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1/ apparently this now exists in the world as an object, featuring the thumb of @dshulman (this is not a way of saying i have been under my editor's thumb)

2/ over the moon thanks to these generous endorsements, from people whose work i have loved and respected for a long time

available for preorder, preferably from the smallest planet rather than the mightiest river (link in bio)

1/ apparently this now exists in the world as an object, featuring the thumb of @dshulman (this is not a way of saying i have been under my editor's thumb)

2/ over the moon thanks to these generous endorsements, from people whose work i have loved and respected for a long time

available for preorder, preferably from the smallest planet rather than the mightiest river (link in bio)

will watch anything with Gillian Anderson unapologetically (and did with @devibabi), but sometimes my reading habits embarrass me. Still, in the interests of keeping the gram feed real and one’s finger on the pulse of raj nostalgia, I read these things so that you don’t have to. After a 60 page account of a Commonwealth tour, my brain turned the consistency of mushy peas. As for the all important question of whether Jawaharlal and mummy Edwina had an affair, we can hardly expect the truth from daughter Pamela. They didn’t, she says, but they kept up a daily(!) correspondence after the Mountbattens left Delhi, and when Edwina died and was buried at sea, Jawaharlal had the Indian frigate INS Trishal scatter marigolds on the waves. But no, they didn’t have an affair 🙄

Books like these are an endless sequence of trivia. Apparently Jawaharlal loved to do head stands. Avi Shlaim’s infinitely more important memoir ‘Three Worlds’ has a picture of David Ben-Gurion doing headstands, a practice for which he was apparently widely mocked. Must have been something in the air in the 1940s: all these heads of state standing upside down, makes you wonder about the state of their heads. At least they didn’t do headstands together. When Modi visited Israel in 2017, Netanyahu said ‘When I do a relaxing Tadaasana in the morning and I turn my head to [the] right, India is the first democracy I see and when Modi does a relaxing Vasisthasana and he turns left, Israel is the first democracy he can see.’ Wow, I’ve really gone off at a tangent here. Sorry Pamela.

mother’s garden

mother’s garden

mother’s garden

mother’s garden

mother’s garden

mother’s garden

mother’s garden

mother’s garden

mother’s garden

mother’s garden

mother’s garden

mother’s garden

mother’s garden

mother’s garden

at first I thought this was ‘Shuggie Bain’ all over again. the alcoholic mother, children playing parents against the grim backdrop of post industrial Glasgow. but (a) so what? - there is something undervalued about a writer returning to the same terrain, or never having left it, and (b) it’s not! much more Romeo and Juliet, and made me think also of Jamie O’Neill’s ‘At Swim, Two Boys’ - queer love (hard enough) made difficult by so many other things.

The incredible @anarchotic reminding us that those in power will always take the opportunity to place blame onto marginalised people to divert attention from themselves!

We are SO happy to have Rahul Rao in the film. His vast knowledge of queer history means he appears throughout Out Laws, covering everything from Henry VIII to modern evangelical Christianity.

📚If you’d like to deep dive into Rahul’s work, our favourite of his books is Out of Time: The Queer Politics of Postcoloniality (2020)📚

This is an extended clip from Out Laws. Using images from WikiCommons and featuring the score from @tony_volker
Additional photo of Rahul by @emilynkanga

The incredible @anarchotic reminding us that those in power will always take the opportunity to place blame onto marginalised people to divert attention from themselves!

We are SO happy to have Rahul Rao in the film. His vast knowledge of queer history means he appears throughout Out Laws, covering everything from Henry VIII to modern evangelical Christianity.

📚If you’d like to deep dive into Rahul’s work, our favourite of his books is Out of Time: The Queer Politics of Postcoloniality (2020)📚

This is an extended clip from Out Laws. Using images from WikiCommons and featuring the score from @tony_volker
Additional photo of Rahul by @emilynkanga

The incredible @anarchotic reminding us that those in power will always take the opportunity to place blame onto marginalised people to divert attention from themselves!

We are SO happy to have Rahul Rao in the film. His vast knowledge of queer history means he appears throughout Out Laws, covering everything from Henry VIII to modern evangelical Christianity.

📚If you’d like to deep dive into Rahul’s work, our favourite of his books is Out of Time: The Queer Politics of Postcoloniality (2020)📚

This is an extended clip from Out Laws. Using images from WikiCommons and featuring the score from @tony_volker
Additional photo of Rahul by @emilynkanga

The incredible @anarchotic reminding us that those in power will always take the opportunity to place blame onto marginalised people to divert attention from themselves!

We are SO happy to have Rahul Rao in the film. His vast knowledge of queer history means he appears throughout Out Laws, covering everything from Henry VIII to modern evangelical Christianity.

📚If you’d like to deep dive into Rahul’s work, our favourite of his books is Out of Time: The Queer Politics of Postcoloniality (2020)📚

This is an extended clip from Out Laws. Using images from WikiCommons and featuring the score from @tony_volker
Additional photo of Rahul by @emilynkanga

The incredible @anarchotic reminding us that those in power will always take the opportunity to place blame onto marginalised people to divert attention from themselves!

We are SO happy to have Rahul Rao in the film. His vast knowledge of queer history means he appears throughout Out Laws, covering everything from Henry VIII to modern evangelical Christianity.

📚If you’d like to deep dive into Rahul’s work, our favourite of his books is Out of Time: The Queer Politics of Postcoloniality (2020)📚

This is an extended clip from Out Laws. Using images from WikiCommons and featuring the score from @tony_volker
Additional photo of Rahul by @emilynkanga

New SASSpod! Lalita du Perron talks to Rahul Rao @anarchotic about his book The Psychic Lives of Statues: Reckoning with the Rubble of Empire (Pluto Press, 2025), the challenges of keeping one’s writing up-to-date in a rapidly changing world, and his recent talk at the Stanford Center for South Asia.

Listen wherever you get your podcasts! Please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts 😇😎🍏

#empire #rhodes #statues #southasia

this book made me reconsider so much of what I thought I knew. as law students, we read hundreds of judgments and now I wonder why. very few of us will become judges and yet we were always subliminally training to think like them, even if we were reading to learn the common law on some point or the other. transcripts might have made us more compassionate interpreters of the law, faced as we would have been with actually existing life and loss. as a queer theorist, i’ve been so alert to how categories fail that I’ve sometimes lost sight of how they can be helpful. there’s a moment here where @izabella.z.scott grapples with this - ‘I wonder if Gayle is gender fluid, but has not found the words. And yet any label is a kind of imposition’ - capturing in two sentences the dilemma of any systematic attempt to understand subjectivity. This is an utterly absorbing account of two stories that could both be true, but as someone who discovered things in the internet chatrooms of the 1990s, I found myself pulled more in one direction than another. Don’t just read this, try to catch a live event with @izabella.z.scott so you can witness her coruscating intelligence ⚡️⚡️

So much wanton human killing around, I feel weird about posting these. But maybe they are a reminder that some kinds of death are part of life, life-giving even, a view of how feathers articulate with bone and where marrow lies and how angels live on earth.

So much wanton human killing around, I feel weird about posting these. But maybe they are a reminder that some kinds of death are part of life, life-giving even, a view of how feathers articulate with bone and where marrow lies and how angels live on earth.

So much wanton human killing around, I feel weird about posting these. But maybe they are a reminder that some kinds of death are part of life, life-giving even, a view of how feathers articulate with bone and where marrow lies and how angels live on earth.

So much wanton human killing around, I feel weird about posting these. But maybe they are a reminder that some kinds of death are part of life, life-giving even, a view of how feathers articulate with bone and where marrow lies and how angels live on earth.

So much wanton human killing around, I feel weird about posting these. But maybe they are a reminder that some kinds of death are part of life, life-giving even, a view of how feathers articulate with bone and where marrow lies and how angels live on earth.

So much wanton human killing around, I feel weird about posting these. But maybe they are a reminder that some kinds of death are part of life, life-giving even, a view of how feathers articulate with bone and where marrow lies and how angels live on earth.

So much wanton human killing around, I feel weird about posting these. But maybe they are a reminder that some kinds of death are part of life, life-giving even, a view of how feathers articulate with bone and where marrow lies and how angels live on earth.

please join us in St Andrews for an urgent conversation on ‘Queer lives in Palestine’ with the brilliant Omar Khatib

Astonishing book; fantastically researched, amazingly well-crafted, and such a necessary contribution to the debate. By Rahul Rao @anarchotic and published by @plutopress Get your copy now!

a lot more of us than them

a lot more of us than them

a lot more of us than them

a lot more of us than them

I finally hear you Wordsworth

I finally hear you Wordsworth

I finally hear you Wordsworth