Made in India: Decolonizations, Queer Sexualities, Trans/national Projects. Suparna Bhaskaran. Palgrave: NY, 2004; 180 pages; ISBN 1-4039-6726-1; $33.95US (paper).
Taking to task poststructralist theories that shape anthropogical research, Suparna Bhaskaran's book, Made in India: Decolonizations, Queer Sexualities, Trans/national Projects examines multiple perspectives on feminine and queer Indian subjectivities through the matricies of both national and transnational practices. Her own dis/placement as a diasporic Indian, who was seen to be the "native informant," interested only in "all things Indian" (2), begins her search for a way to think through the colonial roots of anthropological discourse and to make those colonial connections salient to the articulation of "the modern woman" and "queerness" in India. Each chapter in the book, which can be read as an independent essay, engages with various, often contentious, western theories which are often at odds with the lived realities of the people about

106

Atlantis 31.2, 2007 PR www.msvu.ca/atlantis

whom she writes. The primary argument of the book is centered on the notion that "queer and nonheteronormative sexuality are fundamental issues of economics and material life especially in the geographic third world" (14).
The first part of the book takes anthropology and its theories to task, particularly around the formation of the discipline vis-á-vis the Other. She argues that third-world academics working in the first world, whom she refers to as anthropology's "Curdled Others," the "hyphenated, halfie..." (15), contribute to the underdevelopment of analyses of their subjects since their realities have been disciplined and accepted insofar as they are blind to their own class privilege. This, combined with the politics of multiculturalism, has created a "boomerang anthropology" that only reflects back to the student. Thus, the colonized other remains always the other. A way out, she argues, is through an idea she borrows from Maria Lugones, a "world traveling" (33) that is grounded in love and intimacy, necessary for doing the kinds of embodied analysis of thirdworld sexualities her book wants to do.
Following the theoretical framework she sets up, Bhaskaran then devotes the remainder of the book to examining the creation of the postcolonial modern woman in India through a study of the Miss World and Miss Universe pageants in the late 1990s and the hegemony of Indian pageant winners in both contests. She sees these pageants as the site where the "new" Indian woman emerges - one who is confident, independent, and who configures India in the trans/national imaginary. In the world of femininity in which these women belong, the only kind of sexuality which is present is compulsory heterosexuality.
The last two chapters of the book are case studies. Chapter Four, framed in the contemporary discourse of AIDS and family planning, focuses on the writing of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, which prohibits same-sex copulation. Much like the work of other Indian feminists, Bhaskaran demonstrates brilliantly how the writing and enforcement of Section 377 mirrored British colonial anxiety about the sexuality of the "native" in the 19th century. She ends the chapter by studying the impact of Section 377 on gay men in India.

The final chapter begins by examining the invisibility of lesbians in any of the literature she has previously discussed. She further argues that insofar as the "lesbian" exists in popular culture, she is seen as a pathologized being in need of being "cured." What does this then mean in the lives of khush (Indian gays and lesbians) women? By going through the archives of Sakhi, a now-defunct women's organization in New Delhi, Bhaskaran ends her book by studying cases of lesbian "marriages" and "double suicides," prevalent primarily in the southern state of Kerala. Ultimately, she pleads for a "radical reinvention of tradition" by activists and scholars in a way that studying the embodied sexual markings of postcolonials becomes transformative politics.
Priya Jha Redlands, CA