Chronicling the early years of LGBTQIA+ movement in India

How Pawan Dhall, queer rights activist, researcher, and writer, has single-handedly created a remarkable archive of the early years of the movement.

Pawan Dhall shows a few objects from the archive in his south Kolkata flat. | Photo Credit: Debasish Bhaduri

Please wash your hands,” said Pawan Dhall (55), a queer rights activist, researcher, and writer, when I asked him to show me the contents of his archive on the LGBTQIA+ community. Dhall has been building this up since the late 1980s, long before LGBTQIA+ activism and related archives became mainstream: understandably, he is finicky about the material he has painstakingly collected over the decades. He houses the material in files and folders in a cupboard and boxes in the south Kolkata flat he shares with his 91-year-old mother. “This is an interim arrangement,” says the mild-mannered, diminutive Dhall, adding, “I am trying to raise funds for a resource centre. Cataloguing is under way.”

Dhall has been engaged with the mobilisation of LGBTQIA+ communities in eastern and north-eastern India since the early 1990s. He has worked as a journalist, copywriter, and social communicator in his early years as a professional. From 2002 to 2014, he was with SAATHII, a non-governmental organisation working for universal access to health and social justice. All his work has been fuelled by his own experience as a gay individual.

Dhall felt the need to talk with people of his own persuasion right from his teenage years in the 1980s. In his late school years and in college, he felt the urge to write. He began by shooting off letters to the editor. In 1984, an article in Sunday Mid-Day by a social worker and psychiatrist addressed the poorly understood fears and isolation of gay people: it answered all of the young Dhall’s queries. He also read Shakuntala Devi’s “honest” account of her husband’s homosexuality to make sense of his orientation.

A collection of issues of Pravartak published over the decades. | Photo Credit: Debasish Bhaduri

Then, in 1986, Ashok Row Kavi, a journalist and LGBTQIA+ rights activist, came out publicly—among the first gay men to do so. He thus became not only an inspiration for other closeted homosexuals but also the go-to person for anyone interested in working on queer issues. Dhall and Row Kavi have been friends and colleagues for years now.

Documenting the LGBTQIA+ movement

In the early 1990s, Dhall met three peers working with Trikone, Bombay Dost, and Shakti Khabar, magazines for LGBTQIA+ communities. Fear of violence at home, of bullying, of confinement, of being caught out by parents or wife, of blackmail, and of HIV brought the community together. They felt the need to talk and help one another. The three issues of the magazine titled Pravartak that Dhall published independently between 1991 and 1992 addressed this need. A typewriter was his only tool in this endeavour. Pravartak appeared primarily in English and Hindi, sometimes in Bengali.

After a period of dormancy, Pravartak was revived in 1993 as the house journal of the Kolkata-based Counsel Club (CC), one of India’s earliest queer support groups, which closed in 2002. Pawan was a founding member of CC.

The phenomenal amount of material gathered by Dhall includes copies of Pravartak, as well as letters and essays that appeared in various publications from the late 1980s, when homosexuality cautiously began to come out of the closet in India. This coincided with the HIV epidemic and the fears it triggered among the so-called vulnerable groups. The documents go until the early 2000s, before a Supreme Court judgment in 2018 read down Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, the ruling that finally decriminalised consensual sexual activity among people of the same sex. The archive follows the course of the movement to stop discrimination against gender and sexual minorities.

Comic strips in the July-December, 1996, issue of Pravartak. | Photo Credit: Debasish Bhaduri

Dhall says: “Some of my colleagues in CC back in the 1990s were sceptical and often questioned the need for this archive. But so much is lost already. Most of the photographs are gone owing to neglect. When it comes to letters, I couldn’t get emotionally detached from personal outpourings.”

The archive began as a mini library. He says: “We had to preserve what we were doing and document it for future reference, and also for researchers and activists. It began with the habit of writing minutes to pre-empt future community disputes and then extended to include everything else—photographs, detailed reports, and so on. When an organisation gets registered, many points have to be documented for legal purposes. There is also accountability in a wider sense. As activists, reporters, and writers, we get access to a lot of intimate personal information to work on; in some ways, we also benefit emotionally and financially from it. It is important to preserve this information, but we have to keep it confidential as a lot of it is personal. There should be checks and balances when it comes to consulting the material, but it is important to preserve it because this is the record of whatever we have done, the arguments we made, the advocacy we spearheaded, the awareness we created.”

Highlights

• Pawan Dhall, a queer rights activist, researcher, and writer, has built up an archive of the early years of the LGBTQIA+ movement in India
• Dhall has been engaged with the mobilisation of LGBTQIA+ communities in eastern and north-eastern India since the early 1990s
• One of the important components of the archive are issues of Pravartak, a magazine devoted to LGBTQIA+ issues 

Thick with stories

To give a concrete example of how the archives are helping, non-profits have to delve into records, into stories from the past, each time they argue a case in court. “If you look at the tomes of judgments delivered by the Supreme Court in matters pertaining to Section 377 or to NALSA [National Legal Services Authority], you will find that all of them are thick with stories from the past. These stories of individual lives, of the challenges and problems people face, make up the arguments of a case. In the coming years, when other issues around discrimination will be challenged—and I hope they will be—these stories will serve a great purpose because they provide the evidence base of the problems that the queer community has battled over the decades,” Dhall says.

The queer movement in India has certainly generated tonnes of documents but little of it exists today. Hardly any effort was made to preserve it owing to lack of finances and infrastructure. Sayan Bhattacharya, an assistant professor of gender studies in the University of Maryland, who has worked with the material, stresses the importance of preserving it. He says: “There hasn’t been much effort to maintain records of queer movements in India. Organisations shut down, volunteers move away, legal complications crop up…. It is important to have a collection that gives you a sense of time. The archive serves as a time capsule by preserving things big and small, from the first typewritten notes (1989) to listings in e-groups, letters, printed-out emails, chats in chat rooms like VSNL or Yahoo, many of which have since disappeared.”

In 1991-92, Dhall dropped out of the master’s course he was doing and joined the Business Standard newspaper. CC started monthly meetings in September 1994 after an article in The Statesman discussed the group’s work, mentioning its postbag number. Innumerable people wrote in. More and more ideas came up as they began meeting newcomers. CC started circulating magazines and erotica, threw birthday parties, and held stage performances.

Bringing the community closer

The same set of people acted as reporter, interviewer, editor, and artist in Pravartak. The letters, journals, and files related to CC’s work show how it helped people in different ways, including finding jobs for them. In one case, a youngster’s family had found out about his inclinations and got him tested for HIV. The result was negative. The CC helped him get a part-time job because he needed to become self-reliant. Now he is in the West Bengal Civil Service. However, CC was never registered: it ran on donations and Pravartak subscriptions.

In 1997, the launch of the Network East programme, a CC initiative which no longer exists, brought people of the region closer: they discussed same-sex relations, human rights, health, Section 377, and violence. In the 2002 edition of Network East, quiz contests, film and stage shows were held at several locations in Kolkata in spite of the challenges of getting venues. For the first time, the West Bengal State AIDS Prevention and Control Society offered help. Integration Society, a sister NGO of CC, received funding for Network East.

Pages from the July-December 1994 issue of Pravartak. There is an article on same-sex relations in the works of Bankimchandra Chatterjee on the righthand page. | Photo Credit: Debasish Bhaduri

Dhall says: “I started compiling and safe-keeping the archival material even during the CC years, but more so after 2002, when I left the group. When the webzine Varta [of the Kolkata-based non-profit of the same name] started in 2013, some of its contributors began to research the material and write articles based on the research.” Dhall is a founding trustee of Varta, which is involved in the publication of issues related to gender and sexuality, awareness generation, research, advocacy and training. “In 2013, Varta started a blog, and people encouraged me to make the archive more systematic,” Dhall says.

In 2018, when the Queer Archive for Memory Reflection and Activism—the first professional queer archiving initiative in India—was instituted by the National Law School of India University in Bengaluru, Dhall became associated with it and picked up useful skills on how to classify, digitise, categorise, and store material. “Ideally, all the material should be stored in acid-free boxes. But, given the expenses, it is not possible without regular funding,” says Dhall. So, he continues to look for funding for his archive, hoping that one day it will get the attention it deserves.

Soumitra Das is a freelance journalist based in Kolkata.