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Each File is a Person (Part II)


An Interview with T. Jayashree and Siddarth Ganesh from the


In the first segment of a two-part longform interview, Samira Bose spoke to T. Jayashree and Siddarth Ganesh from QAMRA about self-organizing an independent archive, the complication of categorizing archival materials, and their dialogue with other like-minded projects across the global south.

In this second part, they share about intergenerational conversations, attuning to affect and feeling in archives, and their shift in 2021 from a residential space to the campus at the National Law School of India University, Bengaluru.

Samira Bose (SB): A lot of your work challenges the view of the archive as static. I’ve been thinking about how archives are always already in flux, because the vocabularies are always changing. For example, while newspaper clippings have vocabularies from a moment, the lens towards them is always changing. And I was wondering—what kind of shifts and changes stand out to you within the decades covered in your archive? I know that’s a very broad question, but I’m wondering if there’s something that stands out in terms of the shifts within queer discourse, and have you reconsidered and repositioned some materials in context of the present?

T. Jayashree (JT): Personally, when I was looking at Siddhartha Gautam’s[1] materials from the 1980s, what he wrote was not very public, and not many people know about it. This was before liberalization, and India was very different. The material tells us about the language that people and activists were using, and their approach—it was a much more politicized kind of an environment then because there was the memory of the Emergency in a lot of those people who were working at that time, and this was also the height of HIV. You could see people were very reluctant to talk about sexuality. But even within that, you could see the articulation and how people were engaging with each other and reaching out—I mean the way they were networked, it’s amazing; people wrote 10 letters in a day—Siddhartha Gautam would get 10 letters every day, and he would write some more than 20 letters. I mean, if I were to plot when he slept, I can say exactly how many hours he would have slept. Here’s a person who was fully committed and thinking and doing this, and so were his friends and fellow activists who were responding to him and writing to him. He was a law student, and he was working with senior advocates and lawyers and all of those people; they were all very connected.

In this day and age of digital and social media, how many are we reaching out to in that sense? We post and we just see how many likes we’ve got, but we don’t know those 32 likes in that sense, right? The archive of that time gives you a sense of how people communicated with each other, and the sheer networking during the Naz litigation…the ‘Voices Against 377’ actually speaks for itself. They got through to all these people, they coordinated, they had meetings all over. It’s not that everybody was on the same boat, they had different views, but they all got together and as a collective, they did this, so it really stands out how people worked together in those times.

There were hardly any resources, and the other is language itself—activist language. What was politically correct then will be different from what is politically correct today. If you want to see how activism changes over two or three decades, that also comes across clearly.


From left to right: Prof. Kunal Ambasta, Anuja Gupta, Ashwini Ailawadi, and Prof. Arun Thiruvengadam, at ‘The 377 Journey: Archives, Activism and the Law,’ a panel discussion organized by QAMRA at NLSIU.

A crucial question that is raised when you’re cataloging or when you are reproducing some of those things is: do we use the language that we use today, or do we stay true to what they were using? For example, in the late 80s and early 90s, when you talk about sex workers, you said “prostitutes” and that was common across newspapers, activists, courts—everybody was using it. By the mid-1990s, it is “women in prostitution” first and then “commercial sex worker.” It evolves that way. Similarly, we hardly use the word “hijra” anymore. Ten years ago, it was very much common vocabulary—there was no trans-women then, right? And when Sangama started it was gay and lesbian, and you had kothis and panthis. Now, nobody talks about kothis and panthis.

With each generation, the language changes. But when we talk about someone who lived in the late 90s and early 2000s, who identified themselves as hijra, we have to say that they are hijra. Today, while referring to their identity in the past, we can't say 'transwomen' because they recorded themselves as hijra at that point in time.This is another thing we need to be aware of when we represent something. As an archive, apart from keeping the material, we are also making sure that the representation is true to that original self.

Another major dilemma we have in terms of data deletion is that people have transitioned. They have an earlier avatar in the archives, and then a later one, so how do we refer to them? We are still having the conversation about whether this will be case by case, and how we are going to navigate this. In the present, we are all very aware that when we talk to or about somebody, we refer to them the way they want to be referred to. That’s the first respect that we can give that person, right? If somebody comes and says that I was that, and today I am this and I want to be recognized as this, we have no problem with that. Similarly, if that person comes and says you destroy everything about my past, do we destroy it? Or can we put it away for some time and then have this conversation later?

We were not thinking about these things when we first started. It has evolved as we look at the material, and we speak to people and a lot of these people are around us, they are still there. And now that we have users who want to use these materials, we start to realize a lot of these questions. For me, the fascinating thing was pre-liberalization and post liberalization, it was very clear. And for young people who are born after 2000, they are not aware of the rich material that is there. So when we talk about QAMRA, we are actually reaching out to a larger public; we are not saying that it’s only queer people that we will speak to.

Another thing is that cities are changing so fast. We had a building six months ago. It doesn’t exist anymore. These landmarks are changing. And for queer lives especially, a lot of life happens in the open, in public spaces; and in my own collection, I can see how Bangalore city has changed. Some of those landmarks don’t exist anymore, those places where people used to congregate aren’t there. It’s a very different city and it’s changed. We can actually trace the changes from this small collection. There is so much more out there, but even a small collection reflects so many of these issues; how people lived, how they spoke, how they dressed, how free you were not—all of those things you can see from just this material.

For me, it’s been a very rich journey of 20 years, I must say. And I feel very privileged that people opened up themselves, their homes, their life stories.

Siddarth Ganesh (SG): Because Jayashree mentioned this change that has happened in vocabulary over the years, if you look at the Sangama collection, it will give you a snapshot of the process of change also. In what way? Sangama was doing documentation in so many languages in Bangalore. At that point, they were keeping an eye on how queer issues were being reported. So, every time the English media used words instead of saying transgender or hijra, or if the story of a lesbian couple was misreported and misrepresented, they would write a letter to the editor. They would demand an apology. They would demand a correction, and would also say that in the future, please use the right words. It shows that this organization was very actively involved in thinking about how the entire community was being represented in the media at that point. And you don’t get this from the newspapers alone, but when you place the Sangama organizational material with the newspapers, you’ll even see which specific articles they were complaining about.

Another question about vocabulary that I get asked a lot, especially from younger people is, how do you deal with slurs in the archive? When we catalog, we have an extensive system of key-wording, and our stance is that we will never input the slur that’s in the material, and this is the one point where the archive also decides to directly intervene. We can then use the keyword ‘homophobia’ instead, and that acts almost like a warning. The other thing young people ask about is trigger warnings. This is very heavy material, you know, where are the trigger warnings for this archive for every collection? So, when I put out that exhibition as part of Pride, I had to think about the trigger warnings and preface the curatorial note with the trigger warnings as well. This will then make you think about the categorization, organization, and the vocabularies across the different collections also.


The ‘Pride’ section of the Pride and Protest exhibition curated by Siddarth S Ganesh, as part of the Kamanabillu Santhe, Namma Pride 2022. Source: Alex Winshaw.
SB: This may seem like a simplistic thing to say, but having worked in an archive for the last few years, you realize after immersion in the materials how much of our privilege is actually built on the work done by previous generations. It teaches you a lot of humility because somewhere generationally we are quick to cancel. I can see myself getting angry so easily when I read certain letters that were written in the past and always have to remind myself to give it time, and to understand it contextually before placing judgment. That being said, the sensitivity and consciousness of younger generations is crucial to reconsider the materials, and it was important to hear about your intervention in this aspect as an archive that speaks to different generations.

This also makes me think about students and your recent shift in location. At the beginning, Jayashree, you were talking about how the archives started in your house and now you are in a public library at the National Law School University of India. I’m wondering how you’re feeling. Are you feeling nervous? How are you envisioning the near future?

JT: See, I have always been an independent filmmaker. I started my work with trade unions. I worked with a lot of people through freelance. I never created an institution. I was around when other organizations such as Sangama began, and I never thought that I would set up an organization. I have spoken about QAMRA’s beginnings, and it is our priority for the materials to be cared for and to be in a space that’s open. NGOs are struggling and that whole NGO model doesn’t work anymore in that sense. Our question was, what do we do with this material and where would it go?

One thing is that QAMRA is not just one person. We have an Advisory Board with 13 people officially, but unofficially we have many more that we’ve been talking to regularly. We have had a very collaborative process from day one. Even the decision to move to NLSIU was a collaborative one, and not easy. It took a year for us to make that decision. Our main criteria were that the materials should be safe and that it should be an open space where people can come. These are the only two criteria.

We have been in discussion with the NLS in Bangalore, because a lot of the people who were involved in this litigation process are also from NLS. The institution has played a huge role in it. In fact, the first conference on gay rights happened in 1997 at the school, where a lot of people, activists came from all over the country. It just seemed like a natural, organic way of moving things. And we’re also very excited to say that we are part of the library at NLS, so we are not a separate archive or a center or anything. This gives us an opportunity to actually engage with the library, and be part of this process where we reimagine library spaces, right? This feels like it’s a win-win situation for all of us, and NLS has undergraduate students who live on campus, and we have access to this age group of 18- to 22-year-olds that we can engage with, and there’s already a queer alliance on campus. They were very excited that we brought the archive. NLS is also a public institution, and the archive is open—anyone can walk in. This also means that we can actually be open, because our initial concern was that we don’t want to close off to anyone.


Where Love is Illegal, a rotating exhibition sent to QAMRA by Witness Change, being displayed in the QAMRA working space in the Sri Narayan Rao Melgiri Memorial National Law Library, NLSIU. Source: QAMRA Archival Project, NLSIU.
We now have to teach a course once a year to the fifth year and the Masters in Public Policy students—we do an elective on archives, and this is one way for us also to understand how archives can be understood and used in the area of academics.

I’m also now stepping back from my day-to-day interaction with the archive because now we have a very good team. And I think it’s also good that there is a collection in my name. We also said that whoever has collected and given the material, the collections will be named after them. So, in a way, you pay tribute to that person. I’m very happy that this will have a life, as at one point it could have just died in my cupboard.

SG: I don’t know how I would like to see this going ahead. Like Jayashree was saying, the work in an archive has so many layers, and we’re all interested in so many of them at the same time also. And it’s quite rare that they overlap, or you have that one project that will allow you to do everything. I would say that there are different things that the archive will have to do—definitely more public engagement. Every time we have visitors, queer or not queer, they have so much to learn from here. They always go back having had a lovely experience in the archive. And so I’d like to take that learning to more people and get them to come and interact with our material. I think having people come physically to the archive is very important for us as a physical archive, and having these relationships with people and continuing them is an important part of the work that we do.

Being on campus, we are slowly participating in educational activities outside of the course. We have students not just from NLSIU but also from Srishti, from Azim Premji University, and many other colleges who will request a session in the archive around a particular theme or a particular connection. For me, at the end of the day, it is to see queer history being visible from a very local context, yes, but one of the great things about focusing on queer history in Bangalore is that it will give you networks to go to other places in India. In the context of the queer movement, Bangalore is a city of migration; so many flows of ideas and activists have been through Bangalore. You can start in Bangalore, and it will eventually lead you to the rest of the world.

SB: I want to conclude on a slightly poetic note. In our previous discussion, Siddarth, that we had in context of my work at Asia Art Archive in India, we were discussing the slippery materials that are ephemera and you quite poignantly had asked, “how do we preserve an affective moment?” And I think the idea of the personal and people’s lived experiences is something that you really foreground in your work at QAMRA. How do you position QAMRA as an archive that holds feelings, particularly in terms of categorization and access?

SG: I think the term we’ve all used is archive of “emotion” and not the archive of “feeling”, because emotions are a little more than just feelings, sometimes, right?

It might not necessarily come from within. It could be a bunch of other things as well—it’s that broader context that also needs to be preserved. And it’s that contextualization which gives value to the material that we have in the archive. There are two overlapping aspects, one being emotional, and the other being memory. It’s not just an object in the archive, it’s not just an archival record. Take, for example, one of the people on the Advisory Board, Thejaswi. They have given us an umbrella from the very first pride that happened in Bangalore in 2008. They had been saying they’ll give it to us, but it took two and a half years for it to come. It’s clearly something that they’re very attached to. But then they see that having it in the archive also gives it a bigger life, and in the first public exhibition that we had in Bangalore, I had used that umbrella to create an installation where I suspended photos from the very first Pride to look like raindrops falling off the edge of the umbrella. It was an interactive installation, where people could go in and be surrounded by these different memories. It’s a play on how it is in the archive, essentially.


‘Deluge of Memories’—an installation featuring an umbrella from the first Bengaluru Pride (2008), and photos from the city’s Pride in 2008 and 2009, in the Pride and Protest exhibition curated by Siddarth S Ganesh at the Kamanabillu Santhe 2022. Source: Alex Winshaw.
This is one example of how memory and emotion and its usage through the archive works in our specific context, but this again opens it up. In the event for the installation, there were not just the general public who were invited, but there were also activists, there were people who were part of the Pride Organizing Committee in the crowd. And they were looking at these old photos, and they started listing names and pointing people out. They had spent years with them, and were able to say if they’re still alive or not, if they’re untraceable. Every time a queer person comes and interacts with this material, more emotional bonds and memories are brought out. These materials don’t have static lives, is what I’ve realized, and it’s always going to be a challenge to accommodate each new growing interpretation and keep on adding more layers to each. It’s going to be a process that we will have to discover as we discover our own material.

JT: I’m just slightly jumping in here, but one of the things that we are pondering is…in these archival conferences we talk about preserving items and folders; you have these various categories in which you put all these things. But in each of those items, in each file is a person, there’s somebody’s life. We are now trying to figure out how we can give a language to this. How do we refer to these people? You can’t separate saying this is an archive of emotions or an archive of legal strategies—all of these are enmeshed in one person. And we are talking about people who are alive, and as Siddarth said, we’ve lost so many of them. And how do we remember them?

SG: My first introduction to QAMRA happened in 2019, when I had come down to Bangalore to do field work. I had already been part of pride organizing in Bangalore by then, so I knew people to approach, and then I got introduced to Jayashree and QAMRA.

Going back to that affective moment…I was really a little overwhelmed, but in a good way, because I realized that the project I had embarked on in my dissertation and that QAMRA had come up with was to humanize history. 

The risk with archives dedicated to social movements or even just historic projects around social movements, is that very often it gets reduced to timelines, milestones—Who was the leader? Who was the person battling it in court? But beyond that, nothing is considered actual information. And what QAMRA started out with and continues to do is trying to fill all the pieces of that bigger puzzle. Who was this person? If you look at Jayashree’s interviews with different lawyers and interveners in the 377 litigation series, it becomes personal as well. Take Shyam Divan, for example. Why did Shyam Divan decide to argue our case for us? Why did the parents of the queer individuals decide to sign that petition? I think these are very important questions that get answered by accessing the material, and reground the human aspects of history. Especially when it comes to marginalized communities—which are already challenged with demonization, ostracization, social acceptance—a project like this tries to capture every aspect of their persona, their lives, their loves, their hatreds, their challenges. It becomes very crucial for a larger project in society as well.

JT: And you can reference across these collections, they all speak to each other, even if their work was different from what was happening in the court or what Sangama was doing. You can see that around the same time, all of these people are doing different things and they all feed into each other. And that’s the most exciting part of this.

SG: For me, the simplest pleasure when I’m working with the material is making that connection for the first time, and you find these two random pieces of paper, and then suddenly like, oh my god, this and this, and then that leads you to something else. It’s that process of discovery in the archive.


[1] Siddhartha Gautam was one of the people behind the booklet, Less Than Gay, which is one of the first books or any kind of document to talk about homosexuality in India. It was published in 1991 November. Much of his work is discussed in Part 1 of the interview.


The QAMRA Archival Project at NLSIU, Bengaluru, is a multimedia archival project which aims to chronicle and preserve the stories of communities marginalized on the basis of gender and sexuality in India. The Queer Archive for Memory, Reflection and Activism (QAMRA) aims to aid efforts in queer rights advocacy through archival activism, acting as a resource base for activists, students, educators, artists, and scholars working in the areas 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. Read more about the archive’s collections at www.qamra.in.Samira Bose is Curator at Asia Art Archive in India, New Delhi, where she conceptualizes exhibitions, workshops, and discursive programs to activate archival collections. Most recently, she has worked on traveling library projects and a series of Inter-Archives Conversations.

Samira Bose is Curator at Asia Art Archive in India, New Delhi, where she conceptualizes exhibitions, workshops, and discursive programs to activate archival collections. Most recently, she has worked on traveling library projects and a series of Inter-Archives Conversations.

T. Jayashree is an award-winning independent filmmaker based in Bangalore. Trained in video for development from CENDIT, New Delhi, Jayashree has written, produced, and directed for international television, radio, feature, and documentary films. Her work has focused on the intersection of gender, sexuality, law, and public health. The bulk of her unedited video documentation around sexuality issues and the legal journey to decriminalize homosexuality in India form the founding collection of the Queer Archive for Memory, Reflection and Activism (QAMRA) which she co-founded in 2017.

Siddarth Ganesh is an archivist and aspiring queer historian based out of Bangalore. They have a master’s degree from Université Grenoble-Alpes, with a specialization in the queer history of Bangalore and Social Movement Theory. They are a part of CSMR, involved in organizing Namma Pride in Karnataka. Their areas of academic curiosity include critical geography, human rights, postcolonial and subaltern studies, literature, culinary ethnography, and the philosophy of science.
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