Abstract
In Abundance, Anjali Arondekar engages deeply with the complexities of colonial archives in the Indian Ocean world: in particular, how sexuality and race were documented and managed under colonial rule. Her work optimistically frames and approaches narratives of loss, and offers a counter-colonial position on minoritized history. It refers extensively to societal structures and communities that are shaped by colonialism, historical records, ongoing cultural legacies, and intersections of power, identity, and historical memory. It builds on the ideas of postcolonial theory, queer theory, and feminist historiography to offer new insights into how to engage with history and archives – in particular, those of Gomantak Maratha Samaj, a caste-oppressed devadasi collective in South Asia.
Arondekar's introduction is titled ‘Make. Believe. Sexuality's Subjects’ and the first chapter, ‘Archives’. In this first section of her work, she studies discussions of sexuality in letter records, stigmatization of identity in fictional stories, ideas of female chastity, and discussions of kinship – though these ideas are not entirely brought together, and references to overt sexuality within such realms are indirect. Arondekar draws attention to this lack of overt reference later, within discussions of the limits of her historical source materials – limits that do not mitigate her desire to ‘find’ queer lives in the archive, which is the key theme of her work.
In the second chapter, ‘Sexuality's Exemplarity’, Arondekar highlights the complex relationships between colonial law, morality, and control of sexuality, especially as it pertained to women in colonial-era India. She critiques how colonial authorities maintained a selective moral order, which controlled and categorized women's bodies and sexualities, while also exposing the limitations and hypocrisies of colonial legal power managing social behaviour. In particular, she discusses how colonial India's ‘kept mistresses’ were seen as distinct from ‘common prostitutes’, thus focussing on the moral ambiguity with which women who were financially supported by men were viewed, whilst not being subject to legal or moral scrutiny. Arondekar thus explored how the colonial government regulated sexuality in ways that reinforced class and gender hierarchies: the state's inability or refusal to police ‘kept mistresses’ in the same way as prostitutes demonstrated that colonial law was inconsistent, protecting certain forms of sexual relationships while criminalizing others, depending on class, respectability, and colonial moral standards.
In the third chapter ‘Geopolitics as a Critique’, she highlights how the broader geopolitical forces – such as colonialism, nationalism, and global power dynamics – shape and complicate the way we understand and discuss sexuality. Geopolitics hangs over any narration of sexuality, like an unrelatable ghost. It changes vernaculars, contains movements and indeed complicates any fantasy of shared liberation (p. 93).
In the last section, ‘Coda’, Arondekar discusses her experiences of a conference in Lahore, and in particular, incidents which demonstrate the centrality of loss and recovery to subaltern history. She also discusses the geo-epistemology of being neither here nor there, and how knowledge of sexuality, race, and community is shaped by geography, colonial power structures, archival practices, and regional histories. She furthermore questions critical frameworks employed to explore how knowledge is produced and situated within specific geographical and colonial contexts.
Within Abundance, Arondekar extensively discusses samaj – a Hindi and Sanskrit term meaning ‘society’ or ‘community’ – but does not go into detail regarding what samaj is in the first half of her work. Is samaj a monolithic, made-up community, or small and closely knit? The word samaj takes on layered meanings throughout the book as Arondekar investigates how communities were shaped, regulated, and imagined depending on sexuality, race, and colonial governance. Arondekar's engagement with samaj is a critical lens through which she examines how colonial authorities and indigenous elites categorized and controlled Indian society, including social hierarchies based on caste, religion, and sexuality, and boundaries around sexuality, morality, and respectability. Arondekar's structuring of Abundance around the concept of samaj prompts the question of whether samaj was necessary to support her arguments. While she acknowledges the limits of her findings – particularly the ‘absence’ of what she sought in the archive – her argument in Abundance ultimately suggests that we cannot conclude what remains unattained or undiscovered.
Discussions of geo-epistemology in Abundance also raise questions about how knowledge travels across borders and how colonial histories are entangled with global flows of power, information, and capital. Such discussions enable Arondekar to examine how colonial powers, particularly in the Indian Ocean world, produced knowledge about colonized people – specifically, about their bodies, sexualities, and social identities – by situating them within geographical and cultural contexts. It interrogates assumptions embedded in the ways knowledge is constructed, and challenges the dominance of Western epistemologies in understanding non-Western cultures and histories, which is central to her critique of how colonialism shaped not only the political and economic order but also the production of knowledge itself.
Overall, Abundance explores the recovery of historical voices; the lingering effects and complexities of the politics of representation, and how the sexualities of colonized peoples were documented or erased by colonial powers. Arondekar challenges views of archives as places of ‘loss’, or of ‘absence’ of marginalized histories and argues that there is an ‘abundance’ of alternative interpretations and possibilities within such gaps. While Arondekar touches on ideas of staging and literary expression, the optimism she evokes is difficult to locate in today's institutions, where hegemonic perspectives often overshadow marginalized viewpoints. She also examines the violence embedded in the politics of the archive and questions how we can resist its dominance. In the current context, maintaining hope and aspiration when engaging with the archive is often challenging: Arondekar herself mentions that when she first started her research on the Gomantak Maratha Samaj, she was routinely pressed on the message and use of her work, particularly since it deals with a collective whose history has been mired in the messy discomforts of sexuality, caste, and region (p. 67).
Readers may question how “abundance” is related to this work. There are subtle hints that ‘abundance’ does not counter the absence of overt references to sexuality, but is epistemological, and refers to claims of what sexuality is, and how sexualities of colonized peoples were recorded, or rather, erased by colonial powers. ‘Abundance’ likewise refers to the possibility of perceiving form in a non-dichotomous way: Arondekar is referring to abandoning the dichotomous and investigating complexities no matter what the positionality is.