“Peeping Through a Chink”

In his field-defining manifesto, Ranajit Guha theorized subaltern as “the general attribute of subordination in South Asian society whether this is expressed in terms of class, caste, age, gender, and office or in any other way. This article reflects on why “age” has barely been historicized or theorized as “an attribute of subordination” or a category of analysis in South Asian historiography and shows how age, because it appears as a natural or universal trait, both perpetuates and disguises exclusions premised on other forms of difference. It uses the juridical archive of sodomy in colonial India to showcase how age effected subalternity in colonial courtrooms and traces the paradoxical ways in which age continues to play into understandings of the “sexual subaltern” and in movements for sexual rights. It argues that the foregrounding of age can serve to reanimate a radical politics that comprehends sexual subalternity in terms of political relationality rather than as a form of sexual identity

Anthropological Studies and Insights · History · South Asian Cinema and Culture · South Asian Studies and Diaspora

• Sexology’s Childhood

  Ishita Pande•Osiris•2026

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