Past matters: Queer contestations of colonial masculinity in Leslie de Noronha’s The Dew Drop Inn and Shyam Selvadurai’s Cinnamon Gardens

Abstract

This article addresses the colonial encounter, which often appears as the primal scene in the field of colonial discourse analysis and postcolonial studies, with specific reference to South Asia. Through a thorough reading of two texts, Leslie de Noronha’s novel The Dew Drop Inn (1994) and Shyam Selvadurai’s second novel Cinnamon Gardens (1999), it provides a critical framework of queer/postcolonial analysis within which to comprehend the novels’ contestations of predominant literary tropes of the Raj. In examining colonial relations between men and same-sex interracial desire through a reorientation of contemporary queer research it thus works against the master narrative of European imperialism, which evacuates South Asian subjectivity even while attempting to portray it. To read queer self-definition(s) from a postcolonial perspective provides a significant nuance to the frame of interracial desire in the colonial era. The article contends that both novels reference, challenge and contradict colonial forerunners, in the form of novels by Rudyard Kipling, E.M. Forster and Paul Scott. By considering such postcolonial narratives as a counter-response to literature of the Raj, it attempts to recover the queer South Asian subject as an agential formation rather than an object of colonial desire.