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Chapter 3 - Body

Indenture, Nationalism, and Queer Contours of Diaspora

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 December 2025

Kritish Rajbhandari
Affiliation:
Reed College, Oregon
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Summary

This chapter attends to the legacies of Indian Ocean migrations in Indian contexts, where nationalist politics also underwent a process of conflating national identity with not just territory, but with women as integral to that territorial sense of nationhood. Specifically, it examines queer desire and the gendered construction of the nation through Mauritian writer Ananda Devi’s novel Indian Tango (2007). Devi rewrites Satyajit Ray’s cinematic adaptation (1984) of Rabindranath Tagore’s influential national allegory Ghare-Bāire (The Home and the World) (1916) from a transnational queer feminist perspective. Examining the novel’s intertextual relationship with Tagore’s text, Ray’s film, and early twentieth century anti-indenture discourses, the chapter argues that Devi reorients feminine desire towards an erotic autonomy that reimagines diasporic affiliation and challenges the control of female sexuality within the heterosexual family as the basis of the nation. The assertion of diasporic connection through female erotic autonomy doubly deconstructs the Indian nationalist subject defined through the exclusion of the diasporic other as well as the queer female other.

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  • Body
  • Kritish Rajbhandari, Reed College, Oregon
  • Book: The Indian Ocean and the Historical Imagination in Afro-Asian Fiction
  • Online publication: 19 December 2025
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009627764.004
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  • Body
  • Kritish Rajbhandari, Reed College, Oregon
  • Book: The Indian Ocean and the Historical Imagination in Afro-Asian Fiction
  • Online publication: 19 December 2025
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009627764.004
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Body
  • Kritish Rajbhandari, Reed College, Oregon
  • Book: The Indian Ocean and the Historical Imagination in Afro-Asian Fiction
  • Online publication: 19 December 2025
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009627764.004
Available formats
×