Affectation
This chapter lays the groundwork for the exploration of disaffection and critique in India by examining the relationship between the Oscar Wilde trials and the trial of the Bangavasi: the first newspaper trial in India to introduce disaffection as a disciplinary strategy. It demonstrates how and why both trials were centrally concerned with sexuality, excessive affect, and the artifice of affectation, and shows how the key terms operating in each trial circulated between Britain and India in the Anglophone press. The chapter also explores at length the way the discursive nexus worked in the representation of so-called babu writers, who were sexually pathologized so as to simultaneously place them under political suspicion and discredit their politics. Ultimately, the chapter focuses on the critical tactic of the book — affectation — since this was the first moment when disaffection became a central term in the prosecution of sedition and was redefined specifically to address the colonial context.