"Love was no sin": Negotiating Transgressive Desire and Colonial Specters in Sangeetha Sreenivasan's Acid (2018)

In Sangeetha Sreenivasan’s novel Acid (2018) the colonial specters are subtle, but loud. The research undertaken reveals how the narrative lays bare the failure of the post-colony as it proactively orchestrates the lives of the characters who find themselves to be at the mercy of biopolitical forces. As Sreenivasan weaves her tale around the lesbian affair between Kamala, a married woman and mother of two, and Shaly, a woman who belongs to no one, the postcolonial anxieties surrounding heterosexual constructs of femininity reveal themselves. Kamala is a deviation from the traditional trajectory of the Indian woman for she opts to live with a woman, is a neglectful mother, and struggles with substance abuse. Talking about the role of women in the postcolonial nation state, Suparna Bhaskaran (2001) notes that women are held responsible for “maintaining honour and purity, preventing shame” and for “reproducing national culture.” In failing to do either, Kamala and Shaly are perennially pushed to the fringes of the post-colony, depicted via their displacements and move away from the former’s ancestral home which itself is a concrete manifestation of the colonial hangover that pervades throughout the narrative. I argue that the lack of a stable home for Kamala and Shaly subtly reifies their position as outsiders who cannot be integrated within the postcolonial nation state. The study analyzes how the narrative exposes the rubric of gender power relations in the post-colony through the constant hierarchization of power as seen in the constant negotiation of invisibilized queer lives.