Appearing in Bal Gangadhar Tilak's newspaper The Mahratta in 1884, the above words crystallize some of the patriarchal anxieties set off by women's English education in the latter half of the nineteenth century in western India. Some were concerned that English would encroach on the Marathi language by seducing upper-caste women away from their normative roles. Others argued variously that English-educated women would be more fit to discharge household duties; that English was simply superior and thus should be the medium of women's education, particularly if natives wished to establish cultural parity with the British (an argument that was also made by British administrators); and that English would in fact animate rather than encroach upon Marathi. This is the terrain charted in historian Shefali Chandra's The Sexual Life of English, a book that carefully traces how the English language came to be indigenized “as a critical effect of native gender regimes” (p. 27). Chandra asks: “How did native codes of gender and sexuality shape the history and symbolic power of English, and how in turn did English infuse conjugality, desire and caste?” (p. 6). The book addresses these key questions through two roughly equal segments. Part 1 lays out the acerbic debates around women's education by the earliest proponents as well as detractors of women's English education. Part 2 turns to biographies, autobiographies, and novels focusing largely on women's desire to learn English, probing the gendered subject effects brought about by English education and revealing how it reproduced caste hierarchies by directing sexual desire within the modern, upper-caste conjugal unit.

Chandra enters confidently onto a field inaugurated and developed largely by literary critics like Gauri Viswanathan, Kumkum Sangari, and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan. Chandra narrates how English took root in India not only as a tool of colonial control via English literary texts, but through the agency of a Brahman native elite whose consolidation of caste power in the process is often obscured under an overarching attribution of “anticolonialism.” Departing from the above literary scholars, she draws upon the methodology of cultural studies to argue that “the social categories of Indian society shaped the history of English” (p. 13), rather than merely being shaped by it. For Chandra, “English” is simply “what people say it is and what it does” (p. 6). In the debates she tracks across a fascinating archive of school records, newspaper articles, memoirs, and popular culture of the period, she points out, “English” appears not as a set of literary texts, but as “a sign that supervises behavior, sexual power, and caste” (p. 7). Chandra—a skilled reader of texts—shows how this supervisory effect was evident, for example, in Taruni shikshan natika (1886), a popular Marathi play in which one English-educated female character, Chimni (the name means “sparrow,” underscoring the character's flightiness), appears dressed in “bootstockings,” flirts with her male English teacher, declares her education more desirable than a life with her husband, and ends up a prostitute. This fictional sexualization of English-educated Indian women—echoed in nonfictional discourse as well—is one prime example of what Chandra calls “sexual-citational grafting, the association of sexual signs with languages” (p. 17). Of course, proponents of women's English education also agreed on the standards of sexual “respectability” held up by detractors like Kanitkar—for instance, one reformer, Cursetjee, attributed to Marathi and Gujarati an “unchastity of thoughts and ideas” from which English was free (p. 33). “For all concerned,” Chandra notes, “woman was always and already in the service of the reproductive family” (p. 46).

Part 2 focuses on narratives of a series of female learners under their upper-caste husbands' tutelage, to reveal how English “introduced new emotive experiences to the conjugal unit” (p. 144). Strikingly, across these narratives we find repeated scenes in the bedroom where, Chandra points out in a very fine reading, “English . . . assists or even stands in for sexual consummation” (p. 165). Dosebai Jessawala is particularly breathy on discovering her husband's liberalism vis-à-vis her own English education: “It would be out of my power to describe the thrill of ecstasy which the love of my husband excited in my hitherto virgin breast” (p. 165). Here we see how English could direct sexual desire and strengthen companionate bonds within the conjugal unit.

Women's—that is, upper-caste women's—own voices come through most clearly in this part of the book, and Chandra shows how their writings constituted both grieved critiques of and investments in Brahmanical patriarchy. Presented with Chandra's careful underscoring of the selective democratization of English education, one wonders about the perspectives of lower-caste women on English. Is the relative dearth of their voices in the book emblematic of a silence in the archive itself? In chapter 1, Chandra does point to the educator and Marathi poet Savitribai Phule, who along with her husband Jyotiba Phule started the first school for lower-caste girls in western India. Chandra shows how Savitribai redirected the dominant nationalist trope of nation-as-mother when she wrote, “Peshwa rule has been vanquished, our Mother English is here” (p. 21).

This intersectional, gendered history of English belongs on any graduate syllabus on language and gender. It will also be of interest to scholars in women's history, non-Western histories of colonialism, and the burgeoning field of studies on caste. Literary critics should be very interested in this volume, if only to comprehend how the circulation and reception of literary texts (the focus of early scholarship in the field) took place within a wider field of signification wherein “English studies” in the nineteenth century meant so much more than a language or a literary canon. Insofar as it functioned as a sign that reproduced sexual and caste difference, “English” most decisively “unleashed gender trouble” (p. 76).