The Gastropoetics of Sex: Gluttony, Lust and Excess in Late Nationalist India

Abstract

In this paper, I explore the ways in which queer sex acts and orientations come to be coded through other modes of signifying excess in colonial and nationalist discourse. I explore the way in which food and sex are held on a continuum that ties gluttony to abstinence, creating the standards for respectable sexuality and a map for flouting them. Fundamentally, I look at how sex and food are conflated, especially when enjoyed or imagined in ways outside the norm of conventional morality. Moreover, I examine the terms through which this correlation is translated into a broader framework for thinking about the body in its private and shared forms.

Keywords:

• Food studies
• Hindi literature
• history of sexuality
• nationalism
• queer theory
• South Asia

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Ishita Pande and the participants in the ‘Sex in Translation’ workshop held in Kingston, Canada, on 19–21 April 2018 for the opportunity to work through the ideas in this piece. Special thanks to Theresa Ventura, Katherine Lemons, Yumna Siddiqui and Gretchen Bakke for commenting on an earlier draft, to Lucinda Ramberg and Anjali Arondekar for comments on early iterations of this paper, and to the South Asia reviewers for their helpful suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The recuperative act of asserting the lived experiences of LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) life in India is an important one. Ruth Vanita and Saleem Kidwai have been leaders in this field. Their edited collections and Vanita’s translation of Ugra’s Chaklit stories have substantially contributed to our collective understanding of Indian social and cultural history by introducing the lived experiences of LGBT subjects into familiar narratives as equal participants in the public sphere; see Ruth Vanita and Saleem Kidwai (eds), Same-Sex Love in India: A Literary History (New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2008); Pandey Bechan Sharma and Ruth Vanita, Chocolate, and Other Writings on Male–Male Desire (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006); Pandey Bechan Sharma ‘Ugra’, Chocolate and Other Writings on Male Homoeroticism, Ruth Vanita (trans.) (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009); and Ismat Chughtai, The Quilt and Other Stories, Tahiri Naqvi and Syeda Hameed (trans.) (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1994).

2. Sudipa Topdar has crafted an overview of the emergent field of the history of the body in India; see Sudipa Topdar, ‘The Historian beneath the Skin: Embodiment as Methodology in Colonial India’, in History Compass, Vol. 17, no. 8 (2019), e12577, DOI: 10.1111/hic3.12577.

3. See David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 8. This text was the first to wrench disease and medicine away from conventional histories of imperialism and nationalism, and to instead frame the control of the body as a key facet of colonialism in India.

4. Sarah Hodges and Steven Legg have substantially expanded the parameters of a Foucauldian reading of population in India through their efforts to highlight the mechanisms of planning, in the context of both state and civil society, to reframe the operationalisation of power in late colonial India, along with the co-constitution of gendered, racialised subjects; see, especially, Stephen Legg, Spaces of Colonialism: Delhi’s Urban Governmentalities (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2007); and S.E. Hodges, Contraception, Colonialism and Commerce: Birth Control in South India, 1920–1940 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008). As Anupama Rao reminds us, bodies are marked by experiences of acute and banal violence related to caste for Dalits, the historically ‘untouchable’ community of those living outside the savarna, or upper-caste, community; see Anupama Rao, The Caste Question: Dalits and the Politics of Modern India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009).

5. See, most notably, Charu Gupta, Sexuality, Obscenity, Community: Women, Muslims, and the Hindu Public in Colonial India (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001); also see Luzia Savary, ‘Vernacular Eugenics? Santati-Śāstra in Popular Hindi Advisory Literature (1900–1940)’, in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol. 37, no. 3 (2014), pp. 381–97. For a sense of a similar conversation aimed at male readers, see Shrikant Botre and Douglas E. Haynes, ‘Sexual Knowledge, Sexual Anxieties: Middle-Class Males in Western India and the Correspondence in Samaj Swasthya, 1927–53’, in Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 51, no. 4 (2017), pp. 991–1034.

6. Gono-killer was a popular pharmaceutical product advertised in vernacular publications. For more on this particular product and others like it, see Rachel Berger, ‘Between Digestion and Desire: Genealogies of Food in Nationalist North India’, in Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 47, no. 5 (2013), pp. 1622–43; and Douglas E. Haynes, ‘Selling Masculinity: Advertisements for Sex Tonics and the Making of Modern Conjugality in Western India, 1900–1945’, in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol. 35, no. 4 (2012), pp. 787–831.

7. A recent turn in the literature on population control, reproductive rights and the history of sexuality has brought to light some of the dynamics at play in these conversations, especially by centring childhood, consent and the subjectivity of the Indian girl child in these debates; see Ishita Pande, ‘Loving Like a Man: The Colourful Prophet, Conjugal Masculinity and the Politics of Hindu Sexology in Late Colonial India’, in Gender & History, Vol. 29, no. 3 (2017), pp. 675–92; Ishita Pande, ‘Feeling Like a Child: Narratives of Development and the Indian Child/Wife’, in Stephanie Olsen (ed.), Childhood, Youth and Emotions in Modern History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. 35–55; and Padma Anagol, ‘Age of Consent and Child Marriage in India’, in The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Gender and Sexuality Studies (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016), pp. 1–5.

8. Sarah Hodges’ work on eugenic societies in Madras Presidency shed light on this phenomenon locally; see Hodges, Contraception, Colonialism and Commerce. Sanjam Ahluwalia’s recent work on the participation of Indian sexologists in the global community of eugenicists who worked to position the Indian experience within broad framings of global population planning fleshes out a story of Indian sex/uality beyond national borders; see Sanjam Ahluwalia, ‘Scripting Pleasures and Perversions: Writings of Sexologists in the Twentieth Century’, in Sanjay Srivastava (ed.), Sexuality Studies (London: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 24–45.

9. See Durba Mitra, Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020).

10. See Ishita Pande, Sex, Law and the Politics of Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).

11. See, most notably, Anjali Arondekar, For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009).

12. It is, arguably, traceable earlier and permeates a wide variety of other approaches to reckoning the body. Ayurveda and Unani medicine, for instance, centre food as treatment, giving historians a place to begin a study of food and its effects as a central way of reckoning embodied selfhood. The fields of music, dance, cultural life and patterns of leisure all centre food in dramatic and banal ways. The dearth, then, is with the dominance of a colonial lens in gauging the Indian past.

13. See Rachel Berger, ‘Clarified Commodities: Managing Ghee in Interwar India’, in Technology and Culture, Vol. 60, no. 4 (2019), pp. 1004–26.

14. I explore these and other themes in Rachel Berger, ‘Alimentary Affairs: Historicizing Food in Modern India’, in History Compass, Vol. 16, no. 2 (2018), e12438, DOI: 10.1111/hic3.12438.

15. Benjamin Siegel’s take on the way in which food organises the political in mid twentieth-century India is both expansive and effective in making this sort of claim; see Benjamin Robert Siegel, Hungry Nation: Food, Famine, and the Making of Modern India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

16. It should be noted that the notion of sex/uality as privacy is truly the by-product here of the growing Victorian moralisation of Indian cultural life, which bears no resemblance to the vivid incorporation of the sexual lives of citizen-subjects in the Mughal period or before. Rosalind O’Hanlon’s work delineates networks of patronage that incorporated sexual relationality in the late Mughal period; see Rosalind O’Hanlon, ‘Manliness and Imperial Service in Mughal North India’, in Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, Vol. 42, no. 1 (1999), pp. 47–93.

17. Arondekar, For the Record, p. 1.

18. Parama Roy, Alimentary Tracts: Appetites, Aversions, and the Postcolonial (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).

19. Parama Roy, ‘Meat-Eating, Masculinity, and Renunciation in India: A Gandhian Grammar of Diet’, in Gender & History, Vol. 14, no. 1 (2002), pp. 62–91; and Roy, Alimentary Tracts.

20. Matvala, which translates as ‘the intoxicated’, was a magazine started in 1923 in Calcutta styled after the infamous British satirical magazine, Punch. For more on this periodical, see Prabhat Kumar, ‘From Punch to Matvala: Transcultural Lives of a Literary Format’, in Hans Harder and Barbara Mittler (eds), Asian Punches: A Transcultural Affair (Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag, 2013), pp. 75–110.

21. The link between Hindi literature and its earnest commitment to the nationalist project is well-established, especially in Francesca Orsini, The Hindi Public Sphere, 1920–1940: Language and Literature in the Age of Nationalism (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002); and Alok Rai, Hindi Nationalism (Delhi: Three Essays Collective, 2001).

22. Sharma and Vanita, Chocolate, and Other Writings on Male–Male Desire, p. 6.

23. Vanita makes this point compellingly, drawing on her historicisation of homophobia, undertaken with Saleem Kidwai; see Vanita and Kidwai, Same-Sex Love in India.

24. Sharma and Vanita, Chocolate, and Other Writings on Male–Male Desire, p. 10. Again, Ruth Vanita has compiled a thoughtful and critical take on the work that makes these and other points about Ugra, in essence framing for historians and literary scholars an episode in literary and queer history that had been mostly forgotten.

25. Ibid., p. 39.

26. Ibid., p. 4.

27. Ibid., p. 10. Here Vanita and Sharma maintain that ‘matvala’ was not so much a homophobic slur as an elitist one.

28. Ibid., pp. 46–7.

29. Ibid., p. 56.

30. Ibid., pp. 51–2.

31. Ismat Chughtai, The Quilt & Other Stories, Tahira Naqvi and Syeda S. Hameed (trans.) (New Delhi: Women Unlimited, 2004), p. 8.

32. Ibid., p. 19.

33. Geeta Patel has written evocatively of the case and its afterlives; see Geeta Patel, ‘Marking the Quilt: Veil, Harem/Home, and the Subversion of Colonial Civility’, in Colby Quarterly, Vol. 37, no. 2 (2001), p. 7. Priyamvada Gopal also expounds on Chughtai and the life of ‘Lihaaf’ in ‘Habitations of Womanhood: Ismat Chughtai’s Secret History of Modernity’, in Priyamvada Gopal, Literary Radicalism in India: Gender, Nation and the Transition to Independence (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), pp. 65–88.

34. Chughtai, The Quilt & Other Stories, p. 8.

35. Gayatri Gopinath has linked the conception of food at work in this story strongly to the organisation of both labour and resources in the Nawab’s household; see Gayatri Gopinath, ‘Homo-Economics: Queer Sexualities in a Transnational Frame’, in Burning Down the House (New York: Routledge, 2019), pp. 102–24.

36. Chughtai, The Quilt & Other Stories, p. 19.

37. See, for instance, Jayanta Sengupta, ‘Nation on a Platter: The Culture and Politics of Food and Cuisine in Colonial Bengal’, in Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 44, no. 1 (2010), pp. 81–98; Arjun Appadurai, ‘How to Make a National Cuisine: Cookbooks in Modern India’, in Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 30, no. 1 (1988), pp. 3–24; and Berger, ‘Between Digestion and Desire’, pp. 1–22.

38. See Manirama Sharma, Pak-Chandrika (Allahabad, 1926), pp. 1–2.

39. Charu Gupta has written extensively on Yashoda Devi, reflecting on her unique career and on the impact she had on Hindi literature in the early to mid twentieth century; see, especially, Charu Gupta, ‘Procreation and Pleasure Writings of a Woman Ayurvedic Practitioner in Colonial North India’, in Studies in History, Vol. 21, no. 1 (2005), pp. 17–44.

40. See Berger, ‘Between Digestion and Desire’.

41. See Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).

42. Ibid., p. 82.

43. In the Indian context, Naisargi Dave has critiqued the homo-nationalism at work in middle-class gay activism; see Naisargi N. Dave, Queer Activism in India: A Story in the Anthropology of Ethics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012).

44. Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), p. 210.

45. Patel, ‘Marking the Quilt’, p. 186.

46. Ibid., p. 186.