“While reading down Section 377 IPC, the Division Bench of the High Court overlooked that a miniscule fraction of the country’s population constitute lesbians, gays, bisexuals or transgenders and in last more than 150 years less than 200 persons have been prosecuted (as per the reported orders) for committing offence under Section 377 IPC and this cannot be made sound basis for declaring that section ultra vires the provisions of Articles 14, 15 and 21 of the Constitution.”
(Suresh Kumar Koushal & Anr. v. NAZ Foundation & Ors. (2013)
QAMRA is the outcome of a great deal of collaborative work spanning many years with many different people and stakeholders. Part of this includes the 377 litigation but the impetus for archiving our history precedes this.
The roots of the QAMRA Archival Project lie in first-person narratives recorded over the course of the Suresh Kumar Koushal & Anr. vs NAZ Foundation & Ors. case in the Supreme Court of India in 2012-2013. Based on detailed transcripts of proceedings that lawyers Siddharth Narrain and Tripti Tandon were sharing from within the court, activists worried about the narrow questions from the 2-judge bench and the direction the case was taking. Troubled by dismissals from the bench about “miniscule” sections of society, filmmaker T. Jayashree interviewed lawyers and a range of petitioners, many of whom had revealed their identities in the case without guarantee of a queer-affirmative future.
Soon after, activists in Bangalore organised a three-day queer archiving workshop, supported by the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex. The workshop was attended by many archivists, collectors and queer folks in India, and confirmed the need for an independent archive that would serve as a safe space for queer lives and memory in India. Find more on the report here.
In December of 2013, the Supreme Court overturned the much-celebrated 2009 Delhi High Court judgement, and effectively recriminalised same-sex relations. The Delhi High Court had, in a landmark judgement, read down Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code that penalised “consensual sex against the order of nature”, and held that it could not be applied to consenting adults (Naz Foundation vs NCT of Delhi).
Efforts to consolidate queer histories continued. QAMRA was launched in 2017 at Alternative Law Forum (ALF), with the screening of footage from the first Bengaluru Pride March and other unedited footage.
A retinue of student interns from St. Joseph’s College in the city began to help bring this vision to fruition at Jayashree’s studio in Bengaluru. The eager archivists considered what the integral aspects of this archive might be and came up with the name QAMRA – the Queer Archive for Memory, Reflection and Activism. QAMRA calls to mind the Hindustani word, kamra, that refers to a room. More expansively, QAMRA indicates an association with ‘camera’, also an enclosed assembly, that fits well with our history and multimedia collections. As of now, QAMRA is one of the only multimedia, multilingual, physical queer archives in the Indian subcontinent.
After another landmark Supreme Court judgement in 2018, Navtej Singh Johar & Ors. vs Union of India which decriminalised same-sex relations between consenting adults, two important collections came into T. Jayashree’s studio: the 377 case proceedings from the lawyers in Delhi as well as ALF, Bengaluru and documentation and organisational records from Sangama, the pioneering Bengaluru based sexuality-rights NGO. Documentation and correspondence from Sangama, the Queer Legal collection, and the T Jayashree audio visual collection became the founding collections of the QAMRA archive. We thank the numerous individuals and archivists who have helped us in our journey.
QAMRA aims to aid efforts in queer rights activism and advocacy, as well as acting as a resource base for students, educators, artists, and scholars working in the area of gender and sexuality. As a repository of narratives, its aim is to enable and further conversations around the history, present, and future of the Indian LGBTQIA+ community.
QAMRA Archival Project, NLSIU
In 2021, as the world began to consider a post-COVID-19 future, QAMRA moved to the National Law School of India University (NLSIU) in Bengaluru. The NLSIU has organic links with queer-legal activism in India; in 1997, law students organised a symposium on the rights of homosexuals on campus. There has always been a culture among the students and within the institution of supporting queer issues, which made the prospect of creating an institutional relationship between a public university and a queer archive exciting for both parties.
QAMRA is housed at the NLSIU Library, and has offered archives based elective courses to the student community and resources for external faculty offering electives on queer issues. QAMRA’s book collection can also be found and accessed in the NLSIU library catalogue.
QAMRA is currently working on cataloguing the collections it has received, making these catalogues available online on ArchivesSpace and making them accessible, alongside its continuous upkeep and archival maintenance. QAMRA also encourages discussions around archiving and queer archiving by hosting workshops, discussions, film screenings and other events in the city that are open to the public.
Researchers, artists, students, community members and all interested persons are welcome to browse and study our collections. QAMRA is open to donations in terms of collections, time and money. Please visit our ‘Donate’ page to learn more.
To read more about our work in the past few years, please click here to access our annual reports and newsletters.