Orientalizing Gender, Sexuality, And Identity: Photographs of the Seventh Nizam's Zenana (Perspectives‪)‬

The factory of the harem has permeated understandings of the gender, sexuality, and identity of the "Orient". The myth of the Oriental harem satisfied bourgeois appetites for both the exotic and the erotic by projecting them upon the East, and provided a moral justification for colonization. In India, the practice of purdah, polygamy, and segregated female quarters, all aspects of the domestic zenana rather than the exoticized image of the harem, were mistakenly conflated with the harem.(1) The harem in the 19th century was a symbol of Oriental decadence, corruption, and tyranny.(2) As a result of the confusion of the zenana with the harem, the zenana did not evoke ideas about family in Western minds. Indian women living within the zenana system were believed to be sexual temptresses enslaved by the whims of despotic, decadent males, impressions popularized in Western art and literature. These misguided impressions informed how Indian men and women were perceived by the British, who upon their colonization of India in 1858 sought to reform their allegedly deviant Indian subjects, particularly in the domestic sphere, to obtain compliance with English values. As an unseen realm, the allure of the harem proved lucrative for 19th-century European painters such as Jean Dominique Ingres and John Frederick Lewis. These artists capitalized on the harem myth and established its eroticized presentation, producing for the European male and female gaze depictions of Eastern women as alluring nude odalisques and sexually rapacious sirens, while popular literature told harem tales of male indulgence, female subjugation, and generally deviant behaviour of the Oriental "other".