Leila Neti

By Sachi Anjunkar

Leila Neti is a Professor of English at Occidental College as of September 2022. According to her university profile, her research focuses on how legal formations intersect with literary representations to produce notions of self and sovereignty, particularly with respect to race, gender, class, and sexuality.

According to her bio, she has published no books, papers or research pertaining to Hindus, the rights of Hindus, the impact of or relationship between Islam and Hinduism / Hindutva, India or the Indian Government.

In 2021, she along with Hibatullah Akhundzada, the supreme leader of the Taliban, co-signed a letter supporting the "Dismantling Global Hindutva" Conference, as an academic and scholar and made the following allegation:

"the current government of India [in 2021] has instituted discriminatory policies including beef bans, restrictions on religious conversion and interfaith weddings, and the introduction of religious discrimination into India’s citizenship laws. The result has been a horrifying rise in religious and caste-based violence, including hate crimes, lynchings, and rapes directed against Muslims, non-conforming Dalits, Sikhs, Christians, adivasis and other dissident Hindus. Women of these communities are especially targeted. Meanwhile, the government has used every tool of harassment and intimidation to muzzle dissent. Dozens of student activists and human rights defenders are currently languishing in jail indefinitely without due process under repressive anti-terrorism laws."

Publications related to India

Books

1. Neti, Leila. Colonial Law in India and the Victorian Imagination. Cambridge University Press, 2021.

Papers

1. Neti, Leila. "Siting Speech: The Politics of Imagining the Other in Meera Syal’s Anita and Me." British Asian Fiction: Framing the Contemporary, edited by Wai-Chew Sim and Neil Murphy, Cambria Press, 2008.
2. Neti, Leila. "'The Love Laws': Section 377 and the Politics of Queerness in Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things." Law and Literature, Taylor Francis, 2016.

Paper Presentations

1. Neti, Leila. “The ‘Minute’ and the Penal Code: Macaulay’s Project of Biopolitics in Colonial India.” Law, Culture, and the Humanities Conference, Stanford University, April 2017.