Kind of can't believe

That I forgot to mention that over the weekend greywash and I watched Sally Potter's film The Party, a piece of media I believe was produced specifically to hook to my id and delight me immoderately for 70 densely-packed minutes of the prickly, farcical, intensely awkward dinner party from hell. LIFE GOALS: write a dinner party as terrible as this dinner party.

( Spoilery whisperspace )

The mental gymnastics of colonial othering

I've been so absorbed in writing my little ficlet cycle that I haven't been reading as much! But here's a fascinating couple of excerpts from Anjali Arondekar's For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India, both concerning the desire, on the part of the British, to simultaneously regulate what they anecdotally considered rampant and unchecked unnatural vice on the part of their Indian subjects, and also conceal from said Indian subjects that, um, well actually British folks indulge in those vices too, since that revelation—unlike everything else the British were doing in India, apparently—might potentially undermine the image of Brits as morally unimpeachable, self-evident rulers.

Lord Thomas Babington Macaulay, for example, in setting out to craft the Indian Penal Code in 1835, was adamant that such a code had to be absolutely clear, both in its definitions and its prescribed punishments, so as to survive translation into many Indian languages. It must be a unifying, equalizing force across all peoples on the subcontinent, readily accessible to, and accepted by, the common man, unlike the hodge-podge of top-down local laws already in existence:

Missing the enormous historical irony of his own words, Macaulay passionately claims that the primary reason for such a deplorable lack of legal models is that "all existing systems of law in India are foreign. All were introduced by conquerors differing in race, manners, language, and religion from the great mass of people."

To solve this problem, Macaulay (a foreign conqueror differing in race, manners, language, and religion from the great mass of people), set out to write clear, translatable laws, which he really spent some quality time thinking through:

Whoever voluntarily has carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or animal shall be punished with imprisonment for life, or with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to ten years, and shall also be liable to fine.

Explanation: Penetration is sufficient to constitute the carnal intercourse necessary to the offence described in this section.

The offence made punishable under this section requires that penetration, however little, should be proved strictly. Thus an attempt to commit this offence should be an attempt to thrust the male organ into the anus of the passive agent. Some activity on the part of the accused in that particular direction ought to be proved strictly. A mere preparation for the operation should not necessarily be construed as an attempt. Emission is not necessary.

Macaulay's code was then translated into a dozen local Indian languages, because it was supposed to apply to all subjects of the Raj, really everyone this time, one law for seriously all the people... welllll, except for white Englishmen, because I mean, good heavens, what scandalous impression of white Englishmen would that make on the Indians? What would they think of our national character??

"It is unnecessary to point out how desirable it is that our national character should stand high in the estimation of the inhabitants of India, and how much the character would be lowered by the frequent exhibitions of Englishmen of the worst description, placed in the most degrading situations, stigmatised by the courts of justice in India." Macaulay makes the point that Englishmen committing unnatural offences should not be tried in British India, for fear of the consequences of trial on public and civil life.

If they know we're sodomites, in other words, they'll think we're not civilized. Invading their countries, strong-arming their land into monocrops for export, forcing them into penury, using their sons as cannon fodder, etc.: all these things are all bound to make an excellent impression; a penis in a butt, on the other hand, even if it's just the tip, is surely a bridge too far.

A few decades later, the eager Victorian moralizers of the anti-vice societies were up against a similar catch-22 with regard to anti-pornography legislation:

For antipornography laws to be instituted in colonial India, standards of obscenity had to be carried over from Britain to colonial India. The very presence of antipornograhy laws in Britain translated not only into the questionable morality of the supposedly civilizing colonizers but also undermined the rhetorical force of Britain's ability to govern India. Thus there apears a discourse of contradictory lament int he official archives with respect to the question of obscenity and pornography in the Indian context. On the one hand, we read of colonial officials repeatedly complaining about the rampant perversion of Indian culture and speaking of the need to regulate such outpourings in discursive materials. On the other hand, there is equal despair at the thought of brown subjects "viewing postcards of naked white women, or of English-educated Indians reading works like The Lustful Turk or Venus in India."

Life is hard out there for a colonizer.