It became evident that political enemies were secretly joined in financial arm deals. In Michael Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost we read that It was a Hundred Years' War with modern weaponry, and backers on the sidelines in safe countries, a war sponsored by gun-and drug-runners. Moral distinctions and political solutions may be difficult to discern in any war, but in some literary texts we find a literal inability to identify the victims or agents of violence which, in the case of countries as Sri Lanka, can be read as transnational and postmodern texts. Keywords: Leslie de Noronha Shyam Selvadurai queer masculinity interracial desire the Raj

By considering such postcolonial narratives as a counter-response to literature of the Raj, it attempts to recover the queer South Asian subject as an agential formation rather than an object of colonial desire. The article contends that both novels reference, challenge and contradict colonial forerunners, in the form of novels by Rudyard Kipling, E.M. To read queer self-definition (s) from a postcolonial perspective provides a significant nuance to the frame of interracial desire in the colonial era. In examining colonial relations between men and same-sex interracial desire through a reorientation of contemporary queer research it thus works against the master narrative of European imperialism, which evacuates South Asian subjectivity even while attempting to portray it. Through a thorough reading of two texts, Leslie de Noronha’s novel The Dew Drop Inn (1994) and Shyam Selvadurai’s second novel Cinnamon Gardens (1999), it provides a critical framework of queer/postcolonial analysis within which to comprehend the novels’ contestations of predominant literary tropes of the Raj.

This article addresses the colonial encounter, which often appears as the primal scene in the field of colonial discourse analysis and postcolonial studies, with specific reference to South Asia.

Cinnamon Gardens by Shyam Selvadurai