The 2000s were a bad decade for same-sex loving women in India. A record number of suicides were recorded in different parts of the country, from Raipur and Kanpur to Chennai, where a couple who had been together for a decade set themselves on fire. For Maya Sharma, whose book Loving Women: Being Lesbian In Under-privileged India had come out in 2006, these tragedies were shocking, but not surprising.
In 2001, Sharma had begun researching stories of same-sex desiring women, and gender-transgressing persons who were born female, in rural and working- class India. One of the first people she approached for help was Vadodara-based Indira Pathak, a firebrand activist whose organization, Vikalp, worked with rural women in Gujarat to set up Nari Adalats, all-women courts arbitrating on cases of domestic violence against women and the property disputes they faced. Set up in 1996, the Adalats now have an 18-member team that comprises Dalit women from villages in Vadodara district. They take up cases that come from Vadodara, Bharuch, Dahod, Junagarh and Ahmedabad. Their success has spawned similar initiatives in other parts of Gujarat, Pathak says with pride.
Sitting in the Vikalp office, a rented duplex apartment which harbours a safe-house for runaway lesbian couples and a meeting space for Parma, a collective of lesbian, bisexual and transmasculine (LBT) persons, Pathak recalls the first time Sharma approached her in 2003. “Maya and I spoke about how people often felt that sexuality was an urban issue and didn’t affect rural or working-class women. We wanted to prove that this is a concern for women across class and region. We wanted to go to the villages and start a conversation,” says the 55-year-old. “I wanted to work on issues that affected me,” she adds.
Parma was born out of Sharma’s research. She came across many same-sex desiring women who had no access to information, safe spaces or a community of like-minded people. In 2004, the duo opened a post-box number women could write in to. They left stickers in Gujarati at railway stations, bus stops, cinema halls and restaurants in towns and cities like Rajkot, Ahmedabad, Chhota Udaipur, Tilakwada and Vadodara, with the message: “Are you a woman who loves another woman? Do you face trouble because of this? Do you want more information about it?” These stickers contained a phone number and a post-box number.
Within a week, they began receiving phone calls and letters. Women would ask, “Am I normal? I am in love with a woman.” They would talk about parental pressure to get married. Pathak and Sharma met some of them, first in public parks, and, eventually, at their office. This is how the first members of Parma came together.
Often, members would introduce others to the group. “The excitement of those days was heady,” smiles Sharma, 65.
Raja Babu, one of the early members of Parma, is a 52-year-old transmasculine person (born female but self-identifies as a man) who lives in Sankheda, in Chhota Udaipur district, where Vikalp also runs an HIV/AIDS targeted intervention programme.
He met Pathak while he was working at a private hospital as a receptionist and brought in many members to Parma. He would identify others like him—male presenting and single—when they would drop in at the hospital and slip in information about Parma during casual conversations.
This is where he met a woman, the eldest of five sisters, who admitted that she was attracted to women. Pathak and Sharma visited her in the village where she lived and found that everyone referred to her as durbar, an honorific used for men.
“We found a certain degree of tolerance among neighbours (to same-sex couples living together),” says Pathak. But as Sharma’s book, the first of its kind, showed, this tolerance was a double-edged sword—it gave rise to “complexities and intense pressures of relationships that are not publicly acknowledged, articulated, claimed or accepted”.
The process of providing visibility and a safe haven to these relationships is not without danger. Sharma and Pathak narrate an incident from 2009, when their office was attacked. Pathak recounts how media-persons attempted to enter the office to take photographs of two women who had run away from their homes in Kota, Rajasthan, and taken shelter at the Vikalp office. Following that incident, they put up CCTV cameras at the entrance.Today, Parma has more than 200 members from different districts of Gujarat. When they meet, they discuss the troubles they have faced from family and society. “We got strength knowing that there was a place where we would be encouraged to fight the pressure,” says Babu.
The collective also offers information on sexual reassignment surgeries, and has approached government hospitals to perform operations free of cost. Two have been conducted so far.
Parma recently set up a fund, fuelled by a monthly Rs.100 from each member. The corpus—Rs.1.75 lakh now—is used to help runaway couples set up home, pay rent, buy clothes and food. Members can also take a loan from the corpus to study further. “Indira’s approach is geared towards creating livelihoods—it’s a hard-nosed acceptance of the fact that women need to earn on their own,” says Sharma.
Sumathi Murthy, who is a member of LesBiT—a Bengaluru-based collective for Lesbian, Bisexual women and Transgender persons—points out the importance of the work that
Parma does.
“Non-urban and working-class women feel alienated because they don’t see a community around them, and many do not have access to information either. Communication of information about sexuality and gender happens usually through print, television channels, or the Internet, and this leaves out a number of people as a result. Parma offers not just access to information, but also support, care, and whatever services they need, such as legal aid,” says Murthy.
HOW TO GIVE
MAIN SPONSORS
Fund for Global Human Rights, Government of India.
BIGGEST NEED
Providing skills training to the women.
A DONATION OF Rs.10,000 CAN
Help rent a one-bedroom house for two months in Vadodara.
VOLUNTEERS CAN HELP
Conduct a qualitative survey on the lives of transmasculine persons.
CONTACT
vikalpwomensgroup@gmail.com
