From India, with Pride

Five shortlisted writers for the 2022 Lammys had Indian connections even if they do not live here

Ever since the Lambda Literary Awards were instituted in 1989 “to garner national visibility” for LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer) books in the United States, they have been an inseparable part of the annual Pride Month celebrations that take place every June to commemorate the 1969 Stonewall riots in New York City — a landmark event in the history of the global LGBTQ rights movement. This year, the awards were announced on June 11.

Five of the books that were shortlisted for the 2022 Lammys — as the awards are popularly known — stood out for their Indian connection, even if all the authors do not live in India.

Farhad J Dadyburjor’s novel The Other Man, published by Lake Union, was a finalist in the “Gay Romance” category. S J Sindu’s novel Blue-Skinned Gods, published by Soho Press, made it to the final five in the “Bisexual Fiction” category. Rajiv Mohabir’s book Antiman: A Hybrid Memoir, published by Restless Books, was shortlisted in the “Gay Memoir/Biography” category. Kazim Ali’s Northern Light: Power, Land, and the Memory of Water, published by Milkweed Editions, was a finalist in the “LGBTQ Nonfiction” category. Queer Nightlife, which Kareem Khubchandani edited with Kemi Adeyemi and Ramón H Rivera-Servera for University of Michigan Press, was a finalist in the “LGBTQ Anthology” category.

Dadyburjor, who is a lifestyle and entertainment journalist, lives in Mumbai. This city is also the setting of his novel that revolves around a 38-year-old closeted gay man — scion of a business empire — who agrees to marry a woman his parents have chosen for him. They are not aware that their son is simultaneously in a relationship with a gay man from the United States who is in India on a business trip. The book tracks this messy state of affairs against the backdrop of the 2018 Supreme Court verdict on Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code.

Sindu is an assistant professor at the University of Toronto Scarborough, and identifies herself as Tamil American. Her protagonist is a boy with blue skin, born in Tamil Nadu. His enterprising father sees this unusual occurrence as opportunity to make money off unsuspecting pilgrims, who want the child to bless them as they believe him to be Kalki, an incarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu. This coming-of-age story explores ashram life in India, the rock scene in New York City, and themes such as desire and divinity, truth and deception.

Mohabir, who grew up as a Guyanese Indian immigrant in Central Florida in the US, is now an assistant professor at Emerson College in Boston, Massachusetts. The title of his memoir refers to a Caribbean slur — “antiman” — used for men who love men. Mohabir delves into “his family’s stifled Hindu history and the legacy of his ancestors, who were indentured labourers on British sugar plantations”. On the one hand, his book holds up a mirror to the cruelty that family is capable of. On the other hand, it is also about finding home in the sounds of Caribbean Hindustani and Guyanese Bhojpuri, the memories of his grandmother and her music, and on the banks of river Ganga in Varanasi far away from North America.

The search for home is also the defining theme of Ali’s memoir, as the question “where are you from?” prompts a return to a town that he believed to be part of Canada but was actually built on land that was never ceded by the indigenous Pimicikamak community. Ali, who is a professor of literature at the University of California, San Diego, confronts his family’s role in Canada’s colonial history. His father used to work on the dam built on unceded land.

“What made it possible for me to recognize the damage that colonialism far from home had wrought when I’d thought so little about the damage that I myself might have played a role in?” asks Ali, as he ponders over his experience of teaching yoga and training yoga teachers in Ramallah, and the difficulties that he has faced in obtaining multiple entry visas to India because his father, who was born in Vellore, migrated to Karachi at the time of Partition.

This book also engages briefly with the acknowledgement of genders beyond the man-woman binary in indigenous cultures much before the birth of the LGBTQ rights movement. The Pimicikamak community recognises “two-spirited” people who “have both the masculine and feminine in them”. These individuals have a spiritual significance in the community, so “two-spirited” cannot be seen only as a sexual orientation or gender identity.

Khubchandani is the Mellon Bridge assistant professor in theatre, dance and performance studies at Tufts University in Massachusetts. He is also a “desi drag queen” with the stage name LaWhore Vagistan that references his subcontinental Indian and Pakistan heritage. Khubchandani is a diasporic Sindhi, born in Gibraltar and raised in Ghana, with Hindi films serving as his link to India. He has conducted field work in Bengaluru and the South Asian diaspora in Chicago, and this edited volume builds on his previous book called Ishtyle.

Queer Nightlife foregrounds “queer and trans people of colour who apprehend the risky medium of the night to explore, know, and stage their bodies, genders, and sexualities in the face of systemic and social negation”. It examines how nightclubs, house parties and bars offer creative possibilities for self-fashioning on the one hand, and also become sites where exclusion is practised through the assertion of White supremacy, racism and transphobia.

One of the contributors to this anthology is Brian A Horton, an assistant professor of anthropology at Brandeis University. His essay “The Police and the Policed: Queer Crossings in a Mumbai Bathroom” asks “how queer lives in Global South and postcolonial contexts might be apprehended beyond a tethering to abjection, precarity, and suffering”. The anthology includes Khubchandani’s interview with Rekha Malhotra, a DJ and podcaster who grew up in a working-class Indian family on Long Island, New York, and speaks about how the “journey into DJing” is anchored in “antiracist, feminist and queer organizing”.

Unfortunately, most of these books have not been picked up by Indian publishers and therefore continue to be out of reach for many readers in India. Hopefully, the recognition that comes with being finalists at the Lammys will make publishers line up with contracts.