What is the word for ‘romance’ in Tamil? Kadhal is love and anbu is affection. “A lot of people gave similar suggestions but we could not nail it. This is when we discovered that there is no known or commonly used phrase for ‘romance’ in Tamil,” says C Moulee, laughing.
The co-founder of Queer Chennai Chronicle (QCC) says that it takes several such rounds of discussion to come up with appropriate terms to add to their expansive Tamil and English glossary that addresses members of the LBGTQIA+ community with respect.
For over six years now, his group and a host of volunteers from around the world, have been on a quest, amassing a wealth of words spoken by the Tamil-speaking queer community to add to their list published on their website in 2018. They have taken a dive into the world of letters, finding appropriate terms for words like ‘queer’ which is paal puthumai, in Tamil, while also neatly dividing the terms as those referring to gender, sex, sexuality and umbrella terms used by the community.
In the last year, this group’s effort has ensured that over 90% of this living document is now part of the Tamil Nadu Government Gazette, upon direction by the Madras High Court. It has taken years of debate and discussion to come out with this new, inclusive lexicon.
Unfolding old language
Writer and editor of QCC, LS Gireesh says that ever since he began reading books on gender in Tamil, he has been looking for terms equivalent to their English counterparts to describe queer-folk. Their website has an active collection of words which have been mapped since 2011, used by the Tamil-speaking queer community, to describe themselves.
“Much of the queer discourse is in English so it sometimes becomes difficult to find Tamil words that mean the same. We have found commonly-used terms in Tamil to be derogatory sometimes. The search for respectful words that have already existed in regular parlance while being respectful is the interesting part,” he says.
Moulee adds that volunteers who have contributed to this glossary have used terms that are sometimes exclusive to certain Tamil dialects. Over the years, these terms which were once contested for their lack of grammar, have now found use in regular syntax. “When we came with the terms, it was when Section 377 was read down. There was more interest and conversation back then and it became easier to spread the word. People both in India and abroad began attaching Tamil terms to their identity for the first time. We also normalised the usage by publishing books and blogs with these terms,” he says.
Moulee takes the example of the term ‘dead name’ which refers to a person’s birth name before they transition. He says that an exact translation in Tamil reads as erandha paer, a morbid usage. He says that they have instead used vazhangapatta paer which translates to given name.
While the team is happy that most of their terms have found their way to the Tamil Nadu Government Gazette, some words used by the Government seem to have been invented or are transliterations. “They do not have any historical connection to the community but seem to have made inferences from Sangam literature. However, we know that the Gazette is just a guide and that language constantly evolves,” says Ragamalika Karthikeyan, a journalist who contributed to the glossary. “Some terms make a comeback, some are reclaimed,” she says.
Moulee adds that he is looking forward to several new iterations of the glossary that will be revised over time. “As Ragamalika says, it is important to note that it is not just a singular LGBTQIA+ community but ‘communities’. This is because we come with various intersectional identities. I will be happy if there is more than one term for an identity in Tamil as it enriches the language and its subsequent discourse,” he says.
