Indigenizing Sexuality and National Citizenship: Shyam Selvadurai's Cinnamon Gardens‪.‬

The intersection of feminist and postcolonial critique has enabled us to understand some of the co-implications of gendering, sexuality, and postcolonial nation building. Anne McClintock, for instance, argues that nations "are historical practices through which social difference is both invented and performed" and that "nations have historically amounted to the sanctioned institutionalization of gender difference" (89; italics in original). "Women's reproduction is put to service for the nation in both concrete and symbolic ways: women reproduce ethnicity biologically (by bearing children) and symbolically (by representing core cultural values), and the injunction to women to reproduce within the norms of marriage and ethnic identification, or heterosexual endogamy, makes women also "reproducers of the boundaries of ethnic/national groups" (Yuval-Davis and Anthias 8-9; emphasis added). National identity may be routed through gender, sexuality, and class, such that "respectability" and bourgeois norms, including heterosexuality, are seen as essential to nationalism, perhaps most notably in nations seeking independence from colonial power (Mosse; de Mel). Shyam Selvadurai's historical novel Cinnamon Gardens, set in 1927-28 Ceylon, is a valuable contribution to the study of gender and sexuality in national discourses, for it explores in nuanced ways the roots of gender norms and policed sexuality in nation building. Cinnamon Gardens indigenizes Ceylonese/Sri Lankan homosexuality not by invoking the available rich history of precolonial alternative sexualities in South Asia, but rather by tying sexuality to the novel's other themes of nationalism, ethnic conflict, and women's emancipation. This article will argue that, although the novel rarely links sexuality overtly to the nation, Selvadurai in fact makes the link through the tension between endogamy and exogamy. Ethnicity and women's emancipation may be the overt flashpoints for nationalism in Selvadurai's novel, but he brings sexuality to the forefront by linking it with narratives focusing on the surveillance of reproductive choices, especially the rules regarding proximity and distance in kinship ties for marriage partners. Sameness/difference in ethnic terms, I argue here, functions in Selvadurai's novel as a parallel to same-sex/different-sex relationships. That Selvadurai's attention to alternative sexualities in early twentieth century Ceylon must be directed slantwise, as it were, attests to the non-centrality of this cultural history in Sri Lankan scholarship, and the pressing need for an at least imaginative attention to its material history. (1) Tony Ballantyne points out that the paucity of attention to gender and the cultural history of emotion in South Asian historiographic work means that the "small voices" (the term is Ranajit Guha's) of subaltern figures such as women can be found primarily in personal archives, where they are "fleeting traces and isolated textual fragments" (106). Selvadurai's epigraph declares that he intends to show the connection between "unhistoric" and "hidden" personal lives and historical forces in Ceylon (Cinnamon Gardens n.p.), and he makes sexuality historical not so much by revealing an archive of contemporary sexually diverse Ceylonese figures, but rather by linking sexuality to the more historically central issue of ethnicity. We might speculate that Selvadurai's preference for a realist form of narrative precludes his invoking precolonial Ceylonese examples of alternative sexual and gender roles and anachronistically bringing them to 1920s Ceylon. (2) Indeed, he has noted the extent to which Western ideas of "bourgeois respectability [and] Victorian morality" permeated Ceylon/Sri Lanka (Marks 7). He does, though, present us with two more direct examples of indigenous connections to alternative sexualities that must be noted before this discussion takes up the 'indirect' argument. First, one of the two central characters, Balendra