Writing cultural history comes with significant challenges, and Sindhu Rajasekaran’s Forbidden Desires: How the British Stole India’s Queer Past and Queer Future confronts those challenges head-on. The central difficulty lies in offering a generalised understanding of the queer past of a country of continental proportions and immense diversity. Still, the book treads this terrain well. It acknowledges the challenges in presenting such diversity, pays attention to specifics, and still finds ways to offer broader claims.
Rajasekaran argues that before colonial rule, India thrived on plural ways of living, loving, and desiring, and was largely tolerant of sexual pluralities. Across fourteen chapters, she traces how British administrative authorities turned Indian sexualities into zones of criminality. The familiar legal trifecta of Section 377, the Contagious Diseases Act, and the Criminal Tribes Act becomes the core of her criticism of British rule and its impact on queer desires.
For instance, “Section 377 of IPC (1861) not only criminalised sexual acts ‘against the order of nature’ but also forbid all sorts of ‘native’ homosocial ties.” IPC would often be invoked to announce “vaguely worded” laws that gave the colonial state “discretionary powers” —like a wide variety of women were branded “prostitutes”, sex outside marriage was criminalised, and abortion was banned and continued to police native women’s sexuality. Rajasekaran writes, “Any womxn who used her ‘social capital’ outside heteronormative marriage was seen as a sinner. Framed as a victim of her own excessive sexuality… A wide range of womxn, including polygamous/polyandrous wives, performing artistes, single mothers, widows, coolie womxn, and sex workers, were stigmatised as prostitutes under colonial rule for sexual impropriety.”
Written through a queer historiographical lens for a general readership, Rajasekaran attempts to reclaim India’s erased queer histories. She writes: “Sexuality wasn’t really a taboo; gender was a spectrum. Transwomxn find mention in several medieval texts. They are highly regarded citizens in these accounts, with some of them holding important positions at court. ‘Eunuchs’, who were castrated males, also find mention in Mughal records.” She argues that the British were “too primitive to understand complex classifications of gender like ‘non-binaries’ or ‘trans womxn’,” and so they clubbed everyone who was not properly male or female under the category of “eunuch,” and criminalised them.
Rajasekaran argues that before colonial rule, India thrived on plural ways of living, loving, and desiring, and was largely tolerant of sexual pluralities
The book’s strength lies in its sharp challenge to Victorian morality. Rajasekaran convincingly shows how colonial governance converted sexuality into something pathological. However, one criticism is that she does not frame caste-based differences with the same clarity. As a result, the book often assumes “Indian womxn” or “brown womxn” to be a homogenous category, missing a crucial element of intersectionality: caste, which has long shaped access, experiences, and desires. This omission weakens the analysis because it overlooks the caste’s violent and material force in structuring intimate and sexual life.
Overall, Rajasekaran’s writing is beautiful and captivating. Even readers who do not have much familiarity with queer life will find the book fascinating, because in each chapter she questions the conventional morality shaped by colonial laws and experiences. Indian histories and their once-liberal sexual mores, including polyamory, queer love, and homosocialities, are now largely interpreted through a value system moulded by a long period of colonial influence. The book also challenges our assumptions about what we consider “Indian culture” and what we do not.
Rajasekaran does not shy away from making controversial arguments, nor does she hesitate to offer sharp, polemical criticism (including strong wording). At times, her argument does not sound convincing enough. One may agree with her or not, but the book remains worth reading for the pleasure of reading among all the things it offers.