Beena Aneesh

This Foundation Project implemented by IFA will critically explore the experiences of migration of the queer and trans community to facilitate a report/monograph on the queer history of Kerala drawing primarily from the materials available at the Queer Archive for Memory, Reflection and Activism (QAMRA) at the National Law School of India University (NLSIU), Bengaluru. The proposes to be an auto-ethnographic work, focusing on the migration journey of the Project Coordinator and the stories and memories of a small number of queer and trans people who moved from Kerala to Bangalore between 2002 and 2004. The project is a collaboration with QAMRA, a multimedia archival project situated within the library of the NLSIU, which chronicles and preserves the stories of communities marginalised on the basis of gender and sexuality in India. Beena Aneesh is the Project Coordinator for this project.

Beena Aneesh is not new to writing and researching on queer and trans life experiences. She is one of the earliest members of Sahayatrika collective. She also was a founding member of the LesBiT collective in Bangalore. For this project Beena will collaborate with Reshma Bharadwaj as her academic advisor and Aryakrishna R as the creative advisor of the project. Reshma is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Social Work, Sree Sankaracharya University of Sanskrit, Kalady campus. She is credited with editing and publishing the first collection of queer political writings in Malayalam, Mithyakalkkappuram: Swavaraga Laimgikatha Keralathil (Against the Myths: Homosexuality in Keralam). Aryakrishna is an artist, curator, archivist and activist based in Kerala and New Delhi. They were a community activist associated with Sahayatrika and Vaathil in the early years, and have worked with Sangama and Pechaan Project in Bangalore and Kerala, and Voices against 377 in New Delhi. Given Beena’s experiences, she is best suited to be the Project Coordinator for this Foundation Project of IFA.

The project will draw from the four archival collections at QAMRA - Maya Sharma and Indra Pathak collections, Sangama collection, Section 377 IPC collection and T Jayashree collection - that the institution has opened up for this collaboration. The focus of the research will be to explore connections between gender identities, love and sexuality with experiences of mobility and migration. While the materials at QAMRA will be the starting point of this project, it will also collect stories of queer and trans people who have migrated. This will include experiences that Beena encountered herself as a queer woman from a marginalised caste and class background. One of the main focuses of the project is to trace the queer history of Kerala before the queer-trans movement in the state. In order to do some of the questions that will be investigated include ways in which experiences of class, caste, community, disability, family acceptance or violence, forced marriage or compulsory heterosexuality, gender or sexuality difference, and friendship informed their decision to leave Kerala; the reasons for choosing Bangalore as a location, in spite of the linguistic and cultural differences; and ways in which migration between Kerala and Bangalore influenced the development of organisations and policies.

Beena has divided her one year term of the project roughly into six phases starting with research on secondary resources, writing her own experiences, and traveling to Bangalore for the archival work at QAMRA. Based on the archival work and other research the final report will be written.

The outcome of the project will be a report/monograph. The Project Coordinator also hopes to organise an exhibition or other cultural productions based on the stories and archival work. The Project Coordinator’s deliverables to IFA along with the final reports will be the report/monograph and recordings from exhibition or cultural productions, if any. 

IFA will ensure that the implementation of this project happens in a timely manner and funds expended are accounted for. IFA will also review the progress of the project at midterm and document it through an Implementation Memorandum. After the project is finished and all deliverables are submitted, IFA will put together a Final Evaluation to share with Trustees.