The tropes, aesthetics, and genre conventions of contemporary horror draw heavily from Orientalism, xenophobia, and other intersections of exoticization and Othering. More particularly, horror, and its predecessor in the gothic, express the intertwined desire for and anxiety about the forms of deviant and excessive sexuality that were both projected onto and sought out in the Orient. As such, we can read gothic fiction in particular as a displacement or rearticulation of the norms and fantasies Orientalism imposes. In this paper, I propose to turn this optic around: rather than examining the expression of Orientalist fantasies in the realm of gothic fiction and horror, I consider the ways that these fantasies (and fears) were both developed and expressed “on the ground.” I turn to a minor figure from Indian history, the Maharaja Jai Singh of Alwar, who was “cast” by both the British Raj and the Orientalist press as a perfect model of their fears and fantasies: beautiful but depraved, brilliant but monstrous, Jai Singh served as a repository for intersecting anxieties about sex, rationality, and the right to rule. This paper will consider three moments of imperial intervention: colonial administrators’ attempts to reimpose proper heterosexual development onto Jai Singh in the wake of a criminal intimacy scandal; the deployment of allegations of sexual depravity and sadism to discipline Jai Singh for political disobedience; and the representation of Jai Singh – as Britain’s grasp on India faltered – as evidence of the validity of Orientalist fantasies of Indian despotism.
