Overview

Before the British colonised the Indian subcontinent, it was largely protofeminist and queer. People from across the socio-economic spectrum explored and expressed their gender and sexuality in myriad ways. But to prudish Victorian eyes, this was scandalous. The Empire consistently curtailed Indian (wo)mxn’s sexual agency and the freedoms of sexual minorities. All desire outside the heteronormative was marked as aberrant and sexually unchaste. Colonial authorities passed a posy of laws to criminalise sexually agentive (wo)mxn and queer folks. From nautch dancers to courtesans, effeminate mxn, masculine womxn, trans and queer persons, even ascetic renunciants were classified as ‘sexual deviants’. Old prejudices were mapped onto new ones. Colonial India, in effect, amalgamated ancient and medieval fundamentalist codes of heteronormativity with Victorian attitudes towards sex.

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Sindhu Rajasekaran is a transgressor of genres. Her debut novel Kaleidoscopic Reflections was nominated for the Crossword Book Award. She has published a collection of short stories, So I Let It Be, and a critically acclaimed book of non-fiction, Smashing the Patriarchy. Her poetry has appeared in reputed literary magazines and anthologies. Sindhu has a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Strathclyde, where she was a recipient of the Dean's Global Research Award. She is Curatrix at The Subjective Space.

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