"This engaging and inventive book is not a typical critique of the colonial archive: it depends on the colonial record even as it exposes its limits. This is a crisp and intelligent study that provides both an accounting of the traces of sexuality in colonial India and an excursus on the writing of such a history."--Mrinalini Sinha, author of" Specters of Mother India: The Global Restructuring of an Empire"

Preface ix
Introduction. Without a Trace 1
1. A Secret Report: Richard Burton's Colonial Anthropology 27
2. Subject to Sodomy: The Case of Colonial India 67
3. Archival Attachments: The Story of an India-Rubber Dildo 97
4. In the Wake of 1857: Rudyard Kipling's Mutiny Papers 131
Coda. Passing Returns 171
Bibliography 181
Index 205

Anjali Arondekar is Associate Professor of Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz.