• 1 Anjali Arondekar is a professor of Feminist Studies in the Center for South Asian Studies at the Un (...)

1In this book, Anjali Arondekar1 aims to address the well-established idea that there is a lack of material on the history of sexuality in South Asia. In her study of the Gomantak Maratha Samaj, she proposes to consider sources as abundant in order to overcome the “chimeric prose of paucity and plenitude” between the “present marked by an inescapable surfeit of evidence” and “the past … haunted by an unremitting loss of materials” (p. 1). The concern over archival loss and, consequently, the disappearance of subordinated groups throughout history have been a recurrent preoccupation in historiography. The absence of a wide range of material traces, voices, and bodies in historical sources has been a central issue to postcolonial and feminist literature (Spivak 1988; Chakrabarty & Roy 1988). In such a context, loss and erasure have become meaningful spaces of investigation for historians, as it allows them to consider power over sources as a political problem and not only a methodological concern. As Nairsagi Dave (2011) reminds us, the opposition between the lack or the profusion of archives corresponds to our own expectations over the past and leads us “to acknowledge—in our dualistic schema of lost and found, presence and absence, that our own time and space is just as empty (or just as full) as the archival sites we turn to in order to sanction our present” (Dave 2011, pp. 16-17). Arondekar’s book echoes this perspective and proposes to explore the relationship to loss and abundance in an archival site, entangling issues of caste, gender, and sexuality.

• 2 Scholars such as Avanthi Meduri (2018) consider that devadasis made key contributions to the renewa (...)

2The author presents the Gomantak Maratha Samaj (referred to as the Samaj) as a devadasi collectivity that emerged within the context of the Portuguese colonial occupation of Goa. Devadasis, both as a gendered social role and as a community, have a complex status in India. While the word “devadasi” primarily designates a female slave of a god or a master in Sanskrit, they are mainly classical artists, singers, and dancers2 from lower caste origins who live as communities more or less related to temples. While they are often attached to ritual duties and dances, their functions include important regional variations. They are also associated with prostitution even though they are not always sex workers. Yet their unusual status outside marriage results in the wider stigmatization of their sexuality. Arondekar specifies that the dedication to deities and sex work, prevalent in the study of devadasis from South India, is less accurate for the Samaj, whose members were mostly professional dancers and singers. In Portuguese sources, they were called bailadeiras (dancing girls), but members also referred to themselves as kalavants (artists). While their existence dates back to the early eighteenth century, the organization was formally created in 1927 in Goa and extended to Mumbai and Maharashtra, forming a diasporic devadasi community in Western India. The Samaj started self-archiving since their very emergence as a formal organization. Today, their archives are located in Panaji and Mumbai and gather diverse documentation in Konkani, Marathi, and Portuguese, including recordings of vocal performances, volumes of their monthly journal Samaj Sudharak, photographs, petitions, juridical documents, and also fictional narratives.

• 3 OBC (Other Backward Castes) is a category within the Indian affirmative action system meant to prov (...)

3Arondekar uses abundance as a historiographical concept through her study of this community and starts her argument with two of her own experiences in the Samaj’s archives. In the first one, she recalls her discovery of the collections and her impression of how precious the archival materials were, rooted in the usual scholarly rhetoric of loss. These feelings contrasted with the reaction of the archivist, whose daily working experience was one of limited storage capacity, and the profusion of documentation continuously donated to the organization. With this abundance of materials, the risk of loss became a “laughable matter” in “an oversaturated archive” (Arondekar 2009a, p. 130). The other noteworthy event Arondekar describes happened in Mumbai when a former member of the Samaj came to the archive asking for an OBC3 certification for her son’s inscription at the university so that he could benefit from the reservation system. In this context, archives carry legal value to allow people’s access to their rights. However, the secretary answered that their organization was considered a suspicious record keeper for such certification and faced accusations of caste fabrication, the increasing cases of caste falsification having resulted in stricter verifications (p. 7). The difficulties this woman faced when trying to certify her family’s identity under bureaucratic expectations highlight the blurred frontier of castes “as an open-ended fiction, not of bounded life but of an ongoing oppressive present, full of imperfection and fantasy” (p. 9). Starting from these examples and taking abundance as a theoretical perspective, the book seeks to reconsider three key concepts in the history of sexuality: the archives as historical evidence, their exemplarity in the analysis of this evidence, and geopolitics as positionality in analysis.

• 4 The title is a reference to a poem by Meena Alexander, “Birthplace with Buried Stones” (2013).

4The first chapter, “In the Absence of Reliable Ghosts,”4 discusses the archives’ reliability as “evidence materials” for histories of sexuality, especially considering how colonial records are rooted in the logic of archival secrecy (Arondekar 2005). For communities such as the Gomantak Maratha Samaj, the abundance within their own archive stands in sharp contrast to their absence from official archives. The expression “reliable ghosts” therefore refers to the hegemonic omnipresence of certain materials, considered more legitimate than others. Furthermore, the few existing testimonies and biographies of members highlight the importance of fiction or hybrid narratives in the Samaj archives. For example, the autobiographical account Mee kon, written by Rajaram Rangoji Paigankar, relates reprisal led by Brahmins in a devadasi house in 1921, within the context of protestation against caste hierarchy and the sexual exploitation of devadasi women by Brahmin men. According to this text, the attack was organized by Paigankar himself who alleges that it resulted in Portuguese protection and a trial granting the community’s demands, even though there is no official record of the actual verdict in the colonial archives of either Goa or Lisbon (p. 39). The strategic invention of the attack opens a space of “radical representativity” that is highly aware of the necessity to create or erase an event (p. 41) within the context of caste domination that Paigankar explicitly mentioned, as he was himself the offspring of a devadasi mother of Goa and a Saraswat (Brahmin) father (Arondekar 2009a:121). Further consideration of the Samaj kinship systems also shows variable practices of filiation, questioning norms of names and caste reproduction under the usual model of endogamous marriage. Many devadasis maintained monogamous relationships with Brahmins, especially the Saraswat cast, who frequented the kalavantin houses as yajemans, both patrons and partners. In some cases, children born from these kinds of relationships would take the father’s higher caste name without his consent, bringing confusion into a normative kinship system. Furthermore, adoption and diffuse parenting were commonly practiced within the community, with the limited role of the biological parents and the implication of a wider set of relatives, blurring the norms of social reproduction and transmission. From fictional narratives to the disruption of the evidentiary paradigm of names and papers in castes identifications, “the Samaj’s story challenges and indeed undermines the very idea and entelechy of an archive” (p. 45), questioning the modalities of recording (and writing) sexuality and caste histories.

• 5 Arondekar relocates the word “timepass,” from Hinglish, as a concept in India that means “to kill t (...)

5These reflections lead the author to question the meaning of the archival exemplarity. The second chapter, “A History I am Not Writing”, is “an invitation to move with these deliberations on the archival exemplar” in order to “to find a way to craft a history that would speak to the conundrum of the archival trace, not to decode it (because we cannot) but more to embrace its roving and fractal complexity” (p. 67). Arondekar proposes the concept of timepass5 in historical writing to question the very criteria of value in temporalities: “timepass incorporates and implicates the labor of time into its referent, … to access archival moments where the demands of representation are out-lived, canceled, evaded, and reanimated” (pp. 68-69). She takes the example of a 1911 petition against the installation of Samaj devadasis in a fancy neighborhood in Bombay, where they were described as “evil ladies of Girgaum” bringing the “growing evil” of prostitution. The absence of proper data and the special relations of devadasis with their clients did not allow this petition to be considered by the government secretary, who concluded the request was based on an imagined threat. The very mobilization was rooted in a movement of respectability supported by upper-caste women whose husbands were frequently visiting devadasis, but their protestation also corresponded to economic and property issues, as the Samaj were progressively acquiring real estate through negotiations, heritage from yajemans, and complex payment methods. Within the context of the colonial urban development of Mumbai, the presence of the devadasis and their growing economic power makes Arondeker consider “the archival trace, less as a marginalized, erased archival trace of sexuality, and more as a warehouse of the imaginaries of property, caste, and sexuality” (p. 80).

• 6 QAMRA (Queer Archive for Memory, Reflection and Activism) is a queer activist archive, based in Ben (...)

9Arondekar’s theoretical proposition about abundance nevertheless makes one wonder how it can be applied outside this specific case study. As she herself pointed out in an earlier work, the Samaj are the only known devadasi community that has maintained a continuous archive over such a long period of time (Arondekar 2012, p. 247). Without reducing the theoretical scope of abundance, any historical undertaking, including that for the Samaj, remains conditioned to the irreducible materiality of archives and the uncertain circumstances of their production and preservation. However, the critique of the dualist opposition between abundance and scarcity has wider implications. It is also a call to consider the potential divergence of different communities’ aspirations from the recuperative rhetoric, especially when it is external to the community itself. The unequal representations and bias in public spaces, both in heritage and archival dynamics, carry different reactions and political initiatives. While the Samaj are deeply invested in preserving their past through their self-archiving project, the accumulation of documents over one century has led to an experience of archival overflow that is now entirely a part of how the community perceives its own history. Different positions can also coexist, as “the Samaj’s incitement to archive … is surpassed only by its startling disinterest in the preservation and circulation of the very materials it continuously produces” (p. 16). Parmesh Shahani also recalls how his own experience of discovering QAMRA’s archive6 in 2020 gave him mixed diverse feelings and impressions: “Many of the stories I encounter while going through all these different online and offline archives are not just about despair. There is also an abundance of joy as portrayed in the work of the historian Anjali Arondekar, for instance, [who] looks at Indian queer history as one of abundance, not loss” (Shahani 2020). Thus, “inextricably linked to the histories of subordinated collectivities, [abundance] as a historiographical orientation … challenges the narratives of their constant devaluation” (p. 3). Even though the disappearance of materials remains a central preoccupation, especially for militant archives, the main point of Arondekar’s work is to surpass the idea of scarcity as an absolute undertaking of the histories of subordinated groups.