Sangama Collection

Sangama is a Non-Governmental Organisation dedicated to protecting the rights of working class queer communities, sex workers and people living with HIV/AIDS (PLHA). Elavarthi Manohar established Sangama in Bangalore in 1999. Sangama began as a resource and documentation centre on issues of gender and sexuality during a time when most Indian queers were afraid to come out publicly, and information on alternative sexual and gender identities was severely lacking.

Over the next few years, increasing interactions with the local queer communities of different classes informed Sangama's expansion into an organisation that also involved itself in crisis intervention and HIV/AIDS prevention at the grassroots level while advancing the advocacy for the decriminalisation of Sec 377 IPC.

This collection, spanning 20 years, presents a broad view of Sangama's functioning and its daughter CBOs, and describes the context in which the queer movement developed in the city. The collection is organised into five series as follows:

1. Elavarthi Manohar's Materials
2. Sangama Organisational Papers
3. Sangama Documentation Project
4. Sangama's work on Crisis Intervention
5. Sangama's Media Documentation

This collection has been partially catalogued.

Elavarthi Manohar's Materials consists of documents and other ephemera from community and support groups that Manohar had been a part of in Bombay and Bangalore before he founded Sangama as well as other textual material relating to queer lives and queer groups from before 1999, which fed into Sangama's Documentation Project.

Sangama Organisational Papers provides an understanding of the inner workings of Sangama and its Community-Based Organizations (CBOs). The materials consist of internal and staff documents, correspondence, organisational records, daily reports by employees, and more ephemera, from Sangama's events. This collection also stores academic articles and political theories collected by the organisation.