Forbidden Desire: How the British Stole India's Queer Pasts and Queer Futures

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 cri...