Queering the Postcolonial: Desire in Chudamani Raghavan’s Yamini

Indian women’s writing from the mid-twentieth century that doesn’t fit dominant tropes of resistance in postcolonial and feminist literary critiques have largely been untranslated undiscussed. Especially neglected are narratives native queerness, stories transgressive desire sexual alterity. In this essay, I explore Yamini’s complex Chudamani Raghavan’s eponymous novella its potential to complicate discourses on sexuality. Drawing aspects queer theory poststructuralist notions subjectivity, examine how asexuality challenges destabilizes cisheterosexist gender hierarchies colonization. By examining language silence Yamini through devices criticism intertextuality, locate queerness within subcontinent’s long history multivocal desire. build precolonial notion is not necessarily located body, suggest desires mind, ideas, also a manifestation – capable subverting hegemonic psychic normativity.