a conference held at Jamia Millia Islamia University, New
Delhi, November 23–24, 2020. The call reads as follows: “For too long,
we have worked with the Global South as the space of ‘experience’ and
Euro-­America as the space of ‘thought.’ What would it mean to think
about both history and thinking as fluid: not premised on terrestrial
locations and incarcerated within the nation state or paradigms of area
studies. Perhaps we need to start thinking with ‘geographies of affin-
ity’ rather than the geographies of colonialism and nationalism. The
proposed conference, connected to a sparc-­sponsored collaboration
between Jamia Millia Islamia and Centre for Indian Studies in Africa,
University of the Witwatersrand, aimed to foreground mobility, circu-
lation, and the longue durée thinking with movements across the Ocean
rather than terrestrial histories.” For further details, see the Jamia Millia
Islamia website, https://­www​.­jmi​.­ac​.­in​/­.
13 Fiereck, Hoad, and Mupotsa, “A Queering-­to-­Come.” See also Macharia,
Frottage.
14 Reiter, “Introduction,” in Constructing the Pluriverse. I would add ­here
that the essays in this collection (like many o ­ thers that I have cited
elsewhere in this book) move beyond the early gestures of Dipesh
Chakrabarty’s “provincializing Eu­rope.” See Chakrabarty’s Provincializ-
ing Eu­rope.
15 Two more recent works that speak to ­these shifts in geo­graph­i­cal imagi­
naries within South Asia are Amrith’s Crossing the Bay of Bengal and
C. Ghosh’s “Cross-­Border Activities in Everyday Life.” Th ­ ere is a longer
list of scholars who very early on moved away from nations to regions as
the basis for historiographical analy­sis. Within Indian Ocean studies,
see Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilization in the Indian Ocean; McPher-

108 · chapter three

 son, The Indian Ocean; and Bose, A Hundred Horizons. For work that
addressed the foundational connection between dispersed knowledges
and aesthetics within South Asia, see Fischer, Mute Dreams, Blind Owls,
and Dispersed Knowledges. As I noted early on, slavery studies within
South Asia has equally complicated the moorings of nation-­state forma-
tions, as has scholarly work on gender, ­house­holds, and families. The best
example of such scholarship remains Chatterjee’s opus, Forgotten Friends.
Other noteworthy efforts to rethink India and the Indian Ocean as an
Afrasian space include A. Burton, Africa in the Indian Imagination; and
Desai, Commerce with the University.
16 For an extended analy­sis of the connections between digital India, queer
subjects, and vedic India, see Dasgupta, Digital Queer Cultures in India;
and Shahani’s forthcoming monograph, Pink Revolutions.
17 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 1:103.
18 This brief description is clearly a reductive reading of the work of t­ hese
influential scholars. I note their centrality primarily to acknowledge the
limitations of their work for histories of sexuality of the global South.
The epistemological “case studies” that found the arguments of all three
scholars invariably emanate from Euro-­American lineages and as such
do not engage with the prehistory of ­these concepts within broader
strands of global history. My nonengagement with their work should not
be seen as a form of reactionary refusal; rather, I am more committed to
citational histories that often get elided within queer/sexuality studies.
­Those citations are at the heart of this proj­ect. See Deleuze and Guattari,
A Thousand Plateaus; and Latour, Reassembling the Social. Some notable
exceptions are scholars such as Jasbir Puar who complexly navigate
such scholarship and its import for histories of occupation, race, and
sexuality. Puar’s concerns, however, do not extend to historiographical
formulations of networks. See Puar, Terrorist Assemblages. For a genera-
tive history of literary readings of networks, see C. Levine, Forms. Levine
draws heavi­ly from current debates within global and/or comparative
lit­er­a­ture, where the concept of “networks” has functioned as an allegory
for a more capacious reading practice.
19 See P. Levine, Prostitution, Race, and Politics; and Pragna Shah, Street
Corner Secrets. Durba Mi­tra’s Indian Sex Life is one of the few works that
provides more epistemic histories of prostitution within South Asia.
20 Many of the intellectual frustrations articulated h ­ ere can be found in
fuller form in my review essay, “Go (Away) West.”
21 To access the multitude that is Kabir and Miraji, see chap. 4, “The Anom-
aly of Kabir,” in Milind Wakankar’s wonderful Subalternity and Religion;
and Geeta Patel’s pioneering Lyrical Movements, Historical Hauntings.
22 Van Leur, Indonesian Trade and Society. In many ways, Van Leur’s flawed
yet comprehensive trade history set the tone for many f­ uture histories

Itinerant Sex · 109

 of Indian Ocean Trade that foregrounded networks, itinerancy, and
movement.
23 McKittrick, Dear Science and Other Stories.
24 Some generative theorizations of the concept of “itinerant” within
histories of Indian Ocean studies include Pant, “A Poet’s Ocean” and
“Papering over Racial Capitalism.” Through her research on a merchant
community in Gujarat, Pant trenchantly speaks to the imagination as
a striated landscape of itinerancy that corrupts linear time lines and
geographies of history. Specifically, Pant examines modes of Muslim
knowledge formations ­after 1857, especially poetry, ­family genealogies,
travel routes through Indian Ocean ports, and more. Of note, Pant adds,
is how such modes of itinerant thinking are equally monetized (by Indian
nationalists and more) to sustain the erasures of Gujarati merchant com-
plicity in plantation capitalism, the erasures of Creole life, and gendered
and sexualized erasures of ­women more broadly.
25 De Sousa Santos, “Between Prospero and Caliban.” See also Bastos, “Sub-
altern Elites and Beyond.”
26 See de Souza, Medieval Goa. The quoted text is from a speech he gave at a
conference commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Goan liberation in
2011.
27 Newman, “Goa,” 429.
28 Menezes, “Goa’s Golden Jubilee.”
29 For an astute analy­sis of the prickly status of Goans as Eu­ro­pe­ans, see
Menon, “Eu­ro­pean of Another Color.” See also Noronha, “Goan Citizen-
ship Woes, from Karachi to Portugal.”
30 For a useful historical primer to the genealogies of Bahujan and other
caste monikers such as Dalit, see Karunakaran, “The Dalit-­Bahujan
Guide to Understanding Caste in Hindu Scripture.”
31 See ­Angle, Dayanand; Radhakrishan, “Dayanand Balkrishna Bandodkar,
Architect of Modern Goa”; and Salgaonkar, “Amalgam of Leadership
Styles.”
32 Parabo, India’s First Demo­cratic Revolution, 11. Parabo’s is the only
full-­length monograph available on Bandodkar. The book’s arguments,
however, skew too much in Bandodkar’s ­favor and lack adequate critique
of the subject of its study. Such a mea­sured reading may be due to the fact
that the study was largely made pos­si­ble through the financial support of
the Bandodkar ­family.
33 Fernandes, “Curious Case of Goan Orientalism,” 280–89.
34 lums website, https://­lums​.­edu​.­pk​/­.
35 lums website, https://­swgi​.­lums​.­edu​.­pk​/­events​/­3​-­day​-­queer​-­futures​
-­workshop​-­provides​-­space​-­important​-­conversations.
36 Lauren Berlant’s theorization of the “historical sense” can be generative
­here: “How does a par­tic­u­lar affective response come to be exemplary of

110 · chapter three

 a shared historical time, in what terms?” See Berlant, “Intuitionists,” 845.
As she herself notes, such a reading of affective event becomes the center-
piece of her ­later, oft-­cited opus Cruel Optimism. See also Spivak, Critique
of Postcolonial Reason, and her rewriting of Rani of Sirmur in the chapter
on history.
37 See Orsini, “How to Do Multilingual Literary History?”; Cort, “Making
It Vernacular in Agra”; d’Hubert, “Patterns of Composition in 17th c.
Bengali Lit­er­a­ture”; and Patel, “Translation’s Dissidence” and “Vernacu-
lar Missing.”
38 For more substantial reading on the Khwaja Sira, see Faris Khan’s writ-
ings on the subject, including “Translucent Citizenship” and “Khwaja
Sira Activism.” See also Kasmani, “Futuring Trans* in Pakistan”; Jaffer,
“Spiritualising Marginality”; and Shroff on third-­gender legalization in
Pakistan, “Colonial Choreography of Queer Value.” An additional work
in pro­gress comes from the Lahore conference itself: Jameel, “Hijra-
giri and Translation.”

Itinerant Sex · 111

 coda

I Am Not Your Data

Caste, Sexuality, Protest

I am not your data, nor am I your vote bank,

I am not your proj­ect, or any exotic museum object,
I am not the soul waiting to be harvested,
Nor am I the lab where your theories are tested,
I am not your cannon fodder, or the invisible worker,
or your entertainment at India habitat center,
I am not your field, your crowd, your history,
your help, your guilt, medallions of your victory,
.............................................................
So I draw my own picture, and invent my own grammar,
I make my own tools to fight my own ­battle,
For me, my ­people, my world, and my Adivasi self !
—­abhay xaxa, “I Am Not Your Data”

So writes Abhay Xaxa, an Adivasi scholar, activist, and artist, in an excerpt

from a longer poem titled “I Am Not Your Data” (2011), in what remains
one of the most militant and poignant tracts of anticaste aestheticism and
politics. Xaxa, member of the Kurukh collective, born and brought up
in Jashpur district, Chattisgarh, India, died tragically of a heart attack in
March 2020. A stalwart of Adivasi land reform, Xaxa was first and foremost
an intellectual who pushed for radical imaginaries that would combat the
datafication and dehumanization of his Adivasi and Dalit/Bahujan kin.1
If one motif hums through his poem, it is the pressing, almost unbearable
awareness of the privations of caste and the unction of history. As if to say,
between who we are and how we are seen lies an unbridgeable metrics, an
archive of algorithmic vio­lence that w ­ ill not let us breathe. “So I draw my
own picture, and invent my own grammar,” he writes in his limpid litany of
refusals, exhorting us, his readers, to imagine vibrant historical vernaculars
for Adivasi and Dalit/Bahujan presence.2
For the past de­cade or so, I have often returned to Xaxa’s trenchant
exhortations to think through my own intellectual discomfort with the
evidentiary regimes that secure pathways to histories of caste and sexuality,
to think about what it means to not be data/fodder for a knowledge supply
chain that sees minoritized histories only through lineages of loss, erasure,
and paucity. As a refutation of such bureaucratized and ethnological imag-
inaries, I have turned instead to the concept-­metaphor of abundance as a
heuristic to advance a nonrecuperative history of sexuality that embraces
presence without return, or the fear of loss. My turn to abundance appears
less as a seductive alternative to the evidentiary mandates of datafied history
and more as a gesture ­toward the shifting demands of such a history, si­mul­
ta­neously iterating and circumventing its ubiquitous claims. As this book
repeatedly signals, we have afforded lavish attention to the effacement of
histories of sexuality and somehow left their efflorescence woefully under-
theorized. A history of sexuality’s abundance, like the one that founds the
book’s argument, full of joyous indiscretions and staged archives, s­ haped
and determined by caste oppression, remains untold. To summon a history
of abundance, I suggest, is not to be restored to repre­sen­ta­tion ­under con-
tinuing occupation but to be set adrift upon more intrepid economies of
meaning—­sometimes harmonious, sometimes dissonant—­that come to-
gether to upend genealogies of historical recuperation and repre­sen­ta­tion.
What possibly can it mean, then, to invent a historical grammar, as
Xaxa notes, to refuse metonymic deployment, to do more than witness, to
become—­and indeed to inhabit—­a dif­fer­ent order of presence? Within
­these pages, our engagement with the lower-­caste devadasi collectivity,
the Gomantak Maratha Samaj, has given us histories of sexuality that are
playful, extensive, creative, a m­ atter of rec­ord, folded into archives initi-
ated and indeed sustained by our own productions. Let us rehearse once
more—in brief—­what we know of the Samaj; ­after all, its contra/data
founds the protocols for the reading of my text. A historical anomaly and
rarity in both its archival forms and its content, the Samaj maintains its
own continuous archive, embracing rather than disavowing its history of
caste and sexuality. Its archives in Mumbai and Panaji are accessible and

I Am Not Your Data · 113

available to all who care to enter, and t­ hose archives are full of the minutiae
of subaltern life, an efflorescent and heady mélange of fact and fiction, with
archival genres that corrupt and stage verifiability in the form of fake birth
rec­ords, property deeds, and more. A canny archival pragmatism founds
­these collections, where the sheer abundance of the materials is less an
organ­izing than a disor­g a­niz­ing force, shot through by questions of plea­
sure, practice, and subjectivity, agency and ethics. Within ­these archives,
we have encountered evidentiary genres of invention and sustenance,
thriving ecosystems of protest, profit, and refusal. We have been prodded
into surprise by staged resistive events (the fake halla [attack] in chapter 1),
thrilled by the ekphrastic skills of timepass historiography (the question, in
chapter 2, of ­whether sex is apparent or real), and ushered into an itinerant
geopolitics (through musafir sex in chapter 3) that refuses to ­settle.
A second notable feature of the Samaj, we have also learned, is their cor-
ruption of the endogamous structures of sexuality and gender that suture
caste to power. Endogamy, as Durba Mi­tra so succinctly argues, founds
colonial and postcolonial histories of society in South Asia, a violent struc-
ture of caste and conjugality that scaffolds sexuality into zones of domestic
and patriarchal containment. For Mi­tra, the po­liti­cal and epistemological
imposition of caste-­based endogamy, first by colonial ethnologists/Indol-
ogists and then by homegrown Brahmin elites, systematically places non-
conjugal sexuality (or what Dr. B. R. Ambedkar calls the prob­lem of the
“surplus ­woman” or excess female sexuality) as the source of civilizational
(read Hindu) disarray. To defy endogamy, Mi­tra writes, is to excavate the
sedimented genealogies of its emergence, to speak to its reliance on caste
oppression and the management of female sexuality. 3 Any refusal of
endogamy equally poses challenges for a Hindu f­ amily form in which
caste demarcates kin and conjugality determines access to property, in-
heritance, and livelihood. In bypassing the mandates of endogamy (we
have trou­ble proving who we are, if you recall, says the Samaj secretary),
the history of the Samaj proffers a more radical or perhaps more chaotic
caste narrative, one where ­there is no fixed inherited origin and where caste
histories are always threatening to dissolve. If endogamy preserves the repro-
duction of caste as an inherited form through conjugality, then the Samaj’s
history of itinerant sexuality and nonconjugal kinship makes the perma-
nence of caste both anomalous and temporary. As I noted e­ arlier, Samaj
members maintained nonconjugal, sexual, and long-­term relationships
with their upper-­caste Brahmin yajemans and birthed ­children who ­were
given Brahmin surnames, all outside the prescribed par­ameters of endogamy

114 · coda
and the Hindu ­family form. Such caste mayhem and breakdown can be
seen in the regular ease with which Samaj members are often asked if they
are “original or fake Brahmins” at vari­ous gatekeeping sites in Goa. For
instance, during the course of my early archival work in Shiroda, a small
village in southern Goa that hosted the Samaj’s first large po­liti­cal gath-
ering, I was often accompanied by an elder from the Samaj, Sunita Chan-
davarkar. Chandavarkar (whose surname carries the distinctive stench of
an upper-­caste lineage) facilitated my engagement with local authorities.
At each encounter with priests or bureaucrats, she was repeatedly asked to
explain the logic of her obviously Brahmin surname, especially given our
connections to a devadasi Samaj. Chandavarkar’s weary response to such
inquiries, uttered with mocking and mea­sured irony, was always the same:
“Kaam aamche, naav amche. Khare ki khote, hein kon tharvnaar?” (Our
work, our name. Who decides what is original or fake?).4
Another unsettling aspect of the Samaj’s history is its shifting caste
recognition ­under uneven state laws in India, guided primarily through
muddled legislation around devadasi communities.5 Moving between
nominalizations of Dalit, Other Backward Caste (obc), and Open Cat-
egory (oc) in Maharashtra, Goa, and Karnataka, respectively, the Samaj’s
history speaks directly to the biopolitics of caste and sexuality as striated
and pliable, less a place of certitude than a signature of per­sis­tent unver-
ifiability, where the data for who qualifies as an oppressed caste remains
porous, even arbitrary.6 Ashwini Deshpande and Rajesh Ramachandran,
two prominent economists who work on caste and economic disparity in
India, foreground the foundational untenability of caste categories in the
emerging economic landscape of a divided India, across rural, urban, and
gendered lines. For Deshpande and Ramachandran, a shifting caste history
such as that of the Samaj would not be surprising, as the par­ameters for
oppressed caste categorizations remain exceedingly varied and unsettled.
To be clear, ­there is no equivocation around the brutalities of caste seg-
regation, discrimination, and vio­lence; what remains less certain are the
forms through which caste is legislated and recognized.7 Such mediated
caste knowledges undergird the very judicial categorizations of caste (ma-
terialized in the language of rights and repre­sen­ta­tion) where we become
data (I tick the obc box that holds me in reserve), as we identify with the
very forms that secure our minoritization. Any robust anticaste scholarship
thus requires a balancing act between t­ hese two translations of caste: one
more fluid and embodied, the other sedimented and regularized within
the judicial mandates of the state.

I Am Not Your Data · 115

 ­Here I want to suture Xaxa’s call for new idioms of protest, refusal, and
survival to the Samaj’s history of sexuality and caste and proffer two sight
lines of epistemic and material protest: First, how can a history of sexuality
such as that of the Samaj potentialize nonevidentiary ­futures for Dalit/
Bahujan subjects? How can such histories clog up the data stream, so to
speak, on boats of our own archival making? Can we draw pictures, craft
verse, imagine worlds that do not translate into captured forms? Second,
what happens if we turn to a theorization of radical caste politics, of Dalit/
Bahujan imaginaries, as abundance, as andolan (protest) visions that cull
the creative fury of the bahu (expanse) of lower-­caste subjects? Ambedkar’s
“annihilation of caste” remains the horizon, even as attenuation remains
the more immediate historical task.8 ­After all, the term Bahujan, of Pali/Bud-
dhist lineage, refers to a lexical register of transient diversity—­present-­day
Scheduled Castes (Dalits), Scheduled Tribes (Adivasis/Indigenous), Shudra
(peasant) castes, and Other Backward Castes—­cutting across religion, lan-
guages, and geographies. ­There is ­little historical clarity around the first
po­liti­cal mobilization of the term Bahujan. One well-­known early usage
appears in Vithal Ramji Shinde’s oft-­cited Marathi manifesto “Bahujan
Paksh.” Published in 1920, in Baroda’s Jagruti Patra, Shinde’s manifesto
served to provide po­liti­cal keywords for his party in the new council elec-
tions in Pune (then part of Bombay Presidency in colonial India). For
Shinde, the Bahujan (or the backward class), as non-­Brahmin p­ eople,
­were deliberately kept away from “knowledge, wealth and power,” marked
by an inherent subalternity, an inaccessibility to the lines of power and
repre­sen­ta­tion that must be addressed and eradicated. As such, he writes,
“A caste-­specific name like the non-­Brahmin party does not foreground
the specificity of a Bahujan collectivity that is marked by helplessness and
powerlessness. Therefore, if we name this party Bahujan Party or ­People’s
Party, which is an appropriate and all-­encompassing name, t­ here w ­ ill be
­little objection to it.”9
Even as Shinde’s words invite a pragmatic expansion of an anticaste vi-
sion that is more inclusive of all lower-­caste p­ eople, his call remains wed-
ded to electoral politics or “vote banks” (to return to Xaxa), as seen in
the postcolonial success and visibility of Bahujan-­based po­liti­cal parties,
such as the bsp and more.10 More recently, Gopal Guru cautions against
the cele­bration of Bahujan electoral success as a mea­sure of anticaste proj­
ects. Indeed, Guru lambasts the turn to sarvajan (­people) as an organ­izing
anthem for Bahujan parties, arguing that such language repackages caste
oppression as a reform proj­ect of the Indian demo­cratic state. A history

116 · coda
of sarvajan, Guru underscores, marks the impossibility of Dalit/Bahujan
history where the bland recitation of demo­cratic princi­p les (we, the
­people) flattens Dalit/Bahujan difference and adversity.11 Instead, Guru
and other anticaste scholars, such as V. Geetha, urge a sustained engage-
ment with Dalit/Bahujan intellectual genealogies that speak less to the
nationalist rhe­toric of the sarvajan and more to the epistemological and
agential diversity offered by Dalit/Bahujan pasts and f­ utures.12 To do
so is to leave aside the divisions within Dalit and Bahujan conceptual-
izations, between anticaste stalwarts such as Kanshi Ram and Dr. B. R.
Ambedkar, to focus instead on collective potentiality as an episteme, eth-
ics, and politics.13 For whenever one encounters the Bahujan, the many,
and the more, one is thus engaged with abundance, with the effort to forge
supplementary histories that both incite and dissolve the diminishments
of their histories.
In what follows, I w ­ ill provide three staged events of reading, each an
archival fragment of histories of caste, sexuality, evidence, and protest,
rendered in dif­fer­ent rhetorical keys. Each fragment generates a set of
protocols for the immanent critique of caste and sexuality, ongoing ref-
utations of clarity and easy categorization. My ambition, for better or for
worse, is necessarily diffuse, even didactic: the urgency ­here is to exude new
idioms of the pos­si­ble. In order to get to my (non)data, you w­ ill have to use
your imagination.14

We Are Saraswats: Caste

September 2012: A smaller enclave of the Samaj lives in Hubballi-­

Dharwad, Karnataka, a bustling border city between Maharashtra, Goa,
and Karnataka. H ­ ere members of the collectivity (150 families or so) are
multiply categorized as Dalit or obc (Other Backward Caste), with a few
subgroupings making their way out of lower-­caste classifications on the
basis of their economic success. As with their counter­parts in Maharashtra
and Goa, the broader efforts of this smaller group are dedicated to social
and economic upliftment of their members, as well as a public embrace
of their history of sexuality.15 Anticaste scholars such as A. Geetha are spe-
cifically critical of the Samaj’s activities in Karnataka (and to a lesser extent
in Goa), arguing that their diffuse caste categorization allows them to dis-
avow their lower-­caste Dalit kin who continue to work as devadasis. The
Samaj’s focus, she argues, remains on the more flamboyant and successful

I Am Not Your Data · 117

kalavant (artist) caste whose presence and contributions remain central
to its history. A. Geetha’s claims, while impor­tant, are not well grounded
in any close engagement with the Samaj’s histories or archives; she draws
more on interviews with the head of a local devadasi ngo than on available
information about the Samaj’s outreach to a wide swath of their Dalit kin.
More to the point, A. Geeta curiously elides the Samaj’s embrace of its his-
tories of sexuality and its devadasi past and pre­sent. What remains relevant
is her reminder that the Samaj’s shifting caste forms make for a variegated
and messy arena of reform and recognition.16
As such, I am in Hubballi to conduct archival research and to speak to
some of the living elders who have w ­ ills, property deeds, and vari­ous his-
torical memorabilia to share. On the invitation of a member of the Samaj
executive council, Uday Badkar, I attend their monthly function held at the
Samaj headquarters in the heart of Hubballi. The function is a gathering
of cele­bration and admonition: achievements of kalakar (artist) members
are lauded, even as the continued social and economic destitution of the
community continues to be bemoaned. At this point, I am pulled into the
fray by an enthusiastic older devadasi, Nirmalatai, who asks me to speak

C.1 Konkan Saraswat Samaj, Hubli Dharwad, Sanman Karekram for Sri Ram
Bhandarkar, a kalakar from the community. Photo: Uday Badkar

118 · coda
on my research and remind the audience of the Samaj’s enduring history
of sexuality. And, she adds coquettishly, wagging her fin­g er at me, make
sure to tell them “namma mahileyaru sun­da­ra iddaare” (how beautiful our
­women are).17 It is at this point that I notice the very large banner displayed
prominently above the stage—­a banner written in Kannada, which reads
“Konkan Saraswat Samaj.”
Baffled at what I conclude is surely a m ­ istake, or at least an aspirational
typo, I turn to Nirmalatai and ask her to explain the banner. Surely, I ask,
in my best impersonation of a well-­behaved historian’s “how w ­ ill this ap-
pear in the archives?” mode, you must see how this looks! The banner, I
firmly add, suggests that we are a Saraswat Samaj, a Brahmin Samaj, which
is clearly not true. Without batting an eyelid, and with a weary nod, Nir-
malatai looks at me and says, “Do you see what is next to the banner? That
is the image of the Goddess Saraswati, the goddess of learning. In Hub-
balli, in the Konkan region, we are devotees of Saraswati and committed
to learning, and so we are ourselves Saraswat. That right does not belong
to the Brahmins!” Bemused by Nirmalatai’s casual explanation of what ap-
pears to be a rather imaginative leap of self-­identification, I turn to Badkar,
the Samaj trustee, and ask him the same question. His explanation echoes
(albeit with some difference) much of what Nirmalatai has just referenced.
Badkar patiently reminds me that the Hubballi branch of the Samaj de-
liberately chose this name ­because they believe they migrated from the
mystical banks of the river Saraswati and, as such, are her subjects. When
pressed on the historical details of this claim, Badkar remains unfazed and
states that ­those details are not relevant ­because “this is what we believe to
be true.” And in case I have any further doubts about their legitimacy as a
collectivity, he notes with ­great pride that even the dominant caste com-
munity in Hubballi, the Chitrapur Saraswat Brahmin Samaj, has no choice
but to re­spect their nominalization. With an ironic smile, he adds, “They
have to accept us b­ ecause their numbers are shrinking and we are h ­ ere now.”
Such ac­cep­tance, Badkar reminds me, does not alleviate caste discrimina-
tion or segregation; it does, however, fissure proprietary upper-­caste claims
to visibility and recognition.18
­There is clearly so much more h ­ ere to say about this interlude of caste
and sexuality and the historical rec­ord. A ­ fter all, from what we have
learned about the Samaj’s history, such caste “adjustments” rarely materi-
alize economic change, but they appear throughout in the ways the Samaj
conjures its own histories of belonging.19 Caste becomes marked by disso-
lution, by the very annulment of its evidentiary forms. Regardless of how

I Am Not Your Data · 119

the Samaj narrates its nominalization, its archival presence in the official
archives ­will now always point to one Konkan Saraswat Samaj, legible for
most data-­driven research as a Brahmin community. ­After all, as a regis-
tered “Saraswat” collectivity (Registration Number drz daf 56/2009-
10), the Samaj w­ ill clog up the data stream, corrupting caste lineage as an
inherited form. Let me be clear: such castes of hand, if you ­will, are not
to be read as aspirational forms (wanting to be Brahmin), attempts to
forge an upper-­caste identity. The titular event comports more with the
Samaj’s broader epistemology, a pretext for a dif­fer­ent history of caste,
an installation of protest, a reordering of the grammar of recognition
and lineage. The Samaj’s self-­dedicated name, Konkan Saraswat Samaj,
hovering somewhere between ordained caste structures and imaginative
refurbishment—­between evidence and kala (art)—­becomes magically lib-
erated from the more burdensome data machine, that stultifying apparatus
of rights and repre­sen­ta­tion. Instead, we get translations of sexuality and
caste, circulating in a continuous pre­sent, that thwart state demands for a
compliant and intelligible history.20
The data has changed. Who’s a Brahmin now?

Hum Kagaz Nahin Dikhaenge/We Will Not Show

Our Papers: Evidence

Even as protests against the controversial Citizenship Amendment Act

(caa ) raged rapidly across India at the end of 2019, till 2020 (the last
protest I attended was in Mumbai on March 15, 2020) t­ here was a clear
sense that we ­were facing familiar ­legal, historical, and po­liti­cal challenges
around the linkages between evidentiary regimes and discourses of rights
and repre­sen­ta­tion for minoritized subjects (across, caste, religion, labor/
sexuality, and more). Passed in December 2019, caa enacted the virulent
logic of e­ arlier efforts to create a National Register of Citizenship (nrc)
in the northeastern state of Assam that required all citizens to produce
evidence of their citizenship.21 The prevailing ideology ­behind both state
efforts was the systematic expulsion of the minority Indian Muslim com-
munity, whereby caa would extend citizenship only to non-­Muslims flee-
ing religious persecution in neighboring countries. Meanwhile, Muslims
(Indian or other­wise) would be required to prove their citizenship through
spurious paper archives that may or may not be recognized. Rahul Rao
argues that the anti-­caa protests w ­ ere significant precisely b­ ecause they

120 · coda
mobilized the seductive language of a secular nationalism (India as diverse,
India as democracy) besmirched by the jingoism of a Hindutva, separatist
state. For Rao, such protests underscore the difficulties of a resistive poli-
tics in India, where the recourse to nationalisms against the state produces
“excesses” of its own, including exclusions of region (Kashmir) and indige-
neity (Adivasi), to name a select few.22
The chant “Hum kagaz nahin dikhaenge” (We w ­ ill not show our pa-
pers) became a rousing anthem of the protests, echoing the challenges
evidentiary regimes placed on bodies across regions, generations, and tem-
poralities. Excerpted from Varun Grover’s now viral poem, the full para-
graph reads:23

Hum samvidhan ko bachaenge,

Hum kagaz nahin dikhaenge,
Hum jan gan man bhi gaenge,
Hum kagaz nahin dikhaenge.
(We w
­ ill save the Constitution,
We w
­ ill not show [nrc] papers,
We w
­ ill sing “Jan Gan Man” [the national anthem],
We w
­ ill not show papers.)

For sexuality’s subjects, such a demand for kagaz (evidence) produced

a particularly complex set of l­ egal, ethical, and affective negotiations.
The most strident refusals of such kagaz regimes ­were enacted by trans/
subjects who spoke out against their continuous effacement within l­ egal
and societal structures in India. To produce original evidence (kagaz), to
“prove” trans lives (who we “­really” are), scholars and activists insisted, was
to return to familial, l­ egal, and chronological structures of self that w ­ ere
violent and punitive. For Dalit/Bahujan/Adivasi kin (and the segrega-
24

tions of sexuality and caste’s subjects ­here are clearly artificial), the call to
documents, verifiable or other­wise, was an acutely exclusionary judicial en-
actment of caste consolidation. To be legible as paper subjects was to fur-
ther dehumanize Dalit/Bahujan bodies, already at the peripheries of the
state’s biopower.25 For example, my own m ­ other, like so many other caste-­
oppressed kin in India—­like the legendary figure of Aai in Dalit Marathi
poet Jyoti Langewar’s famous corpus—­has no birth certificate, only a
memory of a life nourished despite the mandate of that origin story.26 To
refuse kagaz was to forge a history of sexuality and caste that required new
languages of po­liti­cal action.

I Am Not Your Data · 121

 A second noteworthy development of t­ hese nationwide protests was
of course the exuberant embrace of Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar alongside a
perceptible sidelining of Mahatma Gandhi as national icon. The phrase
preceding the chant “Hum kagaz nahin dikhaenge,” as we read in the
full extract above, was the equally rousing phrase “Hum samvidhan ko
bachaenge” (We w ­ ill save the constitution), a direct homage to Ambed-
kar’s constitutional legacy, his pioneering vision of a radical democracy,
all of which centered Dalit and Bahujan histories as places of learning and
possibility. The invocation of the constitution (samvidhan) ­here must not
be seen as a return to the idea of enshrined truths, or a turn to an eviden-
tiary genre, maligned at the hands of an authoritarian and divisive state.
Rather, the call to save or rescue the samvidhan was more a call to what
Kalpana Kannabiran has recently termed a constitution as commons—­a
space of active making and remaking, a coming together of new grammars
of subject-­making, to create what Rohit De so importantly reminds has
always been a p­ eople’s document.27 The constitution as commons is not a
kagaz full of verifiable data and embodied beginnings; it is more a vocabu-
lary of protest and possibility.
In a space like South Asia, where the idea of evidence is always already
a hoax, a jugaad (flexible form), what does it then mean—as we have just
seen through the history of the Gomantak Maratha Samaj—to both refuse
and mobilize the rhe­toric of kagaz? ­After all, as Matthew Hull, Nayanika
Mathur, and Sanjay Srivastava have so persuasively argued, official evidence
of existence in colonial and postcolonial South Asia is rarely commensu-
rate with recognizable selves and identities, where the insinuation of paper
rationality into lives is the very crux of the ­matter. Documents fake and fail
lives, and their failure incites the variations of duplication, duplicity, and
collectivity.28 Our pandemic times have further heightened t­ hese kagaz re-
gimes, as citizens are both composed and jettisoned through a language of
evidence that arbitrarily creates insiders/outsiders. I have returned often
to ­these early moments of protest in t­ hese past few harrowing months as
the jugaad form has become both our salvation and our demise in South
Asia—­social media secures life at the very moment in which the state
refuses its possibility. Unnamed kin die in unnamed spaces, even as the
register of covid-19 deaths and cases climbs up each day. A trans/Dalit
comrade in rural Maharashtra (Latur) who could not get their b­ rother into
a hospital bed wrenchingly writes me, “Kagaz navhta ga, mhanoon tyache
maran lavkar aale” (We d­ idn’t have the right papers, s­ ister, that is why he
died so prematurely).

122 · coda
I Remember You: Protest

I remember you, my m ­ other always tenderly says to my partner, Lucy, as she

glimpses her across oceans virtual and real ­every week. My ­mother is eighty-­
five, her memory faded and folded into crevices of stories told and untold.
Her world, a map of the everyday life of sexuality and caste, charts the real-
ism of autofiction, where the past is always somewhere close at hand. In the
pixelated landscape of my video screen, Aai’s words linger, a poignant short-
hand, and a translated rendering of how she manifests absence. “I remember
you” is her En­glish condensation of our shared Marathi phrase—­“Mala tujhi
aathvan yete”—­which makes aathvan (memory) an act of personal conjuring,
a poignant tethering of past and pre­sent. I remember you too, Auntie, Lucy
always responds, sealing a trea­sured ritual of long-­distance love that sutures

C.2 Pramila Laxmeshwar, 1947. Photo: Gomantak Maratha Samaj Archives,

Mumbai, India

I Am Not Your Data · 123

affect to a history of memory. To remember is not to grasp a lost form or
surrender to the nostalgia of a less violent past (if ­there ever was one), but
more to aspire to belong. To fashion a world, or at least a version of a world,
that brings joy, succor, and the possibility of a reunion.
I have thought of Aai’s phrase often this past pandemic year as I’ve trav-
eled several times to Mumbai to see her, without her beloved Lucy (whose
US passport makes it impossible for her to enter a virus-­stricken India). I
have thought of what it means to remember a history lost and/or unseen in
a country besieged by memory disputes, where ­little separates the factional
from the functional. Even as India buckles u­ nder the weight of rampant au-
thoritarianism, communalism, casteism, and a general disregard for h ­ uman
life, I remember you. I remember the promises of liberation, the mandate
to agitate, or­g a­nize, and educate. I remember the farmers’ protests, the
words of Nodeep Kaur, the joyous rhythms of Shaheen Bagh, and the re-
fusals of Bhima Koregaon.
­Today, as heartbreak stretches across India, where more fires are lit to
cremate than to create, ­there are more memories to be made. From the sear-
ing ­faces of my Dalit/Bahujan kin who tend the dead in the crematoriums
of Hindutva making, to the oxygen-­lungar (community kitchen) that pro-
vides breath to the as yet living, we remember. A cremator “at the Center
of India’s covid Hell,” the headline reads, weeps; he is, a­ fter all, the only
witness, the only rec­ord of the living dead.29 Ashu Rai is his name, always a
Dalit, yet now the b­ earer of last rites, of data un/pro­cessed, of bodies un/
spoken. “Almost every­one asks about my caste b­ ecause every­one wants a
Brahmin to do the rituals and not the Dalits, but they ­aren’t available,” Rai
says. “We are.” Drenched in sweat, bearing wood, he takes one remaining
piece of cloth that covers his face and head, and whispers laughingly, “This
cloth . . . ​absorbs [my] sweat and . . . ​when I hang it on my shoulder, ­people
think that I am a Brahmin priest.” I am a Dalit, I am the rec­ord of your loss,
I am, I am, I am not your data. I am abundant.30

notes

1 See Choudhury and Aga, “In Memoriam.” See also Sushmita, “Remem-
bering Scholar and Activist Abhay Xaxa.”
2 Xaxa’s words are a clear tribute to the pioneering work of Dr. B. R.
Ambedkar and his insistence on caste as an enduring theoretical calculus
and vocabulary. See Ambedkar, Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar.
3 Mi­tra, “ ‘Surplus ­Woman.’ ”

124 · coda
 4 Unfortunately, Sunita Chandavarkar passed away tragically due to heart
complications in early 2018. Her humor, grace, and knowledge of the
Samaj activities remain a founding presence in this book. Like so many
subjects who animate the archives of the Samaj, Sunita was an extraor-
dinarily ordinary figure who grew up within a devadasi h ­ ouse­hold and
committed herself to a life of possibility, curiosity, and sustenance. She
ran a tiny grocery store in central Shiroda, a tiny village in Ponda Taluka,
southern Goa, India. My surname, Arondekar, on the other hand, elicited
less concern, as it has no perceptible Brahmin connection.
5 tnn, “Commission to Decide on Gomantak Maratha Samaj’s Inclusion in
obc.”
6 The National Commission for Backward Classes’ central list of obc com-
munities and the statewide list of Scheduled Castes in India reflect many
of the shifts in caste nominalizations I have alluded to h ­ ere. See “Central
List of obc’s.” See also “List of Scheduled Castes.”
7 Deshpande and Ramachandran, “How Backward Are the Other Back-
ward Classes?” See also the current furor over the Maratha quota in
Maharashtra, India, where the debate around who constitutes a disad-
vantaged caste remains an unending debate: Khapre, “Explained: How
Marathas Got Reservation, and What Happens Now.”
8 Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste. The text was published in 1936 and
remains a source of continued inspiration for a broad swath of anticaste
collectivities and politics.
9 I have provided a loose translation of Shinde’s prose. The original Marathi
text of Shinde’s article can be found at Tejas Harad’s blog Scattered Pillar.
For a complete (though rough) En­glish translation, see Harad’s translated
text, June 1, 2019, https://­scatteredpillar​.­wordpress​.­com​/­2019​/­06​/­01​
/­bahujan​-­pakshas​-­manifesto​-­vitthal​-­ramji​-­shinde​/­.
10 For some sample readings of the rise and success of the bsp, see S. Gu­ha,
“From Ethnic to Multiethnic”; and Verma, “Bahujan Samaj Party,” 19,
21–22.
11 Guru, “The Indian Nation in Its Egalitarian Conception.”
12 Guru and Geetha, “New Phase of Dalit-­Bahujan Activity.”
13 See Narayan, “Ambedkar and Kanshi Ram.”
14 On a related note (and yet somehow requiring perhaps more than this
cursory note) is the question of “biodata,” that peculiar Indian-­English
coupling that is regularly foisted on South Asians of all ilk to explain
their genealogies of arrival and futurity in any marriage proposal/ar-
rangement. Biodata routinely functions as a placeholder for all histories
of caste, sexuality, age, religion, and income. Your biodata solidifies your
lineage and smooths your way into conjugality.
15 Information on the membership of the Hubballi-­Dharwad branch of
the Samaj was obtained from open-­access membership lists. Currently,

I Am Not Your Data · 125

 most members of the Samaj claim obc status and government ben-
efits (2A) as mandated by the Karnataka State, with a small section
categorized as Dalit, and a few families claiming Open Category caste
status. All lists and additional materials can be found at the Samaj’s
office at Sahana, House No. 19, 5s Cross, Chandranath Nagar, B ­ ehind
Vijay ­Hotel, Vijaynagar Hubballi-580032. I am grateful to the Badkar
­family (Uday and Manik) for introducing me to the Samaj archives and
membership.
16 Geetha, “Entrenched Fissures.” For a more detailed and historical rela-
tionship between caste and broader devadasi histories in Karnataka, see
Ramberg’s wonderful Given to the Goddess. It would be impor­tant to note
­here that the devadasi community referenced in Ramberg’s work does
not have any connections to the Samaj referenced h ­ ere.
17 Much gratitude to the formidable Prasad ­sisters, Pratima and Prarthana,
for walking me through the linguistic complexities of Kannada and its
translated avatars.
18 Badkar’s comments ­were made in Marathi. Translations are mine and are
excerpted from many long conversations held during my attendance at
the function.
19 Nataraj, “Backward Classes and Minorities in Karnataka Politics.”
20 In her forthcoming book on histories of caste and slavery across the
Konkan coast, Ananya Chakravarti speaks to connected caste malleabil-
ities and nominalizations such as Kunbi Saraswats that trou­ble settled
historical wisdom. This observation is taken from a talk Chakravarti gave
at the Center for South Asian Studies, ucsc, April 12, 2022.
21 A more detailed account of the politics of Assam and its relationship to
the amendments to Indian citizenship law can be found in Roy, Mapping
Citizenship in India.
22 Rao, “Nationalisms by, against, and beyond the State.”
23 Grover, “Hum kagaz nahi dikhayenge.”
24 One well-­circulated video narrative of such refusals can be seen h ­ ere:
“ ‘nrc-­caa-­Trans Bill Suicidal for Us’: Trans Community Speaks Out |
The Quint,” produced by The Quint, YouTube, January 9, 2020, https://­
youtu​.­be​/­eq​-­5wXv3p7c. ­There has also been a considerable amount of
rich scholarship on the quandaries of trans/subjects, judicial repre­sen­ta­
tion, and activist re/formations. One exemplary essay would be Jain and
Gupta, “Law, Gender Identity, and the Uses of H ­ uman Rights.”
25 Joseph, “Identity Card,” 178–79.
26 For more on the pioneering writings and activism of Jyoti Lanjewar, see
S. Gupta, “Jyoti Lanjewar.” The En­glish translation of her best-­known
poem, “Aai,” can be found on The Shared Mirror: Lanjewar, “­Mother (Aai).”
27 Kannabiran, “Constitution-­as-­Commons.” Kannabiran also dedicates her
essay to the memory of Xaxa. See also De, A ­People’s Constitution. A viral

126 · coda
 video of Dalit ­women speaking to the need for a constitution as com-
mons can be seen ­here: “Samvidhan Bachao Sabha | Hum Kaagaz Nahin
Dikhayenge | Barinagar | Jamshedpur | 26 Jan |,” YouTube, January 27,
2020, https://­youtu​.­be​/­bf4by1mpcoc.
28 See Hull, The Government of Paper; Mathur, “Transparent-­Making
Documents and the Crisis of Implementation”; Srivastava, “Duplicity,
Intimacy, Community.”
29 S. Majumdar, “We Spoke to a Cremator at the Center of India’s covid
Hell.”
30 Das, “Dalit Cremation Workers and the covid-19 Pandemic.”

I Am Not Your Data · 127

This page intentionally left blank
 Acknowl­edgments

I have always disliked the historical common sense that loss is a fundamen-
tal ingredient of any subaltern history. That we redeem the deficit of our
minoritized pasts through concerted acquisitions of lost pasts has never
quite settled. I have turned instead to abundance h ­ ere—of theories, ar-
chives, memories, indiscretions, joy, kinship, care, geopolitics—to proffer
a dif­fer­ent story of sexuality.
I have been experimenting with the idea of this book for some time. By
one recollection, it may have started in 1981, when I was thirteen and first
recognized sexuality’s myriad fictions and historical forms. ­There I was,
on an enormous stage in Rang Bhavan, at the annual cele­bration of our
community, the Gomantak Maratha Samaj, in Bombay. I had just received
a prize for a short story I had written on the Samaj’s history. Mostly hagi-
ographical in tone, the story giddily cast the Samaj as a collectivity whose
achievements as a lower-­caste devadasi community w ­ ere unparalleled and
worthy of recognition. The plot of the story is unremarkable: a young fe-
male protagonist, Pramila, bullied by her schoolmates for her caste and
devadasi past, turns to her m ­ other for comfort. Her m
­ other regales Pramila
with rousing exemplars from the Samaj’s archives, exhorting her to imag-
ine the Samaj as a living source more of inspiration than of shame. As the
large, raucous, and joyful audience applauded and cheered me on, I recall
gleefully thinking stories of sexuality ­were clearly my ticket to notoriety.
And as I read the story aloud, I remember thinking, surely one day, I w ­ ill
write a sequel . . .
A more reliable (and less megalomaniacal!) beginning, however, can be
traced to the many conversations I had with my f­ ather ­after my first book
came out. Keen to continue thinking sexuality comparatively, across tem-
poralities and empires, I wanted to turn to Portuguese India, specifically
Goa, and to our Samaj, as one pos­si­ble sight line for such histories. A­ fter
all, ­there was so much to tell, so many archives available to read and access.
Still unconvinced by the innovation of my research, I remember Baba quiz-
zically asking me why such an ordinary history of sexuality would be of
interest to anyone. For my Baba, a poet and a mathematician, any history
of sexuality was inevitably a shape-­shifting chiasmus, one in which value is
generated u­ nder conditions that require presence and absence from ­those
who appear, only retroactively, as its subjects. For Baba, historical loss and
abundance ­were related in more of a recursive, rather than linear way. Our
Samaj’s history was thus simply ordinary, unexceptional, pragmatic in its
existence and purchase. Baba’s early questions forged much of the episte-
mological groundwork for what eventually became a longer meditation
on sexuality’s geo/histories. Other early guides and provocateurs from our
Samaj who pushed me to ask more risky historical questions include Arch-
anatai Kakodkar, Geeta Manjrekar, Anil Paigankar, Manohar Shirodkar,
Adhik Shirodkar, and Sudhatai Bandodkar.
Central to my thinking has been the extraordinary mentorship, tute-
lage, and wisdom of Geeta Patel, Indrani Chatterjee, and Lauren Berlant.
Geeta has always been my intellectual lodestone, a constant guide and
poet whose lyricism and humor have made so much of this book pos­si­
ble. I write overly compacted prose, and Geeta’s provocations have nudged
me to think beyond and across the edges of my own thinking. Geeta read
vari­ous avatars of each chapter, often smoking her way through multiple
cigarettes in thought and consternation, only to return with sound advice
and suggestions. Indrani Chatterjee’s tough love, generosity, and attention
to the mandates of historical archives pushed me in unexpected, rigorous,
and rich ways. This is not a book she would write (or perhaps even approve
of !), but it is a book that speaks to the arenas of gender and sexuality she
opened for so many of us. Lauren Berlant was the first one to think of
my twitchy historical sense (as she would call it) as a potential book for
her series, Theory Q. Through innumerable phone calls, text messages,
and stern emails, Lauren kept me moored to the questions animating this
book. Lauren was simply Lauren: impossible, demanding, loving, and end-
lessly generative. If t­ here is abundance in this book, it owes much to her
questions—­many of which I never did answer. I miss her.
The writing of this book was sustained by an incredible posse of friends,
colleagues, and kin at ucsc. Since the early stirrings of the proj­ect, and
throughout the painful losses and separations of the pandemic, they have
unfailingly extended love, support, bad jokes, food, archival illuminations,
and intellectual exchange. Karen Tei Yamashita is that special crazy ge-
nius we all need. KT fed me, nurtured my endless quests for meaning
(with an eye roll), and gave me a home in Santa Cruz. Ronaldo Wilson’s
poetry (on and off the tennis court) allowed me the space to find joy

130 · Acknowl­edgments
(and choreographed “porn”) when I needed it most. Gina Dent’s intellec-
tual sensibility, love, and fierce friendship have kept me afloat. Vilashini
Cooppan sustained me with her exquisite words and khana, while Dard
Neuman was exactly the b­ rother and coconspirator I had always wished
for. Mayanthi Fernando and Nidhi Mahajan are da special desi ladeez
whose spirits soar high—­especially over good food and drink—­and make
radical kinship pos­si­ble. Other ucsc comrades who extended support and
timely intellectual interventions include Jennifer Derr, Marc Matera, Mad-
havi Murty, Carla Freccero, Juned Shaikh, Rachel Nelson, Mark Anderson,
Jody Greene, Debbie Gould, Angela Davis, and Daniel Selden. At ucla
(where I taught from 2017 to 2019), I benefited from the erudition and
counsel of Jemima Pierre, Peter Hudson, David MacFayden, Robin Kelley,
Ali Behdad, Kathleen McHugh, Jennifer Sharpe, Rachel Lee, and Yogita
Goyal. A special thanks to all the gradu­ate students in my multiple semi-
nars on comparative histories of sexuality, slavery, and empire at ucsc and
ucla. ­Those seminars allowed me to rehearse many of the thorny con-
cerns that are central to this book.
Outside settled institutional contexts, ­there are many o­ thers whose
companionship has generated much of the rich texture within t­ hese pages.
I live in Los Angeles—­a city of special dreamers and secret agents—­many
of who inhabit my life and surround me with magical acts of love and in-
tellectual curiosity. Aneil Rallin, Eve Oishi, Laura Kang, Priya Jaikumar,
Thomas Holden, Conor/Connie McTeague, David Roussève, and Nina
Rota are the ultimate mango-­tango team. Connie is no longer with us, but
I know he’s pleased as hell that I made it h
­ ere. Meha (Memu) Holden grew
up alongside this book, and even developed a grudging taste for archives
through it all. Bishnupriya Ghosh and Bhaskar Sarkar are the queer ­family
­every ho/mo must have. B and B provided that invaluable infrastructure of
bad­ass love and thought that helped this queer survive. Bishnu’s trenchant
critique and Bhaskar’s plastic forms are everywhere. My sakhis/sahelis,
Raka Ray and Saba Mahmood, the dynamic duo, took me u­ nder their wing
and ­shaped my capacity for learning and dissent. Saba, I know, ­will send
me a sign sooner rather than l­ater. Khuda hafiz and shukriya, my sweet
dost. Neferti Tadiar and Durba Mi­tra enthusiastically read many versions
of chapters, served as fabulous cheerleaders on speed dial, nudged me into
coherence along the way: third-­world sistahs forever.
Over the years, many comrades across oceans and time zones have
pushed my thinking on the messiness of queer ­labors and geopolitics:
Jasbir Puar, Pete Sigal, David Eng, Lucinda Ramberg, Mrinalini Sinha,

Acknowl­edgments · 131
Lakshmi Subramanian, Ritu Birla, Joan Scott, Ma­ya Mikdashi, Ania
Loomba, Suvir Kaul, Omnia El-­Shakry, Sherene Seikaly, Michael Allan, Af-
saneh Najmabadi, Christine Balance, Allan Isaac, R. Zamora Linmark (aka
Zack), Judith Surkis, Kris Cohen, Zirwat Chaudhary, Nishita Trisal, Priti
Ramamurthy, Kavita Philip, Paul Amar, Robert Diaz, Usha Iyer, Pavithra
Prasad, Martin Manalansan, Omar Kasmani, Ishita Pande, Sharika Thi-
ranagama, and Neloufer De Mel. I survived the rigors of writing during
the pandemic thanks in large mea­sure to my indomitable El Lay / Ver-
mont Canyon tennis posse: Gustavo Mena, Gabe Moffat, Peter Shin, Ray
Wing Lai, Duncan Williams, York Chang, Giulia Corda, Uttara Pant, and
Ketaki Pant. Rallies and passing returns animated each (pandemic) day,
making words and thought so much more pos­si­ble.
In India, my research on the Gomantak Maratha Samaj was sustained
by an entire network of friends, collaborators, and kin. In 2011, Gopal
Guru was my first real audience at a conference celebrating fifty years of
Goan In­de­pen­dence, pushing me to center caste oppression and sexual-
ity, even as I wrestled my own hesitations around histories of f­ amily and
form. Sharmila Rege’s 2012 invitation to lecture in Marathi on the Samaj
was what ultimately convinced me that this was a book worth writing. My
Goan ­people, kalavants in ­every way, made ­every research visit a homecom-
ing of sorts. The Al Zulhaij Collective (Amita Kanekar, Kaustubh Naik,
Albertina Almeida, and Dale Menezes), with Jason Fernandes playing the
star role, endured my questions, concerns, and archival consternations.
Jason was my early guide to Goa’s post/colonial histories, over many road
trips, meals, and terrible libations. R. Benedito Ferrao (aka Bene), research
partner and meu caro amigo, sifted through the detritus of Portuguese and
Konkani archival papers, tracking down obscure references and ­legal cases.
Vishwesh Kandolkar and Vanessa reminded me that ­there was always time
for art and architecture. Vivek Menezes, Parag Parabo, Sharon Da Cruz,
Alito Siqueira, and Rochelle Pinto w ­ ere the best interlocutors on Goan
history and more. In Bombay (sometimes Mumbai), the “bore mat kar
yaar” diva, Paromita Vohra, listened to and read much of what is included
in the pages ­here. Her irrepressible humor, wit, and khana made late-­night
writing sessions that much more enjoyable. The Bahujan Feminist Collec-
tive (Anuradha, Zareena, Shailaja, Chhaya, and Ismat) w ­ ere committed
to a solidarity of conversations that found so much of the book’s ethical
and political stakes. Sameera Khan, Sameera Iyenger, the Pasha siblings
(Dhanu and Ma­nu), Sadanand Mahad, D. Geetha, Anish Gawande, Lata
Paik, Monica Almeida, Bhushan Korgaonkar, Surabhi Sharma, Tejaswini

132 · Acknowl­edgments
Niranjana, Rohan Shivkumar, Avijit Mukul Kishor, Suryakant Waghmore,
and Monica Ballaney made e­ very return home a place of gathering. My
cousins, especially Nitin Shirodkar, Kamakshi Gawde, and Manik Shirod-
kar, ­were unflagging in their support and enthusiasm for the proj­ect. Nitin
(bhai)’s research on and cele­bration of Samaj histories made my work
that much easier. Thanks to my b­ rother Ashish Arondekar and his f­ amily
(Vaishnavi, Neha, and Anisha); perhaps one day my nieces w ­ ill find their
way into this book.
Financial support for this proj­ect was generally provided by the fol-
lowing sources: University of California President’s Faculty Fellowship
in the Humanities and multiple research grants from the Committee on
Academic Research, University of California, University of California,
Santa Cruz. Th ­ ese sources funded research at libraries, private collections,
and national and region archives in India and Portugal. Of par­tic­u­lar note
is the extraordinary kindness and guidance of trustees at the Gomantak
Maratha Samaj Archives, Panaji and Mumbai, and the archivists and staff
at the Maharashtra State Archives, Mumbai; Xavier Centre of Historical
Research, Goa; Historical Archives of Goa, Central Library, Goa; Heras
Institute, Mumbai; Directorate of Archives and Archaeology, Panaji; Bib-
lioteca Nacional, Lisbon, Portugal; and Arquivo Nacional de Torro de
Tombo, Lisbon, Portugal. Multiple Devasthan rec­ords ­were made available
through the generosity of Samaj networks, too many to be named h ­ ere.
Much of the architecture of the book took shape in many workshops
and seminars, including t­ hose at Afterlives of the Postcolonial, the Sharjah
Arts Foundation; South Asia Series, Stanford University; Davis Center,
Prince­ton University; Gender Studies Colloquium, Cornell University;
Queer Urgencies Symposium, University of Pennsylvania; Queer F ­ utures,
Lahore University of Management Sciences (lums), Pakistan; Queer Leg-
acies, New Solidarities, Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia; Colonial
Sexual Alterity and Histories of the ­Future, Pérez Art Museum, Miami;
­Women, Gender, and History Series, University of Texas, Austin; Fem-
inist Inscriptions, Center for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, India;
Dalit/Bahujan Feminisms: Anniversary Cele­brations, Krantijyoti Phule
Center for W­ omen’s Studies, University of Pune, India; and Goa: 1961 and
Beyond Conference, University of Goa, India. Two anonymous readers
and the Theory Q editorial collective provided perceptive, trenchant, and
challenging feedback. Ken Wissoker has always been the best editor and
ally. His intellectual forbearance, curatorial sensibility, and guidance cre-
ated space for the book I wanted to write. Tony Wei Ling was the perfect

Acknowl­edgments · 133
research comrade and assistant whose timely efforts assembled the manu-
script into presentable shape. Tony began as a gradu­ate student in a semi-
nar and has now grown to be a cherished reader and interlocutor.
If I i­ magined a poetics of abundance for our histories, then that poetics
begins with my Lucy. Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns (who w ­ ill always burn me
up) lived this book with me, in love and in words. Her presence is inscribed
within in more ways than I can know or wish to tally. As always, “mention
not/ your homey/ we have the same brain.” This book is dedicated to Aai
and Baba, Kavita and Ramakant Arondekar, for a lifetime of care, laughter,
and imagination. And to all my unreliable and inspirational kin from the
Gomantak Maratha Samaj, we continue to make.believe . . .
­Earlier versions of some of the arguments and materials in the book
have appeared in “Subject to Sex: A Small History of the Gomantak
Maratha Samaj,” in South Asian Feminisms: Con­temporary Interventions,
ed. Ania Loomba and Ritty Lukose (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2012), 244–65; “In the Absence of Reliable Ghosts: Sexuality, Historiogra-
phy, South Asia,” differences 25, no. 3 (2015): 98–121; “The Sex of History,
or Object/Matters,” History Workshop Journal (Spring 2020): 1–7; “What
More Remains: Slavery, Sexuality, South Asia,” History of the Pre­sent 6,
no. 2 (Fall 2016): 146–54; and “Telling Tales: Archives of the Geopo­liti­
cal,” in Turning Archival: The Life of the Historical in Queer Studies, ed.
Daniel Marshal and Zeb Tortorici (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2022), 164–82.

134 · Acknowl­edgments
 Primary Sources

call me rama

Call me Rama, he said. I was thirteen, a prickly teenager, with queer feel-
ings and a general disregard for all authority. And h ­ ere was Baba, once
again, trying to reach me through his endless experiments with parental
truths. Call me Rama, he said again, with his signature half-­smile. I want
to be your friend, I want you to talk to me.
I never did call him Rama that day or ever. He remained Baba, a sweet,
eccentric, and effortlessly loving parent, the first man of substance I ever
knew. From the story of his wanting to witness my birth (a distinctly non-
manly wish in 1968), to his odd refusal of closed shoes, from his dazzling
poetic mind to his infatuation with algorithmic jokes that never ended,
Baba was always an unfolding and joyful mystery to me. As he was so fond
of saying, “Anju, ­there are always more than two possibilities!” Even my big
reveal at twenty-­one (of my big bad homo self ) elicited the most unusual
response. Ah, he said, that’s good, but “what are you now ­going to do for
the social justice of gays?” And he promptly reminded me (over the course
of many letters and emails) of how more gays should read Babasaheb
Ambedkar. With Baba, life was a test case for possibilities, untold and
unimagined. Sexuality was just one more possibility to be had, let go,
and then revisited again.
Yet that invitation to be with “Rama” has always stayed with me, as a
missed opportunity to talk to Baba in a register of abundance that I never
did. Especially now, as I compose a history of our community, the Goman-
tak Maratha Samaj, a lower-­caste, devadasi/kalavant collectivity that has
shuttled between Goa and Maharashtra for the past two hundred years. As
I read through the archives of our Samaj, I encounter “Rama” again. ­There
is the sixteen-­year-­old writer Rama, who appears in the July 1949 issue of
the Samaj Sudharak excoriating Brahmin ­fathers and patrons and calling
for an end to the biological determinism of blood relationships. Why
must we be forced to
love our biological
­mothers, Rama writes
in his first published
article, if we are to
refuse the blood of
our f­ athers? Can we
not fashion the fam-
ilies we desire ?, he
laments. Then ­there
is the biting editorial
titled “Lagn zurvene:
Ek manastap” (“Ar-
ranging Marriages:
An Irritation”) (No-
vember 1970), where
a more mature editor-­
in-­c hief Rama (and
a f­ ather of my two-­
year-­o ld self ) speaks
to the contradictions
inherent in the ef- PS.1 Cover of editorial, Ramakant Arondekar,
“Aamhi kon” (“Who Are We?”), Samaj Sudharak,
forts of the Samaj to
March 1950. Gomantak Maratha Samaj Archives,
arrang e marria g es Mumbai, India
within its own ranks.
Even as marriage provides the sanitized resolution to the Samaj’s check-
ered history of sexuality, Rama questions the need for such conventional
arrangements. Can we just not forget marriage and just move on?, he writes
with ­great fervor.
Reading Baba amid the pages of our Samaj archives has meant fi­nally say-
ing yes to Rama. It has meant speaking with, and to, a parent who forged an
extraordinary life, despite, or b­ ecause of, the damning calculus of caste, class,
and sexuality. Yes, I want to say to Baba, a­ fter all this time, I do want to call you
Rama, I do want to know you in ways that my young self never could. W ­ ill
you ask me again, please?

136 · Primary Sources

only you

Suppose a photo­graph is a lyric for the f­ uture. Suppose a photo­graph is

only you.
My Aai has dementia. Her memory is suffused with the changing
shades of a life lost and found. ­Will I find myself again?, she asks me. A
question without a focal point. Each day we spend together, we look at
old photo­graphs, feeling the edges of a luminous past folded into f­ amily
­albums. Each day, the same image holds Aai captive: a grainy portrait of
her with my aunt, her best friend. Standing tall, she looks straight ahead
at the camera, defiant, joyous, youthful. I was staring into the ­future, she
jokingly tells me, and I saw you, only you.
Suppose a photo­graph is make.believe. Suppose a photo­graph is a prac-
tice of re­sis­tance.
I do not know what Aai was thinking in that picture. Neither does she.
Not then. Not now. But always, with care, we revisit its forms. Remember,
she cajoles me, we can make up our own stories. Once upon a time, a life
refused simplicity, eschewed the occupation of description.
I write about histories of subalternity and sexuality, histories that are
full of joyous indiscretions
and staged archives, s­ haped
and determined by caste op-
pression. Aai’s photo­g raph
summons that history of
abundance, asking not to be
restored to memory but to
be set adrift on a voyage of
identifications. Perhaps such
abundance leaves us inarticu-
late; perhaps we are daunted
by the weight of its promise.
It might be time to heed the
call and set our photo­graphs
­free. Only you. Only you.

PS.2 Pramila Laxmeshwar and

Leela Shirodkar, 1957

Primary Sources · 137

This page intentionally left blank
 Secondary Sources

archives and libraries

Arquivo Nacional de Torro de Tombo, Lisbon, Portugal

Biblioteca Nacional, Lisbon, Portugal
Directorate of Archives and Archaeology, Panaji, Goa, India
Goa State Historical Archives, Panaji, Goa, India
Gomantak Maratha Samaj Archives, Panaji, Goa; and Mumbai, Maharashtra, India
Heras Institute, Saint Xavier’s College, Mumbai, India
Maharashtra State Archives, Mumbai, India
Paigini ­Temple Documents, Parashuram ­Temple, Paigini, Goa
Pragatik Maratha Samaj Rec­ords and Archives, Panaji, Goa, India
Xavier Centre of Historical Research, Alto Porvorim, Goa, India

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 Index

abundance: archival, 8, 11, 17, 36, 44–45, Bahujan, 98–9, 100, 112–13, 116–17, 121–22,
56; Dalit histories as, 20; as heuristic, 25, 124
69–71, 80, 113–14; linguistic, 94, 105; rad- bailadeiras, 11, 38, 86n47. See also dance
ical caste politics as, 116–17, 124; sexuality bande, 12, 37. See also chede
as/and, 2–3, 5. See also ikde aani tikde; kala/ Berlant, Lauren, 26n9, 67, 82n15, 103, 110n36
art; timepass Best, Stephen, 2, 13, 81n3, 85n36,
access: archival, 14–16, 21, 28n32, 30n54, 46, bio-­: -­data, 125n14; parentage, 40, 54–55,
69, 88, 113; to caste value, 7, 92, 119–20, 92, 136; -­politics, 115; -­power; 121. See also
125n15; institutional, 10, 38, 79, 90–92, 104, conjugality; inheritance; kin
116, 122; linguistic, 105; to property, 96–97, Brahmin: hegemony, 24, 92; land-­ownership,
114; religious, 19 91; language and vernaculars, 100, 115; Saras-
Adivasi, 20, 113, 116, 121 wat, 12–13, 37–40, 55, 97–99, 119; structures
Ambedkar, Bhimrao, 114, 116–17, 122, 124n2, of sex, 54, 86n49, 97, 114
135
archive: access to, 10, 14–5, 17, 21, 28n32, 30–31, caste: certification, 7–10; data, 79, 112–17, 120,
46, 69, 113–14; colonial, 13, 35, 38–39, 45, 49, 124; endogamy and, 92, 114; membership,
66, 69–71, 74–79, 89n66; economies and 7–8, 13, 30n53, 43–45, 54, 115, 125n15.
value, 3–4, 6–10, 16, 23–25, 27n17, 28n32, See also Bahujan; make.believe; obc
34, 36, 41, 45–46, 49, 53, 61n44, 64, 67–68, Chandavarkar, Sunita, 116, 125n4
71, 80–81, 97; of Gomantak Maratha Samaj, Chatterjee, Indrani, 18, 31n60, 64, 82n7, 108n15
6–9, 13, 15–17, 45–46, 52–56, 69–72, 78–80, chede, 12. See also bande
90–93, 98, 100, 113; as historical futurity, circulation: of archival materials, 15–17; of
3–4, 8–9, 22–23, 34, 45, 66, 104, 116, 137; historical narrative, 13, 46, 72; of value, 75,
preservation of, 3, 6, 8, 21, 45, 59n32, 114; 80, 120
staging of, 4, 16, 40–45, 72, 80, 114, 117–20; collectivity: of evil ladies, 79; Gomantak
trace, 23, 27n14, 66–67, 71–73, 80, 104. Maratha Samaj, 6, 24, 71, 90; Kurukh, 112;
See also access, archival; data; evidentiary mi­grant, 77; ­political, 116; reproduction of,
forms 9, 25; Saraswat, 119–20
Arondekar, Ramakant, 55–56, 62n56, 136 conjugality, 72, 114, 125n14
asymmetry, 3, 18, 93–94, 102, 106 critique: anticolonial, 5, 17; of caste and sex-
attachment: to archival form, 42; to commu- uality, 117; geopolitics as, 94–95, 100; loss
nity, 9–10; genealogy, 67; to Kapalikas, 18; as, 1–2; of nationalist epistemology, 19–20;
to language of loss, 1–4, 21; to Portuguese of “show and tell” historiography, 17, 19, 21,
India, 68, 91–92; to region, 24; to sexuality, 72; as Western intellectual tradition, 64; of
14–15, 43 Western intellectual tradition, 93
Dalit: art/kala, 11–13, 38, 42–43, 46–9, 74, 9, 16, 40, 45–48, 52–54, 80, 82n12, 114, 123,
86n49, 91, 112, 118–20; diaspora, 11, 14; his- 129; jugaad/duplicate, 9, 122; letters, 7, 30n53,
toriography, 18–20; 46–48, 114–16; lit­er­a­ 52–54, 61n44, 62n50, 70, 72, 85n33; name,
ture, 16, 18, 46, 50–54, 95, 121; ­performance, 7, 14, 43, 54, 76, 97, 114–16, 119–20, 122–24;
12, 14–15, 29n46, 30n51, 48, 121; politics, 19, photo­graph, 25n1, 49, 60n37, 60n40, 72, 118,
31n60–64, 43, 99, 116–17, 127n27; Studies, 123, 137; origin story, 2, 21, 34, 36, 43, 52, 55,
18–19, 29n44, 31n64, 116–17. See also Bahu- 57n5, 92–93, 103, 106, 107n8, 121; petition,
jan; caste; esbc; obc; subaltern 77. See also archive; data; halla/attack; kagaz;
dance: bayadere or nachnis, 11–13, 29n41, 38, make.believe; veracity (genres)
43, 86n47. See also devadasi; kalavants/kala- exemplar: archival, 22–23, 34–35, 66–69, 96,
vantins; m­ usic 129; as epistemology, 68, 71–73; ordinari-
data: and archival research, 21, 81n4; and caste, ness, 85n35; relegation to, 64, 72, 92; of
115–16, 120, 124; as ethnographic episteme, sexuality, 67, 76, 80–81, 92, 101
79, 113, 125n14; Xaxa, Abhay, 112. See also
evidentiary forms; kagaz genealogies: of caste, 12, 18, 114; of ­family his-
devadasi: and conjugal structures, 14, 70–74, tories, 25, 55, 72, 110n24; of inheritance, 78;
97; Goan histories of, 12–14, 31n55, 36–41, intellectual, 17, 26n9, 105, 117; of modernity,
44, 56; Gomantak Maratha Samaj, 6, 12–16, 20; of past and ­future, 97, 125n14; of religion
19n46, 36, 48, 87n58, 91, 118; ­labor, 6, 11–14, and practice, 106; of repre­sen­ta­tion, 25, 56,
43, 74, 117; reform, 16, 44, 46, 86n49; 60n37, 113; of sexuality, 66–67, 72, 114
Southern Indian histories of, 15, 29n48, genre: archival, 15–16, 28n32, 45–46, 52, 72, 75,
126n16. See also caste; Gomantak Maratha 114; evidentiary, 4, 8, 16, 22–23, 35, 52–56,
Samaj; kala/art; sexuality 77, 122; “Genre Flailing” (Berlant), 67;
diaspora, 11, 14 historiographical, 22; narrative, 6, 59n25, 63,
84n27. See also evidence (genres/forms of );
El Shakry, Omnia, 35, 58n10 evidentiary forms; veracity (genres)
endogamy, 92, 114. See also caste; kin; inheri- geographies: of affiliation, 93–94, 97, 108n12;
tance; sexuality of “elsewheres,” 4, 34–35; as history, 6,
epistemology: and/against exemplarity, 22, 34, 13–14; imaginary, 22, 108n15; itinerant, 98;
71, 89n66; and geopo­liti­cal difference, 4, 6, networks: 21, 91–94, 99, 109n18, 109n22;
18, 93, 96; in histories of sexuality, 80, 94–95, queer, 95; settled, 100, 107n8; social, 74, 78,
100–102, 119; of loss, 2–3, 53; malleability 106n2; as value, 24
of, 53, 62n50, 66, 120; non-­evidentiary, 19, geopolitics: as form/method, 4, 15, 22–24,
49–52, 116; non-­recuperative, 8, 36, 42, of 35–38, 90–96, 100–106; itinerant, 97–98,
race and rule, 11, 18; timepass as, 68, 72; 114; as site, 3, 6, 34–35, 67; stakes of, 63–64;
esbc, 10. See also Adivasi; obc; Dalit as value, 99
evidence: of caste lineage, 7; genres/forms of, Ghosh, Bishnupriya, 49, 61n41
4, 8, 16, 35, 45–46, 52, 61n44, 77, 114, 119, Global South, 33–34, 108n12, 109n18;
122; and loss, 1–2, 21–23; regimes of, 22, 99, elsewheres, 5, 26n8, 34, 64, 67, 96; South–­
101, 113, 120–21; transactive value of, 7–10, South comparison, 93
21–25, 33–36, 42, 54, 65, 76–77, 80, 97. Goa, 6–15, 29nn42–46, 29–30nn49–50, 31n55,
See also archive; evidentiary forms; exem- 36–44, 54–56, 75, 79–80, 83n19, 86n47,
plar; veracity (genres) 90–92, 97–100, 106n2, 107nn4–7, 115, 117
evidentiary forms: certificate, 7–10, 121; edito- Gomantak Maratha Samaj: archives of, 7–9,
rial, 24, 54–55, 74, 90–92, 98, 136; fiction, 16–17, 22–24, 30n53, 31n56, 45–56, 61n42,

164 · Index
 67–72, 81, 85n33, 87n58; as collectivity, 25, make.believe, 7–10, 52, 137
38, 59n27; figures of, 29n44, 29n46, 30n51, Maratha, 6, 10, 38, 43, 59n27, 100, 125n7.
73, 83n19; history of, 6, 11–5, 29n47, 42–44, See also Gomantak Maratha Samaj
48, 58n20, 78–80, 88n62, 90–93, 96–103, Marathi, 15, 29n46, 30n53, 38, 43, 48, 52–54,
113–20, 122; Samaj Sudharak, 16, 46–49, 58n12, 59n27, 75, 85n43, 88n61, 90, 100,
51–56, 60n34, 61n42, 90, 135–36 107n3, 116, 121, 123, 125n9
Mi­tra, Durba, 81n4, 89n66, 109n19, 114
halla/attack, 37–8, 40–44, 72, 114 Mumbai/Bombay, 7–8, 14, 16, 28n29, 31n56,
hermeneutics, 1, 3, 23, 27n15, 32n74, 34, 42, 45, 39, 43–48, 54, 60n34, 69–71, 74–79, 85n33,
63–67, 71, 80, 96, 103 87nn55–60, 113, 116, 120, 123–24
heuristic, 6, 25, 36, 69, 96, 113. See also episte- musafir, 102–6, 114. See also itinerant; queer;
mology; evidentiary form, jugaad timepass
­music, 12, 15, 29n46, 43, 48, 88n61. See also
ikde aani tikde/here and ­there, 92, 96, 100, 102. dance; kala/art; kalavants/kalavantis
See also itinerant; musafir; queer
llaiah, Kancha, 19 obc, 7, 10, 13, 58n20, 98, 115, 117, 125n6, 125n15.
Indigenous: concepts, 96; elites, 11; studies, See also Dalit; Gomantak Maratha Samaj
17–21. See also Adivasi
inheritance: caste lineage as, 114, 120; of loss, 8, Paigankar, Rajaram Rangoji, 16, 31n55, 36–43,
22, 32n71; of property, 14, 78 46, 53–54, 79, 99
itinerant: archival forms, 34; heuristics, 6, Panaji, 6, 16, 31n56, 43–45, 88n62, 113
110n24; musafir, 102–3; sex, 24, 94–99. Patel, Geeta, 2, 26n11, 34, 57n4, 95, 106n1,
See also ikde aani tikde; musafir; queer 109n21, 111n37
Phadke, Narayan Sitaram, 52, 61–62
kagaz, 120–22 Povinelli, Elizabeth, 2, 64
kala/art, 11–15, 36, 41–43, 48, 73–74, 91, presence, 3–4, 7–11, 14–19, 24–25, 45, 49, 55,
96–99, 120 60n33, 62n57, 65–66, 69, 73–75, 79, 86, 97,
kalavants / kalavantins, 11–13, 15, 36–43, 48, 113, 118, 120
54–56, 73, 79, 92, 118. See also devadasi; prob­lem event, 23, 66, 79–80. See also
Gomantak Maratha Samaj exemplar
kin, 55, 99, 114, 117–18, 122, 124. See also protest, 24, 31n61, 69, 114, 116–17, 120–24
collectivity
Konkani, 15, 79, 100 Ramberg, Lucinda, 29n48, 126n16
reproduction: as copy, 8–9; futurity, 43–45,
liberation: of British India, 55; of Goa, 29n49, 53–54, 56, 95; lineages of, 68; of modernity,
90, 98, 107n5; histories, 42; movements, 24, 20; protocols of, 4–5, 25
44, 91; shared fantasy of, 93, 124
loss: in/as history, 1–8, 15, 17–22, 32n71, 34, Satoskar, B. D., 29n47, 90–93, 98, 107n3
42–45, 63–68, 71, 80, 97, 113, 124; language sexuality: as capital, 72; and evidence, 121–22;
of, 26n4, 56; repetitions of, 63, 103 Gomantak Maratha Samaj and, 13–16,
42–48, 52–55, 69, 97–100, 115–19; histories
queer: history, 9, 52, 56, 57n1, 61n44, 66–73; of, 1–10, 22–25, 33–36, 61n45, 65–67, 72–73,
musafir, 102; readings, 45, 64, 83n23, 84n31; 80–81, 91–92, 96, 101–6, 112–17; and slavery,
studies, 26n4, 93–95, 101–5; subjects, 2, 24, 17–18, 64; Studies, 94–95, 108n10, 109n18;
44, 65, 84n26; as term, 6. See also musafir and timepass, 84n26

Index · 165
Shiroda/Seroda, 11–12, 43–44, 115 Tambe, Ashwini, 74, 88n63
slavery: Atlantic, 21–12, 27n13; devadasi, 6, timepass, 68–69, 72, 81, 82n23, 84nn25–27,
12–13; histories of, 1, 31n59, 32n74, 35, 57n5, 114
64–65, 85n36, 86n48; South Asian and
Indian Ocean, 17–18, 108n15, 126n20. value: archival/evidentiary, 8, 16, 28n32, 41,
See also Devadasi; subaltern 46–49, 53, 61n44, 67–68, 80–81, 85n36; of
Spillers, Hortense, 73, 85 caste, 10, 97; devaluation, 3–4, 17, 34, 36, 64,
Spivak, Gayatri, 5, 52, 59n30, 61n43, 103, 110n36 69; epistemological, 27n17; form, 9, 23–24,
staging: of halla/attack, 40–45, 72–73; 33, 45, 76; of geopolitics, 92, 96; loss as, 3,
“hermeneutics of perfidiousness,” 42; of his- 61n44, 68, 71; of ­music, 48; of property,
torical narrative, 2, 10, 21, 48, 92, 100, 104; of 75–78; of sexuality, 5, 10, 25, 73, 110n38;
incommensurability, 5; of rec­ord or archives, timepass and waste, 84n26, 84n29, 84n30
4, 16, 40–45, 55, 80, 113–14, 117–20; of veracity: archive, 23, 42, 66–67; genres, 23, 46;
sexuality, 6, 95, 102. See also archive, staging narrative, 41; and sexual knowledge, 62n49.
of; kala/art See also data; evidentiary forms; kagaz
subaltern: “Can the Subaltern Speak” (Spivak), vernaculars: elitist, 19; of geopolitics, 93; of
5; empire, 97; evidentiary practices, 8, 10, loss, 2; press, 39, 74, 87n53; postcolonial, 68;
34, 100; lives and pasts, 2–3, 103, 114, 116; of reading, 65; of self-­making, 10; of sex, 24,
middle-­class, 59n31; (non)oppositionality, 94; theoretical, 5, 27n28, 94
41, 44–46; Studies, 19–20, 23, 27n17, 82n7, vio­lence, 18, 43, 64, 85n38, 90, 92, 97, 106,
109n21 113–15, 121, 124
Subrahmanyam, Sanjay, 83n22, 108n10
surplus: archival, 8, 17; Derridean supplement Wakankar, Milind, 18
as, 62n57; ordinary, 6; “surplus ­woman”
(Ambedkar), 114 Xaxa, Abhay, 112–13, 116, 126n27

166 · Index
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