Anjali Arondekar

speaker

496 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 1 May

Anjali Arondekar’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.

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Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society · Sex Work in Colonial India · 1 May 2026 podcast

How are you doing?

I am doing as well as possible in this global dystopia, but I await love, life and liberation.

Well, that's a great question.

And it allows me to say something about my own biography, which is always, I always tell my students, biographies are epistemologies, which is basically a fancy way of saying it provokes the questions that you want to pursue.

So I come from a sex worker family in India.

That community is called Devadasi, which is a Sanskrit word, which means slave of God.

also interchangeable with courtesan, prostitute, et cetera.

In fact, my second book is a history of that community and its refusal to be erased.

So when we talk about sex work, which is why I was so intrigued and delighted that you asked me to come on over and share the couch with you, as it were,

was because people assume that histories of sex work have been disappeared, erased.

And I want to insist on the opposite.

I mean, I come from a family community that I exist because of the work that my grandmothers did.

My mother and father were the first to be legally married.

So there is a robust counter history that exists right alongside us, which we often don't look for, which is why my first book was called For the Record, which is to say, snap, there is material in the archive that tells us about the existence of a robust, capacious, messy history of sexuality.

And the second book is called Abundance because that history is not only there, but it is efflorescent and everywhere.

And the book that I'm working on right now, which is about the British Indian oceanic territory of Mauritius, is called Oceanic Sex.

And it's about the continuation of this conversation within histories of indenture, which is that nasty little period kind of switched in between slavery and colonialism.

So I'll pause there, but it is both personal, political, and intellectual.

Absolutely.

In fact, that's the kind of opening proviso of my book, which is to say, we assume that histories of sexuality begin with origin stories of loss.

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