Post-colonialism, an interdisciplinary field that developed in the 1980s, examines the culture of colonialism by re-reading colonial texts through a de-colonizing eye. It provides tools to examine dilemmas of post-colonial societies that are in part tied to their colonial roots, while also offering insights into a spectrum of practices of resistance and accommodation. This chapter outlines some of post-colonial scholarship’s major contributions to understanding sexuality in colonial contexts, including the Americas, Africa, and Asia. Post-colonial scholarship has helped historians write new histories of the discipline and rule of sexual bodies under colonialism. It has emphasized that far from being only a process of economic extraction, colonialism shaped the ways that we see, know, and experience sexuality together with race, gender, and nationality. Post-colonialism continues to provide analytical tools for decolonizing knowledge and debate over sexual issues in formerly colonized societies and their metropoles, including same-sex marriages, transgender identities, and sex as paid labour. It has opened doors for new interpretations of tradition, as many people deploy post-colonial thinking in re-imagining cultural knowledge.

The chapter provides an insight into the complex sexual milieu of Bombay in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Beginning with the Rajabai Tower case as a key narrative, numerous facets of the city, such as cosmopolitanism, group identities, the link between forensics and sexual assault, racial profiling, and police corruption, are discussed. Also examined are the spatial controversies surrounding Bombay’s red-light neighbourhoods and links between spatiality and the identity of prostitutes. Pop culture’s role in shaping a sexual ethos, in Parsi theatre and later Bombay cinema, and particularly the unique position of performative androgyny, is reviewed. Further, the impact of contagious disease acts and the fluid definition of prostitution is studied. Finally, the role of eugenics is surveyed, and the extremely divisive and convoluted politics of the eugenics movement is analyzed.

Based on ethnographic encounters in India over three decades, the authors reflect on what it means to study gender and the sexual. They argue that knowledge of gender and the sexual is bound up with epistemological and historical legacies, political ruptures, and subjective estrangements. In particular, the chapter critically engages the trajectories through which ontological assumptions about gendered and sexual selves have been configured and reconfigured over time. Moving away from the assumptions of “interiority” as the space for articulating or experiencing subjectivity, and from notions of “authentic,” extant cultural “types,” they look at the shifting material conditions and multiple temporal trajectories of forms of identification and self-evincing. Gendering and evincing of sexual selves emerge as terrains of partial connectedness between people, concepts, and material “things” as opposed to wholly defining attributes of any given subject. Three categories of gendered and sexual selves (kothi, hijra, and transgender) emerge and disappear over time in relation to each other, and to registers and economies of signification of law, health policy, activism, religious nationalism, and anthropology. This took shape within and across intimate lifeworlds, state actions, and transnational (mis)connections, here apprehended ethnographically.