In the Absence of Reliable Ghosts: Sexuality, Historiography, South Asia

Abstract

Sexuality endures as an object of historical recovery through a poetics of melancholia, an irresolvable longing for loss that refuses all forms of consolation. My meditations call upon a historiography of sexuality in South Asia that pushes against the binding energies of such melancholic historicism. To fix sexuality primarily within such an arbitrary arsenal of loss (while politically exigent) is to refuse alternative histories of emergence. At its most ambitious, my essay ruminates instead on more imaginative histories of sexuality, full of intrepid archives and acts of invention. To do so, I engage the emergence of a Devadasi collectivity in Portuguese India and pose two broad and vulgar questions: What happens if we abandon the historical language of search and rescue and focus instead on sexuality as a site of radical abundance, even futurity? How do collectivities in South Asia wrestle with the evidentiary forms that such models of loss demand, and in doing so, how do they assemble historical archives that anticipate the compensatory gains that such losses should or will produce?