... having been breathed out

Though the United States was now [in the early 2000s] providing nearly twice as much to the global effort against AIDS as the rest of the world's richest governments combined, those billions of dollars brought with them a legion of problems. The Bush administration concertedly began to use the funds to impose destructive policies on the governments of poorer countries, the United Nations, and grassroots and civil society groups. At precisely the point when Bush was insisting that the world accept his trumped-up claims about "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq, those diktats were yet more proof of his schoolyard-bully approach to foreign relations.

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Sex workers continued to bear the brunt of the persecution [from government, medical, press, and societal stigma around HIV/AIDS. In addition to hospitals refusing to treat HIV-positive patients, courts refusing to let HIV-positive people marry, and employers firing HIV-positive employees, which were issues faced by all HIV-positive Indians, o]n the orders of the courts or government, sex workers were routinely rounded up in raids and forcibly tested for HIV, with those testing positive incarcerated indefinitely. In 1994, the Maharashtra government attempted to pass legislation that would have allowed it to brand HIV-positive sex workers with indelible ink. In 1996, the Mumbai High Court ordered the arrest and mandatory HIV testing of more than four hundred sex workers; many of the women were incarcerated for over a year, and seven died in that time. The Supreme Court made several rulings that further legitimized the persecution and abuse of sex workers.

My notebooks were soon overflowing. Every one of the interviews was heartbreaking because of the desperation they exuded, so different from the philosophical resignation with which I had seen Indians accept more conventional catastrophes, however awful or unremitting. Their terror leached through as relentless anxiety. Every conversation returned to the looming prospect of death. For those with children, there was the added feverish dread about which relative or friend could be trusted to house them, how to set aside some money to provide for them, how to ensure their well-being.

The one constant I found in my research was that AIDS had devastated the lives of India's sex workers like no force ever before. In the dozen years since Selvi and the five other sex workers in the Madras reformatory had been found to have HIV, countless more sex workers had contracted HIV, had fallen mortally sick, or had died. [But due to the rudimentary state of India's vital registration systems at the time, and the lack of sites providing trend data on HIV infection rates], no one knew exactly how many—or even exactly where.

[...]

But it soon became evident, to my great surprise, that alongside the havoc AIDS was wreaking in the lives of sex workers, the epidemic had also catalyzed positive changes for them, perhaps even transformative changes for those who might survive the epidemic. ( Read more )

[My partner] Tandavan and I often went to my brother Pratap's home, where he and his family treated us warmly. I found even a greater warmth and naturalness at the home of my only other relative in Delhi, my aunt Nandini, the very youngest of my mother's five siblings and hence of my generation rather than my mother's. We had been close since our childhood. I had not discussed with her my being gay, so I was surprised and deeply touched to see that from the moment that Tandavan and I started living together she made it a point to specify that he was always invited with me to her in-laws' home, where she lived in a traditional joint family. From every one of her family, Tandavan and I only felt love and warmth. They may have privately discussed my being gay among them, but not once in their company did I ever feel that my choice of romantic partner was remarkable or made me different.

I was struck that my other favorite aunt, Usha, who lived in the small town of Jabalpur in Madhya Pradesh, also treated my relationship with Tandavan with complete ease, insisting that we visit her often, giving us a bedroom with a double bed, and taking care to give us privacy. I thought of telling her and Nandini categorically about Tandavan and my being a couple, but decided against it on realizing that they were certainly already aware of it yet had not asked for any explanation on my part. All the evidence began to convince me that traditional Indians were immeasurably more accepting of same-sex desire than Anglicized Indians like my father. Siddhartha, with whom I had been debating the matter, insisted that was true, judging from his personal experience of being raised in a more Indian setting than I, a sprawling extended family that shared a large Calcutta house.

In contrast, my father—though unfailingly courteous to Tandavan—did not display the same kind of warmth. I didn't raise the matter with him, as all I wanted him to do was what he was doing already, treating Tandavan politely. But the unfortunate downside was that I stopped joining my parents and brothers on family holidays, to which my brothers' girlfriends were invited. It created something of a hiatus in my relationship with my father after a decade in which we had drawn closer and closer.

The munificent dildo of india rubber [...] does appear as staple fare in Victorian pornography, either carefully highlighted as in the case of The Story of a Dildoe or casually inserted in random scenarios of sexual pleasure, as in several episodes in the Pearl: "The godemiches [dildos] were brought forth, and proved to be of monstrous size, to our ideas; they were made of the finest vulcanised india rubber, beautifully molded and finished with all appendages complete." In most of these instances, the material of the dildo is always remarked on and cited as a guarantee of the dildo's superiority and efficiency. In one case, it is a "big india-rubber instrument" tucked away in a drawer on the dressing table; on another occasion the dildo disappears, but the qualities of the india rubber are still extolled: "What do you think of my sweetheart? Isn't she a beauty? There's an elastic belly to spend on, and I can assure you it has a moist engaging entrance to it—feels like velvet, and clutches like India rubber."

I describe these appearances of the india-rubber dildo for two reasons: first, the reification of india rubber in these pornographic texts as efficient, modern, lifelike, and beautiful resonates strongly with the history of the [cultivation and] manufacture of india rubber, a history powerfully linked to the management of colonial India.[...] The raw material for the manufacture of india rubber, Woodruff tells us, originally came from the "moist clayey lands of the Amazon basin, and extending over a large district of Central and South America." He points out, however, that this dependency on raw materials from the Amazon was carefully altered by English entrepreneurs and bureaucrats, who wanted to ensure that the raw materials came from areas over which they had colonial control: "Sir Clements R. Markham had already transplanted the quinine-yielding chichona tree from South America to India and in 1870... he turned to the cultivation of rubber. The plants and seeds which he brought back with him... were soon distributed through the Botanical Gardens at Kew to the tropical colonies. The story of the distribution of these supplies in the nineteenth century is... in part the story of Britain's role as the leading mercantile nation."

As Woodruff demonstrates, the manufacture of india rubber announced in many ways the ingenuity of British rule: plunder the raw materials from one part of the New World (South America), take them to a centralized space in the metropole (the Botanical Gardens at Kew), then redistribute them along the shores of a British colony (India), and you have the makings of a booming rubber industry. Woodruff's history thus provides the india-rubber dildo with a complicated and insistently colonial referent of its own. Technologies of sexuality fuse with technologies of colonial industry [...]

[Furthermore, t]he technologies of manufacturing india rubber in the late nineteenth century much resembled the technologies of colonial rule in India. The first stage in the manufacture of india rubber in the metropole was purification: the raw rubber had to be rid of any "foreign matter. The rubber was cut up by hand and the more obvious forms of adulteration... introduced by the native as good measure removed." The rubber was then fed into a filtering machine, where it was cleaned further, and added into a plasticizing machine that moulded and "kneaded the rubber effectively." Once through that process, it was passed into a "softening machine," where critical artificial chemicals were incorporated into the rubber to ensure its appropriate malleability. It was only "when the material had been cleansed, ground, softened and compounded" that it was ready for the process of vulcanization. [...]

Such a manufacture was echoed in the process of creating the perfect native subject. Gauri Vishwanathan delineates how the business of empire building was facilitated through the intellectual purification of the native Indians, which supposedly obtained from the introduction of English-language literature and the careful filtering out of native literary and intellectual traditions. The emphasis, as in the india-rubber manufacturing process, was on slowly curing the natives of their "adulterating" instincts, on somehow incorporating alongside those instincts a respect and need for English rule.

oulfis