Sexualized Racial-Colonial Grotesque in the Company Archives

Abstract

Building on Michel Foucault and Ann Laura Stoler’s recontextualizing of the Foucauldian theory of sexuality, I propose the category of the “sexualized racial-colonial grotesque” to unravel the double of Warren Hastings’s crime of corruption that Edmund Burke indexes onto his construction of Munny Begum. Throughout the infamous impeachment proceedings, 1787–95, Burke is deeply disturbed by Hastings’ relationships with Indians from varied caste-gender-class categories. These relationships disrupt mobilities that are historically and socially permitted in Indian and British codes of conduct. The most unhinged example of Burke’s anxieties around the spilling over of private relationships into political decisions is Hastings’s relationship with Begum. Through this construction, Burke poses Begum’s “deviant” sexuality as generative to and of power.