A Space for All

A few years ago, software engineer and Dalit activist Grace Banu wanted to publish a collection of her writings. She had them all ready: articles and essays about the rights of trans women, poems and short stories about their plights and experiences. She took them to many mainstream publishing houses, hoping to secure a contract on her terms that treated both her, and the subjects that she is passionate about, fairly.

But she couldn’t find one. “All the publishers I went to had upper-caste people in charge, and they kept saying things had to be changed in the book,” she says, speaking to me over the phone from Kovilpatti in Tamil Nadu. “Some openly said we are not publishing this book, and some were more indirect.”

She felt slighted, angered, and, above all—unheard.

In 2019, Banu decided to self-publish her collection of essays, Talks of Grace Banu, and she thought that was that. But then in 2022, Dalit trans woman writer Ajitha came to Banu with her own question about the publishing industry.

“She asked me how she could get her book published and I didn’t know to whom I could refer her, after my own experience with the industry,” she says. “And that’s when I had the idea—why not start a publication house myself?”

With the help of Negha Shahin, an award-winning trans woman actor from Kerala, Banu went ahead and registered the company—and thus Queer Publishing House (QPH) was born. Currently, there are seven members of the team. With limited resources, Banu is still working on getting a website and a physical office set up for the publishing house, but the authors are already here.

Over the phone, QPH author Swetha Udhyasuryan speaks to me in Tamil, while Banu translates. Swetha is a Dalit trans woman. She is also a writer and a pharmacist, and lives with HIV. QPH published Swetha in June 2023, and her book was launched in New York in both Tamil and English this past August at a talk given by Banu in Brooklyn.

“I heard about QPH being at the Chennai Book Fair and I went to visit the stall,” says Swetha. “Writing is an easy way to connect with people, and I wanted to tell society about the kind of oppression I am facing for who I am.”

Swetha took four months to write her autobiography, after which QPH guided her through the publishing process. Her favourite part of the process? Hearing from her readers. “After the launch, a reader called me and shared their own life journeys with me,” says Swetha, “It was so encouraging.”

Banu’s QPH is one of the first in India to be founded specifically to publish books by Dalit queer authors. The house has already published eight books including Ajitha and trans man writer Arun Karthik’s poetry in Tamil, as well as Negha Shahin’s book RIP, but it was not the first to focus exclusively on queer people.

In 2010, queer activist Shobhna S. Kumar had started Queer Ink—an e-commerce platform to find and buy books about queerness by queer authors from India. Currently, the platform has taken an entirely new form, having transformed into, first, a publishing house, and now an archive and a production house.

“After I arrived in India in 2003, my partner and I went to bookstores in Mumbai looking for queer books—and we quickly found out that there weren’t any on the shelves, as people hesitated to buy them in public or even take them home,” says Kumar, speaking to me from her home in Mumbai over a video call.

In 2012, Queer Ink published its first book—an anthology of short stories edited by Minal Hajratwala, called Out! Stories from the New Queer India. The house has published 10 volumes so far, acting as both publisher and distributor.

But this wasn’t to be the final form of Queer Ink. Like Kumar—who has, at various points, been a community development worker, a spiritual counsellor and a human resource professional—the platform soon transformed itself once again. Currently, apart from being a publishing house, it is also an archive and a production house for documentary filmmaking.

“While preparing a book trailer for Out!, I couldn’t find a single romantic picture of Indian same-sex relationships. I had to use white people’s images!” exclaims Kumar.

So, in 2014, she started making short documentary films featuring Indian queer people. Eventually, during the pandemic, this became a full-blown archival project, called Queer Ink Archives. Via the archives, she wants to publish a searchable database of queer history with consulting archivist Ishita Shah, maintain oral records of queer people’s histories in India, and make a feature-length documentary with filmmaker Malati Rao—while, of course, continuing to publish books (a call for submissions of short stories just closed in July.)

“I started to realise that queer people are a miniscule minority,” she says. “We have no documented history, as if we were not a part of India.”

On speaking to authors of queer writing, one starts to get a sense of how rare Indian queer writing was before Ruth Vanita and Saleem Kidwai’s pioneering work, Same-Sex Love in India: A Literary History, appeared in 2000. Vanita, in an email, names Suniti Namjoshi’s first book, Poems, published by P. Lal of Writers Workshop, Calcutta in 1967, and Vikram Seth’s first book of poems, Mappings, as contemporary influences.

Author Sandip Roy credits the overturning of Section 377, the erstwhile section of the Indian Penal Code that outlawed ‘unnatural sex’ including same-sex relations, with the entry of queer writing into the mainstream—“Post-legalisation, it seems like publishers are scrambling to get queer authors on the list,” he says.

But Banu’s experience shows that there is a long way to go before publishing in India starts to imagine the Indian queer person in a truly intersectional way.

“We want to share our stories and histories with people, but publishers want stories that require sympathy, not empathy,” says Banu. “I founded Queer Publishing House so that publishing books becomes accessible to all people, not just people from privileged castes and classes.”

booksGrace BanuIndian publishingqueerShobhna S. Kumarwriters