MONDAY, MAY 13, 2024
Vivek Menezes
It is only now, six long decades after decolonization, that some of the inconvenient truths about Goa’s complicated histories - which pose continual, and indeed often insuperable challenges to the prevailing simplistic, majoritarian or nationalist readings - are being analyzed with the close attention they’ve always merited. With her brilliantly conceived Abundance: Sexuality’s History, Professor Anjali Arondekar (who teaches Feminist Studies at the University of California at Santa Cruz, where she is the Founding Director of the Center for South Asian Studies) has reset the bar very high, with one of the best, richest and most important books of Indian historiography ever written. It’s a huge achievement, with even huger implications for how we assess and think about our collective past.
Although not yet well known in her ancestral homeland, Arondekar has been an academic rockstar for a long time. Born in 1968, she left India at 17 after being awarded a scholarship to represent India at the Armand Hammer United World College in New Mexico, then received her undergraduate degree as a college scholar (reserved for students of “exceptional academic promise”) at Cornell University, and went on to earn her PhD at the University of Pennsylvania. Her debut monograph For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India (Duke University Press, 2009) won the Alan Bray Memorial Book Award for the best book in lesbian, gay or queer studies in literature and cultural studies from the Modern Language Association. Now, her UCSC page says that “broadly speaking, I read and write within established disciplines (history, literature, law) and field formations (area studies, queer/sexuality studies), mobilizing South Asia through its multilingual and divergent colonial and national formations.”
There is an additional crucial biographical twist here, however, which imbues much of Arondekar’s work with incandescent urgency. That is, Abundance is not only an intellectual tour-de-force, but also an insider’s presentation. As the author herself puts it, her book “The past is not only usable here but always somewhere close at hand. I grew up within the bawdy, colorful and expansive lower-caste politics of the Gomantak Maratha/Kalavant Samaj, and it is those familial genealogies that first opened me up to the urgencies of archives and politics. My questions thus emanate from those intimacies; they are of them, but not about them. Contravening the protocols of data collection (be they of collectivity, family, caste, music) was not just a familiar feature of my Samaj life, but a profoundly political matter. One’s history was not a place of capture; it was a compositional lexicon of self-making, to be continuously taught, modulated, inhabited and shed. I can do no better than to tell that story.”
For abiding by her task with such determined verve and vigour, backed by over 400 sources (with some 50 pages of footnotes an absolute treasure in themselves), we owe an immense debt of gratitude to Arondekar’s ongoing lifetime of toil. The result is any number of profound and game-changing insights, because the relentless making and unmaking of selves that is the story of the Gomantak Maratha Samaj – once admiringly referred to as Bharatil ek Aggressor Samaj– is at the heart of modern Goan identity as well. I especially liked how this was put: “Unlike oft-circulated histories of devadasis in South Asia that lament the disappearance or erasure of devadasis, the history of the Samaj offers no telos of loss and recovery. Instead, the Samaj, from its inception, has maintained a continuous, copious and accessible archive of its own emergence, embracing rather than disavowing its past and present attachments to sexuality.”
Abundance is the sum of Arondekar’s highly impressive engagement with that all-important Samaj archive, and it would be a mistake to summarize too much further from this instant classic now that it is easily available in India. But I did email the author at her home in California to ask some questions, including how to best categorize this elegant, beautifully produced book (about which my initial reaction was to think of Susan Sontag, and then Teju Cole). Her response: “Less than antecedents, I draw inspiration from the many scholars and activists who have been working on caste, gender and sexuality in South Asia— all of them have pushed back against the mandates of conventional history, and demanded we seek new vernaculars for carving out our lives and futures. This book is very much in conversation with that struggle.”
How did she manage to navigate all her personal entanglements in this subject matter? Arondekar said that “as a minority scholar, I don’t think one ever eludes the burden and/or responsibility of representation. All one can do (as I have tried to here) is to temper and attenuate the force of those expectations. I always tell my students and anyone else who wants to listen that biography cannot be an obdurate exemplar or an uncomplicated place of expertise; it must always be a place of un/learning and a site of knowledge. I say very clearly in my introduction that this book is of the Samaj but not about the Samaj at the same time. So, while the book engages robustly with the GMS, it is not a hagiography of the Samaj either. Instead, I work with the Samaj as an archive that allows us to ask difficult and necessary questions about our past and our desires for a simple and redemptive history. What that means is that there will be many members of the Samaj who disagree with the claims of the book, even as there will be many who celebrate its place in the world. When I began archival research on this project, I published a general letter in our monthly Samaj newsletter, asking for permission to begin this research, and for the most part, received great support and encouragement.”
In our exchanges, it was easy to see this stellar America-based academic was particularly keen that her new book should be read, understood and assimilated in India’s smallest state. When I asked her directly about this, Arondekar responded with palpable emotion: “my fierce Aai was born in Shiroda, and I grew up within a community of strong female elders who always thought of Goa as home. Konkani was a familial language as were annual trips to Goa. So, Goa has always been my second home, indeed a place of sanctuary and resistance in our checkered Samaj history. What has always surprised me is the pride that Goans take in claiming kalavants such as Amonkar, Mangeshkar and Kurdikar as their own, and how prickly we are about engaging the histories of sexuality that undergird the emergence of these kalavants. Similarly, the rise and impact of Dayanand Bandodkar is rightfully lauded and celebrated, even as his connections to a Devadasi samaj are relegated to the backyard of Goan history. As I repeatedly note, the Samaj’s uplift was made possible through the labor (coercive and otherwise) of hundreds of Goan devadasis who made it possible for someone like me to do the work I do today. To cover over that story is to reproduce the violence of caste-oppression, and to once again, not see the abundance founding our histories. That is sexuality’s history, that is Goa’s history.”
