‘Raped, outraged, ravaged’: race, desire, and sex in the Indian empire

Abstract

ABSTRACTVenus in India is unique amongst pornographic literature of the long nineteenth century for being located almost exclusively in the Indian subcontinent. As men, goods, and services streamed across trade routes and expanded the frontiers of British dominion, there was a concomitant layering to the fluid, trans-cultural economy of British desire. This article evaluates this consuming anxiety generated by protracted and direct contact with the racialized other. The infrastructural and institutional paraphernalia of the British Raj act as active determinants in the nexus of desire and intercourse in this text. The narrator, a military man happily and faithfully married by his own estimation, laughs ‘at the idea that there existed, or could exist, a woman in India, who could raise even a ghost of desire in me’. However, desire is generated and finds recurrent realization within the carefully racialized confines of British India. Accordingly, in considering the various gradations of desire as they operate and frame the action and logic of Venus in India, this article will not just consider how the forbidden and the taboo work closely to inform each other, but also how the spectre of interracial desire serves as an agent of both political and libidinal titillation.