It’s Pride Month.
And even as corporates and multinationals move away from DEI policies that once made June an explosion of rainbow, LGBT lives are not going back into the closet.
Earlier this month I was at the 17th Kashish Pride Film Festival in Mumbai, South Asia’s biggest LGBTQ+ Film Festival where renowned actress Konkona Sen Sharma received an award for being a rainbow ally amidst huge cheers.
KSS1: Its so amazing to be here today again. I am so amazed its the 17th year of Kashish pride film festival. This is how to build community. Thank you so much
Meanwhile a five star hotel in Kolkata hosted a Pride party with a transman band in attendance.
BAND
The transman band is named Adamya or Indefatigable. But transmen themselves have been left out of India’s recent Transgender bill according to activists.
Which begs the question when it comes to LGBTQ+ rights in India what is the writing on the wall?
It turns out to be a mural.
This is Sandip Roy in Kolkata
The building had seen better days. An old three-story house, with slatted windows and trellis patterns on its balcony, faded by sun and rain.
But its walls have become a canvas.
Figures, larger than life-size, of ambiguous gender, gaze out onto the street from its walls. The delicate jamdani textile one wears glows neon yellow against the peach pink of the wall in the late afternoon sun. Another stands in a casually-wrapped grey printed sari, fist raised in the air as if captured in mid-chant.
The figures depict transgender lives, portraits of real-life queer people says artist Archee Roy who worked on the mural. But the building belongs to the sixty year old Crafts Council of West Bengal and its store Artisana. Anjum Katyal the honorary general secretary says they had done a makeover of the inside but were wondering what to do with the exterior.
AK1:It was looking to put it mildly a little shabby and rundown and we we thinking of for our 60th year, doing fresh things and bring a fresh approach. We’ve done the interior. Lets see about the exterior.
So poet and writer Karuna Ezara Parikh stepped in and connected the crafts council to the arts collectives Aravani Arts Project and Fearless Collective to see if they would do a mural. Aravani works to create a collective space for the transgender community in public art. Fearless Collective works with women and misrepresented communities. Karuna Ezara Parikh says they quickly saw an overlap between the stories of craft and transgender lives.
KP1 : It felt like a wonderful intersection. We quickly realised what craft and marginalised edges of society had in common was erasure and facing that. So we joined hands
Once that threat of erasure for both came from colonisation says artist Nandini Moitra who conceived the mural. For example handloom weaves were imperiled by machine made cloth from England.
NM1: When our history as transpeople has been erased because of it. How do we reclaim it because both of these things have been colonised. How do we decolonize?
Art seemed an obvious answer, the biggest tool for expression, says artist Archee Roy
AR1: It is the biggest tool to express our independence as well. Thats how we have weaved our thought and fight through textile.
The figures in the mural literally resist that act of erasure. Bandhni, the act of plucking cloth with finger nails to create a design from “scars” on the cloth resonated with Archee Roy. Queer people know a thing or two about finding meaning in the scars life deals them.
Or the grey printed sari or chapa sari one figure wears which has a slogan running along the border.
AR2: from Bangladesh a beautiful chhaapa sari tradition said there is a tradition like they write on the textile so we use the slogan Aaamar Shorir Aamaar Mon Door Hotho Rajshashan.
(My body, my mind, State keep out of it.) An old marching slogan.
But what was really striking was this was a story of queerness without any of the markers we have come to associate with Pride month. No rainbow saris and flags. There is a painting of an old cupboard, literally a coming out of the closet of sorts, an object that co-exists perfectly in the stories of both craft and sexuality. But it’s a nuance that many passers by would miss.
The mural told an older story of Pride, one that was more about resistance than rainbows.
Happy Pride everyone
This is Sandip Roy in Kolkata for KALW