Essential South Asian Queer Non Fiction
After the fiction list we shared for Pride Month, we’ve decided to hone in on the other side of things - memoirs, nonfiction works and biographies that have been a key part of the queer movement in South Asia and beyond. Below is our selection of a few important South Asian nonfiction works that have made an impact and showcased perspectives that were historically silenced.
Yaraana: Gay Writing from India - ed. Hoshaang Merchant, 2000
Perhaps one of the first and most impactful ‘gay anthologies’ to come out of India, including excerpts from writers like Vikram Seth, Ashok Row Kavi and Bhupen Khakkar, this book is a comprehensive look at homosexuality in India, including translations from various languages as well as English writing. Many of the pieces are deeply personal, evocative, and showcase a variety of gay experience in India at a time when it was truly revolutionary.
Love’s Rite: Same Sex Marriage in India and the West - Ruth Vanita, 2005
This book is a comprehensive examination of same-sex unions in India, going between various historical periods and the contemporary to provide a new perspective on the sociocultural and legal traditions in which same sex relations are embedded. The book was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and is also a cultural history of homoeroticism that examines things from a new perspective.
Loving Women - Maya Sharma, 2006
The sub-heading of this work is ‘Being Lesbian in Unprivileged India’, and Maya Sharma does a fantastic job of documenting the lives of ten queer women from around North India in this seminal work. Published by Yoda Press, who have long been pathbreakers in putting out alternative narratives and played a big role in India’s queer movement, it’s well worth a read.
Shikhandi and Other Tales They Don’t Tell You - Devdutt Patnaik, 2014
An exploration of queerness in Indian mythology by one of the nation’s foremost scholars of that genre, Shikhandi and Other Tales is a look at the oral and written traditions of Hinduism that examines stories of queerness from an ancient context. It is a nod to the ways in which traditional Hindu culture has always been infused with examples of queerness and alternate gender identities, with myths ranging from the playful to the emotional to the downright shocking.
Infinite Variety: A History of Indian Desire - Madhavi Menon, 2018
Navigating many centuries, geographies and various cultural histories within India and the subcontinent, Madhavi Menon’s book is gloriously subversive, powerfully written and a treasure trove of knowledge about the history of desire in India. From straight to queer, it showcases how gender and sexual identities in India have always been fluid rather than fixed, and offers new insight via various analyses.
Straight To Normal - Sharif Rangnekar, 2019
As a fifteen-year-old, Sharif D. Rangnekar could not fathom why he felt aroused watching men dance in a Jermaine Jackson music video. He soon found the ‘answer’ in a book that told him that this was just a phase and it would end once he got married. He almost did. Straight to Normal is the autobiography of a gay man who had to battle bouts of confusion, vulnerability, fear, dejection and depression and also unlearn the normative definition of lust, love and everything in between, in order to thwart the desire to kill himself and find a way to live.
In Sensorium: Notes for My People - Tanais, 2022
Writer and perfumer Tanais aka Tanwi Nandini Islam wrote this expansive memoir structured like a perfume, moving from base to heart to top notes. Tapping into the sensory, olfactory and cultural, this books weaves new tapestries from the perspective of a Bangladeshi American Muslim femme, interrogating various strands from the personal to the political in a beautiful manner.
Homeless, K.Vaishali - 2023
This memoir is about a woman discovering she’s lesbian and dyslexic at 20, prompting her to deconstruct her anxieties around reading and writing. She comes out to her mother at 22, and leaves her home in Bombay to chart her own path. From living in a dingy, rent-free hostel room in Hyderabad, we are companions through a process of contending with her feelings around dyslexia, queerness, mental health struggles, heartbreak, caste, gender and body. Vaishali’s story mirrors many hidden truths of the young in India, and is a courageous work from a new writer to watch.