The Dark History Of LGBTQ Desire In India | The Mohua Show

This episode of The Mohua Show is a powerful and deeply reflective conversation about queerness, colonial memory, and the politics of desire in India.

Academic and Author of the book ‘Forbidden desire’, Sindhu Rajasekaran speaks candidly about growing up queer under Section 377, uncovering erased queer histories in Indian archives, and how colonial morality reshaped the way gender, sexuality, and women’s bodies are policed today.

From Victorian ideas of “modesty” and the criminalisation of queer lives to the forgotten histories of sexually agentive women locked up in colonial institutions, this episode confronts how much of what we consider “tradition” is actually inherited repression.

A conversation about memory over amnesia, desire over shame, and why reclaiming queer histories is essential to imagining freer futures.

What this episode is REALLY about

• Not nostalgia for the past.
• Not Western feminism.
• Not fixed identities.

It’s about:

• Growing up queer in India: Life under Section 377 and criminalised love
• Colonial sexual politics: How the British rewrote Indian morality
• Queer archives: What history tells us about gender fluidity
• Victorian modesty: Exporting shame and regulating bodies
• Lock hospitals: The sexual prisons nobody talks about
• Erased literatures: How queerness was removed from Indian memory
• Postcolonial amnesia: Why we forgot our own histories
• Smashing the patriarchy: Everyday feminist resistance
• Gen Z & feminism: Redefining gender, identity, and politics
• Queer feminism: Why the future of feminism must be fluid
• Undoing hierarchies: Power, equality, and dismantling gender binaries
• Visual storytelling: Representation, responsibility, and imagination
• Honest conversations: Creating space beyond performative politics

If you’ve ever wondered whether India was always this conservative — or what we lost between colonial shame and modern fear — this episode offers a rare, honest rethinking of gender, sexuality, and freedom.

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Music Credits : 

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