QAMRA Archival Project at NLSIU is delighted to announce our latest acquisition – the Maya Sharma and Indra Pathak Collection.
Maya Sharma and Indra Pathak are feminist, queer, grassroots activists based in Vadodara, Gujarat. Maya, a journalist, has a history of working with trade unions and with the autonomous women’s movement before entering the queer movement. Indra previously has worked with labourers, the Mahila Samakhya programme and Nari Adalats in rural Gujarat.
Currently, they lead Vikalp Women’s Group, a feminist-queer NGO in Vadodara. Indra has been working with Vikalp since the late 1990s, and Maya’s association started when she began research on lesbians, FTM transpersons and queer female couples in rural Gujarat. Aided by Vikalp, this project culminated in Maya’s first book, Loving Women: Being Lesbian in Unprivileged India.
By the mid-2000s, Vikalp initiated work in the HIV/AIDS field, and with Maya’s and Indra’s involvement expanded towards working with communities of queer women and FTM transpeople. They were instrumental in creating Parma, a self-support group for female born queer individuals in Gujarat, which is now called Sabrang.
This collection, built over a period of almost two decades, represents Maya’s and Indra’s work with queer communities in Gujarat and some of their organisational work with Vikalp and Parma/Sabrang. The collection is divided into four series: 1. Documentation, 2. Organisational Documents, 3. Maya’s Writings, and 4. Photographs.
The first series, Documentation, contains newspaper clippings andÂ
and magazine articles on violence against lesbians and FTM transpersons that were featured in the media, and legal documents from some of the cases in which Parma/Vikalp intervened to lend support to queer individuals. This series forms a majority of the primary sources on which Loving Women is based.
The second series, Organisational Documents, covers programmes and activities that Parma/Vikalp participated in and organised as part of their mission towards social change; and includes the organisation’s publications, and a set of hand written letters sent to them by queer women from across the state.
The third series, Maya’s Writings, is a selection of some notes from fact finding committees she was part of, and notes from meetings with people.
The fourth series, Photographs, has ten photo albums which document Parma/Vikalp’s journey, the people involved and the memorable episodes they were involved in.
A two-hour interview with Maya and Indra where they share some personal histories, talk about their career and the decades long process of constituting this collection accompanies the material.