The Home and the World

This article attends to the legacies of Indian Ocean migrations in the construction of women as integral to the territorial sense of Indian nationhood. Specifically, it examines Mauritian writer Ananda Devi’s novel Indian Tango (2007), which rewrites Satyajit Ray’s cinematic adaptation of Rabindranath Tagore’s Ghare-Baire (1916) from a transnational queer feminist perspective. Tracing the novel’s historical intertexts in Indian nationalist and anti-indenture discourses, the article argues that Devi reorients feminine desire towards an erotic autonomy that reimagines diasporic affiliation through queer kinship, challenging the control of female sexuality within the heterosexual family as the basis of the nation

Autonomy · Diaspora · Human sexuality · Kinship · Nationalism · Political science · Politics · Queer · Sociology · Anthropology · Gender Studies · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · Socioeconomic Development in Asia · South Asian Cinema and Culture