Taxonomies of Loyalty in Bankim Chandra Chatterjee's Ānandamaṭh

Abstract: Bankim Chandra Chatterjee's Hindu nationalist novel Ānandamaṭh, or The Sacred Brotherhood (1882, English trans. 1906) presents readers with an unlikely hero for an anti-Muslim revolutionary action in the character of Shanti. Represented as an assigned-female-at-birth (AFAB) adolescent, Shanti passes as a boy called Nabin and joins a group of all-male freedom fighters, The Children. Bankim grafts a pure Hindu nation with its strict male/female romantic partnership onto India's far more gender-fugitive mythic past through the burgeoning enmeshment of public (national) and private (conjugal) loyalties. At the same time, Bankim leverages Mughal India's pre-British colonial frameworks of gender fluidity through Shanti. To serve his narratological ends, Bankim finds a commonality with the 1860 Indian Penal Code, which criminalized gender and sexual deviance—cultural aspects often associated with Persia, Islam, and Muslim-identified Indians. Bankim's revisionist approach to history enacts a method of archival exploitation in which the queer and trans past is manipulatively used and erased simultaneously.