Out! Stories from the New Queer India, edited by Minal Hajratwala, takes the 2009 reading down of Section 377 of the Indian Penal code by the Delhi High Court – a law that criminalises homosexuality – as marking the beginning of the 'New Queer India'. Out! takes the metaphor of the closet as its guiding imagery, and seeks to talk about queer lives in all their manifestations and ambiguities, however in or out of the proverbial closet they may be. Documenting a space outside the "magical gay ghetto" of Western queer fiction, Out! is filled with stories populated by "mothers, fathers, grandfathers and great-aunts, children, neighbours, and sometimes unlikely allies." On the other hand, Close, Too Close: The Tranquebar Book of Queer Erotica, edited by Meenu and Shruti, is populated by hands, tongues, bodies and a physicality that for many individuals is the beginning of their experiences of difference. In order to look forward, this book starts with desire, that through which "many people first know of their sexuality". In exploring the "less visible zones of queer sex writing from South Asia," Close, Too Close is a visceral journey that satisfies as it charts the shifting spaces of desire, difference, love and the emotionally aloof. Both collections are an invaluable addition to the growing corpus of literature, art, film and scholarship which takes Southasian queer lives as its subject.
New queer India?
But if this is the 'New Queer India', what is new about it? Are these books themselves a testament to things that could not have come before? The short answer seems to be yes. Yet the Supreme Court verdict of 11 December 2013 to uphold Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, overruling the Delhi High Court's 2009 decision on the grounds that "Section 377 IPC does not suffer from the vice of unconstitutionality," is yet another challenge to a 'queer India' entering another 'new' phase.
Out! announces that the "genie has been let out of the bottle – and the closet." The exposure of and interest in queer lives post-2009, which through extensive media coverage uncomfortably 'outed' many individuals, certainly marked a shift in the 'mainstream' gaze towards queer lives. Yet to overemphasise the shift of the mainstream would obscure the hard work of individuals and groups around India who have worked and continue to work tirelessly to make a queerer India in all the concrete ways, places and spaces where legality means little. It is these people that work for and populate the 'New Queer India', many of whose lives we can glimpse in these collections of writing. It is these people who stood together on 11 December and declared they would keep fighting this battle until it is won.
Both collections draw on a pre-existing tradition of queer writing and reading, whether 1960s queer American pulp novels lingering under Mills & Boons on a street-side book stall, or contemporary zines and blogs such as Scripts or Gaysi, or novels and short stories by writers such as R Raj Rao, Devdutt Pattanaik, Hoshang Merchant, or the classic Same Sex Love in India (2000) edited by Ruth Vanita and Saleem Kidwai. Headlines like "Authors get bold as gay literature picks up in India" (Times of India 2011) reflect the gentle growth in the publishing of and demand for queer literature in India, to which Out! and Close, Too Close add significant momentum.