There is a kind of silence that settles into the bones of a people – a silence that has not grown there naturally but has been imposed by the tyrannies of oppression, in an attempt to erase memories of being. Sindhu Rajasekaran’s Forbidden Desire: How the British Stole Our Queer Pasts and Queer Futures is an excavation of this silence in search of the ancestors of our queerness in India, in all their resplendence living across the fluidities of gender and sexual orientation spectrums.Forbidden Desire: How the British Stole India’s Queer Pasts and Queer Futures, Sindhu Rajasekaran, S&S India, 2025.Breaking through the shutters and barbed wire fences built with legal, medical and social apparatuses orchestrated by the colonial masters in India, Sindhu explores how existing queer-celebratory civilisations in this country were first shamed and then systematically throttled by the British due to their Victorian prejudices and racial fear.As readers we journey through her book visiting graves of lost loves we were never told existed, meeting ghosts of people with diverse queer lives we never knew were lived. With the persistence of an archival researcher and the gentleness of a poet, Sindhu not only unfastens doorways that lead us to our myriad beautiful and complicated queer pasts, but she also unveils the many layers of our contemporary worlds where the ‘queer’ spectacularly exists, often in audacious stillness in our languages, rituals and cultures.A Jangam Lingayat. Edgar Thurston. 1909. From Castes and Tribes of Southern India, Vol. 4 of 7. Wikimedia Commons. Photo arranged by the author.In the various chapters held together with great attention to detail, Sindhu takes us through the temple corridors of Khajuraho and Konark, where eloquently designed stone bodies entangled in plays of pleasure challenge contemporary stigmas and interrogate our understandings of the sacred and profane. She reads insights from the Kamasutra where the cartography of desire paints maps that defy strictly framed boundaries of play, pleasure and pain. She guides us into the histories of the hijras and khwajasaras – legacies of cultures that made space for gender fluid identities even within a world with several discriminations.With Sindhu we also travel into the worlds of the devadasis, courtesans, and tawaifs who lived and worked very much embedded in the societal structure with families and households that were different in nature from heteronormative monogamous ones. She traces the many varieties of queer kinship patterns that existed together with differing forms of relationships between people in their sexual, romantic and familial engagements – all considered valid and tenable. This was not some ancient utopia, but a civilisation that understood what modern India has forgotten: that the landscape of human desire is as unique, varied and complex as the seasons across this country.‘Radha and Krishna Dressed in Each Other’s Clothes’. India, circa 1800-1825. Ref: M.80.232.4. Los Angeles County Museum of Art Collections. Photo arranged by the author.Then comes the rupture – the colonial powers’ deliberate destruction of this flourishing river of fluid existences, albeit with more than enough help from those among the Indian community who themselves feared and loathed the beauty of this complex diversity. The Brahmanical upper castes, the hardline among the Muslims and those who wanted to be in the grace of the Empire assisted the British in their war of erasures and enforced silencing.‘The Poll’. Thomas Rowlandson. April 12, 1784. Hand-coloured etching. Ref: 59.533.56(b). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Photo arranged by the author.Sindhu’s narrations of the British imposition of Victorian morality, is not just an analysis of policy – it is a haunting and traumatic tale of annihilation of the existence of communities, their livelihoods, and cultures. The British did not simply disapprove of what they found; they engaged in what can only be described as epistemological genocide in their attempt to apparently ‘civilise’ a population they deemed barbaric and sexually licentious. They arrived with their Bibles, laws and prejudices, their narrow categories, their terror of the body and colour of skin, and proceeded to methodically dismantle a thousand years of understanding. Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code was just one of many impositions that were not merely laws but weapons designed to sever a people from their own deepest truths. Sindhu brilliantly deconstructs how the British through a combination of legal enforcement, anthropological ‘study’, and educational reform, pathologised what they did not understand and mostly feared, enforcing rigidity where there was fluidity, instilled shame where there was celebration, and created isolation where living practices integrated ancient bonds. Unidentified womxn of the zenana. Maharaja Sawai Ram Singh II. Circa 1870. Digital reprint from wet collodion glass plate negative. The Maharaja Sawai Man Singh II Museum Trust. Photo arranged by the author.The most significant theft though, as the title suggests, was not of the past, but of the future. What happens when a queer child grows up in a world where their own mirror has shattered and all they see as their reflections are sin, sickness, foreignness? The real violence of colonisation, beyond the occupation of land and people is the occupation of time and imagination. In the case of queer people in India the devastating irony is that being queer is seen as alien and imported, a betrayal of tradition when actually homophobia is the real colonial import – a Victorian legacy gift wrapped in the flag of nationalism. Sindhu’s deep research into the colonial archives, her incisive reading between the lines and under the surfaces of the materials she foraged and her sharp analysis consolidates a formidable thesis, on the need to decolonise our ways of thinking, critiquing and arriving at the present moment through the labyrinths of the past. ‘Nob Kishen’s nautch party’. Sir Charles D’Oyly. Patna, 1825-28. Watercolour illustration for D’Oyly’s satirical poem ‘Tom Raw, The Griffin.’ Ref: IS.2-1980. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Photo arranged by the author.What also makes this book an absolute unputdownable read are Sindhu’s framing of the materials and her style of writing. The way she has gathered the fragments of our stolen past and begun the delicate work of reassembling our future is truly commendable. Archival research and legal treatises sit side by side with mythological stories and anecdotal references creating a form of storytelling that shifts seamlessly between fresh hypotheses, challenging arguments, and insightful reflections. This book connects the historical to the personal with such a sense of urgency and loss that it is hard not to bear the emotional weight of its import as a reader. But Sindhu’s perceptive inquiries are equally matched by her witty humour and funny takes that also makes the reading immensely pleasurable. ‘A Marathi theatrical group’. Bombay, 1870. Lee-Warner Collection. Wikimedia Commons. Photo arranged by the author.Forbidden Desire: How the British Stole Our Queer Pasts and Queer Futures is an essential and groundbreaking work that must be read not just by those interested in queer studies, Indian history, or post-colonial theory, but anyone seeking to understand the complex forces that have shaped modern Indian identity. Ultimately Sindhu issues a challenge which is as poetic as it is political – to unlearn the silences of our pasts and listen to the desires of our ancestors. And she assists the process by gifting us one of the tools that will help dismantle centuries of quiet – this book – a sharp knife that cuts through the shackles of colonisation.Arundhati Ghosh is a writer, cultural practitioner, social activist and traveller living in Bengaluru.