BOOKS | SEEMA
A CISHET WOMAN’S GUIDE TO
Desi Queer Lives PRATIKA YASHASWI
O
k, let’s get one thing straight (pardon the pun): you could read all the books, journals and scholarly papers available in the world on queer lives in South Asia and still come away with only a sliver, not even a slice of a queer individual’s life. Even lovers can’t claim to understand one another fully. But one should not set foot in a conversation without lived experience. Where lived experience is lacking, one can pick up a book like “Mohanaswamy” and walk for a while in the shoes of a heartbroken gay man cringing under the gaze of a society he longs to fit into. It is no longer acceptable to hold the view that members of the LGBTQ+ community must conform to heteronormative ideas of family, beauty, gender, and more. It is in fact an act of violence not to be true to oneself and the responsibility lies as much, if not more, with cis-gendered, heterosexual individuals to widen the asphyxiating strictures of a centuries old society, and make the world a safer, more welcoming space for the LGBTQ+ community. But why read about communities that lie on the margins? Why adventure in reading at all? Well, simply because we’re not that different. If you are a woman, or have ever been a child, you have struggled to be seen. If you have ever felt repressed or alone or struggled to find yourself in strife, there are few communities that know more about true courage, honesty and fighting ten battles at once. There is so much to learn from the margins, whose survival depends on fighting the good fight. And more importantly, if we are to make the world a safer space for queer communities, we have to let them enter our hearts and fiction is a time-tested route to greater empathy. So we at SEEMA have put together a collection of writings (mostly fiction and memoir) from LGBTQ South Asia, for the average reader to dip their toes and allies to broaden their vision and understanding of queer communities.
66 | SEEMA.COM | JUNE 2021
“TRYING TO GROW” — FIRDAUS KANGA It is never, ever going to be understandable or even fair, that although a novel like Trying to Grow came out in the 1990s, conversations around sexuality and disability still lack nuance three decades on. The sex lives of the disabled are all but ignored in conversations of sexuality. The semi-autobiographical tale of a young boy called Brit, in a family full of anglophiles, with brittle bones and plenty of intelligence, mischeivousness and chutzpah is a narrative that was way ahead of its times. Kanga is one of a kind, perhaps the first, to explore sexuality and disability with as much tenderness and beauty as it was done in his debut novel. The book was later turned into a film Sixth Happiness in which Kanga himself starred.
