Spacialising and Contextualising the Queer Movement in India: A Book Review of Naisargi N. Dave’s Queer Activism in India: A Story in the Anthropology of Ethics through a Philosophical Anthropological Perspective

oleh: Meghjit Sengupta

Format: Article
Diterbitkan: Sarat Centenary College 2022-07-01

Deskripsi

The discourse of the queer movement in India is hardly thought through a spatialised and contextualised understanding of the very identity of a ‘queer’ individual. Naisargi N. Dave quite beautifully weaves her understanding of ethics in doing anthropology along with her own participation in the queer movement in a city like that of Delhi, while being a lesbian person herself. Her work strikes a chord with the larger philosophical anthropological discourse which hinges upon the irreducibility of humans, despite stratification, or markings. Big concepts like that of the ‘self’ and ‘life’ irk a more thoughtful, reflexive, and universal understanding. This project is a kind of universalism indeed which transcends the previously viable modes of essential understanding. This reflects a new turn where the ontological question of knowing the “what” or the essence has returned to anthropology, which tries to reach at more universalistic answers, without compromising or ignoring the situated-ness of both the knower and the subject. We find such questions rising up in Naisargi N. Dave’s book, Dave’s ‘Queer Activism in India: A Story in the Anthropology of Ethics’, while she grapples with the very identity of the ‘queer’ individual in a society that refuses to even recognise their existence. It is in the interstitial spaces of such marginalisation that a context is created for claiming a space of freedom, in order to engage in debates, activism, and merry-making, as similarly placed, intimate individuals living each day in anticipation of acceptance, freedom, and love.