Oscar Wilde and the Dead Hijra:

Sexploitation and Neo-Colonialism in Gyles Brandreth’s The Murders at Reading Gaol

Abstract

This essay presents a legal, anthropological and postcolonial critique of Gyles Brandreth’s novel Oscar Wilde and the Murders at Reading Gaol (2012), dealing primarily with Brandreth’s neo-Victorian depiction of a hijra character. The hijras are an Indian community of castrated men who pose as women and remain outside the idealised Western construct of binary sex. In 1871, the colonial government in India criminalised their community for cross-dressing and sexual ambiguity in the same vein that Oscar Wilde was arrested in London in 1895 for ‘sodomy’. The first part of this essay delves into the history of the hijras in India and how colonialism produced their contemporary subaltern status, while the second part focuses on Brandreth’s novel and the subversive potential of his hijra character’s sexual performativity. I conclude that the stage that Brandreth sets up in his novel, despite its many positive attributes, remains conservative and exploitative in the final instance. In the guise of historical authenticity, Brandreth depicts the hijra character as being essentially criminal and, thus, as a threat that the neo-Victorian detective must contain.