By Sreya Chatterjee

As part of my placement funded by the White Rose College of Arts and Humanities, I have been looking into the Bishopsgate LGBT Archives and Special Collections for an insight into the queer brown diaspora living in the UK. In this blog, I put the spotlight on Shakti Khabar, one of the earliest newsletters run by and for queer people of South Asian descent.

The first Shakti Khabar newsletter published in 1989 focusses on the seeming incompatibility between a queer and South Asian identification. In the 90s, queerness is mostly interpreted within a white, Eurocentric context. For the diaspora, community-building necessitates conforming to the heteropatriarchal ideal of the family. An article in the first volume states, “Being gay is so far a Western concept, an expression of the individual freedom to be. For the Asian, family and community are paramount.” In a bid to reconcile this conflict, Shakti Khabar assumes the role of an alternative family for queer people of colour all over Britain. It becomes an institution for activism, a community for support, as well as a ground for various forms of queer artistic expression.

Activism

Activism becomes front and centre of Shakti Khabar as columnists raise awareness about intersectionality and specific forms of discrimination. While a predominantly white queer culture leads to the exoticization or erasure of queer South Asians, their deviance from heterosexuality also leads to violent encounters within the brown community. Multiple activists and LGBT workers thus agitate against this human rights crisis, while organising rallies and protest marches all over the nation.

Different subgroups and communities like Women in Shakti, Shakti Ghar, Shakti Arts Group etc start forming, focussing on various aspects and concerns of queer brown lives. Shakti publicises conferences, workshops and pride walks to amplify queer discourse within the academia as well as public spaces. Further into the 90s, there are articles raising awareness about the AIDS crisis, as well as advocating for safe sex and the use of contraception.

Community

Although Shakti Khabar is based in the UK, it features new developments in the queer scene in ‘home countries’ in South Asia as well as in the US and Canada. Featuring input from magazines and newsletters from India and abroad - Bombay Dost, Pravartak, and Shamakami among others, Shakti Khabar establishes a worldwide network of brown queer people struggling with the process of self-identification.

Another useful tactic Shakti Khabar uses to foster community is introducing ‘networking’ columns, where people write looking for friends and/or romantic/sexual partners. While queer courtship in real life poses impediments and threats of violence and scandal, Shakti Khabar provides an alternative platform for seeking intimacy through the newsletters.

Joy

The final, and perhaps most important thing Shakti Khabar celebrates through its work is queer joy. Despite recurring themes of persecution, shame, erasure, housing and healthcare crises, Shakti emphatically promotes celebration as one of its core values. Creative forms of queer expression feature in the newsletters in the form of poetry, fiction and art. From closely biographical accounts of queer awakenings to entirely concocted romance fantasies, Shakti celebrates unbounded creativity, desire and pleasure.

Events like the monthly Bhangra Disco organised by the members also celebrate festivity, frenzy and the reclamation of South Asian culture with the sanction of queer self-expression such as drag runs. In a time when queerness is made simultaneous with oppression, Shakti creates spaces where queer brown bodies can dance, gyrate, and erupt with joy.

Over time, more such organisations and people from racial and sexual minorities, some working in tandem with Shakti, come to form a culture of diversity, difference and protest in the 90s. This subverts the right-wing imagination of a monocultural Britain and instead speaks of a nation thriving on multicultural spaces.

With one of the biggest LGBTQ and kink collections in the UK, Bishopsgate Institute is home to books, newsletters, pamphlets, posters and movies that shed further light on such queer lives from all over the world.

Sreya Chatterjee is a PhD student researching 21st-century Indian women’s travel writing at the University of Leeds. Her other research interests include postcolonialism, queer studies and pop culture. Her thesis is funded.