Queering the Prison: Criminal Intimacies and the Minor Revolutionary Life of Homosexuality in Colonial India

This talk frames the early 20th century colonial prison in India as a sexual scientific laboratory, arguing that the site of the prison grounded a new architecture for sexual science tied to the science of confinement. In the talk, I will explore a scandal between subordinate medical officers and the colonial prison establishment, centred around the latter’s attempt to suppress scientific studies on the scope and nature of homosexuality in prisons. Focusing on Calcutta and the Andaman Islands settlement prisons, I will show how prison medical officers’ experiments on subaltern sexual “deviants” helped reconstitute the architecture of the prisons they administered from association-based prisons to cellular-based ones. Second, I will show how such investigations shifted from foregrounding anatomical observation to documenting prisoners’ love letters to frame Indian homosexuality as a problem of habitual “native” racial and cultural excess. In the process, however, these studies negated prisoners’ individuality and inflicted both psychological and physical forms of trauma on them, provoking repeated assaults on prison officers’ lives. Finally, I will document how the state prevented the circulation of such studies, anticipating potential outcry from Indian political prisoners about sexual abuse, as recounted in their prison memoirs. The talk will thus theorise an imperial will-to-ignorance as an alternative epistemology for understanding Indian, particularly subaltern sexual life, in contrast to the European metropolitan paradigm of the will-to-knowledge.