Gendering English: Sexuality, gender and the language of desire in Western India, 1850-1940

This article traces the mutually constitutive and dynamic relationship between the English language and gender in colonial India. English enabled new evaluations of public and private, masculine and feminine. Simultaneously, the content, meaning and purpose of English were informed by wide shifts in the discourse over sexual difference. Focusing on the western Indian cities of Bombay and Poona from 1850 to 1940, I discuss the debates and institutional changes that first marked English as desirable for the socialisation of the bourgeois colonial female subject, the changes produced by the portrayal of English as threatening to indigenous culture and 'native' masculinity and finally the manner in which a newly domesticated English was subsumed to the requirements of a fixed, indigenous gender regime. This history demonstrates how gender inflected the social role of English and how English, in turn, shaped new alliances between men, women and sexuality.