Anjali Arondekar commences For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive by recalling an archivist's impatient question: “What are you looking for, madam?” (p. ix). This is an apt beginning for a book concerned as much with the process of looking as it is with what is eventually found. As Arondekar argues, the relationship between sexuality and the colonial archive is not constituted simply by the evidence of sexual behavior that may be found within archival texts, or even by the scholar's attempts to interpret silences in the archival record. Instead, Arondekar turns our attention to the assumptions that underpin turns to archival knowledge, asking “why does sexuality (still) seek its truth in the historical archive? What are the spatial and temporal logics that compel such a return? And conversely, what kind of archive does such a recuperative hermeneutics produce?” (p. 2). For the Record seeks to challenge this recuperative model of interpretation by investigating the “processes of subjectification” (p. 3) that are made possible and desirable through the constitution of the archive itself. This critical analysis does not, however, lead to a disavowal of archival research, and thus For the Record is replete with records of all sorts, as Arondekar investigates the mutually implicated histories of sexuality and the archive in colonial India.

Each of the book's four chapters examines a specific archival site to investigate the “epistemological stress” (p. 134) that attends its production. Such stresses are rendered visible, for instance, in the myths surrounding a missing report on male brothels in Karachi authored by Richard Burton in 1845. Supposedly suppressed by the government because of its scandalous contents, the report is repeatedly referenced by Burton himself, and later by scholars seeking to locate the text. Arondekar's interest in this report lies not in documenting its content or existence, but in asking what is at stake in searching for this scandalous text. Given the controversies attending the conquest of Sindh, Burton's invocations of the report serve to obscure the failures of colonial governance in the province by asserting a myth of colonial omniscience, whereby even the most intimate and hidden sexual practices of “natives” can be documented by the colonial bureaucrat-cum-anthropologist. Yet the report “remains stubbornly missing, a fantasmatic figuration that resists its own standardization” (p. 36), and Arondekar's careful reading of Burton's archive reveals the slippages that attend any attempt to recover the absent text.

Arondekar returns to the politics of recovery in her study of the criminal conviction in 1884 of one Khairati for allowing sodomy to be committed on his person. Khairati was tried under section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, which criminalized sexual intercourse “against the order of nature.” For several decades after the conviction, Queen Empress v. Khairati was repeatedly invoked in legal treatises as an illustration of section 377, and Arondekar examines both the case and the archive that it generated. Khairati's conviction as a “habitual sodomite” at once adopted, and simultaneously undermined, the principles of colonial legality: the case had no eyewitness, no victim, and no chronology of when the alleged offences were committed. Instead, the law mobilized bodily evidence alongside ethnographic claims to link Khairati to a community of eunuchs. The archive generated in this way instantiates a “violent repetition of Khairati's forensic embodiments (subtended anus), even as Khairati as subject cannot be found” (p. 90). Subsequent scholarly analyses, which read figures such as Khairati as hijras, risk reenacting these occlusions when they abstract hijras from “systems of capital and colonialism” (p. 91) to reference only an abstract sexuality separated from its conditions of production within the colonial archive. Arondekar develops these themes further in the final two chapters of the book, which explore the india rubber dildo within the Victorian pornographic archive, and finally, Rudyard Kipling's writings on the “Mutiny” of 1857.

Each of Arondekar's examples suggests that a recuperative hermeneutics cannot exhaust the relationship between sexuality and the colonial archive. In the wake of this book, scholars of South Asian studies and sexuality studies will be forced to rethink our assumptions about what we are looking for when we search for archival evidence about sexuality and, indeed, to pay closer attention to the relationships that undergird the constitution of particular archival sites. In this way, For the Record carries forward the research of scholars such as Antoinette Burton and Gayatri Spivak, both frequently cited by Arondekar, who have worked with and called into question the archival record. Perhaps appropriately, given Arondekar's emphasis on the process of interpretation, For the Record is not always easy on its readers. But for those who persevere, the book offers new insights not only about sexuality, but about the very process by which we write with, and through, the colonial archive.