Walk on the Rainbow: Queer Orientations and the Ethics of Everyday Intimacies in Kolkata

Abstract

Under the banner of the rainbow flag, LGBTQ* movements around the world have raised discourses of human rights, personal freedoms, and national identity. In India, this apparently global movement has steadily gained momentum since the 1990s, securing the decriminalisation of the colonial-era anti-sodomy law and lobbying for legal protections including the right to marry. In the process, queer activists have publicly confronted hegemonic and ascendent religious nationalist formations of gender, sexuality, and the family, to raise an alternative vision of contemporary Indian personhood for the post-colonial era. In this thesis I draw on a decade of ethnographic engagment with queer communities in Kolkata, West Bengal, to analyse the ways in which queer orientations to questions of ‘identity’, rights, love, and community are lived out in the daily lives of queer-identifying people. Taking an approach inspired by Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology (2006) and Michael Carrithers’ analysis of culture as rhetoric (2005b, 2009), I locate activism as an ethical practice that is played out in everyday interactions with social others in shared spaces. Beginning with the large-scale, public-facing event of Kolkata Pride, I assess how aesthetic choices and practices of kinesis, including dance in its various forms, can express and indeed constitute ethical precepts. I show how the ethics of aesthetics and movement play out in the dialectical relations between bodies and the spaces through which they move, and claim these as the fabric with which people, places, and communities are continuously re/made. While speaking of relations through visuo-spatial metaphors, I also seek to take seriously a the call for a “sensuous scholarship” that descends into the tastes, smells, sounds, and tactile senses of the body as ways of knowing. This is expressed both in my writing style, the fragmented structure of my thesis, and my attention to the multisensory experience of being human. I conclude by drawing these ideas into the intimate plane of the everyday, considering habitual bodily dispositions, private repurposings of ancient rituals, and personal expressions of affection. In offering up a polyphonic impression of the diverse queer life of Kolkata, I press towards a social manifesto of love, friendship, and radical empathy as the basis for creating social worlds wherein people might dwell with one another.