Description
Book SynopsisChandra explores how English became an Indian language during the colonial period of 1850-1930. Using archival and literary sources, she focuses on elite language education for girls and women.
Trade Review“This book is an indispensable reference for those interested in challenging the traditional discourse of national, imperial, and postcolonial histories. This engaging interrogation of the seductive efficiencies of the English language in India, from a postcolonial feminist perspective, turns the way we conceive of the language of the colonizer, in effect, inside out.” - Kristin Hutchins,
Women’s Studies"
The Sexual Life of English poses a significant challenge to modern Indian history, which has tended to take the links between language and culture and the gendered colonial self for granted, when engaging the latter at all. From now on, it will be impossible to grapple with liberalism, education, women, domesticity, class and caste, conjugality, nationalism, sexuality, and so much more without reckoning with Shefali Chandra's cogent, subversive arguments."—
Antoinette Burton, author of
Empire in Question: Reading, Writing, and Teaching British Imperialism"Shefali Chandra's rethinking of cultural theory and modern Indian history is remarkable. Her major thesis, that Indian English has a brutal and loving social history of sexualization, will set a model for analogous studies in other national traditions. Her breakthrough argument is that English acquisition produced male cultural authority through the installation of biosexual difference. The point, then, is not the phallogocentrism of English as English but rather the installation of a 'native' phallogocentric power in the processes of colonization and postcolonization. All those who have found wanting the orthodox position in the historiography of subaltern studies will find
The Sexual Life of English an exhilarating read."—
Tani E. Barlow, author of
The Question of Women in Chinese FeminismTable of ContentsNote on Transliteration and Spelling ix
Part One
1. Learning Gender, Knowing English: An Introduction 3
2. "The Prudent and Cautious Engrafting of English Upon Our Female Population": Pedagogy and Performativity 29
3. "The Language of the Bedroom": Mimicry, Masculinity, and the Sexual Power of English 57
4. "A New Generation of Hipless and Breastless Women . . . To the Forefront in Europe and America": Literature, Social Class, and the Wider World of English 83
Part Two
5. "I Shall Read Pretty English Stories to My Mother and Translate Them into Marathi for Her": Widowhood, Virtue, and the Secularization of Caste 117
6. "Why Had I Ever Begun to Learn English?": Desire, Labor, and the Transregional Orientation of Caste 137
7. Dosebai Jessawalla and the "March of Advancement in the Face of Obloquy" 157
8. Epilogue: "I Am an Indian. I Have No Language": Parvatibai Athavale and the Limits to English 175
Salaams 191
Notes 195
Bibliography 245
Index 267
