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breathedoutAnjali Arondekar, in For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India, goes into some depth about the complex and shifting organizational schema with which British colonizers conceptualized "native" participation in male-male sexuality (either with each other, or, more threateningly, with Englishmen). As a note, the word "pederasty" at the time was used to denote male-male sexuality generally, and didn't necessarily refer to a relationship with an age difference wherein one party is a very young man or boy.
Still using Richard Burton's writings as an object lesson, Arondekar outlines his argument that a propensity or lack thereof to sodomy, was a clear-cut function of geography:
(Asgreywash pointed out, that last sentence is remarkable for the way it manages to combine extreme condescension with a kind of all-points challenge to Try Sodomy Today.)
Arondekar points out that, although Burton claims a focus on climate over race when it comes to pederasty, he's certainly not otherwise averse to wide generalizations about the appearance, practice, and character of various regional "races." Nor does he hesitate to give those generalized racial descriptions in language saturated with a colonial preoccupation about "le vice contre nature," with a result that comes off as frankly lecherous:
So it's not that the English conception of Indian natives wasn't essentialist or racialized, but more that, according to Burton, the deciding and influencing factor that caused certain regional "races" to practice pederasty whereas others supposedly didn't, was a function of climate. Whether out of actual conviction or because it was backed up (or proceeded from) preexisting political biases, this rationalization apparently extended to the conceit that groups which had been resident longer in the "Sotadic Zone" were more dangerous and less to be trusted than those which had immigrated more recently. Hence, Hindus in the Zone were less suspect than Muslims:
Thus the spectre of male-male sexuality became the nexus of a whole host of colonial bigotries and anxieties relating to race, creed, and region of origin. This was the context in which the British colonizers criminalized homosexuality in India—a good thing to keep in mind when thinking about the legacy section of the Indian penal code that rendered consensual homosexual sex illegal, and the fact that it was only overturned in 2018.
Incidentally I was so sure some subaltern studies grad students must have named their garage-rock band "The Sotadic Zone" that I was frankly shocked to uncover zero relevant Google results.
Still using Richard Burton's writings as an object lesson, Arondekar outlines his argument that a propensity or lack thereof to sodomy, was a clear-cut function of geography:
Burton's invocation of the Karáchi report segues, as is well known, into his famous formulation of the Sotadic Zone, a perilous zone of climatic extremes that engenders a geography of perversions: "Bounded westwards by the northern shores of the Mediterranean (N. Lat. 43°) and by the southern (N. Lat. 30°)." Pederasty is to be understood as "geographical and climatic, not racial" ("TE," 207). In South Asia, it includes the strategic territories of "Afghanistan, Sind, the Punjab and Kashmir." The limits of the zone mandate a clear-cut relationship to the vice: "Within the Sotadic Zone the Vice is popular and endemic, held at the worst to be a mere pecadillo, while the races to the North and the South of the limits here defined practise it only sporadically amid the opprobrium of their fellows who as a rule, are physically incapable of performing the operation and look upon it with the liveliest of disgust."
(As
greywash pointed out, that last sentence is remarkable for the way it manages to combine extreme condescension with a kind of all-points challenge to Try Sodomy Today.)Arondekar points out that, although Burton claims a focus on climate over race when it comes to pederasty, he's certainly not otherwise averse to wide generalizations about the appearance, practice, and character of various regional "races." Nor does he hesitate to give those generalized racial descriptions in language saturated with a colonial preoccupation about "le vice contre nature," with a result that comes off as frankly lecherous:
[The Scindi] is emphatically a conquered race. Inhabiting a valley with a hot damp climate—the most unfavourable to unmanliness; exposed to the incursions of the hardy natives of the arid mountains that look down upon it, he had the bodily strength perhaps, but he had not the strong will, and he had not the vigour of mind to resist invasion, and the emancipate him from thraldom.
So it's not that the English conception of Indian natives wasn't essentialist or racialized, but more that, according to Burton, the deciding and influencing factor that caused certain regional "races" to practice pederasty whereas others supposedly didn't, was a function of climate. Whether out of actual conviction or because it was backed up (or proceeded from) preexisting political biases, this rationalization apparently extended to the conceit that groups which had been resident longer in the "Sotadic Zone" were more dangerous and less to be trusted than those which had immigrated more recently. Hence, Hindus in the Zone were less suspect than Muslims:
Burton's [previous anecdote] rests (as do all his references to pederasty) on the founding myth that pederasty must remain a vice specific to Muslims (of Afghani, Sindi, and Kashmiri descent), extending rarely to Hindus. Such an attitude followed the dominant ideology of the day that staged Muslim vice precisely to contain Muslim threat. More specifically, in the case of Sind, the threat of Muslims translated into Hindus being chosen as the liaisons for the East India Company, with the native consul of Karáchi being a prominent Hindu. Hindus could be trusted as they are newcomers, like the British, and thus less vulnerable to le vice: "Sind is essentially a Muslim country... The Hindus of Sind... are comparatively speaking, recent immigrants." Burton assures us that Hindus are to be trusted because, like Englishmen, they "hold pederasty in abhorrence and are as much scandalized by being called Gándmárá (anus beater) or Gándú (anuser).
Thus the spectre of male-male sexuality became the nexus of a whole host of colonial bigotries and anxieties relating to race, creed, and region of origin. This was the context in which the British colonizers criminalized homosexuality in India—a good thing to keep in mind when thinking about the legacy section of the Indian penal code that rendered consensual homosexual sex illegal, and the fact that it was only overturned in 2018.
Incidentally I was so sure some subaltern studies grad students must have named their garage-rock band "The Sotadic Zone" that I was frankly shocked to uncover zero relevant Google results.
