Pride in The City of Joy

Pride in the City of Joy

I had no idea where I was, but as soon as I opened the door I was greeted by a rainbow flag and a booth was manned by four staffers, the youngest of which was my age—wearing a modern blue sari paired with a septum ring—who I would later have the privilege of watching my friend tragically attempt to flirt with.

The day before, I had run into some students at the college campus where I was doing archival work, and they invited me to join them at an archival art gallery exhibition they were working on. The gallery had assembled a group of around 50 or so attendees—ranging in age from college students to seasoned veterans of Kolkata’s queer movement. The art exhibition entitled the 25th Anniversary of The Friendship Walk ‘99: Celebrating Friendship, Pride, and Diversity,  was hosted at the Indian Council for Cultural Relations for two days highlighting community-sourced art that varied across mediums from performance art, photography of queer love, and even a reinterpretation of Matisse’s Dance with brown androgynous bodies. For some of the pieces, the artist’s name was merely a pair of anonymous initials. 

The gallery celebrated the 25th anniversary of the June 1999 Friendship Walk, when 15 people marched through Kolkata in bright yellow T-shirts reading “Walk on the Rainbow,” considered now the first pride march in South Asia. 

“From 15 to 1,500,” said one of the originally 1999’ers speaking to the current Pride Walk in Kolkata which is now held in December, “Next we’ll get to 15,000.” 

The artwork was a conversation with its audience. In the performance piece The Box, dancer [XYZ] walked through the gallery with a cardboard box on his head, led only by the voices and kindly hands of his peers in the audience. City of Colors by Aryan Goel began as a black-and-white illustration of queer scenes in Kolkata—by the end of the night however, audience goers had made use of the markets conveniently left beside the easel and transformed the piece into a bright collection of color and joy. Next to the art were statements of solidarity and short essays. One, titled None of Us Are Free Until All of Us Are Free, read: “Whether it’s the Dalits of India, the minority religions, people who identify with any or many of the letters of LGBTQIA+, the people of Palestine, or any other minority group in any setting of oppression, we are all the same. Some of us might be sitting in places of privilege, others not, but at the end of the day, we are just steps away from having our rights taken away by the State and its machinations” 

While, India only legalized homosexuality in 2018 and same-sex marriages are still unrecognized across the country, queerness has a long history in South Asian tradition. Next to a series of hanging crowns and a water color painting done in Mughal style,  the printed piece of paper serving as a placard read : “Particularly in India, we are often told about the Ardhanarishwar, the half-man and half-woman version of Lord Shiva, or the various woman forms of Vishnu, such as Mohini. Our epics are also laced with such transformations. Depicted here are Mala and Chandra in a moment of an intimate embrace still thinking about the birth of Bhagirath. These crowns here represent the State, the authorities, and the aspects of religion that are often used to subjugate us. However, we can use the the same to lead us to liberation” 

The second room of the art gallery was an archival exhibition, highlighting different pivotal moments of queer Kolkata history, including a collection of photos from the original Friendship Walk, a newspaper articles surrounding the controversy of the lesbian film Fire, and posters for the pride walks that followed the original march in 1999. There was a singular portrait honoring a transgender community member who died under unclear circumstances the past month. I had brought a girl from my neighborhood with me, who had actually texted me about the news right when it had happened as she had been one of her friends. The news had reported little on the situation so it was only at the art gallery, asking one of the organizers that she learned that the case had been abruptly closed by the woman’s father. 

At the back was a selection of letters from Varta’s archives. While Kolkata is generally a liberal city, being out in the 90s posed a threat for serious danger, especially given the cultural centrality of family relations. As a result, a P.O. box was established where queer individuals could send letters to each other—creating a community of love and friendship through postage. 

As the placards read, pulling an excerpt from the Varta Trust blog, “They mark the moment of the birth of a community. These collections of letters are a map in themselves—a map of an invisible city; a city that cannot speak its name. They represent a cartography of desire built by anonymous men who walked the city streets to find comfort in each other’s company. It’s a map, obliterated by official maps, encapsulated inside files of letters. Each letter, an excerpt from a story waiting to be told” 

Me and a group of other college students stood in front of the letters attempting to decipher the English and Bengali scrawl connecting them to our own crazy texts that we had sent before. I explained to my friends, how growing up in America it felt like my South Asian and queer identity were almost antithetical to each other. The queer history I knew had no one who looked like me—but through this archive I was able to claim a space in a longer, international movement. 

The program culminated with a panel talk from four of the original attendees of the 1999 Friendship Walk, who discussed not only the current state of queer rights in India but also their memories of late nights crashing at each others apartments after drinking together. The program was continued two days later at a local theatre, where the archival letters were read aloud in conversation along with an academic talk.  Discussing the future of the queer movement, the panel noted that legalizing same-sex marriage isn’t the main priority of queer activist communities at the moment—rather they seek to militate ongoing violence against queer, trans, and hijra communities (hijra is the legally recognized third gender in India). Specifically, he brought into focus, a loophole in the writing of a new law denied recognition of the rape victimizing transgender women and men.

At the closing of the final night, the audience and panelists stood up and began to sing, “We Shall Overcome,” three times—once in English, again in Bangla, and finally in Hindi. Me and my friend smiled sheepishly at each other, and I quietly joined in stumbling in a language I barely knew to over a voice to a message, universal and unmistakable.  

Sitting in the stands, I thought back to an essay on Louise Gluck I wrote at sixteen, in which I said, “But, then again, there is very little built with me in mind, a queer brown girl from Texas rendered invisible in every history book I’ve read, born of ancestry that could hardly fathom my existence, and outcast in the only state I’ve ever lived in. So perhaps Louise Gluck can spare a poem, if it may be my only home…You see, I have no Oscar Wilde or Audre Lorde, no forebears, to offer precedence of past and future. So, I must search harder—squeeze into the spaces between lines, scour the ashes of history, turn sidewalk cracks into maps—until I can find someplace in which my narrative fits.”

Here, though I found a history that I could claim inheritance, not hidden in cracks, but explicit and proud. Thinking back, I don’t think, up until this program, that I had even met explicitly queer Indians of past generations who were out and advocating for their community. But, here was a collection of people telling a history long before I was born. Not only did they give me a past, but they offered me an image of a future to look forward to as well.