Subalterns and Sanyasins in the End Game of Empire

The scholarship on the twentieth century history of South Asia and the United States has rightfully focused on diplomatic, military and economic factors. It has also shown that the South Asian relationship with US power was rarely passive, or one-sided. Building on that literature but reversing its investment in the primacy of US power, my paper explores the generative role of India in one aspect of the history of South Asia and the United States: India’s role in producing and guiding the discourses of sex. I examine two, possibly inter-related, developments integral to the complex relationship between India and the United States, both of which occurred in the 1980s and both of which crafted sex as the object of debate. I will discuss the formation of the commune of Rajneeshpuram in Oregon and its rapid achievement of world-wide notoriety, and secondly, the consolidation of “South Asian postcolonial” scholarship. My interest is to probe the institutional locations, the cultural codes and the lived embodiment of these highly charged and citationally mobile developments. Together they underscore how sex became highly significant to the twentieth century history of Indo-US relations.

Overturning the assumption that epistemic and material power emerged from the United States, I argue instead that India entered the end game of a bipolar world order to normalize a new imperial formation. Sex was absolutely critical to this project: it was a primary motor of transnational interaction between the United States and India. By centering the politics of citation, my paper problematizes ideas of US power and hegemony, explores why India and Indians mobilized sex in the dwindling years of the Cold War, why the United States was particularly receptive to this self-fashioning, and questions how the process widened the hegemonies of Hinduism, Brahmanism, whiteness and heterosexuality upon a global stage.