I’m going to start off by talking about the Niranjana article, since I feel I have more to say about the novel we read for this week. Niranjana discusses Indian nationalists’ concern with the migration of “immoral” women to become indentured laborers in the Caribbean from around 1882 to 1900. Something I found interesting about this concern with “immorality” is that one of the possible explanations given for the amount of “immoral” women working as indentured servants was that only women from the lower castes made good indentured laborers, and that women from higher castes would not be so immoral. This made me think about the relationship of purity/impurity to caste that we discussed in class last week. It also reminded me of the discourse of unnatural/natural sex, because both moral/immoral and natural/unnatural are extremely vague but heavily charged binaries.

In Cereus Blooms at Night I paid close attention to the nuanced ways in which sexuality was referred to by different people. (I also considered that it might only be that way because of a choice the author made– the story is, after all, being told through his narrative voice).  For example, the way Mala chooses to tell Chandin that she accepts his sexuality is by bringing him a female nurse’s dress for him to wear. She doesn’t make a spectacle out of the gesture, causing Tyler to take it as a genuine acceptance of his true self.

I thought the development of the relationship between Sarah and Lavinia was very subtle, but then realized that this might have only been my initial reaction due to the fact that the identity of queer South Asian women is framed as being “impossible”. I had to check myself and my assumption that they were nothing more than friends from the start of their relationship.

Finally, I find myself wondering how I can connect the Niranjana article to Cereus Blooms at Night. Can they be connected, and if so, how?