Anjali Arondekar

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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

But when we talk about colonial India, the kind of ravages around histories of sexuality are not just because of the colonial state, which of course I would love to blame for everything, but the kind of messiness of sexuality is also because of the ravages of religion and caste, C-A-S-T-E,

which for some of your listeners may be an unfamiliar term, but is a term which is a division of labor, which is predestined.

You are born into a caste, unlike class, which is mobile.

And it is a division of laborers, as Dr. Bidker says.

So I think because of this messy, you know, and I think sexuality is always the perfect case to think about these questions because it is where everything goes wrong and where everything goes right.

Yeah.

Well, let me begin with the story that I always tell my undergraduates to explain to them the kind of immensity of the British colonial empire.

So Joseph Conrad, in his very famous book, Heart of Darkness, which I'm sure some of your readers are familiar with, begins the story, his central protagonist, with a map.

And he sort of looks at a map of the globe and he says, here are some dark spaces and here are some blank spaces.

And then he talks about the fact that Britain used to be a dark place, meaning a place worthy of civilization.

And then we move on to the 19th century and it becomes the civilizing force.

But one of the things about that map, and if you sort of draw up a map of the 19th century, late 19th century, Britain, which is the size of my armpit in terms of geographies, right?

It's not very big, but it colonized almost one quarter of the globe, right?

So I think your listeners need to understand the scale of colonial extraction, exploitation that we're talking about.

I mean, in terms of dates, again, a reminder for your listeners, dates are our kind of historical hangers, things that we like to hang things on, but things don't always begin and end when we say they do.

So the beginning of the East India Company, which I would argue is one of the first transnational corporations, begins in 1757 with the famous Battle of Plassey.

When Robert Clive, thanks to a conniving collaborator who is an Indian, overthrows a major ruler in India, the East India Company arrive.

They take over.

Fast forward 100 years.

They're not doing so well because militarization doesn't work without seduction of some other sort.

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