Saanvi Agarwal is a senior from Fremont, California, pursuing a dual degree in English with a concentration in Creative Writing in the College of Arts and Sciences and Legal Studies & Business Ethics at the Wharton School. She is a Perry World House Fellow, Turner Schulman Fellow, Institute for Urban Research Fellow, and PORES Fellow, where she has researched political opinions on race and diversity following the 2024 election. She has also conducted research on neurological diagnosis through deep learning and on gender-based violence in conflict with Professor Rangita de Silva de Alwis. On campus, she is a member of the Philomathean Society and serves as President of the Lambda Alliance. Her academic interests center on postcolonial South Asian literature, with particular focus on the Partition, colonization, and the Asian American diaspora. In her free time, she is completing a poetry collection on globalization and enjoys experimenting with fusion cooking.
Saanvi Agarwal
Wolf Humanities Center Undergraduate Fellow
2025—2026 Forum on Truth
Saanvi Agarwal
English, Legal Studies & Business Ethics, Statistics
Inventing Truth After Empire: Form, Fragmentation, and Identity in the Works of Anita and Kiran Desai
This project examines how South Asian women writers use literary form to reconstruct truth in the aftermath of colonialism. It focuses on the mother-daughter authors Anita and Kiran Desai, and traces how narrative experimentation—nonlinearity, fractured voice, magical realism—becomes a means of articulating identities shaped by generational trauma, diaspora, and postcolonial dislocation. Rather than relying on historical or empirical truth, the Desais’ fiction engages with layered, affective truths that emerge in the silences of official record. Drawing on postcolonial and feminist theory, this project argues that literary form enables new modes of truth-telling in contexts where state narratives and inherited structures have failed. It contributes to ongoing conversations about how fiction functions as a medium of epistemic resistance and identity formation.


