Looking For a Room of One’s Own

When I was 19 years old, I took a bus from my college to central Delhi to join a protest march against George Bush who was in the country. It was 2006, my first time at a protest. I was wide-eyed, taken in by the bristling anti-imperial sentiment, the catchy posters and slogans, all the political groups with flags, news vans, journalists, and the many, many students like me.

We walked up and down flyovers, and came to the corner of Jantar Mantar when I passed a huddle of cheerful protestors. A young woman from the group smiled at me. I may have walked right past the group if it wasn’t for that smile—something in me seemed to have spoken to her. She came over, handed me a tiny pink triangle made of paper, and a pamphlet talking of queer identity and rights, and Section 377, created by a student queer collective called Anjuman. I took them and rushed back to join my friends’ worldly discussion on American imperialism; I was flustered by that moment of recognition.

I had just been dumped by a slightly older woman with whom I had had an electrifying, secretive affair. We’d held hands in movie halls, written each other long love letters and texts, talking about the women under the lihaf (quilt) in the Ismat Chughtai story, the devotional love of Akka Mahadevi and Bhakti poetry, and the shapeshifting Orlando of Virginia Woolf.

She had since destroyed all evidence of our time together—deleting our personal archive of texts, emails, and letters. Injured and left only with my memories, I had deferred my coming out. The pink triangle seemed to give me all sorts of permission that day: to cry, to mourn, and to say what it is that I was to myself, and to friends.

I thought about that brightly lit day, wondering where lost objects go, and whether that was my first moment of coming out, as I headed to see the QAMRA—the Queer Archive for Memory, Reflection and Activism—in National Law School of India University (NLSIU), Bengaluru. It was strange to be taking this route—I had spent my childhood years cycling up and down these very roads in Nagarbhavi, which were barely developed scrubland in West Bangalore in the 1990s.

Ten-year-old-me, who thought of herself as George from Famous Five, was already being misgendered in public spaces, and my parents had resigned themselves to my rejection of frocks and langa-dhavanis. That there was now a queer archive close to the house where I grew up, and near the sites of spectacular cycle crashes, felt personal and poetic.

QAMRA is a small room in the large and bustling campus of NLSIU, nestled in a building of lecture halls and staff rooms. It is quite easy to miss but for an exhibition of clippings and posters outside the main door; a photocopy of ‘a Declaration of Freedom’ by a group of gay folks from 1995 is lined up against a poster for Bengaluru Pride from 2008 designed with Banksy’s Flower Thrower, and a newspaper clipping about a lesbian couple photographed in a gentle embrace.

I am shown the lay of the archive by Ammel Sharon, the Project Director of QAMRA at the time (who has since moved on), who oriented me to the many things this archive is and can be. QAMRA began as the unintended consequence of the 2013 judgement in Suresh Kumar Koushal & Anr. vs NAZ Foundation & Ors., in which the Supreme Court reinstated Section 377 of the IPC, overturning the 2009 judgement from the Delhi High Court which had decriminalised homosexuality. When the judgement called the queer people of India a “minuscule minority”, a group of queer activists, historians, and archivists thought it was important to put together a house of evidence and memory about queer lives and activism.

In 2017, filmmaker T. Jayashree, lawyers Arvind Narrain and Deeptha Rao, and other queer activists and volunteers worked to set up QAMRA as a gender and sexual minorities archive in T. Jayashree’s studio in Cooke Town, Bengaluru. QAMRA in 2017 already had a vast range of material in its possession, starting with court transcripts and legal collections of the case against Section 377, documentation and clippings of newspaper items in five languages from sexuality-rights NGO Sangama, and a thousand hours worth of video footage from 2000 from Jayashree.

The archive had the case files, affidavits, petitions, notes from Voices Against 377 and civil society consultations, records of protests, Pride marches, and events. There was documentation of the private lives of queer individuals who shared their stories with generosity and courage for the case, in the form of diaries, journals, and manuscripts.

In the words of queer activist and lawyer Arvind Narrain—part of the QAMRA advisory team—the archive has grown to be broader than the legal history of the work against Section 377, though strongly connected to the legal case. Over the years, owing to the hard work done by activists all over the country, the archive has collected material that was privately circulated or owned, the ephemera of lives, memories, and intimate things. This process of collection and cataloguing is ongoing.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, QAMRA sought a more public space for the archive and shifted to NLSIU, opening up a longer institutional future for the archive which is now open for public engagement. The physical multimedia archive exists as a space to learn from and listen to others, a history lesson, a toolkit for activist endeavours, or just a place to find the social and cultural life of queer people who came before us. As a community archive, QAMRA is meant to be near and accessible to the queer community that it hopes to serve, and an act of community building. It is a link, in a sense, between the past and the future.

At NLSIU, there is now a permanent exhibition both to give the archive visibility and offer a mode of engagement for people on campus and visitors. The archive has offered courses at the university and engaged students in its activities to create sensitisation on queer issues. They host public events ranging from talks, film screenings to workshops both on campus and in the city. Through this time, the main focus has been on the process of acquisitions, gathering personal and organisational materials from individuals and activists around the country.

In its initial days in NLSIU, QAMRA was able to think more broadly about the practices of archiving, conceptual dilemmas of curation and cataloguing, and begin the arduous process of digitising materials that existed in outdated formats. How could the archive protect the lives and memories that were generously shared by individuals? What did it mean if private stories were to be circulated online? How could the archive be protected from the elements and create resources that anticipate the future? For QAMRA, the main focus was to preserve material for the community to engage with and interpret, and to set into place practices for public engagement around its material. In its current form, the archive is accessible only in person.

The first thing I notice as I enter is a beautiful sticker with a smiling photograph of activist Priya Thangarajah who passed away in 2015: “We finally made it, Priya!” It’s dated 6 September 2018, the day that Section 377 was finally read down. I look at it with a pang. Priya was in the many queer spaces and homes I spent my 20s in; her laughter, voice, and ideas had reached me through the osmosis of house parties, lovers, and common friends. The photograph brings up a tender melancholy.

Before I got here, I thought quite a lot about what it might mean to encounter QAMRA as a queer person. Is it a pilgrimage or a rite of necessity? It felt like the archive would hold some kind of historical evidence that could explain why and how I could be a free and out queer person, a kind of moral and political ancestry. What did people before my time think about their queerness, other than the illegality of it? What desires did they have, and what did they want to do? Actions around sexual citizenship had shaped so much of the discourse on queerness, and I wanted to find something else.

So where could I start? In the metal almirahs full of acid-free boxes, there is so much possibility. There are audio cassettes, stacks of hard drives, VCR tapes, children’s book collections, documentation and training manuals for HIV awareness, and years worth of newspaper clippings compiled by Sangama.

I choose to begin from my own identity as a lesbian, and look for my own forebears in the archive, trying to find out more about the lives lesbians experienced, what they did and and said. I start with a box full of Scripts magazines put together by Stree Sangam in 1998, which later became Lesbians and Bisexuals in Action (LABIA). In the late 1990s, women wrote to postboxes and support groups to express themselves, and the magazine grew out of a need to feature and gather this writing by queer and questioning women from India, and give them visibility.

In a 1999 edition of Scripts, I find an article that talks about a young couple— Mamata Rani Mohanty (25) and Monalisa Mohanty (19)—in Odisha who signed a ‘Maitri karar’ deed agreement of their partnership in 1998. The maitri karar was a semi-legal form or a ‘friendship contract’ used in Gujarat for civil partnerships between consenting men and women that aimed to secure rights within an intimate relationship outside of formal marriage. It was a notarised written document, listing the terms and conditions of a couple’s agreement to cohabitation. In Gujarat, this form was used by men with extramarital relationships to circumvent the laws against bigamy, but was also sometimes used by women who wanted to live their lives together. These young women were neighbours who had fallen in love.

In the notarised deed transcribed in the magazine, Mamata and Monalisa said that “their relationship has become so close that it is not possible on the part of either party to live apart.” They pledged a thousand rupees each to their partnership, ‘MAMATA & MONALISA’, and promised to uplift the poor and the destitute. Four days later, when Monalisa’s father was to be transferred to another town, they attempted suicide. Monalisa did not survive, and the police charged Mamata Rani with her murder.

The magazine has a piece listing marriages and suicides by women—can we call them lesbians? Did they call themselves lesbians? Women who loved women, who died by suicide when their families refused to accept them, when villages rejected them, when one of the two lovers were abducted, never to be found.

In 12 reported instances where couples used the maitri karar, half the couples attempted suicide, were forced in some way or the other into separating, or kidnapped. In another story in a 2011 edition of Scripts, I read about Swapna Mondal (23) and Sucheta Mondal (19) who were not only forcibly separated when they tried to run away, but died by suicide together. Their bodies lay unclaimed and uncremated in the village of Sonachura in West Bengal. This happened at a time when the High Court of Delhi had read down Section 377, and homosexuality was supposedly legal.

A real treasure is the collection from Maya Sharma and Indira Phatak, activists from Gujarat who documented the lives of queer women from marginalised communities in Gujarat for decades and whose collections entered QAMRA in 2023. They worked at a time when words we now use to talk about queer self-identification like ‘trans’, ‘non binary’ or ‘lesbian’ were not in play.

They spent years working with working class communities to offer safe spaces and to understand what working class women needed at a time when they did not have the privilege to disclose their sexuality. This collection includes their writings, minutes of meetings, photographs, newspaper clippings and magazine articles on violence against lesbians and transgender men found in regional media, legal documents, fact-finding reports, and hand-written letters from queer women sent to their organisation Vikalp and Parma/Sabrang.

In this, I find carefully collected chronological listings of news reporting in the media in English, Hindi, and Gujarati. The newspaper reports talk of families that view women loving women as a mental illness, taking forcible psychiatric actions, arranging forced marriages to men, and the loss of jobs and housing for the women involved. There are gratuitous pictures of unnamed bodies. The reporting is sensationalised and gory, speaking of lives lost in glib tones and terrible stereotypes.

There is a price to be paid to be an “honest body”, a term in American poet and playwright June Jordan’s text Freedom is Indivisible. “If you are free, you are not predictable and you are not controllable,” says Jordan, and the question became what an article in Scripts tells me the Shiv Sena said in response to the movie Fire (1999): “If women start satisfying each other, then who will marry?”

What this material helps me think about is the careful and diligent work of archiving undertaken by activists over the years, to preserve the memory of lives lived and lost. These documents and reports allow me to understand and think about where we have come from, and what it has taken to get here. I know that the story of queer folk in our recent past is not only one of loss. But there is some sort of defiance and courage I see in this loss—the women I am looking for, and find, in the archive, were women who tried to forge ways to be together against all odds.

I think about what the scholar, activist, and archivist Graeme Reid said in one of QAMRA’s initial public lectures, that “refiguring” is an important part of making a queer archive. Archives were traditionally extensions of bodies of power, while same-sex practices from the past were both illegal and illegible to institutions or excluded from mainstream documentation.

QAMRA emerged in response to the state, in response to the lack of sexual citizenship, to make known the lives and stories of queer people on their own terms, refiguring what the 2013 judgement said about the “miniscule minority”. The archive responds not only to the glaring absences in official records but captures the journey for social justice by marginalised communities, and evidence of queer lives and how they were lived. It forages for the subjective world of queer people— emotions, experiments, arguments, and hopes, offering a view from the inside. The interdisciplinary rhetorical scholar Sarah Lindsey Beck calls this “representational belonging”, where the stories in the archive are told by the people the archive is about, rather than about them by someone else.

As I engage with the heartbreak and loss in my search for lesbians in the archive, I think, surely this is not all there is. I open an edition of Scripts titled Food from 2012. The cover image is of two bodies, one with hair of broccoli and the other of noodles, literally eating each other out. The first line I open to is, “I want to be a dum biriyani but I think I am an idli.” I resonate with this.

The magazine is a delight, capturing a range of emotions around the idea of food. Hunger as desire, potlucks for families we choose, sharing food across cultures and backgrounds, family dinners as a unique trauma. The menu is of fiction, memoir, funny drawings, and raunchy prose. I am most curious about the writers and their pseudonyms: ‘Staunch Vegetarian, Deeps’, ‘Haseena Zulfonwaali’ or ‘Imli’ who writes, “You smattered me and I was helpless over your fierce heat.” As I flip through this and other editions, I wonder, where are these people now?

Where are all these people, women, trans men, lesbians, or whatever they chose to call themselves? How many women ran away successfully? Did some succeed in what feminist writer Sarah Ahmed calls the “battle for the ordinary”, and were they able to make cosy homes for themselves? As a young person, I never really thought far ahead and wondered what I wanted a lesbian life to be. But now, as I encounter the archive, after half a lifetime of being out and queer, I imagine a world of happy possibilities. I have found stories of loss and hiding, death and trauma, but perhaps there is something like thriving we can find if we look hard enough.

In the archive, I have looked for “an affective connection” in the words of queer theorist Carolyn Dinshaw, a “queer touch across time”, and in looking, I have found, in the manner of literary critic Eve Sedgwick, a way of “valuing the ways in which meanings and institutions can be at loose ends with each other.” I have come close to real lives, real stories, real Antigones, and Kuzhali Manickavel’s Item Girls.

Growing up, so much of the ways I imagined a lesbian life was scrounged from the internet, and desperate queer interpretations of characters in books and movies. It had taken a decade to put on and take off clothes and identities, to fine tune these to fit what one thought one is, borrowed and invented through intuition and with friends and lovers. 

In that moment in QAMRA, I realised how I could quite easily belong in the archive as a story for someone to write, having amassed enough love letters on lost digital formats, my own specialised heartbreak playlists, and places of memory and longing. Not so far from the place of my childhood roving, I now consider the idea that in living our lives, we have created the stories for someone else to live and consider. As I leave, I pull up songs I’ve always listened to with lesbian ears, and hit play.