WELCOME TO THE SUBALTERN

The lived experiences of queer people, both mighty and mundane, have often slipped through the cracks of history. Three creative practitioners across the country's biggest metros are attempting to remedy that

- NIDA NAEEM

“Dearest Aunt Nadia…”, the actor reads out from a letter, as the crowd around him draws in closer. Behind them, amid the evening bustle of modern-day SoBo and across the Oval Maidan, stands the famed Rajabai Clock Tower and Fort Campus Library (now known as the University Of Mumbai Library), brooding in its Venetian Gothic flair.

The ‘Nadia’ the actor refers to is none other than India’s most celebrated stuntwoman Fearless Nadia, and the sender of the letter is late filmmaker Riyad Vinci Wadia. The scion of Wadia Movietone cut teeth on the set of Fearless: The Hunterwali Story, a documentary on his grand aunt. From there, he charted his own very queer course with BOMgAY, arguably India’s very first gay film, released in 1996. The 12-minute-long anthology (based on the poems of queer literary icon R Raj Rao) explored the underground exploits of Mumbai’s gay community post-liberalisation and became famous for its library sex scene, set in the very Fort Campus Library framing the aforementioned actor and his audience.

The letter he’s reading from is actually fictional – an imagined correspondence that’s a part of Postcards From Colaba, an immersive walking play that takes viewers through the vibrant queer history of one of Mumbai’s oldest neighbourhoods. Another letter imagines an exchange between Sultan ‘Bobby’ Padamsee, the pioneering gay poet and playwright, and his sister Roshan. Bobby’s existence as an openly gay, flamboyant man in the 1940s was in itself a marvel, and his premature death at age 23 a tragedy etched in the history of Mumbai’s theatre community.