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To Render Real the Imagined: An Ethnographic History of Lesbian Community in India

Among the preoccupations of the anthropology of sexuality has been demonstrating the cultural uniqueness of queer sexual forms around the world, a task most effectively begun by excavating a range of vernacular, culturally specific, sexual identity terms. Often missed in this attention to difference is an engagement with the processes by which the term “lesbian” has offered itself as a site for passionate personal attachment and as a node for imaginative activist labor in non‐Western, non–middle‐class, non–English‐speaking sites. Through an analysis of hundreds of letters received by India’s first lesbian networking group, Sakhi (founded in 1991 and disbanded in 1997), I narrate in this article the story of how women from a range of classes and positions across India first came to think of themselves and their desires as lesbian. The letters they wrote to one another and to the activists at Sakhi were the medium for the formation of a trans‐ and pannational imagined Indian lesbian community. The story of the formation of this imagined community is one of complex, unruly transnational mediations: a cosmopolitan lesbian activist travels the world in search of funding for the founding of Sakhi, women in Calcutta read advertisements for the network in underground zines published in Toronto and San Jose, and hopes and dreams of same‐sex love are sparked by images and travelers from Delhi and London. One of the phenomena I analyze in this article is how, in the teleological process of transforming an emergent, imagined community into something “real,” face‐to‐face, and ideologically coherent, such formative mediations are actively obscured in order to imbue community with a sense of ontological truth and political necessity. As lesbian community in India increasingly became a physical thing to be protected, rather than a dream produced through letters, new norms were instituted against English identity terms, against the presence of white women and nonresident Indians, and against speech that privileged lesbian sexual desire over lesbian political analysis. Through this ethnographic history of community formation among early lesbian activists in India, I argue for the importance of examining emergent rights movements through their play between possibility and limitation. I ask, for example: What processes of normalization were required and enacted in order to produce out of the term “lesbian” an identity and a way of being in the world? What was the relationship between the possibilities that “lesbian” was imagined to offer and the moral norms for proper behavior that would come to define it? Understanding activism as the ethical practice of commitment to possibility that emerges over and against the imposition of norms, this article also argues that it is in the face of loss that new ways of living, thinking, and being must be created. The story of India’s early lesbian activists is one of the struggle between norms and possibility, a struggle variously shared with all emergent radical worlds.