Collections and Impressions
Felt Notes
ID: A shared desktop computer by the window used for cataloging collections and making descriptive metadata at QAMRA’s former location in Cooke Town, Bengaluru. Contents of individual collections, particularly the newspaper clippings, brochures, and print matter ephemera are in their corresponding boxes with labels. Image courtesy of Kush Patel (October 2021).
This letter comes in the form of queer archival recollections. Ananya Vepa and I offer the readers a set of impressions from last month’s joint visit to the QAMRA archive. Ananya is currently pursuing his postgraduate diploma in Contemporary Art Practice at the Srishti Manipal Institute. You may read these recollections in any order or side-by side in conversation with each other or as constituting a set of annotations to think about the archival objects we engaged. The below juxtapositions and their emphasis in large fonts are deliberate.
from: Ananya Vepa
On Thursday, October 5th, Kush and I visited the Queer Archive for Memory, Reflection, and Activism (QAMRA), situated in the National Law School India University (NLSIU), Bengaluru campus. QAMRA is a “multimedia archival project” that chronicles and preserves stories from the LGBTQIA+ community in India [1]. We met around 9:00 am in SMI’s N5 campus (October 5) to touch base on the ongoing work of the lab’s Queer Futurities space and to discuss our preparations for a daylong visit to the archive. QAMRA has five collections in its repository and I was personally interested in the Sangama collection because I knew of their work beforehand. Also, since I am from Bengaluru, I wanted to place their work in the geography of Bengaluru that I knew [2].
When we got there, we met Ammel Sharon and Daya in a small corner of the NLS library, where QAMRA is housed. Ammel and Daya introduced us to the work of the archive and suggested that we begin with the interviews transcribed from T. Jayashree’s collection as it would give us a better sense of how the archive fulfills its aims. Here, I read Anuja Gupta’s interview from 2013 [3] and Anjali Gopalan’s interview from 2019 [4].
Anuja Gupta was a part of AIDS Bhedbhav Virodhi Andolan (ABVA) along with her brother Siddharth Gautam. In 1994, ABVA filed the first petition challenging the constitutionality of Section 377 in the Delhi High Court to criticize the ban on distributing condoms among the male inmates of Tihar Jail. Anuja spoke about these early meetings in coffee shops with an ever rotating cast of members, notably, lawyers, students, and a nun. She then spoke about her brother Siddharth whose premature passing motivated Anuja’s continuing work with the ABVA. She and a few others, for example, got together to start a film festival where the goal was to curate a program of interest to members of the LGBTQIA+ community while also protecting viewers’ privacy by keeping the event free of journalists and photographers. Later on, Anuja talked about starting RAHI Foundation, which continues to work with survivors of child sexual abuse to this day. In the interview, she recalled how the seed to build this foundation was planted during her ABVA days, considering that there was no provision to protect children from sexual abuse at the time of filing a petition against Section 377—and that 377 only covered male sexual abuse.
I also read Anjali Gopalan’s interview in the context of NAZ Foundation, which has been working with HIV/AIDS and public health in Delhi since the 1990s. The interview chronicles Anjali’s change in attitude over time as she finds ways of coping with the difficulties of her work. She has recently started a farm that takes care of domesticated animals and follows a zero waste lifestyle.
What I took from both transcripts was the kind of personal pain that social work can cause, especially with communities dealing with ongoing public health crises like HIV/AIDS in India. While neither Anuja nor Anjali wanted to give up the work they did, they acknowledged the tremendous impact that this work had on their mental health, especially when compounded by frustrations stemming from prolonged legal battles and sorrows enduring with deep personal losses. Initially, when I took up social studies in my undergraduate education, I wanted to pursue social work. I was interested in working with organizations such as the NAZ Foundation that are helping people battling HIV/AIDS. Such work, however, is often unforgiving and laborious because there will always be people in need of care in our country; care in the form of economic and legal care, as well as medical and palliative care. Overall, as Anjali noted, even though the government is involved in offering support and services to people living with HIV, they still need more resources and personnel, and living with this ever present need sometimes takes a toll on the health and well-being of a social worker as well.
I also took a look at one file among Sangama collection’s many files—and to see Gail Omvedt’s signature alongside Ruth Vanita’s and many others’ on a petition to reinstate Urmila and Leela, a lesbian couple who were dismissed from the police force in Bhopal for getting married was a personal highlight. Among others, I saw meeting notes from a 1990s Asian Lesbians outside Asia meeting. One note read, “should we allow white lesbians to come to the meeting? They came last time and asked why they haven’t been included.”
Being in the archives for a few hours and experiencing the meticulous and tireless work that has been done to preserve these records felt bittersweet. On the one hand, I was truly amazed that I was in a queer archive in India. It's a wonderful reminder that queerness in India is not new, that people have cared about it for decades, that its own movement is not dependent on movements and agenda from elsewhere, that queerness is legitimate, and that documenting queerness is necessary work. I love the archives’ position as a political project, which is very evident in their extensive documentation. It is a physical reminder that knowledge is power and that it is possible and required for queer people to remember and know their history on their own terms. I love that it is also a record of changing attitudes, which is especially seen in the interviews. One of my trans friends is 27 years old, and it's a running joke that they are a queer elder to us; this reminded me of how important it is for stories from my elders to be recorded.
On the other hand, in the interviews I read, there is a lot of pain documented—as one might expect or as it should be; pain that existed and continues to exist alongside activism, meetings, parties, films, and social work. The documentation and experience of pain through materials and objects make these archival engagements a bit overwhelming at first. However that just means one has to keep going back and interacting with the collections.
In the end, Ammel spoke to us about QAMRA's current work on issues of privacy and consent, and how one works with these things within an archive about queer and trans people and bodies, which are constantly changing. Consent is also something that can change over time, and in records such as these, how does one respect a person’s present while also keeping note of the past? I appreciated this inquiry as it reflects the living nature of this archive and the transformed and transforming nature of queer peoples. The archive is also a great documentation of social organizing; I learned a lot about the labor that goes into building and sustaining a social movement from Sangama’s everyday office records.
** A previous version of this letter had wrongly attributed Siddharth's passing to AIDS, which has now been corrected, thanks to Jayashree's review and communication. This edit also allowed Jayashree and me to discuss how the addition of bios to her video transcripts, for example, might aid in dispelling any such assumptions or false beliefs in the future.
Notes
[1] The aim of this archival project is to “aid efforts in queer rights advocacy through archival activism, acting as a resource base for activists, students, educators, artists, and scholars working in the area of gender and sexuality. As a repository of narratives, its aim is to enable and further conversations around the history, present, and future of the Indian LGBTQIA+ community.” See: https://qamra.in/history/
[2] The Sangama collection included Manohar Elavarthi’s documentation of their activist activities in Mumbai before moving to Bengaluru, so I was doubly excited to see that record as well.
[3] Anuja Gupta interviewed by T. Jayashree on 26th September, 2013. T. Jayashree Video Collection, QAMRA, Transcript TJAV01.013.
[4] Anjali Gopalan interviewed by T. Jayashree and Deeptha Rao on 16th October, 2019. T. Jayashree Video Collection, QAMRA, Transcript TJAV01.031.
from: Kush Patel
It was through queer networks that I first encountered T. Jayashree’s biography on a social media post by Alternative Law Forum in November 2017; a post that also marked the introductory launch of Project QAMRA (Queer Archive for Memory, Reflection, and Activism). I was then a year into my postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Michigan’s Institute for the Humanities—and I made a note to write to Jayashree to learn more about the queer archive that was just coming into being. Three years later, in October 2020, I re-encountered the opportunity to connect with Jayashree—this time via a virtual session with her and Arvind Narrain, where they each talked about what it means to remember queer lives we’ve lost.
When I finally relocated to Bengaluru in August 2021, Jayashree was among the first people I reached out to with all of my iterative and compounded curiosities about her career in writing, producing, and directing independent documentaries and films, centering matters of gender, sexuality, law, and public health. QAMRA was not yet a publicly accessible archive. Sharing space with a children’s bookstore in the city [1], the project at the time covered two rooms on the building’s ground floor. I spent the entirety of my first visit that same month listening to Jayashree and Siddarth Ganesh (then archivist) talk about the origins, goals, and ongoing needs of this memory work. Over the course of about six to seven subsequent meetings, I experienced the archive first hand; volunteered with them to learn about the cataloging process; and made a few entries to help with navigating the Ivan John collection.
The resulting connections have been precious—and every visit to QAMRA has been rich in experience and immersive as scholarship. The archive’s own movement within the city and across the NLSIU public library during the pandemic has also shaped my engagements with its collections over the last two years, particularly around questions of vocabulary (non)standardization, ethical living-ness, and custodianship [2].
+ Please carry your institutional ID since we'll be asked to present it when we enter the campus and library.
+ Please go through the QAMRA website and their collections in particular—and make a list of things you may wish to look into or request the archivist specifically.
+ Ammel Sharon (Director) will meet us and orient us to the archival collections.
+ Plan for taking notes—and bring pencils and a sharpener.
+ Time will fly by quickly in the archive, so if there is a specific collection that you would like to delve into, please bring that interest to our visit.
+ Be prepared to find material you may not have expected to find, and which we can discuss there as well.
+ Carry a water bottle with you; we're planning a long day.
+ We can bring laptop computers to the archive—and if asked, we can place them in the library locker.
+ Keep a record of the material you read and encounter (both expected and unexpected), make notes in the original language, and copy relevant details for subsequent discussion and next moves, but also try not to be overwhelmed by the material.
+ We will start and end the day asking questions about and reflecting upon the contents and form of this very physical archive.
— My notes for Ananya and me on how to prepare for our visit to QAMRA
This past academic cycle’s visit in late October was similarly exceptional (see my preparatory notes above). I met Ammel Sharon (director) and Daya (intern) for the first time. As a way of orienting and reorienting us to the archive, Ammel had preselected a set of transcripts of the Section 377 oral history archive for Ananya and I to look at. Even though I have had several conversations with Jayashree about her video collection [3], it was personally moving to encounter two oral history transcripts in particular. I have shared their brief summaries below.
“Don’t think straight, think people.”—Sanjay Kabir Bavikatte [4]
NLS alum and co-founder of the Alternative Law Forum in Bengaluru, S.K. Bavikatte was instrumental in organizing the first Gay Rights Symposium on campus in 1998. Recounting the then institutional and public discourse on sexuality, his reflections were quite telling of how he and other members of his cohort came to see the 2009 Naz judgment [5] as also one that defined for them a certain shift in people’s engagement with queer politics. Throughout the 90s, conversations on sexuality in India extended primarily to AIDS and HIV. The Gay Rights Symposium tried to link these matters as well as related concerns involving community and safety to the question of human rights, setting the tone for much of the public lobbying that followed around sexual rights, in Bavikatte’s words, “the right to enjoy yourself, the right to have access to space, the right to be who you want to be.” [6]
“I was teaching history without having to teach or being able to teach my own history”—Saleem Kidwai [7]
For historian, professor, writer, and translator Saleem Kidwai (1951-2021), the question of being queer in academia was about balancing fear that came with publicly acknowledging one’s minoritized social location and power that came from building alliances with people through arts and cultural organizing in Delhi. In his interview, Kidwai recalls how academia offered him friendships that would eventually support him both personally and intellectually, including one with fellow historian and academic Ruth Vanita with whom he co-edited Same-Sex Love in India: Readings from Literature and History in 2000 [8]. While Same-Sex Love in India was widely quoted during the 2018 Supreme Court hearings against Section 377, publishing it in India at the turn of the century was itself difficult due to prevalent and imagined threats from political networks. In his end note to young readers, however, Kidwai adds, “My work as a gay historian means a lot of hard work. It means being good at what your subject is and being honest about the labour you put in . . . [it is about] building up your own self-confidence, which eventually helps you also fight, whether it’s family or work or any other discrimination.” [9]
What does a physical archive feel like in terms of its people and collections? What care practices might keep an archive alive, accessible, and meaningful for those contributing to it, those serving as its custodians, as well as others approaching it for reference, study, or even protection? I have been grappling with these questions (and more) for a long time and my current proximity to QAMRA has only made them ever so intimate and queer—not to better understand its subjects, but to reflect on my responsibilities as a digital humanist to build better relations with technologies of queer archival making, visibilizing, and publicity.
Notes
[1] QAMRA is now located in the Sri Narayan Rao Melgiri Memorial National Law Library, National Law School of India University (NLSIU), Bengaluru, where it serves as a custodian of five physical collections, namely, Section 377 IPC; Sangama Collection; T. Jayashree Video Collection; Ivan John Collection; and Maya Sharma and Indra Pathak Collection. See: https://qamra.in/collections/
[2] In April 2022, I visited QAMRA at NLSIU with members of the Co-lab’s Queer Futurities space, Aditi Bhat, Gayatri Shanbhag, and Shamanth Joshi. Siddarth gave us a tour of the archive and explained the process of documenting and preserving materials of queer life, activisms, legal proceedings, and milestones for research, teaching, and organizing work among scholars and educators in Bengaluru and other parts of the country—“raw video footage, photographs, newspaper clippings in multiple languages, legal documents and notes, and personal artifacts and memorabilia.” See: https://qamra.in/history/
[3] The T. Jayashree Video Collection was among the first private collections to help constitute the QAMRA archival project. Many thanks to the team of archivists and volunteers at QAMRA for creating accessible transcriptions in print for visitors and researchers.
[4] Sanjay Kabir Bavikatte, interviewed by T. Jayashree on 12th August, 2013. T. Jayashree Video Collection, QAMRA, Transcript TJAV01.009.
[5] See full text of the Naz Foundation v. Government of NCT of Delhi and Others Judgment, 2009) and learn more about the case description and constitutionality of Section 377 IPC via the Supreme Court Observer, a living archive of the Supreme Court of India: “The Delhi High Court ruled in 2009 that Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code violates the right to privacy and personal liberty under Article 21 of the Constitution and that it cannot be used to criminalize sex between two consenting adults. The Court held that classifying and targeting homosexuals violates the equal protection guarantee to all persons under Article 14 of the Constitution. Section 377 thus violated human dignity which forms the core of the Indian Constitution.”
[6] S.K. Bavikatte, QAMRA, Transcript TJAV01.009.
[7] Saleem Kidwai, interviewed by T. Jayashree on 18th August, 2013. T. Jayashree Video Collection, QAMRA, Transcript TJAV01.008.
[8] Ruth Vanita and Saleem Kidwai (eds.), Same-Sex Love in India: Readings from Literature and History. 1st ed. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000.
[9] Saleem Kidwai, QAMRA, Transcript TJAV01.008.
Opportunities
+ Call for Papers: Research Workshop on Gender, Youth, and Media in Asia, NUS, Singapore (Deadline: November 3, 2023)
+ Job / Call for Applications: DARIAH ERIC Project Manager (Deadline: November 5, 2023)
+ Job / Call for Applications (Various Positions): IT for Change: Bridging Development Realities and Technological Possibilities (Locations: Bengaluru, Delhi, Remote) (Deadline: On a rolling basis where stated).
+ Call for Submissions: JITP Issue 24: General Issue (Editors: Elizabeth Alsop, CUNY School of Professional Studies; Cen Liu, The Graduate Center, CUNY; Sarah Silverman, University of Michigan-Dearborn) (Deadline: December 1, 2023)
+ Call for Submissions: DiGRA Conference 2024: Playgrounds, Guadalajara, Jalisco, México, Full Papers, Abstracts, and Panel (Deadline: November 15, 2023) and Workshop Proposals (Deadline: January 30, 2023)
+ Call for Participation: Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI) 2024 at the University of Victoria, Victoria (Early Registration Deadline: April 1, 2024 / Regular Registration Deadline: June 1, 2024)
About
Felt Notes are monthly dispatches about the work of the Just Futures Co-lab, and the co-labouring worlds of research and teaching in art, design, and the digital humanities that it scaffolds, furthers, and amplifies. The letter writing translates the ever so negotiated nature of this space and the discourse and scholarship on equity and justice we produce through critical pedagogy; archives and databases; interactive digital storytelling; and inquiries into queer-feminist media technologies and infrastructures.
I hope reading this letter and its upcoming segments are a meaningful experience for you. If you aren’t subscribed yet, you may do so here. If you are already subscribed, I would love for you to share the link with friends and trusted networks as we make sense of our relationships to technology as well as our relationships to each other via technology. If you would like to write or co-write a letter in the future or share any announcements, please feel free to get in touch with me, and whilst you’re here, please also check out the Felt Notes Archive.
Kush Patel