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.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

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

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

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

So again, like what I said about before and after, it is also organized around this idea of what those of us in the business would call colonial difference.

So in order...

for me to travel somewhere else and extract, exploit, fetishize.

I need to have a sense of what is different about you from me that allows me to rape, ravage, seduce, right?

Think about that trilogy.

is because I have to rhetorically stage a difference.

So one of the primary differences of the colonial difference was not just race, it was also sexuality.

So if you read, you know, what I call ethnopornographers, meaning all of these travelogues that are written from the 17th century on about people who traveled to India, to Egypt.

Remember, there was no India before independence.

What was then Hindustan, which is the broader congeneries of states,

All of these ethnopornographic texts basically hone in on the differences of practice, rituals, etc., which I don't tell the whole story, but they tell a story that's different from what they've experienced, say, on the shores of England, right?

Yeah.

This fetishization, this fantasy of Indian sexuality being free and rampant and more flexible, all puns intended, is also an imaginative form.

It doesn't mean it's not there.

But remember, in the 19th century, when our British friends are traversing across oceans, dying of diarrhea, only about one-fourth of the people make it.

England is also the largest producer of pornography.

I wrote a chapter about this called The Story of the India Rubber Dildo, which is about the fact that in the 19th century, England is producing more pornographic texts in England than the Bible.

So this idea of us Victorians, us Brits, we are a little bit concerned.

We know it's complete rubbish, but the question is how do you historically shore up this fantasy, right?

How do you use it to make colonialism work, right?

Showing 121–140 of 496 · page 7 of 25