Aniruddha Dutta's Story

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Having lived and studied in India and now in the US, and moving between my small-town home in Eastern India and many large cities, being queer has been a complex and at times paradoxical experience for me.

I had a childhood that I now recall as mostly happy, which was disrupted in early teenage when I moved from my small-town school to a large boys-only catholic institution in a nearby city. There I realized both my attraction for boys and the sheer impossibility of articulating that desire, given the circumstances.

It was only in my first year of college that I came out – not to my friends at first, but to my sister and to cousins within our extended family, who were initially taken aback but soon became a large, closely-knit and invaluable support base.

This had a side benefit – I never had to directly come out to my father, he heard from an aunt who had been in turn tipped off by a garrulous cousin. So the extended-family gossip network ensured that I never had to face his initial reaction whatever that had been, and as the years passed we came to an unspoken understanding that he knew and accepted.

India is of course a large, diverse and conflicted space – many have tried to map its geography in terms of conservatism or acceptance, with varying and contradictory results. The very elite liberal arts college in the capital city of Delhi, where I did my undergrad degree, had a mixed atmosphere – the administration was Christian-conservative, the faculty largely left-liberal, and the students mostly uncaring of how you lived or died, let alone loved or had sex. Class and being 'with-it' mattered more than sexuality of any sort, and I found company only in a small circle of people who were outsiders to that dominant culture.

Doing my Master's in Kolkata (Calcutta) was a far more liberating experience – I found a department and faculty that would both encourage me to pursue my intellectual interests in issues of gender, sexuality and class, and would cheer me when I randomly decided to turn up in drag in a very academic and serious seminar on literary modernities.

Another huge source of sustenance has been my music (I had started learning the piano in adolescence but eventually turned entirely to composition), and in this way America has provided me with many more opportunities, as western classical is a fringe genre in India.

Being queer on a US campus – in my experience – is at once easier and more mundane, and my quotidian identity as a grad student, as well as the super-efficient and individualized lifestyle I am supposed and compelled to lead, completely overwhelms any other side of my personality and identity here.

I somehow keep longing for summers in Kolkata with the exciting pride week that comes with it, the companionship in front of scandalized or curious stares during the pride march, where the entire gamut of queerness in India – with people from tiny villages as well as large cities – can be seen in a combined show of bravado and scandal.

We know how everyone loves to perform, and being out and queer in Kolkata involves performance on a day-to-day basis, certainly with its attendant dangers, but also its attendant thrills.