Revisiting Sex and the Family

Abstract

T h e r e i s a d o c u m e n T f r o m my first book, Sex and the Family in Colonial India, that continues to haunt me because it represents an important omission in how I explained sexuality in colonial India. The document I am thinking of is the will of a woman named Elizabeth who died in 1803 leaving three children fathered by three European men who had come to India as soldiers in the army.1 She left a substantial estate, as well as a list of debts that she was owed. She asked her executors to distribute her estate to her three children. She named her children and their respective fathers in the will, while she identified herself as “a native woman.” Whether Elizabeth was her “real” name or the name given to her by her English partners is unclear. She has no last name, nor do we know if Elizabeth was her only name, a problem that plagued my research on enslaved and subjugated populations.2 I had an aha moment when I found this will in a bound volume of Bengal wills at the British Library in London, because texts written by women who identified as “native” were extremely rare at the turn of the nineteenth century. One of the continuing dissatisfactions I have with my early work is how quickly I gave up on researching families with gay, queer, and trans* subjects.3 Elizabeth’s reproductive biography is relatively easy to track—there were offspring who “proved” the predominance of sexual relationships between white men and brown women, which was the goal of my first book. As I reflect on my adherence to the logics of the archive, I know that