Past matters: Queer contestations of colonial masculinity in Leslie de Noronha’s The Dew Drop Inn and Shyam Selvadurai’s Cinnamon Gardens

Abstract

This article addresses the colonial encounter, which often appears as the primal scene in the field of colonial discourse analysis and postcolonial studies, with specific reference to South Asia. Through a thorough reading of two texts, Leslie de Noronha’s novel The Dew Drop Inn (1994) and Shyam Selvadurai’s second novel Cinnamon Gardens (1999), it provides a critical framework of queer/postcolonial analysis within which to comprehend the novels’ contestations of predominant literary tropes of the Raj. In examining colonial relations between men and same-sex interracial desire through a reorientation of contemporary queer research it thus works against the master narrative of European imperialism, which evacuates South Asian subjectivity even while attempting to portray it. To read queer self-definition(s) from a postcolonial perspective provides a significant nuance to the frame of interracial desire in the colonial era. The article contends that both novels reference, challenge and contradict colonial forerunners, in the form of novels by Rudyard Kipling, E.M. Forster and Paul Scott. By considering such postcolonial narratives as a counter-response to literature of the Raj, it attempts to recover the queer South Asian subject as an agential formation rather than an object of colonial desire.

Keywords:

• Leslie de Noronha
• Shyam Selvadurai
• queer
• masculinity
• interracial desire
• the Raj

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The novel fictionalizes the friendship between Edward Carpenter and the first president of the Ceylon National Congress, Ponnambalam Arunachalam. Despite the colonial divide and the absence of sexual relations, the two friends shared similar views on colonialism. Carpenter was a committed anti-imperialist whose views were reflective of his intimacy with Arunachalam. Arunachalam, on the other hand, supported Carpenter’s radical formulations of “homogenic love” and “the intermediate sex”. See Aldrich (2003, 290–298).

2. Stoler (2002) suggests that racial hierarchy, which was integral to colonial science, manifested itself explicitly through the threat of métissage and the loss of whiteness (79–95). Hyam (1990), however, emphasizes the instability of scientific principles in relation to the question of intermarriage (1990, 115–119). For a detailed account of the complicity of colonial science in the construction of racial inequality and questions governing hybridity, see Young (2005, 85–110).

3. Critiques of Said’s account of Kim primarily focus on the underlying aesthetic tension in the novel (Taylor 2009, 49–69), issues of race and language (Maibor 2004, 68–82; Roy 2005, 4–8) or the “process of colonial remembrance” (Tickell 2012, 102). Although such analyses offer a nuanced revision of Said’s view, I am interested in the ways in which Kipling’s novel functions as an advocate of imperial ideology that carefully omits references to colonial violence and hyper-masculinized imperialism. As Anjali Arondekar (2009) argues, “the (successful) pursuit and control of native knowledge” (133) is the key concern of Kim.

4. For a cogent account of the recurrence of “colonialism-as-rape” as an imperial imaginary, see Loomba (1998, 77–81).