Puja Sen Majumdar

This Foundation Project implemented by IFA will facilitate research towards three to four scholarly essays and long form visual articles based on the materials available at the Queer Archive for Memory, Reflection and Activism (QAMRA) archival project at National Law School of India University (NLSIU), Bengaluru. The essays and articles will historicise Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, and trace the cultural and socio-political struggle towards decriminalising homosexuality in India. In doing so, this project will unpack the category of citizenship to explore how the relationship between queer persons/communities and the state is articulated, mediated, and engaged with, in the struggle for equality. 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. Puja Sen Majumdar is the Project Coordinator for this project with Rini Pratik Kujur as her primary collaborator.

Puja Sen Majumdar is a researcher based out of Kolkata. She has completed her MPhil from the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta (CSSSC) and has a bachelors and masters degree in English literature from Jadavpur University, Kolkata. She has worked as a Research Assistant for Hugh Downs School of Human Communication, Arizona State University. Having worked as a Project Fellow at School of Cultural Texts and Records, Jadavpur, Puja is familiar in working with archival materials. For this project she will collaborate with Rini P Kujur, who is currently pursuing PhD in History at Princeton University, USA. Rini also has an MPhil from CSSSC and completed her masters in English literature from Jadavpur University, Kolkata. Given Puja’s considerable research experience, she is best suited to be the Project Coordinator for this Foundation Project of IFA.

This project will draw from all 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. By researching through these four collections, the project will explore themes and questions around community, solidarity and struggle. Puja along with her collaborator rests their larger inquiry of queer lives in a context where subjectivity and universality is denied to people with marginalised gender and sexual identities in dominant, heteronormative and patriarchal discourses, and societal structures including legal systems. The essays and the long form articles will trace how queer persons, groups and organisations documented in these archives approach the idea of ‘community’, and the ways in which class, caste and religion become instrumental in shaping these articulations. They will also enquire how solidarity is practiced across these boundaries. The archival materials will be juxtaposed with secondary research to understand how queerness is understood and articulated across various communities. 

Puja has divided her fourteen months term of the project into four phases starting with research on secondary resources, travel to Bangalore for the archival work at QAMRA, writing of the articles, with the possibility of a symposium towards the end of the project term.

The outcomes of the project will be three to four scholarly essays and long form visual articles. The Project Coordinator hopes to organise a symposium as well towards the end of the project term and create social media engagement, with the intent of forming networks of queer activists, scholars, researchers and creative practitioners. The Project Coordinator’s deliverables to IFA along with the final reports will be the essays and long form articles and recordings of the proceedings from the symposium if it happens. 

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.