“They would make the Mangs and Mahars drink oil mixed with red lead and bury our people in the foundations of their buildings, thus wiping out generation after generation of our poor people. The Brahmans have degraded us so low; they consider people like us even lower than cows and buffaloes.” — Muktabai Salve, About the Grief of the Mangs and Mahars (translated from Marathi)

In 1855, a young Dalit girl wrote these words, exposing a society structured by caste violence – quite literally on the burial of Dalit bodies. More than a century later, Sindhu Rajasekaran’s Forbidden Desire: How the British Stole India’s Queer Pasts seeks to recover India’s lost queer histories. Yet in its attempt to decolonise, it overlooks the caste histories that structured the material realities of people i

See Full Page