Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Abundance and Loss: Queer Intimacies in South Asia Naisargi N. Dave Queerness, definitively, is no longer "a question of silence" in Indian arts and letters. When Mary John and Janaki Nair published their important edited volume A Question of Silence? The Sexual Economies of India in 1998, with "lesbian" and "gay" largely relegated to a brief section on "alter nate sexualities," so much was just on the horizon. Deepa Mehta's Fire, a film about the love affair between two sisters-in-law in a middle-class Hindu home, would soon lead to lesbian organizations increasing their ranks across India and the word "lesbian" becoming a household word, if still a deeply uneasy one, in urban milieus.1 The campaign against the anti sodomy statute, Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, would soon acquire its momentum, pulling into its center film stars, feminists, former judges, writers, and of course queer women and men from India and its wide dias pora. Gay Pride would become an annual rite in New Delhi, Mumbai, and Bangalore, bringing thousands of queer people—cheekily masked to proudly half-naked—to celebrate queer life on India's streets.2 This intensity of queer practice has been nearly matched in scholarship about it. Since 1998 there have been over a dozen books published about queer sexuality in India, from collections of activist narratives, to literary and film criticism, to history and mythology, to ethnographic studies of gay men's lives.3 I argue in this essay that the works that emerged from and within these extraordinary moments of queer presence share an interest in what Feminist Studies37, no. 1 (Spring 2011). © 2011 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 14 Naisargi N. Dave 15 we might think of as queer abundance: demonstrating and examining the inventive fecundity of queer life. The four books that I review here, however, share something else in addition to contributing to a critical, reflexive archive of queer presences. What these books share is a tentative embrace of loss that lies at the heart of liberatory politics, if not of (queer) love itself. I say this embrace is tentative because the books neither valorize nor wallow in loss; they grapple with it, as fact and as fiction. A related way of thinking of these books together is as occupying and even consti tuting the space of intimacy—that between researcher and subject and between subjects themselves. Intimacy is driven by a tension between presence and absence, one made manifest in the desire to both have the Books Discussed in This Article For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India. By Anjali Arondekar. Durham: Duke University Press, 2009. Loving Women: Being Lesbian and Unprivileged in India. By Maya Sharma. Yoda Press, New Delhi, 2006. Love's Rite: Same-Sex Marriage in India and the West. By Ruth Vanita. Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. With Respect to Sex: Negotiating Hijra Identity in South India. By Gayatri Reddy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. other and to love the other from a distance that enables human flourish ing. Another way to phrase that tension is as a struggle between the will to know and a willingness to acknowledge some things as unknowable. These four books, through their relationships to loss, reside in and illuminate the tension between knowing and the unknowable. Anjali Arondekar's For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India sets this out most explicitly. Arondekar's focus is on sexuality in the colonial archive; she studies the movements of sexuality's traces in that archive while consistently interrogating the feminist and queer scholarly belief that sexuality must be "recovered" from its state of loss and deliberate obfuscation. Maya Sharma's Loving Women: Being Lesbian and Unprivileged in India is, perhaps, just such a project of recovery that Arondekar is critical of: 16 Naisargi N. Dave Sharma delves past silence, violence, and denial to lay bare for her readers the inventive richness, and often the pathos, of women's love in rural, "unprivileged," India. Through oral history and interviews, Sharma shows us the wide variety of intimacies that do not easily emerge under the polit ical sign of "lesbian." Ruth Vanita's...