The eunuch archive: Colonial records of non-normative gender and sexuality in India

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis essay explores the quotidian, mundane colonial archive of sexuality. It is particularly concerned with accounts of colonised peoples’ sexuality that were produced at the local level of colonial administration and were deposited at the margins of official archives. In the 1860s and 1870s, British colonial administrators in north India compiled district registers of ‘eunuchs’ that recorded brief notes on the lives of local people who challenged a binary understanding of gender and were understood as sexually ‘perverse.’ The British were particularly anxious about the transgender hijra community, whom they labelled ‘habitual sodomites’ and ‘criminals.’ This essay builds on Anjali Arondekar’s analysis of sexuality and colonial archives, but argues that there are some limitations to her approach. In particular, this article argues that attention to practices of record keeping, circulation and archiving reveals contested and contradictory forms of knowledge about ‘eunuchs’ in colonial archives.