Abstract
The three selected texts by E. M. Forster, 1924 (A Passage to India Forster, 1924), Paul Scott, 1983 (Jewel in the Crown 1983), and Top Stoppard, 1995 (Indian Ink 1995) explore the complex interweaving of race, sexuality and law in colonial India suggesting the interpolation of subliminal desire that affected the relationship of the colonizers and the colonized. This essay focuses upon the intervention of race and sex in these narratives that defined the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized which have not be adequately discussed earlier. The narratives reveal the fraught and ambiguous attitude of the British colonizers towards the “natives” as objects of sexual desire though infected by the threat of racial contamination and miscegenation. Hence, such relations were either to be shunned or controlled by law. It has also been suggested that imperial administration may have used “sexual relations” as central political mechanism to control its subject population. The point to note is that the sexual gaze was in many instances reciprocal and the colonizer was also an object of desire for the colonized. The selected narratives explore three sites where the play of desire and their culmination take place.
Highlights
IntroductionIt needs no reiteration that the analysis of the colonial context taken as a system for the exercise of power had strong and far-reaching ramification and impact and is relevant for understanding the past’s relationship with the postcolonial present
This paper focuses on the multifaceted intersections of colonialism, sexuality and law as presented in three fictional works which review British imperialism in India
The three texts seem to emphasize that the colonial Rule of Law as an authoritative system was flawed because it was founded on discrimination of Race and Gender
Summary
It needs no reiteration that the analysis of the colonial context taken as a system for the exercise of power had strong and far-reaching ramification and impact and is relevant for understanding the past’s relationship with the postcolonial present In his path breaking study on Orientalism, Edward Said (1978) maintained that such understanding would reveal the construction of ideologies by the Western colonizers of the non-West/non-White worlds regarding matters of race and gender. This research paper attempts to study and analyze through the selected narratives the intervention of race and sex that defined the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized, to the extent of formulation of laws by the colonizers to regulate and control individual lives This subject has not been adequately discussed earlier
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