(Im)possible Love and Sexual Pleasure in Late-Colonial North India

Abstract

This paper explores how unconventional love was written about and expressed in late colonial north India, with special emphasis on Uttar Pradesh (then known as the United Provinces, hereafter UP), in literary genres, print media and in actual practices. It focuses on male-male sexual bondings in an urban climate, relationships between the younger brother-in-law and elder sister-in-law and inter-religious love. Historians of colonial India have emphasized the moral and sexual worries of the British and the aspiring indigenous middle classes, coupled with a coercive and symbolic regulation of women, which helped in replenishing colonial authority, updating indigenous patriarchy, and proclaiming a collective identity. In UP too, endeavours were made particularly by the Hindu publicists to redefine literature, entertainment and the domestic arena, especially pertaining to women, and to forge a respectable, civilized and distinct Hindu cultural and political identity. Less, however, has been said on how a rich variety of literary practices and complexities of cultural imagination were at the same time placing limits upon projections of respectability and homogeneity. As a result, I will argue, there was no single code of Hindu middle-class morality and no final triumph of sexual conservatism in this period. The efficacy of disciplinary power was considerably diluted. Feminists have also pointed out that though women are often victims of violent crimes and aggressive patriarchal displays, the persistent fore-grounding of pain and political correctness marginalizes women's sexual pleasures and desires.