Proposal for Colloquium Politics, Poetics, and World Literature-1

Dr. Anhiti Patnaik

Assistant Professor, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences
Birla University of Technology and Science-Pilani, India

Trials of Wilde and Manto: Witnessing Crime, Empire, and Censorship

This project examines writers on trial to interrogate the legal and aesthetic processes through
which certain literary texts proceed from criminalization to canonization. It redefines
discourses surrounding censorship – as ‘World Literature’ – by comparing two iconic trials;
Oscar Wilde’s trial for “gross indecency” in Victorian England and Saadat Hasan Manto’s
trials for “fahishi” (obscenity) in India around the Partition. When a writer is criminalized for
his transgressive aesthetics, the entire culture and public morality also comes under scrutiny.
This literary and cultural history reveals how writers like Wilde and Manto were forced out
of an ivory-tower existence by the moral and colonial apparatuses of their age. They became
legal actors or witnesses and there are striking affinities in the ‘script’ that Wilde and Manto
deployed in court to exonerate themselves. Heavily influenced by English and French
Aestheticism, Manto developed an Urdu iteration of the Art for Art’s Sake (adab-baraa-e-
adab) for the Progressive Writers Movement of India. His radicalism developed from a
singular experience of subalternity as an Islamic Socialist during India’s Partition, much like
Wilde was targeted for being an Irish homosexual in Victorian England. At the heart of this
comparative project, however, is a relatively under-researched text – Manto’s 1934 Urdu
translation of Wilde’s Russian tragedy Vera: or The Nihilists (1880). With this rare
translation acting as a bridge between the two writers, this project analyses intersections
between literary and legal drama, beauty and obscenity, empire and cosmopolitanism, and
citizenship versus exile.

Professional Bio
Dr. Anhiti Patnaik is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Humanities and Social
Sciences at the Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, India where she teaches
courses in Creative Writing, Cultural Studies, Comics and Visual Culture, and Crime and
New Media. She is a prolific scholar of Oscar Wilde, Victorian Literature, Crime Fiction,
World Literature, Queer Theory, and Trauma Studies. Anhiti is an Ontario Trillium Scholar
and completed her PhD in Cultural Studies at Trent University, Canada. A 2017 Fellow of
The School of Criticism and Theory (Cornell University), Anhiti has been published in
international journals like Neo-Victorian Studies, Victorian Network, The Confidential Clerk,
and Brontë Studies and included in Bloomsbury’s upcoming anthology Horror Fiction in the
Global South: Cultures, Narratives, Representations.