In ‘An Interesting Condition’ written for The Pioneer in 1888, Rudyard Kipling personified India as a licentious woman available to every intruder:

The poem imagines the country as a woman indiscriminate in her choice of lovers and unforgiving in her promiscuity. While the men are identified by geography or culture, the woman is adrift of such mooring and wholly given to sexual mobility. The British believe they have entered an honourable union, but the Englishman's confidence, buttressed by his naïveté, is betrayed. Whereas earlier narratives rehearsed European colonialism in heteronormative metaphors as the providential dominance of man over woman, thus Britain over India, a hundred years of colonial rule also exposed the anxiety and instability of such binaries. For Kipling, India was not a passive femininity, but rather an avaricious and perfidious sexual being – actively seeking the demise of the lover.