Without a Trace: Sexuality and the Colonial Archive

ANJALI ARONDEKAR
University of California, Santa Cruz

There were no papers, the ostensible reason for my visit, and of course, no
trace of the Rani. Again, a reaching and an un-grasping.
—Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason^

X H E PAST FEW DECADES OF SCHOLARSHIP have witnessed a rich out-

pouring of critical thought on the colonial archive and its varied instan-
tiations. For better or for worse, the turn to the archive is no longer the
sacrosanct domain of the discipline of history. Rather, it has emerged as
the register of epistemic arrangements, recording in its proliferating avatars
the shifting tenor of academic debates about the production and institu-
tionalization of knowledge. As Foucault observed, the idea of the archive
animates all knowledge formations and is the structure that makes meaning
manifest.^ Jacques Derrida has termed the quest for such a meaning-making
network "le mal d'archive," or "archive fever." The literal andfiguralsite of
the archive both permits the "commencement" of and provides the "com-
mandment" for intellectual labor. "Archive fever" expresses the craving
for this archive, the desire to enter it and to procure it, even unto death.'
This essay would not have been possible without many timely and productive conversations
with Gceta Patel, Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns, Indrani Chatterjec, and Gina Dent.
'Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "History," in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a
History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, Mass., 1999), 242, It is worth noting that this
chapter on "History" extends the arguments of an earlier piece, "The Rani of Sirmur: An
Essay in Reading the Archives," History and Theory 24, no, 3 (October 1985): 247-72. In
the earlier piece Spivak ends with the promise that she will "look a little further, of course. As
the archivist assured me with archivistic glee: it will be a search" (270), The quotation cited
at the beginning of this article illustrates the message of the earlier study, cautioning scholars
once again about the dangers of reading the colonial archives as verifiable documents/signs
of historical subjectivity.
^Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York,
1973), 15.
'Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago,
1995), 1-6, 7-23.
Journal of the History of Sexuality, Vol. 14, Nos. 1/2, January/April 2005
© 2005 by the University of Texas Press, P.O. Box 7819, Austin, TX 78713-7819

10
 Without a Trace 11

Such a deconstructive reading of the archive as a necessary and precarious

repository of meaning has been embraced as well as resisted by historians
and anthropologists. Social historian Carolyn Steedman reminds us that
the material deposits of the past (dust, in her case), whose affective reach
exceeds all forms of theorizations, are the "real" drama in archive fever:
"You think, in the delirium: it was their dust that I breathed in.'"*
Even as the concept of a fixed and finite archive has come under siege,
there has been an explosion of multiple/alternate archives that seek to
remedy the erasures of the past. Scholarship in South Asia, in particular,
has recast the colonial archive as a site of endless promise, where new
records emerge daily and where accepted wisdom is both entrenched and
challenged. In some ways, these archival expansions resemble the contours
of the earlier canon wars in literary studies, as they question received no-
tions of proof, evidence, and argumentation, particularly in fields involving
historical inquiry.
Like other fields of inquiry, sexuality studies has turned to the colonial
archive for legitimacy. Queer texts, topics, and themes have been discov-
ered in the archive and examined exuberantly. The process of "queering"
pasts has been realized through corrective reformulations of "suppressed"
or misread colonial materials.^ These reformulations have intervened deci-
sively in colonial historiography, not only decentering the idea of a coher-
ent and desirable imperial archive but also forcing us to rethink colonial
methodologies. Implicit in this rethinking, however, is the assumption that
the archive, in all its multiple articulations, is still the source of knowledge
about the colonial past. The inclusion of oral histories, ethnographic data,
popular culture, and performances may have fi-actured traditional definitions
of the archive (and for the better), but the telos of knowledge production
is still deemed approachable through what one finds, if only one can think
of more capacious ways to look.
I am not suggesting here that such archival modes are facilely flawed or
merely enact a different order of archival truth claims. The new material on
homosexuality does not purport simply to "correct" and/or reveal the truth
about the history of sexuality in the colonial period. While there might be a
certain evangelical flavor to some of the scholarship, most of the work indi-
cates that the authors are keenly aware of the shifting parameters of space,
time, and knowledge and of the role of the archive in such entanglements.

••Carolyn Steedman, Dust: The Archive and Cultural History {Htv/ Brunswick, N.J., 2002),
19. There is much more to be said about Steedman's ambitious claims to reimagine cultural
history through such readings of the archive. For one trenchant critique see Jo Tollebeek,
"'Turn'd to Dust and Tears': Revisiting the Archive," History and Theory 43 (May 2004):
237-48.
^Ruth Vanita, ed.. Queering India: Same-Sex Love and Eroticism in Indian Culture and
Society (New York, 2002), 1-14.
12 ANJAU ARONDEKAR

David Halpetin, for example, has often made a case for historicism in the
study of sexuality, a historicism that would acknowledge the alterity of the
past as well as the irreducible cultural and historical particularities of the pres-
ent. The recent turn to geopolitics in sexuality studies has also highlighted
historical differences across geopolitical sites, emphasizing the uneasy and
sometimes impossible portability of sexual categories.* As a result of such
deliberations, and as historical sources extend to include materials hitherto
considered inappropriate and/or unreliable, evidentiary paradigms are being
reinvented.
Of interest is the fact that such archival turns still cohere around a tem-
porally ordered seduction of access, which stretches from the evidentiary
promise of the past into the narrative possibilities of the future. That is,
even though scholars have foregrounded the analytical limits of the archive,
they continue to privilege the reading practices of recovery over all others.
Does this mean that the logic of the positivist archive is becoming the new
dogmatism of scholarship, unremitting and total in its analytical hold? And
if so, how can we, as readers who continue to access and inhabit archives,
formulate new reading practices that rupture such a logic' The intellectual
challenge here is to juxtapose productively the archive's fiction-effects (the
archive as a system of representation) alongside its truth-effects (the archive
as material with "real" consequences), as both agonistic and co-constitu-
tive. These (new) reading practices, I suggest, must emerge not against the
grain of archival work but from within it, except the imperative here is not
about founding presence but more about confounding our understanding
of how and why we do archival work.^
In this essay I approach the possibility of a more differentiated archival
logic through a consideration of the following questions: If the imperial
archive is the sign of colonialism's reach, then what does that record show.>
How is the history of sexuality recorded in the colonial moment, and how
can we return to that moment to produce, as it were, a counterrecord of
that history.' How does one think through the current privileged lexicon
of erasure, silence, and recovery within a colonial context, such as that
of nineteenth-century India, whose archival instantiations emphasize the
centrality rather than liminality of the race/sex nexus? Or alternately, what
*See, for example, Lee Wallace, Sexual Encounters: Pacific Texts, Modern Sexualities {Ithza,
N.Y., 2003); Licia Fiol-Matta, A Queer Motherfor the Nation: The State and Gabriela Mistral
(Minneapolis, 2003). There is, of course, a rich body of scholarship on sexuality and diaspora/
globalization studies, but such work overwhelmingly focuses on analysis of contemporary is-
sues, with colonialism appearing more as a referent than a sustained period of study. See, for
example, Arnaldo Cruz-MgGalave and Martin F. Manalansan FV, eds.. Queer Globalizations:
Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism (New York, 2003).
'In a related context Philippa Lcvinc argues for an archival logic that offers "creative means
to see past a dominant creed, not to uncover an impossible truth but to identify the very op-
erations of power, both when it succeeds and, as interestingly, when it fails." Sec "Discipline
and Pleasure: Response," Victorian Studies (Winter 2004): 325.
 Without a Trace 13

epistemological imperatives undergird current scholarship.^ Is our critical

history really distinct from the methods and fields of argumentation of
the past? How can one accept sexuality studies' claims for innovative in-
terdiscipHnarity if the very turn to interdiscipHnarity is an epistemological
restaging of the colonial state? If the current turn in sexuality studies to
divergent temporalities and spatialities assumes that "race" is an a priori
marker of such divergence, how is such a turn related to the racial logics of
the colonial state? To explore these questions we must begin by examining
the archival imperatives of recent scholarship.

L O S T AND F O U N D : THE ARCHIVE AS O P E N SECRET

We must always have a place

to store the darkness.
—^Agha Shahid Ali, A Nostal^ist's Map of America^

The archive industry is booming, and especially so in studies of colonialism.

Inspired in part by the intellectual provocations of the Subaltern Studies
group, the question of the archive and its formations has become a lively
source of contention in South Asian historiography. The recovery of subal-
tern consciousness mandated a reassessment of the idea of what constituted
the national archive, a site that had hitherto systematically erased the labor
of subaltern groups in independence struggles. In many ways, to cite Ranajit
Guha in a slighdy different context, the failure of the Indian nation lay in
its own historical amnesia. However, this condition could be mitigated by
a new historiography, one that would make subalternity the focal point
of narration.' Guha's call was echoed in much of the early work of the
Subaltern Studies group and later expanded beyond modes of recovery to
include wider discussions of the myriad ways that colonial power had been
mediated through structures such as the colonial archive.'"
The recovery model of archival research was first criticized by Gayatri
Spivak, who argued for a more self-refiexive analysis of the instrumentality
of this new "subaltern" consciousness." Spivak's early critique made way
for more capacious readings of the archive, as evidenced by the inclusion of
such issues as gender, race, and culture in the more recent volumes of the

"Agha Shahid Ali, A Nostalgist's Map ofAmerica: Poems (New York, 1991), 49.
'Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Delhi,
1983).
'"See Dipesh Chakrabarty, Habitations of Modernity (Chicago, 2002); Gyan Prakash,
"The Impossibility of Subaltern History," Nepantla: Views from the South 1, no. 2 (2000):
287-94; and Tony Ballantyne, "Archive, Discipline, State: Power and Knowledge in South
Asian Historiography," New Zealand fournal ofAsian Studies i, no. 1 (2001): 87-105.
"Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak.'" in C. Nelson and L. Grossberg,
eds., Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Chicago, 1988), 271-311.
14 ANJAU ARONDEKAR

Subaltern Studies group,'•^ While shifts in critical modes have occurred, the
additive model of subalternity still persists, where even as the impossibility
of recovery is articulated the desire to add, to fill in the gaps with voices
of other unvoiced "subalterns," remains. One recalls here Bernard Cohn's
playful warnings about the seduction of gaps in the record, incarnated in
Philias Fillagap and Lucy Lacuna, a pair of anthropologists who attempt
diligently to find the missing record, the unvoiced voices of the subalterns,
without paying much heed to the epistemic questions at hand,''
Several scholars of colonialism have questioned these archival assump-
tions and predilections, Thomas Richards has argued that the colonial
archive (especially in South Asia) was based upon the belief that imperial
knowledge was both "positive and comprehensive,"'* and Nicholas Dirks
has contended that the colonial archive registers the state's increasing reli-
ance on ethnography as a form of knowledge,'^ Feminist historians, such
as Antoinette Burton and Betty Joseph, share some of Dirks's reimagining
of the colonial archive as both participant in and observer of the past (i,e,,
an agent of policy and a source of ethnography); however, they caution
against "panoptical" readings of the archive,'* That is, to recognize the
archive as the total (albeit precarious) site of colonial knowledge is still
to succumb to a certain dangerous territoriality. Burton wonders why it
is still so difficult for scholars of colonialism to detach themselves from
the claims of an official archive. Such claims. Burton writes, sediment the
contours of the archive as the standard through which disciplinary models
are measured: "In this sense, guardians of the official archive—however
delusional they may be—remain as convinced of its panoptical possibilities
as they do of its capacity to legitimate those who submit to its feverish
gaze,"'^ Within sucb a policed state of knowledge, texts that fall outside
the purview of official archives are read as flimsy evidence and historically
specious—largely the conjectures of those engaged in too much cultural
thinking. It is. Burton points out, no coincidence that such texts are usually

'^There is clearly much more to be said about the debates and differences within the
Subaltern Studies collective. For more detailed readings of the early shifts in the Subaltern
Studies group see Saloni Mathur, "History and Anthropology in South Asia: Rethinking the
Archive," Annual Review ofAnthropology 29 (2000): 89-106.
"Bernard Cohn, "History and Anthropology: The State of Play," Comparative Studies in
Social History 22 (1980): 198-221,
'••Thomas Richards, Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire (London,
1993), 7,
'^Nicholas Dirks, "Annals of the Archive: Ethnographic Notes on the Sources of History,"
in Brian Keith Axel, ed,. Historical Anthropology and Its Futures: From the Marjiins {Durham,
N.C., 2002), 47-65.
'"Betty Joseph, Reading the East India Company, 1720—1840: Colonial Currencies of Gender
(Chicago, 2004), 1-32.
"Antoinette Burton, Dwelling in the Archive: Women Writing House, Home, and History
in Late Colonial India (New York, 2003), 137-45.
 Without a. Trace 15

gendered (as in the case of the writings of the three female colonial subjects
she speaks of) and moored (or dwelling, to use her metaphor) in archives
of their own making. While still holding on to the idea of an archive that
will "surrender female subjects," both Burton and Joseph have initiated
a much-needed critique and compel a wider and gendered understanding
of the colonial archive.
Despite the rise in archival consciousness, some scholars have observed
that the turn to archival research remains largely "extractive," particularly
in studies of colonialism. In the words of historical anthropologist Ann
Stoler, students of "the colonial experience 'mine' the content o( govern-
ment commissions and reports, but rarely attend to their peculiar/orw and
context." Hence, the need exists, she writes, for scholars to move "from
archive-as-source to archive-as-subject," to pay attention to the process of
archiving, not just to the archive as a repository of facts and objects."
While Stoler clearly articulates the limits of the archival imperative in
colonial historiography, she is silent about, or rather detached from, similar
questions in sexuality studies. This is especially curious given her remark-
able readings of Foucault's oeuvre within the context of empire. While she
speaks of sex, intimacy, and affect, she does not engage substantively with
these issues as they are currently understood in sexuaUty studies. While I am
not interested here in suggesting a corrective to Stoler's scholarship, I do
wish to initiate a conversation between the archival imperatives of colonial
historiography and those of sexuality studies. What can sexuality studies
learn from the archival debates in colonial studies, and vice versa.* Even as
we ask. What kind of history does the colonial archive have, can we not,
following David Halperin, similarly ask. What kind of history does sexuality
have.*" Let me turn now to that question.
The historiography of sexuality (at least as practiced in the Euro-American
academy) has oft:en turned to the colonial archive. In many ways, as Philip
Holden argues, there is a "profound connection" between colonial histori-
ography and sexuality studies, one that derives less from a theoretical than
a historical context. Both, Holden rightly suggests, "find the latter part of
the nineteenth century a period of radical historical discontinuity." The late
nineteenth century is the period that marks the intensification of imperial
domains, territorial redistributions, and the rise of nationalist movements. It
is also the period, to follow Foucault's pronouncements, when homosexu-
ality emerged as a set of identifications that articulated and differentiated

"Ann Laura Stoler, "Colonial Archive and the Arts of Governance," Archival Science 2
(2002); 87-109.
"David Halperin writes: "Once upon a time, the very phrase 'the history of sexuality'
sounded like a contradiction in terms; how, after all, could sexuality have a history? Nowadays,
by contrast, we are so accustomed to the notion that sexuality does indeed have a history that
we do not often ask ourselves what kind of history sexuality has" {How to Do the History of
Homosexuality [Chicago, 2002], 105).
16 ANJAU ARONDEKAR

sexuality's relationship to knowledge and power.'^" Scholars in disciplines

ranging from literature and anthropology (the more favored locations) to
law and science have held up the colonial archive as a storehouse of historical
information that can reveal secrets about sexuality's past.
In a recent study. Colonialism and Homosexuality, Robert Aldrich
identifies the perils of such efforts, writing that it is crucial to bear in mind
that "colonial homosexuality did not proclaim itself openly."^' Aldrich's
scholarly efforts are largely aimed at revealing the secret lives of a range of
male homosexuals across colonial sites, from E. M. Forster in Sri Lanka to
lesser-known figures such as Jean Senac in Algeria. Aldrich's overall argu-
ment relies upon narratives of recovery (letters, memoirs) that operate,
I would argue, through the logic of the "open secret." Homosexuality
emerges as the structural secret of the archive, without whose concealment
the archive ceases to exist. Alternately, the recovery of the hidden docu-
ments of homosexuality surrenders presence, but only to reinstate its archival
liminality. To take some liberties with D. A. Miller's original formulations,
writing the history of colonial homosexuality is ruled by the paradoxical
proposition that the homosexual is most himself when he is most secret,
most absent from writing—with the equally paradoxical consequence that
such self-fashioning is most successfiil when it has been recovered for his-
tory.^^ This movement from archival secrecy to disclosure echoes what Eve
Kosofsky Sedgwick has famously called the "epistemology of the closet."^'
Such a movement relies upon the maintenance within the epistemological
system of the hidden, secret term, keeping all binaries intact.
While Aldrich focuses primarily on European sources, other writers
studying the relationship between history and homosexuality in non-Euro-
pean locations employ similar analytical models of recovery. Nayan Shah's
much-cited early essay on sexuality and the uses of history in South Asia
warns against an unmediated recovery of the past. He is still one of the few
scholars of sexuality who question the dependence on a recovered history
to sanction our surviving present: "We may trap ourselves in the need of
a history to sanction our existence. South Asian lesbians and gay men are
present now. On that alone we demand acknowledgment and acceptance."
However, while maintaining that "the past is not a thing waiting to be
discovered and recovered," Shah advocates strategics of historical research
that derive from a differentiated language of loss and discovery. Shah must
rely on the coming-out materials of his contemporaries (classic models of
the logic of the secret) to think critically about the archives of the past. He

^"Philip Holden, "Coda: Rethinking Colonial Discourse Analysis and Queer Studies," in
Philip Holden and Richard Ruppel, eds.. Imperial Desire: Dissident Sexualities and Colonial
Literature (Minneapolis, 2003), 304.
^'Robert Aldrich, Colonialism and Homosexuality (London, 2003), 404.
" D . A. Miller, The Novel and the Police (Berkeley, 1988), 199-200.
"Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley, 1990), 1-64.
 Without a. Trace 17

grafts a lexicon of "resisting silences" or "liberation" onto the project of

archival research. In all fairness, it is important to note that Shah's essay
appeared in a now classic collection, A Lotus of Another Color (1993), which
was the first of its kind to bring South Asian queer materials together. Its
appearance in a collection of largely literary materials—fiction, poetry, and
personal memoirs—makes Shah's historiographical efforts all the more
noteworthy.-^*
On the other hand, while the literary turn continues to produce innova-
tive readings of sexuality and the colonial archive, it has been lambasted
for its elision of extraliterary sources and its preoccupation with discursive
tropes of representation. The privileging of literary materials yields too
much discourse analysis, it seems, and too little engagement with historical
documents. While multidisciplinary research on sexuafity and colonialism
has done much to overcome the backlash against the overdetermination
of literary sources, its success has been limited. Anne McClintock's much
acclaimed Imperial Leather (1995), for instance, is heralded for deploying
a range of cultural texts—advertisements, maps, and treaties, as well as
fiction—and for invoking literature as only one of many sources. It is not
that literary sources are redeemed in such scholarly formats but rather that
they are placed in commensurate relationship to other sources.
Indrani Chatterjee warns against the pitfalls of discipUnary thinking, an
analytic retreat that she characterizes as one of the "more pernicious aspects"
of colonial educational establishments in India. In nineteenth-century co-
lonial India, Chatterjee explains, the demarcation of the separate domains
of "Literature" and "History" was created to stabilize the writing of his-
tory within a fixed form and method. Such a division masked the colonial
establishment's inability to understand that precolonial history in South
Asia, for example, was written primarily "in the dominant literary genre
of a particular community, located in space, at a given moment in time."
The slippages between history and literature became impossible to discern
because through time communities changed modes of literary production,
and "when such a shift occurred, the earlier genre lost patronage as well as
historicity and became more 'literary' (or was meant to be read that way)."^^
Since today's history becomes tomorrow's literature, multidisciplinarity is
a methodological requirement rather than a hermeneutical choice.
In anthropological writings on homosexuality and the colonial archive
the archival turn has mandated a rethinking of the narrative of progress
that left some disciplines as belatedly interested in theoretical questions of
^••Nayan Shah, "Sexuality, Identity and the Uses of History," in Rakcsh Ratti, ed., A Lotus
of Another Color: An Unfoldin£ ofthe South Asian Gay and Lesbian Experience {^o^ton, 1993),
122-24. See also Ruth Vanita and Saleem Kidwai, eds., Same-Sex Love in India: Readings
from Literature and History (New York, 2000).
^^Indrani Chatterjee, "Introduction," in Indrani Chatterjee, ed.. Unfamiliar Relations:
Family and History in South Asia (New Brunswick, N.J., 2004), 6-9.
18 ANJAU ARONDEKAR

sexuality. As Kath Weston has ciemonstrated, the "classic debates which

molded social sciences into a distinctive set of disciplines relied, as oft:en
as not, on illustrative examples drawn from sexuality." Colonial ethnog-
raphers such as Evans-Pritchard, John Shortt, and Malinowski used what
Weston calls a "flora and fauna approach," producing scattered references
to homosexuality in their varied writings on different geopolitical sites.
Such references, Weston argues, have been viewed mistakenly as sources of
empirical facts rather than as hermeneutic signposts for anthropology's early
reliance on the instrumentality of sexuality to construct narratives of culture
and power.^* Weston's complications notwithstanding, current scholarship
still functions as a vexed, theoretical antidote to earlier models of a flawed,
colonial geography of perversions. Rudi Bleys's ambitious study. The Ge-
o£[raphy of Perversion: Male-to-Male Sexual Behaviour Outside the West and
the Ethno£iraphic Ima^fination (1995), is one such example that interprets
"male-to-male sexual behaviour among non-western populations in Euro-
pean texts between approximately 1750 and 1918." Covering a dizzying
and often haphazard array of colonial ethnographic materials drawn from
Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Oceania, Bleys goes on an old-fashioned
global hunt for the homosexual, with the occasional apology for not having
enough materials by non-European subjccts.^^ The archival mode here shifts
from savage to salvage; Bleys revisits colonial ethnographic and anthropo-
logical materials and mines them for their endorsements and descriptions
of homosexuality in all its cross-cultural forms. Repeatedly in these cross-
cultural forays one finds a reliance on colonial ideas of alterity for the form
and content of largely Western models of male homosexuality.
Elizabeth Povinelli is one of the few scholars who complicates such a
reliance on the colonial archive by referring to the importance of what she
terms "modal ethics." In her work on Aboriginal communities in Australia
Povinelli raises important questions about how and why we recover lost
materials in the colonial archive. She believes that "who and what are being
recuperated from the breach and shadow ofthe settler archive and colonial
history" merit careflil attention. Translating into text a ritual practice that
fiinctions through orality, for example, risks returning to the very knowledge
technologies of colonial liberalism. Focusing on rituals that lift "sex out of
corporeal practices" coheres sexuality to structures of knowledge. In such
cases, Povinelli argues, scholars have an "obligation" to engage in what she
calls a project of "radical interpretation."'^'
In the remaining sections of this article I examine two archival traces drawn
ftom the foundational sites ofthe colonial archive—law and anthropology—
that require such an interpretation.
Weston, Lon^ Slow Burn: Sexuality and Social Science (New York, 1998), 1-28,
^'Rudi Bleys, The Geography ofPerversion: Male-to-Male Sexual Behaviour Outside the West
and the Ethnosraphic Imagination, 1750-1918 (New Yorlc, 1995), 1-16,
^^Elizabeth Povineili, The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making
ofAustralian Multiculturalism (Durham, N.C., 2002), 71-75.
 Without a, Trace 19

I. HABEAS C O R P U S : SHOW M E THE BODY

It cannot be doubted that such atrocities are frequent in the present day. A
gentleman ofthe highest veracity assured me that a late Judge of Hooghly
once mentioned to him that when about to sentence a native to imprison-
ment on proof of his having committed this crime in corpore capellae, he
intimated his decision to the native jury, who hinted that, if so much sever-
ity was to be employed against so prevalent z crime, the prisons of Bengal
would not be large enough to hold the culprits. Convictions for this crime
are however rare; / only find one in the Records—of Unnatural Crime with a
Cow—at Dinagepore, (Police Report (L. P., 1845), 23.)
—Dr. Norman Chevers, A Manual of Medical
Jurisprudence for India (1870)^'

For Norman Chevers, one of the leading colonial experts on medical ju-
risprudence, the discourse on unnatural sexual conduct in colonial India
appears embedded in an evidentiary paradox: the known prevalence ofthe
crime and the equally known rarity of its documentation. That sexual per-
version (e.g., homosexuality) was a condition ofthe colonial subject was
one ofthe familiar claims underwriting the project of colonial difference in
India. Unlike representations of homosexuality in the metropole, in colonial
India homosexuality was naturalized. It was a "frequent" phenomenon,
though sparsely documented in the official archive—a "fact" corroborated,
as Chevers noted, by a "native jury." Chevers's observations rendered native
perversity intelligible through a foundational everywhere/nowhere model of
colonial governance. Such a model scripted native perversity as ontological
excess by employing the language of "proof," "veracity," and certainty even
while bemoaning the colonial state's lack of official documentation, "Such
atrocities" may indeed be everywhere, but "convictions are . . . rare,"
Chevers's description of an official archive denuded of all traces of a
"crime" that must surely exist is uncannily echoed in contemporary scholars'
analytical models of colonialism. In discussing homosexuality Ann Stoler
and others reiterate the colonial dynamic they are attempting to overcome:
homosexuality remains both obvious and elusive—undeniable anecdotally
(in colonial travelogues, ethnopornography, etc.), yet rarely substantiated
in any official archival form.'" Is this indeed what the record shows, or do

^'Norman Chevers, A Manual of Medical Jurisprudence for India: Including the Outline
of a History of Crime Against the Person in India (Calcutta, 1870), 706,
^Despite her claims, Stoler sdll stumbles over the "absent presence of the dangers of
homosexuaiiry" in Dutch archives. She spcalcs ofthe threat of homosexuality as a "deflected
discourse, one about sodomitical Chinese plantation cooiies, about degenerate subaltern
European soldiers, never about respectable Dutch men," only to withdraw and admit that
"my silence on this issue , , , reflects my long-term and failed efforts to identify any sources
that do more than assume or obliquely allude to this 'evil'" {Kace and the Education of
Desire: Foucault's History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things [Durham, N.C.,
1995], 129 n. 96).
20 ANJAU ARONDEKAR

sexuality studies of the colonial period mandate a different order of archival

reasoning?
The Indian Penal Code contains numerous references to successful sod-
omy convictions. These appear in legal tables and case records compiled
between 1860 and 1861, when the Penal Code and the Code of Criminal
Procedure, respectively, were established, and 1920. The Judicial Statements
(Criminal) for the North-West Provinces record that in 1879 forty-one
persons were convicted for unnatural offenses, and seventy-two were still on
trial.^' Similarly, the imperial returns for offenses reported and persons tried
and either committed or acquitted in Punjab record that in 1874 sixty-two
persons were convicted under Section 377 (the antisodomy statute). These
same returns record that in 1880 thirty-eight persons were convicted, and
fourteen remained on trial.'^ However, the number of actual transcripts of
cases and judgments available in the various colonial Presidencies for the
decades between 1860 and 1920 is much smaller.'^ I was able to find only
five case records and judgments under Section 377 for that period: Queen
Empress V. N«?a<^» (Allahabad, \?,7S-7^),Jiwanv. Empress{VvLn]zh., 1884),
Queen Empress v. Khctirati (Allahabad, 1884), Sardar Ahmed v. Emperor
(Lahore, 1914), and Gcmpntv. Emperor {Lzhore, 1918).^*
Of these cases, only one. Queen Empress v. fChairati, serves as the prec-
edent and illustration of Section 377 in the various legal commentaries,
digests, and reports that are available from the period 1885 to 1920.^^
Its use as precedent is perplexing: it is not the earliest of the five cases, it
lacks important details, and it is the only one that ended with an acquittal
(the other four cases were all successfully prosecuted).^* The particulars

^'Oriental and India Office Collections (hereafter OIOC), L/PJ/6/26/1616 (1880).

^^Criminal fustice in the Punjab and Us Dependencies, 1869-81, 3 vols. (Lahore, 1892),
apps. 2 and 9.
^Worth considering here is the easier availability of sodomy cases in the records of the
Nizamut Adawlut and the Sudder Foujdaree Adawlut prior to the establishment of the Penal
Code in 1860. For instance, I was able to locate over fifteen judgments between 1829 and
1859 in the Reports of Cases Determined in the Court of Nizamut Adawlut, iS27-50 (Calcutta,
1851-59).
^'^Queen Empress v. Naiada, ILR (Indian Law Reports) 1 (Allahabad, 1875-78), 43-47;
Jiwan V. Empress, PR (Punjab Reports) (Punjab, 1884), 4; Queen Empress v. Khairati, ILR
6 (Allahabad, 1884), 204-6; Sardar Ahmed v. Emperor, AIR (All India Reporter) (Lahore,
1914), 565; and Ganpatv. Emperor, AIR (Lahore, 1918), 322.
''The Khairati case continued to be cited past 1920 and, in fact, is still routinely referenced
in current legal commentaries on Section 377. However, the post-1920 period in colonial
India requires a more sustained discussion of Indian nationalism and its efforts at legal reform,
which is beyond the parameters of this study. For more on contemporary debates in India on
Section 377 see Suparna Bhaskaran, Detours of Decolonization (forthcoming).
^'While there has been a rich outpouring of scholarship on nineteenth-century homosexuality
and criminality, most of it has focused on sites in the metropole. The critical difference of loca-
tion makes the claims of that scholarship less applicable to colonial sites like India. For instance,
Ed Cohen has written extensively about the Wilde trials, and William Cohen has provided deft
readings of the fiulures of the Boulton-Parks sex scandals. However, both studies assume that
 Without a Trace 21

of the conviction as disclosed in an excerpt from the judgment of the

sessions judge reveal that Khairati was initially arrested for "singing in
women's clothes among the women of a certain family" of his village and
was thereafter subjected to a physical examination by the civil surgeon.
Upon examination, Khairati was shown "to have the characteristic mark of
a habitual catamite—the distortion of the orifice of the anus into a shape
of a trumpet—and also to be affected with syphilis in the same region in
a manner which distinctly points to unnatural intercourse within the last
few months." When asked about his physical condition, Khairati denied
all charges of sodomy and argued that he had suffered a serious case of
dysentery, which caused the extension in his anus. His explanation was
dismissed as insufficient, for it did not account for the presence of syphilis
in the same region. The sessions judge, Mr. J. L. Denniston, concluded
that while individually none of the three circumstances (wearing women's
clothes, subtended anus, and the presence of syphilis) was sufficient evi-
dence of criminality, taken together they left no "doubt that the accused
had recently been the subject of sodomy."
However, when the case was later brought before the Allahabad High
Court, Judge Straight (seriously!) quickly dismissed Khairati's earlier convic-
tion for lack of precise detail about the particulars of the offense: the "exact
time, place, and persons with whom these offences were committed" were
not fully discovered. Judge Straight concluded his remarks on the case by
declaring that while the "accused is clearly a habitual sodomite," and while
he could "fully appreciate the desire of the authotities at Moradabad to check
these disgusting practices, neither they nor he can set law and procedure at
defiance in order to obtain an object, however laudable."'''
How does one read the presence of the Khairati case within a histo-
riography of sexuality and colonialism? How does a case that stumbles
over critical issues of evidence, criminality, and legal codification become
the colonial sign for crimes against nature? Such an archival turn, I would
suggest, requires a theory of reading that moves away from the notion
that discovering an object will somehow lead to a formulation of subjec-
tivity—from the presumption that if one finds a body, one can recover a
person. Even as the discourse of law becomes the space of reform (e.g.,
current efforts to repeal Section 377), the very sign of the law as evidence
needs to be examined. Such a reading would undo the current practice

in Victorian England homosexuality was regarded as aberrant and marginal, even though their
own readings suggest the centrality of its presence. As I have previously mentioned, such a
claim to "secrecy" and/or abnormality is untenable within the colonial context, where native
sexual excess is assumed, even if archival evidence of that excess is ostensibly unavailable. See
Ed Cohen, Talk on the Wilde Side: Towards a Genealogy ofa Discourse on Male Scxualities (New
York, 1993) and William Cohen, Sex Scandal: The Private Parts of Victorian Fiction (Durham,
N.C., 1996).
Empress v. Khairati, ILR 6 (Allahabad, 1884), 204-6.
22 ANJAU ARONDEKAR
f
in contemporary sexuality studies of excavating in order to posit a history
of presence. It would also complicate the additive model posited by the
Subaltern Studies group, which attempts to mitigate or amend the failures/
negations of traditional nationalist historiography through an engagement
with the voices of women, Dalits, and others.
One way to conceive of this shift to the object as subject-effect is to think
of it as a trace, both beyond and within the Derridaean spectrality model,
and to consider, as it were, both the forensics and the metaphysics of that
trace. ^* One must work with the empirical status ofthe materials even as
that status is rendered fictive. With regard to the case of Queen Empress
V. Khairati., every reading of its archival imprint requires a repetition of
Khairati's forensic embodiments (a subtended anus), even as Khairati as
subject cannot be found. The theoretical and historical provocation is to
engage with the material imprint of archival evidence as "recalcitrant event"
(to borrow Shahid Amin's term), "to move beyond the territory of the
contested fact, the unseen record, from the history of evidence and into
the realm of narration."^' Here, the "recalcitrant event" as trace eludes
the historian/scholar's attempts at discovery but offers new ways of both
mining and undermining the evidence ofthe archive. I would push Amin's
formulations further and suggest that to view archival evidence as recalcitrant
event reads the notion of the object against a fiction of access, where the
object eschews and solicits interpretative seduction.

II. A SECRET REPORT

In thefinalpages of his famous translation of The Arabian Nights Richard

Burton turned his attention to pederasty—"le vice contre nature.'""* It
is here that he first provided his readers with the scant but calculatedly
sensational details of a secret government "report" on Karachi's "three
lupanars or bordels, in which not women but boys and eunuchs, the former
demanding nearly a double price, lay for hire." Having recendy "annexed
Sind," Gen. Charles Napier (the "Devil's Brother") authorized the report
in 1845, specifically requesting Burton, "the only officer who could speak
Sindhi," to "indirecdy make enquiries and to report upon the subject."
We are told that Karachi was "not more than a mile from camp" and that
Burton agreed to undertake the project "on express condidon that the
report should not be forwarded to the Bombay Government." Disguised

^'For more on the theory ofthe subject effect see Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Subaltern
Studies: Deconstructing Historiography," in Ranajit Guha, ed.. Subaltern StudiesIV: Writings
on South Asian History and Society (New Delhi, 1985), 330-63.
^'Shahid Amin, "Writing the Recalcitrant Event," edited and abridged transcript of talk
given on 5 July 200J at Remembering/Forgetting: Writing Histories in Asia, Australia, and
the Pacific (http://www.iisg.nl/~sephis/).
•""At this time, pederasty signified the larger terrain of sexual relations between men and
did not rigidly denote intergenerational sex.
 Without a Trace 23

as a traveling merchant, Abdullah the Bushiri, Burton then proceeded to

infiltrate Karachi's muldple sites of "porneia" and to procure the "fullest
details, which were duly dispatched to the Government House." However,
Napier's departure from Sindh soon after resulted in Burton's report (along
with two other "sundry reports" on Sindh that he had authored) being
sent to Bombay by Napier's rivals. So scandalous were the contents ofthe
report that its exposure resulted in Burton's "summary dismissal from the
service." Burton provided no further details, either on the report's contents
or on its current locadon. Or so the story goes.*"
The mystery surrounding this lost report inaugurated a tale of archival
losses that haunted Burton's endre career. Just as his career in India began
(and failed) with the composidon of an alleged report on male homosexual-
ity, so was his death forty-five years later embroiled in controversies over lost
records on the same subject. Burton, the story continues, became obsessed
with translating the missing twenty-first chapter of The Perfumed Garden.,
reputed to be 500 pages of Arabic, which was to appear unexpurgated as
The Seented Garden., a staggering treadse on homosexuality with "882
pages of text and footnotes and a 100-page preface." Announcements
of Burton's death in 1890 were accompanied with indignant accusadons
against his widow, Isabel Burton, the prime executor of his estate. The
public consensus was that Isabel had burned the copious and much-awaited
"Oriental" manuscripts in an effort to safeguard her husband's reputadon
against ftirther cridcism. In her own letter to the Morning Post in 1891
Isabel Burton fueled public ire, acknowledging that the burnt materials
were related to the same "certain passion" as was the Karachi report: "His
last volume of The Supplemental Nights had beenfinishedand out on No-
vember 13, 1888. He then gave himself up endrely to the wridng of this
book, which was called The Scented Garden., a translation from the Arabic.
It treated of a certain passion."*^ In 1923 Norman Penzer, Burton's first
bibliographer, chronicled the difficulty of finding suitable library space for
Burton's writings and personal collecdons, a difficulty made more painfiil
by the fact that many of Burton's original "Oriental" manuscripts had been
destroyed previously at a fire in Grindley's depository.*^
That the archival myth surrounding the Karachi report takes center stage
in the iconography surrounding Burton's lost works is abundandy clear.
The report, as archival object, came into existence after all only through
being lost. Its presence was sustained only through addidonal stories about
•"Richard Burton, "Terminal Essay," in The Book ofthe Thousand Nights and a Night
(London, 1886), 178-79. In this article I follow Burton's spelling of ICarachi.
"^Morning Post, 19 June 1891.
"Norman M. Penzer, An Annotated Bibliography ofSir Richard Francis Burton K. CM. G.
(London, 1923), 291-97. Penzer describes the difficulties he had in even procuring Burton's
collections for libraries after the death of Isabel Burton. One of Burton's executors, Mrs.
Fitzgerald, "started to cause endless trouble, and actually wanted to burn all the MSS. and
books."
24 ANJAU ARONDEKAR

its vanishing. The mystery surrounding its disappearance and/or existence

has spawned endless speculation and debate. Several biographers of Burton
concur that in 1845 Napier sought Burton's linguistic and spying skills for
a singularly important report, but they provide different theories regard-
ing its existence and circulation. Fawn Brodie contends that it was burned
by Isabel Burton along with all the other "peculiar" Burton manuscripts.
Edward Rice and Glenn Burn suggest that the report, if there was one,
was delivered orally and never existed as a written document.*^ Christo-
pher Ondaatje's hagiographical account, Sindh Revisited: A Journey in the
Footsteps of Captain Sir Riehard Burton (1990), zealously retraces and
relives, as it were. Burton's formative years in India in the hope of finding
the infamous report.*^ Jonathan Bishop's article goes so far as to conclude
that speculations about Burton's particular brand of participant-observation
(a skill that earned him the title of "Dirty Dick") must be laid to rest, as
he was clearly "uncircumcised" when he visited the Karachi brothels and
thus could not risk participation for fear of exposure!''* In other words, the
report's contents may well have been scandalous, but stories of Burton's
own participation in the brothel's activities must be drastically revised. James
Casada, on the other hand, is less generous and caustically concludes that
the details of the report were "nothing more than figments of Burton's
fertile imagination.'"'''
The available official records tell an equally perplexing tale of the report.
Burton's relationship to its existence, and its deleterious effects on his army
career. Richard Burton spent seven years in India, from mid-1842 to mid-
1849, serving variously as an armyfieldsurveyor and intelligence officer. In

"Fawn Brodie, The Devil Drives: A Life of Sir Richard Burton (New York, 1967), 347.
See also Edward Rice, Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton: The Seeret Agent Who Made the
Pilgrimage to Mecca, Discovered the Kama Sutra, and Brought the Arabian Nights to the West
(New York, 1990), 128-30.
••'Christopher Ondaatje, Sindh Revisited: A Journey in the Footsteps of Captain Sir Richard
Burton: 1842-49, the Indian Tears l^oroato, 1990). Ondaatje's efforts exemplify the celebra-
tory fervor with which the life of Burton has been resurrected in the past few decades. As one
reviewer says of this book, "Richard Burton and Christopher Ondaatje were bound to join
up one day. The intrepid, restless adventurer and the intrepid, restless entrepreneur are soul
mates, and only the divide of time separated them. Now Christopher Ondaatje has solved
that problem with his fascinating, sometimes moving, and often gripping account of the great
Victorian explorer. Sindh Revisited is as intriguing in its exploration of Burton's obsessive need
to push out into the 'unknown' world as it is in delineating Ondaatje's own need to push out
beyond the restrictions of his own known world" (John Fraser, master of Massey College,
University of Toronto, as reported on www.ondaatje.com).
"Jonathan Bishop, "The Identities of Sir Richard Burton: The Explorer as Actor," Victorian
Studies 1, no. 2 (1957). Bishop's conclusions are drawn from a review of Burton's medical
reports, which show no record of a circumcision in his annual medical examination, conducted
in 1845. While Bishop's research is clearly thorough, his conclusions reveal a rather limited
understanding of male-to-male sexual encounters, where the scene of "uncircumcision" fiinc-
tions as the definitive marker of Burton's anthropological innocence.
•"James A. Casada, Sir Richard F. Burton: A Bibliographical Study (London, 1990), 9.
 Without a Trace 25

1843 he was appointed regimental interpreter and sent to the Eighteenth

Bombay Native Infantry, stationed in Sindh, which had recently and most
brutally been acquired as a British possession. There he served under Sir
Charles Napier, who was the governor of the province until 1849. Burton's
last year in India was spent recovering from sickness in the mountains of
Goa, after which he was forced to return to England.
Burton's service record indicates that he was a model officer and con-
tains no mention of any scandal or unbecoming behavior on his part. On
the contrary, he is lauded for his fine efforts as a linguist and surveyor for
the Bombay army.** Burton may well have regarded his entire India career
as a professional failure, but that story is not corroborated by the official
records of the colonial state.*' Casada suggests that Burton may simply have
"forfeited his commission for overstaying his leave" in Mecca (he was asked
to return to India no later than March 1854), and Burton acknowledged
as much in A Pilgrrima^/e to Mecea.^°
My interest in recounting the story of the Karachi report and its dis-
semination lies not so much in debunking the articulated theories of its
absence/presence but rather in identifying what is at stake in continuing
the debate. The alleged "report," I suggest, is a dense textual palimpsest,
less a record of native pederasty in India than evidence of a clash among
the multiple colonial epistemes undergirding its evocation. One can argue
that the reference to an Indian intelligence report within the translation of a
foundational Arabic text simply renarrates that text, interpreting the mystical
world of The Arabian Ni£[hts through recourse to colonial empiricism.^' The
extensive representations ofpederasty in ancient erotic texts are overlaid by a
"report" that proves that native pederasty is real and lives outside tbe pages
of Burton's translation. Yet while such a gesture corroborates tbe presence
of native vice, it equally, or perhaps more stridently, invokes the scandal of
British participation in such activities. After all. Burton tells us, Napier or-
dered the report because the brotiiels were a mere "mile from the camp."
Napier himself articulated related concerns about the widespread pres-
ence of "infamous beasts" in a memoir recorded for Sir John Hobhouse in
1846: "There is public morality supported by putting down the infamous
beasts who, dressed as women, plied their trade in the Meers' time openly;
and there is this fact to record, that the chief of them were recipients of
stipends from the Ameers, as the government records I became possessed

•"Dane Kennedy, "Orientalist," in The Highly Civilized Man: Richard Burton and the Vic-
torian World (Cambridge, Mass., 2005). I am grateful to Professor Kennedy for his informal
comments on Burton in India and for sharing excerpts from his forthcoming book.
«Z/L/MIL/5/21-22, 35, OIOC, L/MIL/12/73 (1842-51), OIOC.
'"Richard F. Burton, Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah &• Meccah, ed.
Isabel Burton, with an introduction by Stanley Lane-Poole (London, 1898), 29.
*'See Colette CoUigan, "'A Race of Born Pederasts': Sir Richard Burton, Homosexuality,
and the Arabs," Nineteenth-Century Contexts 2S, no. 1 (2003): 1-20.
26 ANJAU ARONDEKAR

of as collector testified."'^ Napier's reference here to "government records"

indicates clear and official foreknowledge of such "immoral activities" among
native subjects and rulers. Not only was the native populace prone to le
viee., but native rulers lent it state support. The Karachi report became a
mediating form through which the excesses of the primitive cover over any
excesses of the civilized. But while the focus was on the "infamous beasts,"
the fear of moral contamination was never far behind.
Indeed, what the report does is to underscore the grids of intelligibility
within which claims of both presence and absence have been asserted and
questioned. But what would happen if we were to shift archival attention
from the ultimate discovery of this report to understanding the compacted
role its evocation plays? What if we were to consider the report less as a lost
archival object and more as an embedded sign whose evidentiary status (as
an official product of state intelligence) decisively links sexuality, colonial
anthropology, and governance.' The salacious detail, after all, is lodged not
in a marginal footnote but in the body of the text, in an official form that
mandates legitimacy and attention. What would it mean, then, to abandon
our fascination with the contents of the report and to turn our attention,
as it were, to the secrets that are encrypted in the form itself? And finally,
what would it mean to resituate this historiographical metalepsis and to
read the report instead as an archival trace that resurfaced in muted terms
in Burton's later writings, as the haunting sight of the male nauteh)^^

C O D A : L I M I T S AND P O L I T I C S
The traveler wandering frotn town to town forgot
the path to his house. What was mine, what was yours, both
of the self and of the other, lost, then, to memory.
—Miraji, Tin ran^''

Ifit is by now evident that the colonial archive has emerged as the center
of interpretation and contestation in the historiography of sexuality, it is
equally clear that the structure of the archive is necessarily inchoate. There

^^Lt. Gen. Sir W. Napier, The Life and Opinions of General Sir Charles James Napier
(London, 1857), 28.
"Spivak uses the term "metalepsis" to refer to the historiograpbical "substitution of an
effect for a cause." The positing of a metalepsis is the primary discursive substitution that
sanctions the reading of the subaltern as subject rather than as subject-effect. Sec "Subaltern
Studies: Deconstructing Historiography," in Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, eds.. Selected
Works ofGayatri Chakravorty Spivak (New York, 1996), 211-13.
^^"Nagari nagari phira musafir ghar ka rasta bhul gaya / . . . kya hai mera kya hai tera apna
paraya bhul gaya," in Miraji, Tin rang (Vindi, 1968), 151. The cited translation of Miraji's
poem is provided by Geeta Patel in her wonderful book. Lyrical Movements, Historical
 Without a Trace 17

is always a politics of the archive, as Thomas Osborne suggests, because

rarely is it a simple matter of revealing secrets that are waiting to be found.
The current efforts of the Hindu right in India to mobilize the idea of the
"archive" toward sectarian ends (most aggressively through the rewriting of
history textbooks) is a dangerous instantiation of the very logic to which I
am referring.^^ As I have suggested, archives are untenable without readers,
and "across the gap between the archives and its motivating interests there
is a perpetual agonism."'* What are the political stakes embedded in this
relentless consumption of the idea of the archive.' Is the relationship between
the colonial state and the archive undone or merely reftirbished through
our current intellectual labor.' Achille Mbembe notes that despite all efforts
to democratize and widen the arc of the archive, as it were, it still survives
as a talisman, as a sort of "pagan cult" where the powers of the archive re-
create through an inventive but uncannily similar logic the original act of
creation. The debt of the colonial state is paid off through its archival debris,
where deaths of the past are breathed into life through the archives of the
present. Mbembe speaks specifically of the case of South Africa, where the
artifactualization of memory through the idea of the archive as talisman
"softens the anger, shame which the archive tends" because of its function
of recall.^'' Sexuality studies is an accomplice in such archival mythmaking
and must remain alert to its own methodological and analytical foibles. Not
to do so would be to forgo the histories of colonization, to brush aside the
possibilities and impossibilities accorded by the idea of an archive.

Hauntings: On Gender, Colonialism, and Desire in Miraji's Urdu Poetry (Stanford, Calif.,
2001), 32. Patel writes: "Miraji was an acclaimed Muslim male poet, who wrote under a
Hindu woman's name, and whom contemporary critics described as mad, sexually perverse,
and a voyeur. Miraji's short life (1912-49) spanned thefinalperiod of British colonialism in
South Asia, and his work played a part in the nationalist struggle" (3-15).
'^For more details on the textbook controversy see Romila Thapar, "The Future of the
Indian Past," Outlook India, 1 April 2004.
^'Thomas Osborne, "The Ordinariness of the Archive," History of the Human Sciences 12,
no. 2 (1999): 51-64.
"Achille Mbembe, "The Archives and the Political Imaginary," in Carolyn Hamilton and
Verne Harris, eds., Refiguring the Archive (Cape Town, 2002), 20-37.