Maya Sharma: Activism through storytelling
Photo Courtesy: photo.abhijit@gmail.com (via flickr)
“I could not have imagined such a change. I see a path now where none existed. So many of our feet have made it possible as we march on.”
Such was Maya Sharma’s response when questioned about the recent progress regarding LGBTQ+ rights in India. As of 2023, India ranks 39th in the world on the LGBT equality index - only 13 behind the UK. The last 15 years, compared to the silence of the preceding decades, have seen a much faster pace of change.
In 2014, the Supreme Court passed a landmark ruling which recognised transgender people as a third gender. In 2018, gay sex was decriminalised after the Supreme Court overturned Section 377 - the continuation of a 157-year-old law dating back to British rule. And now, over two decades since India’s first pride march in Kolkata, pride marches regularly fill city streets.
The story of Maya Sharma
To understand how some of that progress was achieved, it is important to tell a different sort of story. Maya Sharma was born in a village in Chittorgarh, Rajasthan, and studied in Ajmere. Despite being attracted to women, she was married out of choice at the age of 24, and then lived in Delhi with her husband for ten years - this is an all too familiar story, from a time when it was still compulsory for women to get married.
Photo Courtesy: Advocacy Project (via flickr)
Today, Ms Sharma lives with her partner in Vadodara. She is a feminist, LGBTQ+ activist, and has been heavily involved in the Indian women’s movement. But Ms Sharma is also the current programme director at Vikalp Women’s Group, a grassroots organisation in Gujarat that works with tribal women and transgender people. She has taken on a different voice, because her work focuses not on the privileged urban elite, but the poor, working-class LGBTQ+ women from villages and urban slums.
Speaking about the source of her activism, Ms Sharma explained that her first involvement in any movements only came in her 40s. She encountered oppression in her life as a married woman and decided to join a women’s group called Saheli - she recalls how “wonderful [it was] to be in a group of women where one could express oneself freely”. With time and an increasing amount of work in ‘bastis’ (slums), her interests then grew to include labour issues. Ms Sharma saw firsthand the gender disparity between the formal and informal sectors - with women’s greater involvement in the latter, especially in home-based work, construction, and others. She saw firsthand how villages and small towns are isolated from the exposure and conversations of urban India. And so, Ms Sharma dedicated her life to spreading these conversations and awareness.
The influence of storytelling
In the past, much of her own awareness of such issues came from texts and works of literature - this is something Ms Sharma often refers to in interviews. The most prominent example is likely the 70-page booklet titled ‘Less than gay: A citizen’s report’. Published in 1991 by a collective called the Aids Bhedbhav Virodhi Andolan (ABVA), this was the first document of its kind and Ms Sharma recalls how “Less than Gay, which we call the Pink Book, broke the silence around homosexuality. It tempted you to come out”.
In fact, similar books punctuated Ms Sharma’s life. As she learned more about gender, she began reading the works of Uma Chakravarti - a feminist historian who was also closely involved with the women’s movement. When Ms Sharma had been a literature student in Delhi, her first exposure to feminism came through a book called The Female Eunuch, by Germaine Greer. When she speaks about these phases of her life today, Ms Sharma’s language is suitably literary. She compares the experiences of reading The Female Eunuch and joining Saheli to “a cool breeze on a sunny day”. And she remembers particular anecdotes, such as when “a girl once said that she liked knitting because you could always take the threads out and start over”.
Given the influence such texts had on her own awareness and communication, it is unsurprising that her activism in unions and movements came to be accompanied by storytelling: “women were very isolated and alone in far-flung areas, and one saw the need to write about them and bring them together”. And so, in 2006, Ms Sharma published Loving Women: Being Lesbian in Unprivileged India, telling the story of ten working-class lesbian women. Her new book Footprints of a Queer History: Life Stories from Gujarat features another 11 case studies of LGBT women she met in the course of her work with Vikalp Women’s Group - I highly recommend reading this, and you can find an excerpt here.
What’s the next chapter?
One of the advantages of such activism through storytelling is that it tackles social realities which can sometimes overpower the law. A stark reminder of this came this past October, when India’s Supreme Court refused to grant legal recognition to same-sex marriages. This is why, despite her positivity regarding the increasing level of LGBTQ+ rights in India, Ms Sharma recognises that “some changes happen piecemeal but real transformation is a long haul”. She suggests that lesbians specifically cannot come out because it continues to be a taboo in Indian society, which is very hierarchical in nature. This is why writing and its ability to spread social awareness is so important.
Looking to the future, Ms Sharma highlights the need for younger and older generations to learn from each other. On the one hand, she recognises her need to better understand how to use technology for activism. On the other, she believes younger people should re-learn the art of letter writing. It seems that Ms Sharma refers to this in an archival sense, asking the youth of today to properly document queer history as it occurs - she worries that, while social media is everywhere, “it only gives people information, not knowledge”. But it is likely that Ms Sharma also refers to the wider art of storytelling - an art which is increasingly ignored by modern society. At some point in her journey, Ms Sharma realised that “class is not just about money - class is culture, class is language”. If this is true, what more effective means of activism is there than storytelling?
Maya Sharma is often referred to as a writer by accident and a queer activist by choice. But even if she did unwittingly fall into writing, storytelling is clearly what she was meant to do, and it has allowed her to contribute to great social change. In the introduction to Loving Women, Ms Sharma explains that the work’s aim was to provide “a somewhat fuller understanding of a most marginalised social group; we had hoped for the emergence of a collective voice and at least fragments of visibility through such life-stories”. The ideas, stories, and conversations she has experienced are now inscribed in India’s cultural history, and will hopefully spread awareness and inspire multitudes from around the world for years to come.