‘Raped, outraged, ravaged’: race, desire, and sex in the Indian empire

ABSTRACT

Venus in India is unique amongst pornographic literature of the long nineteenth century for being located almost exclusively in the Indian subcontinent. As men, goods, and services streamed across trade routes and expanded the frontiers of British dominion, there was a concomitant layering to the fluid, trans-cultural economy of British desire. This article evaluates this consuming anxiety generated by protracted and direct contact with the racialized other. The infrastructural and institutional paraphernalia of the British Raj act as active determinants in the nexus of desire and intercourse in this text. The narrator, a military man happily and faithfully married by his own estimation, laughs ‘at the idea that there existed, or could exist, a woman in India, who could raise even a ghost of desire in me’. However, desire is generated and finds recurrent realization within the carefully racialized confines of British India. Accordingly, in considering the various gradations of desire as they operate and frame the action and logic of Venus in India, this article will not just consider how the forbidden and the taboo work closely to inform each other, but also how the spectre of interracial desire serves as an agent of both political and libidinal titillation.

KEYWORDS:

• Victorian pornography
• South Asian pornography
• Venus in India
• empire and rape
• interracial sex
• sexuality and gender
• desire
• imperial masculinity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Anubhav Pradhan http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7099-3621

Notes

1 Such tirades have a long history in the annals of English literature and criticism, but by the middle of the nineteenth century they seem to have acquired an urgency and vehemence akin to zeal.

2 Indeed, although this is far from the case, this pervasive scholarly trend seems to unwittingly imply that pornographic writing seems to have completely died out.

3 See Treaty of Peace and Friendship between the United States of America and the Bey and Subjects of Tripoli of Barbary, ratified 1796.

4 This widespread sense of national – even civilizational – outrage seems to have informed the rhetoric behind such incidents as the Bombardment of Algiers in 1816 and the Second Barbary War in 1815.

5 The authorial question in Venus in India is necessarily vexed: Charles Devereaux appears to be a pseudonym, and what is known satisfactorily is only the publisher's identity.

6 Having used an open source edition of Venus in India from Wikisource, I am unable to provide page numbers for quotations from the text in this article.

7 ‘But for the burning pictures of love and passion, drawn in the wonderful prose poem, perhaps I might have escaped from the nets in which love entangled me’.

8 Victim as much of her husband's violence as well as his inclination for anal sex, a habit inculcated amongst boys during service in Persia, Mrs Searles presents a liminal example of the fallen memsahib. Sodomized by her husband, she is the object of pity; a beautiful woman herself, her establishment at Ranikhet is supported by the crème de la crème of colonial society, including the Viceroy; yet, as a woman who can be bought, she is, as Mrs Selwyn angrily exclaims, ‘a disgrace to sex’ and to the reputation, amongst natives, of the British as a people. Mrs Selwyn's keen concern for conduct and example, particularly amongst the so-called gentle classes, neatly allows for the extension of Sramek's (2011) thesis in Gender, Morality, and Race in Company India to the latter half of British rule as well.

9 Often the literature itself – primary and secondary – seems to enact this racial implosion of disparate identities of English, British, Scottish, and Irish as simply ‘European’.

10 Devereaux's detailed description of the ekkha in Volume 2 is yet another indication of the text's deep involvement with the networks of imperial and racial power in British India. He refers to it as ‘a two-wheeled conveyance much used in Northern India’, goes on to describe its structure and design, and declares that although ‘it can go almost anywhere’ it is nonetheless ‘not a kind of carriage which I can recommend as forming one of the comforts of Indian travel’.

11 Devereaux doubts whether they are actually married: ‘a capable man he was, and one who had an eye to business, for whether he was married or not I do not know, but he brought a very fine young native woman with him’.

12 ‘Mabel was a lascivious little girl, a grand poke. Like Lizzie Wilson her mission in life is to fuck. The dear reader will not be surprised to hear that she joined that select number of fair women, who, nominally “kept” by wealthy lovers take delight in relieving the pains of numerous adorers … To her was the glory of having the first to give palpable proof of the ecstasies of fucking to no less a personage than one of the Royal Princes’.

13 But for this small aside, Arondekar's thesis that the pornographic in Venus in India is ‘at once transgressive and deeply self-regulatory’ (2009b, 106) would hold: Devereaux does have a racially determined moral code which guides his sexual entanglements, but this does not preclude sex with native women. Therefore, Venus in India is only selectively self-regulatory of the limitations of bourgeois sexuality in the racialized domain of British India: its transgressions rather than its self-regulations make it uniquely pornographic for its context.

14 This is, of course, one of the central distinguishing marks of pornography, but in Venus in India it is a mark reserved specially for Indians. The Selwyn sisters are also often referred to in terms of their ‘delicious cunts’, and Devereaux does not shy away from referring to himself as just a prick, but as a rule characterization of the British endows them a range of emotions and motives beyond sexual organs and sex as well.