Homogastroerotics Available to Purchase

When first published in 1932, J. R. Ackerley's memoir Hindoo Holiday: An Indian Journal, which recounts his brief residency in colonial India in the employ of an anonymized maharaja, the head of a minor princely state, withheld several passages explicitly signaling the maharaja's and Ackerley's homosexuality. Over several decades, Hindoo Holiday distended itself through piecemeal engorgements of the text, arriving at its fully restored version in 2000. This essay revisits Ackerley's first edition, among his other archival paraphernalia, to explore the first set of expansions in the 1952 text. These expansions principally restored evidence of Ackerley's homosexuality in India. “Homogastroerotics” names a gustatory refrain this essay adopts to extract and assemble three major absences in the 1932 edition that track how race and caste became significant contingents in Ackerley's (un/re)queering. It reveals three major figures, one being Ackerley, who are core to each absenting and mines awkward sociotemporal positionalities assumed by these characters, whose theory and practice of (un)liaising with and (un)becoming the ethnic other, especially at intersections of the alimentary and venereal, are found inconsistent with their (con)texts.