research
In 1946, Indian writer Ismat Chughtai narrowly escaped jail. She stood trial for obscenity, on the grounds that her short story, “Lihaaf” (“Quilt”), exploded the moral standards of the British Empire, codified into the Indian Penal Code. The obscenity in question: a queer relationship between the two women. But despite the prosecutors’ best efforts, no one could pinpoint what, exactly, was obscene about “Lihaaf.” Its queerness was not cognizable in a courtroom. It inhabited the shadowy spaces of euphemism and suggestion, but did not cross the threshold of legibility under the law. Ultimately, after pressing the prosecution to point to exactly which of the words in “Lihaaf” were obscene, the judge ruled that there were none. Chughtai was free to go.
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My project, Litigating Desire: Queer Literature on Trial in Twentieth Century India, spotlights encounters between British colonial law and queer literary production in twentieth-century India. Specifically, it examines four trials in which queer literature came under legal scrutiny. The works on trial include Ismat Chughtai’s “Lihaaf”; Manto’s “Bu” and “Thanda Gosht”; Aubrey Menen’s Rama Retold; and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. These proceedings—held on grounds ranging from obscenity to sedition to “hurt sentiments”—offer glimpses into how legality interacts with queer literary production. How did the law codify and target deviant sexuality? What kinds of legal instruments were harnessed to police sexual non-normativity? What strategies did writers deploy to depict queerness, and how did the law adapt to such strategies? How might engaging with these trials as literary archives change our understanding of law and literature in the Indian context?
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My project maps the ways in which the nation is materially produced through the interlocking forces of law and literature. These trials, spanning the years 1924 to 1997, bookend the moment of Indian Independence and the Partition of British India into India and Pakistan. The legal witchhunt for queer literature doubles as an attempt to “narrate the nation” into being (Bhabha 1990). As Toni Morrison writes, “canon building is empire building. Canon defense is national defense.” Examining the policing of queer literature helps us trace the nascent nation’s anxieties, values, and investments. Drawing on Benedict Anderston’s argument that “print capitalism” creates the “imagined community” of the nation, my dissertation suggests that these discrete instances of queer literature coming up against the law all gesture towards a broader project of nation-building. Unruly queer stories disrupt the production of a static national narrative, and must therefore be excised. The stakes of these trials are not just the texts or their authors, but the gestational identity of the nation itself.
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Methodologically, I follow the law and literature model that theorizes the law itself as a kind of literature—iterative, malleable, subjective, narrative in structure. I am primarily interested in the textuality of the trials themselves, and the discourses they produce and proliferate. This methodology coheres a literary archive for each chapter, comprising the primary text on trial, the court documents produced through the trial, media coverage of the text and its legal afterlife, and, of course, the section of the Indian Penal Code in question.
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I use the dense space of the courtroom to think more broadly about the affective dimensions of law and literature, arguing that affect is central to legality, rather than divorced from it. In tracing how colonial legal instruments attempt to police and mute unruly queer affects, my project conceptualizes the law as a desiring entity with its own unruly affective investments. Such a model ruptures static western understandings of the law as objective and disembodied, and instead opens up alternative avenues in legal humanities scholarship. Just as we trace lines of case law or policy changes, we can trace lines of desire. Every attempt to police desire is, after all, also an expression of desire. Thinking of the law as a desiring entity, thinking of the courtroom as a site of many competing desires, produces new understandings of legality writ large.