“The Indian Queer”

Literature has often served as a weapon of social and political activism. The absence of a vernacular literary tradition of the sexual minority in a multi-lingual country like India has compelled the Indian queer to predominantly use English as the language of literary creation as well as theorising. The process of canon formation has taken the shape of (1) the publication of English anthologies of literary pieces such as Same-Sex Love in India: Readings in Indian Literature and (2) literary writing in English following the Anglophone models, as in the case of R Raj Rao’s Lady Lolita’s Lover (inspired by Lolita and Lady Chatterley’s Lover). This move aims at the consolidation of a pan-Indian queer community united not only by a common cause but also a common tongue and the creation of global solidarity of people defying the rigid taxonomy of identification through sex, gender, and sexual orientation. However, the queer terminology borrowed from the West lacks contextual specificity in the Indian subcontinent and has not been translated due to the lack of equivalent vernacular terms. The Indian queer, for lack of a better term, is faced not only with the challenge of overthrowing a compulsory norm-assigning web cast upon its shoulder, which too was a colonial imposition but is compelled to use tools alien to them.