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print versionThe Washington Post, September 2, 2021
Saleem Kidwai, scholar who unearthed long-buried literature on gay love in India, dies at 70
Saleem Kidwai in his garden in Lucknow, India (Mona Bachmann)
by Suzanne Goldenberg
(The Washington Post, September 2, 2021)
Saleem Kidwai, an independent scholar and co-editor of a transformative anthology that recovered lost and long-buried writings about same-sex love in Indian literature from ancient Sanskrit texts through Mughal-era poetry and short stories set in college dorms during the 1970s, died Aug. 30 at a hospital in Lucknow, India. He was 70.
The cause was cardiac arrest, said Ruth Vanita, a University of Montana literature professor and the co-editor with Mr. Kidwai of the 2000 volume “Same-Sex Love in India: Readings From Literature and History.”
A scion of a prominent Muslim family, Mr. Kidwai became an eminence in Delhi’s LGBTQ community with the publication of “Same-Sex Love in India.” The book was widely regarded as a foundational text for queer studies in India and was cited in hearings before the country’s Supreme Court, which ended the criminalization of homosexuality in 2018.
“Saleem Kidwai and Ruth Vanita were the ammunition for us to advocate what our history was and how our culture was and how to reclaim it,” said Anand Grover, one of the lawyers who led the case for the repeal of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, under which homosexuality was illegal.
That shift helped change the public atmosphere within which the justices would eventually render their decision, Grover said.
“The mainstream history and for the vast majority of the people, the thinking was that Section 377 is part of our culture, and they had no idea that prior to the British it was a different ballgame,” he added.
“Same-Sex Love in India” was a sweeping historical correction that sought to reclaim a rich repository of poetry and fiction celebrating romantic attachments that had been deliberately ignored.
When Mr. Kidwai and Vanita embarked on their project in the early 1990s, much of the Indian academy, political establishment and social elite rejected homosexuality as an alien import from the West and an affront to Indian culture and society.
“During the time that the book was first published, it was commonly asserted by homophobic cultural nationalists that homosexuality was never a part of Indian tradition,” Shohini Ghosh, a professor at the A.J.K. Mass Communication Research Center in India, wrote in an email. “It served as an eye opener to many, while to others it confirmed that queer love and its many manifestations had a long and vibrant history in South Asia.”
Mr. Kidwai and Vanita had first met when both were lecturers at Delhi University — though in different colleges and disciplines. Mr. Kidwai was an associate professor in medieval and Mughal history at Ramjas College; Vanita taught literature.
Independently, they had been collecting texts describing same-sex attraction and love from their readings, Mr. Kidwai in Urdu and Persian, Vanita in Sanskrit and other languages. “As you’d be reading, you’d find lots of things that would strike you and your gaydar would start tinging,” Mr. Kidwai later told Project Bolo, a collection of oral histories documenting the gay community in India. “Both Ruth and I had been doing similar things.”
Queer studies didn’t really exist as a discipline in India at the time. In the Indian media, gay and lesbian couples, when they appeared at all, were mostly confined to the category of tragic circumstance — doomed love that ends, for example, in a double suicide by rat poison or self-immolation.
Even private references were oblique. As Mr. Kidwai liked to recount, gossips dissecting the end of a marriage might mention that the man was impotent, though only with women.
Until the 2018 judicial ruling, homosexuality was punishable by up to 10 years in jail. The anti-sodomy law, imposed by the British in India in 1861, was used to blackmail men trying to meet men for sex in public parks and, at the height of the AIDS crisis, to block the distribution of condoms in Indian jails.
There were no gay bars or nightclubs in Delhi. Meetings were arranged surreptitiously, such as by leaving a red rose on a coffee shop table to signal that it was safe to approach.
Mr. Kidwai had left his teaching job at Delhi University in 1993, and there were no major grants or establishment support for a project of this kind when he and Vanita embarked on the book. The two academics struggled to find a publisher, releasing the book first through a U.S. imprint in 2000 and publishing an Indian version a year later.
In the two decades since its publication, “Same-Sex Love in India” has undergone 19 printings.
“By translating literature about same-sex love from 15 Indian languages composed over more than 2,000 years, the book challenged the modern homophobic idea that homosexuality was a foreign import,” Vanita said. “Homosexuality wasn’t a foreign import. Homophobia was.”
Mr. Kidwai was born Aug. 7, 1951, into a large landowning clan in Lucknow, the capital city of the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. He moved to Delhi at 17, ostensibly to study history at Delhi University, but also because he had realized that Indian small-town life would be too constraining for a gay man.
He received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in history and started teaching at Delhi University in 1973.
He was granted leave from the university in 1976 to pursue PhD studies at McGill University in Montreal. On a terrifying evening in October 1977, Mr. Kidwai was among about 150 men arrested in an armed police raid on two Montreal gay bars. The men were subjected to compulsory VD tests and threatened with criminal charges.
The raids provoked massive street protests the next day and, months later, Quebec banned discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. (The criminal charges, however, were not dropped for years.)
By then, traumatized by his arrest, periodic court appearances and the constant threat of deportation, and disillusioned at the prospect of living openly as a gay man in the West, Mr. Kidwai fled Montreal and his PhD program to return to his university job as an associate professor of history in Delhi.
He was open about his sexuality with his family and close friends, a circle that expanded even more rapidly after he left academia once he became eligible for voluntary retirement. In the 1990s, he became increasingly active in Delhi’s gay community, where he was in constant demand at conferences and on television talk shows.
After moving back to Lucknow about two decades ago, he worked with television producers on a documentary about the late singer and actress Begum Akhtar. He also published English translations of Urdu novels and a memoir, and he entertained a constant throng of visiting Indian and Western academics, eager to tap Mr. Kidwai’s vast knowledge of the Mughal Empire, Hindustani classical music, and Urdu literature.
Survivors include three sisters. [ . . .] full text here
(Suzanne Goldenberg is the editor of The Washington Post’s Sunday Business section. She joined The Post in 2017 from The Guardian where she covered climate change and the environment, three presidential elections, and the U.S. invasion of Iraq after stints as a foreign correspondent in the Middle East and South Asia.)
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A tribute to Saleem Kidwai, a man who made a real contribution to India’s LGBTQ community
A respected professor at the University of Delhi, Saleem Kidwai, who enjoyed engaging with people and chronicling lives and times, was especially intent on defeating homophobia
by Sharif D Rangnekar
PUBLISHED ON SEP 02, 2021 03:30 PM IST
On Monday, August 30, when I received a message from my dear friend, author, poet and advocate, Dr Saif Mahmood, that Saleem Kidwai is no more, I was in shock. Saleem and I had been in touch just the week before, planning a long conversation or guftagu over the coming weekend to discuss politics, love and life.
Saif, of course, was devastated, as Saleem and he had exchanged messages two days earlier. Their friendship dated back several decades, finding literature, history, Sufism and legendary poets and artists such as Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Iqbal Bano, Malika Pukhraj and Begum Akhtar, as common interests.
In my case, it was homosexuality that we connected on.
It was on August 28, 1999, a little over 22 years ago, when I first met Saleem at a gay group meeting called Humrahi held at Anjali Gopalan’s Naz Foundation office in Delhi. I had just “come out” and was trying to find a place for myself among the small number of young gay men, most of whom, like me, were seeking an identity and legitimacy that law and society had denied us.
Even though Saleem was a tall scholar and a respected professor at the University of Delhi, he never let his professional stature come in the way of his personal pursuits of defeating the “homophobia project”. He believed literature and history had its role to play and being a “chronicler” of lives and times, engaging with people was innate to him. “I enjoy it,” he had told me.
Hence, he was approachable to anyone, instinctively socially mobile, believing in shared values and that conversations and engagement could lead to a common thread, a more empathetic world.
So it was natural for him to keep his rented accommodation in Anand Lok open to all of us. While listening to his stories, we’d unhesitatingly sit for hours quietly rummaging through his library-like bookshelves without a care of time or his need for privacy. He would even “hand over the keys to his home”, reminisces our mutual friend, lawyer and activist, Aditya Bandyopadhyay, “knowing how his vast collection of books and journals was a treasure trove for me”.
Even if Saleem saw himself “only” as an intellectual, historian and teacher and not an activist taking to the streets, coining slogans, he was one. “His stature of scholarliness that he brought to the young movement then,” gave us a sense of self and identity,” recalls the author and activist, Maya Sharma. And his sheer “aesthetics, sensitivity and ability to empathise” made him a real icon of sorts, she says.
Yet, he wasn’t the typical leader, chasing power and status to be on the main stage.
He was driven by the urge to bring about the empowerment of the community rather than by a hankering for the trappings of power. He didn’t impose a singular way or route for us to achieve freedom from the colonial law of Section 377. He believed bringing people together, listening to them, was far more critical. “At least they know they have someone to turn to, to come to, someone who will not judge them,” he told me.
While Saleem himself proclaimed his “very liberal” political outlook on Facebook, Anjali felt his humility was why he was so special. In the early years of Naz Foundation, “he was one of the people manning our helplines with Jivi Sethi,” the last thing you’d expect of such a lettered man, she recalls. He’d even make himself available at the drop of a hat, providing immediate counsel if someone was in trouble. He’d offer to talk to parents and meet them, as he laughingly said, age and education was respected in most homes, and the “old man in the room” (himself) was aging enough and a professor!
Saleem, of course, was aware of gay life in India as well as what it was to be gay in the West during the 1970s and 1980s. He had once faced the horror of being picked up by the Canadian police that raided a gay bar when the law was against homosexuality. So, as he told me, he had an indication of the conflicts that an emerging gay night life can face in a slowly evolving India where everything was against us.
His pursuit to make a difference was not limited to his interactions within the community, it led him to co-edit Same-Sex Love in India with Ruth Vanita. While the book was bound to be contentious, he seemed least bothered. But according to the senior lawyer, Anand Grover, the book “became a bible for those of us fighting to get rid of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC).” And as history had it, his work with Ruth found its way into the verdict of September 6, 2018 that read down Section 377!
Yet, Saleem never showed any sign of ego or arrogance given his well-established contribution to our lives, directly or otherwise. He still kept an open house in Lucknow, insisting we stay with him, even asking me to bring my mother along “as there is enough room, food and drinks” to keep us alive.
Over the past few years, Saleem and I spoke more often and even met in Lucknow in February 2019. We were at a queer function where he invited Maya, the author, Nighat Gandhi and journalist Anant Zanane and me over for dinner. He was in his elements, talking about the 1990s, the movement, lust and pleasure, history and politics. He had arranged the best of meat and quality alcohol, quietly telling me that the meat and alcohol was the ‘only’ perfect marriage, “where one completes the other”.
Of course, Saleem was single and never expressed any disappointment at being so. While he supported the “old gay liberation politics” that were pro love and freedom and not marriage, he never ridiculed anyone who chose matrimony. Perhaps his singlehood allowed him to share love in a manner that touched many of our lives, leaving us with unforgettable memories.
Through the pandemic, the frequency of conversations with Saleem increased as we checked on each other. If there was anything that bothered him, it was the growing Islamophobia, ageism and body shaming, all of which had entered the queer world. “Sociability has diminished, people rejecting each other over a word, a picture,” he observed in disgust, indicating that human rights were now far more complex than earlier.
Still, Saleem, a victim of this change, kept his phone and home open to people on either side of the ideological divide, queer or straight, although reluctant to engage with hate mongers. He didn’t wish to change as a person just because the politics of our time or the media was somewhat unrecognisable. If we stop talking, asking questions, sharing our views, reassuring each other, “we’d be irresponsible too”, he had said, reminding us of his undying courage.
I often wondered how to describe him, his nature or character or how to define his contribution to our lives, and to my mind.
Saif says there are two words in Urdu – khuloos and wazadaari – that are “inextricably intertwined with the definition of sharaafat.” While khuloos, “is typified by genuineness and sincerity and an underlying element of lovingness and warmth, wazadaari entails a certain enduring attachment to one’s social values.” Saleem epitomised both, he explains, adding that he was “a living embodiment of Awadhi tehzeeb,” and a person I would never wish to forget!
Sharif Rangnekar is an author and the Festival Director, Rainbow Lit Fest.
