Biographical note:

Maya Sharma and Indira Pathak are feminist, queer, grassroots activists based in Vadodara, Gujarat. Maya is a journalist and worked with trade unions and the autonomous women’s movement before entering the queer movement. Indira previously worked with labour unions, the Mahila Samakhya programme and Nari Adalats in rural Gujarat before founding Vikalp Women’s Group.

Historical background:

Vikalp is a feminist-queer NGO based in Vadodara, founded in 1996, working with lesbians, bisexuals, transgender women and transmasculine men across different axes – crisis intervention, providing legal support and holding workshops on a plethora of issues affecting these individuals. By the mid-2000s, they initiated work in the HIV/AIDS field, and with Maya’s and Indira’s involvement expanded towards working with communities of queer women and trans-masculine persons. They were instrumental in creating Parma, a self-support group for female born queer individuals in Gujarat, which is now called Sabrang.

Notes on the collection: 

This collection spans 34 years of work (1988-2022) and has been fully catalogued and can be accessed via QAMRA’s ArchivesSpace as well. It has been divided into the following series:

I. Vikalp Internal Documents,

II. Parma,

III. Parma/Vikalp Crisis Intervention,

IV. Maya Sharma’s Writings, and

V. Vikalp’s Photo Albums.

There is also a two-hour interview with Maya and Indira that acts as an accompaniment to this collection. They share their personal histories, the kinds of work they engaged in before coming to Vikalp, the discourses around sexual politics and organising within the community. They also talk at length about the decades-long process of creating this collection.

Collection Summary:

Vikalp Internal Documents covers programmes and activities that Vikalp participated in and organised as part of their mission towards social change; and includes the organisation’s publications, reports of workshops they conducted and more. Parma, documents the group’s interaction with the media and other activities. Parma/Vikalp Crisis Intervention, contains legal documents from some of the cases in which Parma/Vikalp intervened to lend support to queer individuals and newspaper clippings and magazine articles on violence against lesbians and trans-masculine individuals. This series contains some of the primary sources on which Loving Women (2006) and Footprints of a Queer History (2022) are based. Maya Sharma’s Writings is a selection of some notes from fact finding committees she was part of, and notes from meetings with people. Vikalp Photo Albums has eleven photo albums which document Parma/Vikalp’s journey.