‘Qatha’s of Queer Kolkata: Pride at its Inception

 

A Still from Gender Mela, 2022. 

Aisarya Dutt Roy traces the history of PRIDE in Calcutta. 

The city of Kolkata, with its effective organisation, mobilisation and community building since the early 90s, has been a pivotal site of a kaleidoscopic blend of queer voices and identities. While the post-NALSA (National Legal Services Authority vs. Union of India) queer-scape of the city in the last decade has witnessed a vibrant and outspoken assertion of queer identities intersecting with caste, religion, disability, age as well as mental health, the legacy in effect, goes back to the early 90s and even before. In August 1993, a small group of gay and bisexual men including journalist Pawan Dhall formed a queer support group called Counsel Club. Its biannual multilingual queer newsletter called Pravartak (renamed as Naya Pravartak in 1995) published letters from queer persons across the country and abroad (Dhall: 2020, 7-13). In an interview, Dhall reflects about the contents of the letters which ranged from queer persons sharing their struggles with mental health, seeking advices regarding their careers, relationships, family, sexual health, and sometimes seeking support for gender reassignment surgeries etc. (Maheshwari-Aplin: 2021). Such letters were reflections  of  ―the  microcosm  of  an  India  that  was  sexually  active,  liberal,  inquisitive, orthodox and repressed, all at the same time‖ (Dhall: 2020, 18). Similarly, in June, 1999 what started as Sappho, an emotional support group for lesbian and bisexual women created by six women to share their joys, fears, difficulties and ambitions, transitioned into Sappho for Equality that now also welcomed transmen. Currently it is an NGO undertaking projects, producing documentaries alongside carrying out significant outreach work in West Bengal and its neighbouring states. (Chatterjee: 2018, 24; see also, www.sapphokolkata.in). Commemorating the 30th year of the Stonewall Riots in the US, a group of 15 people from the city and outside congregated on July 2, 1999 for the Friendship Walk, which is regarded as the first pride walk in India and South Asia. Owais Khan, one of the organisers of the walk, reflects on his personal journey regarding the organisation of the walk back at a time when words such as ‗queer‘ rarely existed and the concern about making the ‗queer‘ community visible through a march was mingled with hope and trepidation at the same time (Khan: 2012).

The late 1980s and early 1990s have ben two significant decades, with the advent of economic neo-liberalization and globalisation, and opening of the Indian economy to free trade and market regime, laying the foundation of what is today considered as the ‗queer movement‘ in India. (Kole, 2007) With a flourish of NGOs and community based organisations working mainly in HIV/AIDS intervention and prevention, questions around gender and sexuality emerged as important concerns. The NGO sponsored discourse on sexuality also brought in the market terms such as kothis (although occasionally overlapping with the hijra identity; see Reddy: 2005), men who have sex with men (MSM), etc. which has been rightly criticised for restricting the questions of marginalised sexual identities solely in terms of donor-driven approaches to practising safe-sex in this context (Cohen: 2005; Kole: 2005; Tellis: 2012). 

While the 1990s was a truly exciting decade with regard to queer visibility and community mobilisations in the city, journeying through a few of the oral historical narratives reveal the decades before to be equally vibrant and thriving in terms of sexual subcultures in certain pockets of the city. Qatha is an oral history project of queer Kolkata aiming to document five decades of queer lives from 1960 to 2000 (https://vartagensex.org/qatha/). Of particular interest are the decades from the 1960s to the 1990s, also a time with perhaps very limited organisational politics, and much before words like ‗queer‘ or ‗gay‘ began dotting our everyday parlance. The interviews for Qatha have been published in part-wise series in the Varta webzine from 2013 to 2018. A registered trust, Varta has its foundations in the 1990s community building through the works done by the Counsel Club and Pravartak, and Integration Society, a sister NGO of Counsel Club. It aims at building conversations and dialogues about gender and sexuality ―through the prism of intersections‖ of not just diverse axes of identities, but also their interactions with the larger questions of livelihood, healthcare, human rights and environment (www.vartagensex.org/about-varta).

Picture taken during the parade on International Transgender Visibility Day, 2022.

 The interviews of SD, a journalist and Suresh, a teacher have been published in separate three-part series ina the webzine issues of 2015 and 2016 respectively. Both interviewees, in their 60s when their narratives were published, speak about the joys and sorrows of growing up gay in a rigidly cis-heteronormative city. While there are obvious differences in their individual experiences, both the accounts also provide us with glimpses of queer desires in the city long before the advent of solidarity and support networks and queer activism. Describing his early years as being a ‗girly boy‘, SD reminisces about hypermasculine Anglo-Indian boys from his school, having his own group with others like him, as well as sexual encounters among the boys in the school hostels. Physical and/or sexual violence abounded in his school directed mainly towards those who were effeminate and did not correspond to hypermasculine codes of conduct. The short film 'Piku Bhalo Aachhey' (Piku is Fine) by Tirthankar Guha Thakurta (2004) also captures the violence experienced by gay boys in educational institutions. On the other hand, growing up in the Calcutta of 1960s, Suresh recounts his experiences during his adolescence, of experiences at a friend‘s house when his parents were away. Recalling the sexual experiences of eight or nine boys inside a dark room in which the partners were selected at random in the darkness, he reflects on the fun and naughtiness of suddenly turning on the lights only to find everyone in awkward positions.

Adolescent accounts of both these men not only illustrate the articulation of same-sex desires in the queer-scape of the city, but also speaks of their class privileges which provided them the space for certain kinds of sexual explorations. Both SD and Suresh also spoke of public parks in Kolkata which served as cruising spots for older men from different parts of the city to meet, occasionally even being chased by police. However, both of them convey that the unavailability of terms such as ‗queer‘ or ‗gay ‘was in no way a hindrance to the expression of same-sex desire, at least among the same-sex desiring individuals they were growing up with. For Suresh clearly, the sexual relationship between two men was something that was quite normal, albeit not enough to be flaunted, but it was neither anything special nor different. SD on the other hand, explained various facets of Indian history and culture in which exemplars of strong male-bonding, homo-erotic relations and cross-dressing were abundant without the usage of any particular terms to denote those practices. At the same time, Suresh also feels that the city during his youth was much more stringent and inhibited about same-sex desire, unlike in the present times wherein, there are at least efforts to understand love and desire other than heterosexuality.

These oral narratives also reflect on the extraordinary personal journeys of ordinary queer lives in navigating their sexualities and desires within the city-scape. One is left to wonder, going through these accounts, about the queer geographies of Kolkata where supposedly non- normative desires bloomed in quiet and clandestine spaces. From the silent acceptance of one‘s queer identities traversing the city with quiet resilience to the fiercely outspoken assertions of queer persons reclaiming the city streets in the Pride Marches, Kolkata itself has had its own long journey. At the same time, the relentless efforts of activists from semi-urban and rural areas to create their own support niches often get obscured in the grandeur of urbane queer activism (see Dutta: 2019). While Kolkata as a metropolis receives fair share of attention for queer community building, it is equally crucial to appreciate the labours of activists from outside the city by acknowledging the nuanced means in which hierarchies of spaces operate.

References:

 

Chatterjee, Shraddha. 2018. Queer Politics in India: Towards Sexual Subaltern Subjects. Oxon: Routledge.

Cohen, Lawrence. 2005. ―The Kothi Wars: AIDS Cosmopolitanism and the Morality of Classification.‖ In Sex in Development: Science, Sexuality and Morality in Global Perspective, edited by Vincanne Adams and Stacy Pigg, Leigh, 269–302. Durham: Duke University Press. 

Dhall, Pawan. 2016a. ―Qatha: Recalling Dark Room Discoveries and More (Part 1).‖ Varta (blog). August 21, 2016. https://vartagensex.org/2016/08/21/qatha-recalling-dark-room-discoveries- and-more-part-1/.

———. 2016b. ―Qatha: Recalling Dark Room Discoveries and More (Part 2).‖ Varta (blog). September 25, 2016. https://vartagensex.org/2016/09/25/qatha-recalling-dark-room- discoveries-and-more-part-2/.

———. 2016c. ―Qatha: Recalling Dark Room Discoveries and More (Part 3).‖ Varta (blog). October 24, 2016. https://vartagensex.org/2016/10/24/qatha-recalling-dark-room-discoveries- and-more-part-3/.

———. 2020. Out of Line and Offline: Queer Mobilizations in ’90s Eastern India. Calcutta: Seagull Books.

Dhall, Pawan, and Soma Karmakar Roy. 2015a. ―Qatha: Times and Lives of Girly Boys from ‗60s Kolkata (Part 1).‖ Varta (blog). February 21, 2015. https://varta2013.blogspot.com/2015/02/qatha-times-and-lives-of-girly- boys.html?zx=2c04169bf24753c9.

———. 2015b. ―Qatha: Times and Lives of Girly Boys from ‗60s Kolkata (Part 2).‖ Varta (blog). March 20, 2015. https://varta2013.blogspot.com/2015/03/qatha-times-and-lives-of-girly- boys.html.

———. 2015c. ―Qatha: Times and Lives of Girly Boys from ‗60s Kolkata (Part 3).‖ Varta (blog). April 20, 2015. https://varta2013.blogspot.com/2015/04/qatha-times-and-lives-of-girly- boys.html.

Dutta, Aniruddha. 2019. ―Undoing the Metronormative: Urban-Rural Exchange within LGBT Communities in Eastern India.‖ In Queer Potli: Memories, Imaginations and Re- Imaginations of Urban Queer Spaces in India, edited by Pawan Dhall, 101–22. Mumbai: Queer Ink Publishing.

Guha Thakurta, Tirthankar, dir. 2004. Piku Bhalo Aachhey. https://youtu.be/Qllb0F5SbIQ. 

Khan, Owais. 2012. ―Friendship Walk, 1999.‖ Gaylaxy (blog). August 16, 2012. https://www.gaylaxymag.com/exclusive/friendship-walk-1999/.

Kole, K. Subir. 2007. ―Globalizing Queer? AIDS, Homophobia and the Politics of Sexual Identity in India.‖ Globalization and Health 8 (3): 1–16.

Maheshwari-Aplin, Prishita. 2021. ―Counsel Club: Meet the Archivist Reaching into the Postbag of One of India‘s Earliest Queer Support Groups.‖ Gal-Dem (blog). February 26, 2021. https://gal-dem.com/counsel-club-archive-queer-groups-india/.

Reddy, Gayatri. 2006. With Respect to Sex: Negotiating Hijra Identity in South India. New Delhi: Yoda Press.

Sappho for Equality, www.sapphokolkata.in 

Tellis, Ashley. 2012. ―Disrupting the Dinner Table: Rething the ‗Queer Movement‘ in Contemporary India.‖ Jindal Global Law Review 4 (1): 142–56.

Varta, https://vartagensex.org/qatha/ 

Varta, www.vartagensex.org/about-varta


Aisarya Dutt Roy is a Doctoral Scholar at Centre for Women‘s Studies, University of
Hyderabad.
Email: aisaryaduttroy@gmail.com

Photo Courtesy: Aisarya Dutt Roy. 

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