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This article focuses on disparate sites and subjects to reflect on and problematize the relationship between sexuality and the archives in colonial north India. I dwell on how 'recalcitrant' and hidden histories of sexuality can be gleaned by not only expanding our arenas of archives, but also by decentering and recasting colonial archives. I do so by specifically investigating some of the "indigenous" writings in Hindi, through texts concerning homosexuality, sex manuals, the writings of a woman ayurvedic practitioner, didactic literature and its relationship to Dalit (outcaste) sexuality, and current popular Dalit literature and its representations of the past. The debate for me here is not about the flaws of archival uses but rather of playing one archive against another, of appropriating many parallel, alternative, official, and popular archives simultaneously to shape a more nuanced and layered understanding of sexuality.
This article argues for a wider understanding of the colonial and postcolonial archive. It proposes to extend research on questions of sexuality and obscenity to include-and indeed center-materials that are often erased or elided in archival research. Historians for long have been convinced about the authority and authenticity of the archive, its evidentiary status, and its production of history's truth-effect. Proof and therefore legitimacy as established through valid records continues to be germane to history's disciplinary organization.1 However, even while recognizing the importance of archival research, scholars have offered effective critiques of such an approach. Feminist scholars particularly have pointed out problems with obsessing about the archive and its dangers and limitations, especially for writing the history of gender and sexuality. Their arguments are multiple and varied, whether they critique the notion of archives as verifiable signs of historical subjectivity, or as the most important source of production and institutionalization of knowledge. Some question whether they are fixed and finite and others critique the notions of truth and authority as reflected in the idiom of the archive, and, notably, its distorted representations of sexuality. Here, feminists focus on the erasures and silences around sexuality, and have sought to read between the lines to remedy, recover, and record these omissions.2 They have also tried to extend our definition of the archives, by pointing out how permeable they are, and also by including archives of emotion,...