Out! and New Queer Indian Literature

What, exactly, constitutes a new queer literature in India? This essay attempts to examine this question by focusing on works written in the twenty-first century, with particular attention given to two short stories from the 2012anthology Out! Stories from the New Queer India, edited by Minal Hajratwala: Sunny Singh’s “A Cup Full of Jasmine Oil” and Ashish Sawhny’s “Nimbooda, Nimbooda, Nimbooda.” Intended as neither a legal nor a historical study, this essay considers the interplay of literary cultural production and real-world, watershed events. Through asking questions such as “What is ‘new’ about these twenty-first century works?” and “How are they ‘queer’?” I seek to map the politics of location in Singh’s and Sawhny’s texts. More generally, I consider contemporary queer Indian literature, particularly with regard to its focus on what I would term “visible-invisibility”—the contradictory, complex, time-and-place-specific discourses that construct queer Indian subjects across diverse religious, gender, and community contexts.