The Ethics of Erotics: Engaging Persian Literature in Colonial India

Historians of colonial India have held that nineteenth-century Indian intellectuals absorbed Victorian sexual ethics. Bashfulness in talking about sex and silence on same-sex matters are said to have become the norm for the colonized. These cultural changes allegedly dovetailed with a linguistic change: a turn away from Persian towards English and Indian ‘vernaculars.’ This paper questions these historiographical tenets by drawing on the Indian reception of a classical Persian text of Islamic ethics, the Gulistan of Saʿdi (d. 1291). The Gulistan was among the most printed texts in the nineteenth century, with its editions frequently containing marginal commentaries, interlinear translations, variant readings, and visual illustrations. Attention to these prints reveals that a significant number of Indian scholars and lay readers engaged openly with the sexual and homoerotic themes of the Gulistan. As in the precolonial era, Indians approached the text under a paradigm that I call the ethics of erotics: experiencing and discoursing upon desire was part of this paradigm, but acting upon same-sex desire was prohibited. In the space between desire, language, and action, lay the possibility of ethical cultivation. Through attention to the Muslims and non- Muslims involved in this publishing industry, this paper reveals a cross-communal engagement with Persian literature, continuities between early modern and colonial-era Indian engagements with sexual themes, and the enduring role of Islamic ethical literature in propagating sexual
knowledge in colonial India.