The Sexual Life of English

Chandra explores how English became an Indian language during the colonial period of 1850-1930. Using archival and literary sources, she focuses on elite language education for girls and women. Breaking with scholars who see English as imposed from without by colonizers, Chandra tells the story of the language from the perspective of Indians, showing how Indians interpreted and disseminated English for their own purposes. The author uses gender and sexuality as her main lenses of analysis, showing how concerns over linguistic change were popularly voiced in a sexual idiom, how English and the vernacular were separated through the vocabulary of sexual difference, and how the demand for matrimony (monogamous and once-only), chastity, maternity, and a selective modernity both seemed to naturalize heterosexual structures and helped elite, native men use 'their' women to claim power on a national level.