Forum: Lesbian Generations 365 they were mixing up the terms, and it was not clear when lesbian as an identity (or shorthand for community) became useful to them. In the end, it was unclear under what conditions the term lesbian was deployed, but I do know that it was deployed. And I do know that a lot of people contributed to its deployment and thus played a role in les bian history per se. And while I really wanted to be able to historicize the utility of the deployment of the identity-based category "lesbian" around a specific set of political ideas, I couldn't. But I tried. And I guess what I want to say is that I tried, I wanted to historicize the idea of the lesbian as a historical actor, especially in relation to gender transgressive identities and behaviors, but what I got was the history of a community that engaged with these ideas in different ways. Also, as I mentioned earlier, when ideas, such as the concept of the lesbian as a particular type of person, are deployed really effectively, they take on a kind of materiality and cultural weight. The idea of the lesbian as a kind of person becomes a common sense way of human izing historical actors in a way that's very difficult to challenge or his toricize, but I think it's worth it. I think it's important to keep the his tory of the idea in mind when researching and writing the history of the community. Playing theField Ruth Vanita The issue of the global translation of Western categories of sexu ality has preoccupied many in recent times. It is worth emphasizing, all the same, that many contemporary problems are not entirely new but rather that people have been debating them, or questions very similar to them, for centuries. In our focus on the current wave of FeministStudies39, no. 2. © 2013 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 366 Forum: Lesbian Generations globalization, we tend to forget that the world has been globalized for many centuries, even millennia (consider Alexander's conquests or formations such as the so-called Silk Road). The degree has changed, the speeds have changed, and some of the locations have changed. But Indian cities like Delhi, Lucknow, Bañaras, and Hyderabad in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were intensely cosmo politan places where people from all over western Asia and Europe rubbed shoulders in the streets, goods from many parts of the world could be found in the markets, and words and ideas from different cultures were assimilated into language and culture. Interracial mar riages and relationships flourished. In an early nineteenth-century verse romance by Lucknow poet Sa'adat Yar Khan, (whose pen name was Rangin, meaning "colorful"), a prince of Bulgar marries a prin cess of Kashmir, and their wedding outfits incorporate items from many parts of the world—European gauze, Dhaka muslin, Banar asi silk. In another poem a woman teases her female friend about a crush on a European woman: "Ever since you heard the sound of the organ, /You've been obsessed with that foreign woman." In this perspective, the current debate about using Western terms in non-Western contexts is interesting, but I suggest that our anxiety around it is somewhat inflated. This anxiety springs from the fear that these terms are neocolonial or imperialist imports, and that Eng lish itself is an instrument of oppression. However, we often forget that Indians have been speaking, writing, and reading English for two hundred years, and English is now one of India's twenty-four official languages. In fact, India is now the country with the largest number of English speakers in the world. Even though English speakers are a minority of the Indian population, they still outnumber English speakers in England and the United States put together. These Indian speakers of English wield the language very comfortably for their own purposes, and the vast majority of them do not worry about English being a colonial import. The underlying assumption of our anxiety regarding Western influence on the non-West is that formerly colonized countries are subordinate to colonizer countries. It is...