The Sexual Life of English: Languages of Caste and Desire in Colonial India

by Shefali Chandra

Overview

In The Sexual Life of English, Shefali Chandra examines how English became an Indian language. She rejects the idea that English was fully formed before its life in India or that it was imposed from without. Rather, by drawing attention to sexuality and power, Chandra argues that the English language was produced through conflicts over caste, religion, and class. Sentiments and experiences of desire, respectability, conjugality, status, consumption, and fashion came together to create the Indian history of English. The language was shaped by the sexual experiences of Indians and by native attempts to discipline the normative sexual subject. Focusing on the years between 1850 and 1930, Chandra scrutinizes the English-education project as Indians gained the power to direct it themselves. She delves into the history of schools, the composition of the student bodies, and disagreements about curricula; the way that English-educated subjects wrote about English; and debates in English and Marathi popular culture. Chandra shows how concerns over linguistic change were popularly voiced in a sexual idiom, how English and the vernacular were separated through the vocabulary of sexual difference, and how the demand for matrimony naturalized the social location of the English language.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822352273
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	05/02/2012
Series:	Next Wave: New Directions in Women's Studies
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.20(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Shefali Chandra is Assistant Professor in the Department of History, the International and Area Studies Program, and the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at Washington University in St. Louis.

Table of Contents

Note on Transliteration and Spelling ix

Part 1

1 Learning Gender, Knowing English: An Introduction 3

2 "The Prudent and Cautious Engrafting of English Upon Our Female Population": Pedagogy and Performativity 29

3 "The Language of the Bedroom": Mimicry, Masculinity, and the Sexual Power of English 57

4 "A New Generation of Hipless and Breastless Women … to the Forefront in Europe and America": Literature, Social Class, and the Wider World of English 83

Part 2

5 "I Shall Read Pretty English Stories to My Mother and Translate Them into Marathi for Her": Widowhood, Virtue, and the Secularization of Caste 117

6 "Why Had I Ever Begun to Learn English?:" Desire, Labor, and the Transregional Orientation of Caste 137

7 Dosebai Jessawalla and the "March of Advancement in the Face of Obloquy" 157

8 Epilogue: "I Am an Indian. I Have No Language": Parvatibai Athavale and the Limits to English 175

Salaams 191

Notes 195

Bibliography 245

Index 267

Editorial Reviews

"The Sexual Life of English poses a significant challenge to modern Indian history, which has tended to take the links between language and culture and the gendered colonial self for granted, when engaging the latter at all. From now on, it will be impossible to grapple with liberalism, education, women, domesticity, class and caste, conjugality, nationalism, sexuality, and so much more without reckoning with Shefali Chandra's cogent, subversive arguments."—Antoinette Burton, author of Empire in Question: Reading, Writing, and Teaching British Imperialism


"Shefali Chandra's rethinking of cultural theory and modern Indian history is remarkable. Her major thesis, that Indian English has a brutal and loving social history of sexualization, will set a model for analogous studies in other national traditions. Her breakthrough argument is that English acquisition produced male cultural authority through the installation of biosexual difference. The point, then, is not the phallogocentrism of English as English but rather the installation of a 'native' phallogocentric power in the processes of colonization and postcolonization. All those who have found wanting the orthodox position in the historiography of subaltern studies will find The Sexual Life of English an exhilarating read."—Tani E. Barlow, author of The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism

From the Publisher

This monograph offers a rich account of the entanglement of English studies with caste, patriarchy, and heteronormativity, and historians of colonial India will find much of value here…. The book poses startling and important questions for historians of gender, sexuality, and language, and transforms how we understand the production of English as an Indian language.

Mytheli Sreenivasn Historical Review

This book is an indispensable reference for those interested in challenging the traditional discourse of national, imperial, and postcolonial histories. This engaging interrogation of the seductive efficiencies of the English language in India, from a postcolonial feminist perspective, turns the way we conceive of the language of the colonizer, in effect, inside out.

Women's Studies - Kristin Hutchins

This monograph offers a rich account of the entanglement of English studies with caste, patriarchy, and heteronormativity, and historians of colonial India will find much of value here…. The book poses startling and important questions for historians of gender, sexuality, and language, and transforms how we understand the production of English as an Indian language.

American Historical Review - Mytheli Sreenivas