Postqueer Politics in India Reimagining Queer Theory, Activism, and Intersectional Justice

Postqueer Horizons: Toward a Politics of Intimate Futures in Contemporary India

Himadri Roy and Kaustav Chakraborty

PART I: RIGHTS, LAWS, AND POSTQUEER CRITIQUES OF MAINSTREAM RECOGNITION

1.   Marginal Queers: Negotiated Respectability and Embodied Inequalities in Urban India 

Shannon Philip

2.     Postqueer Cartographies: Delegitimizing Supremacism in Postcolonial India's Legal Landscape

Sourav Mandal

3.     Postqueer Refusal, Caste Order: The Limits of Same-Sex Marriage in India

Swakshadip Sarkar 

PART II: POSTQUEER PRAXIS AGAINST NEOCOLONIALITIES

4.   Pride, Postqueer and Pinkwashing: Homonationalism in Saikat Majumdar’s The Scent of God and The Middle Finger

Rajat Suvra Mandal

5.     The Queer Medusas: A Postqueer Reading of Serpents Under My Veil

Huzaifa Pandit and Takbeer Salati

6.     Love and Militarized Masculinities in Times of Armed Resistance: Postqueering the Lived Experiences of the Men Insurgents of the National Democratic Front of Bodoland in Assam

Nitish Gogoi

7.     Disruptive Intimacies: Postqueer Counterpublics, Bahujan Politics and the Subversion of Islamophobic Normativity in India

Parvin Sultana

8.     Greening Equates Queering: Reflecting the Everyday Postqueer Geography of New Delhi.

Victor Banerjee

PART III: COUNTERPUBLICS AND POSTQUEER FUTURES

9.       Queer Digital Storytelling, Platformed Homonormativity, and Postqueer Potentials in India

Suvojit Bandopadhyaya

10.   Decolonizing Transgender History in India: Shifting Paradigms

Lopamudra Sengupta

11.       Performing Arts and Postqueer Emancipation: Vulnerability, Violence and Transgender Lives in Contemporary India

Somabha Bandopadhay 

12.   Queer Body of the Vernacular: Toward a Postqueer Study of Lakshminath Bezbaroa’s Burhi Aair Sadhu

Anupom Kumar Hazarika

13.       Postqueer Practices of Care, Curation and Healing: Mental Health in Manipur and Northeast India

Rajorshi Das and Sunny Gurumayum

Biography

Himadri Roy is Professor in the School of Gender and Development Studies at Indira Gandhi National Open University, New Delhi. His work spans LGBT Studies, Gender and Cinema, Media, and Literature, with notable books including Cinematic Adaptation of Literary Texts (2023), Author to Auteur (2021), and Reel and the Real (2019). He coedited Queer Provincialism: Narratives and Resilience of Rural India (2025) with Kaustav Chakraborty. He is also a novelist. The Hope Chasers received attention from The Times of India, while L’Amour of Siliguri has been praised for challenging gender binaries. He has published widely and serves on several academic boards and editorial panels across India.

Kaustav Chakraborty is Associate Professor of English at Southfield (Loreto) College, Darjeeling. He has held fellowships at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, and the Nantes Institute for Advanced Study, France. His important publications include Abrasive, Soft and Ecological: Masculinities in North India (2026), Queer and the Vernacular Languages in India: Studies in Contemporary Texts and Cultures (coedited with Anup Shekhar Chakraborty, 2023), Queering Tribal Folktales from East and Northeast India (2021) and The Politics of Belonging in Contemporary India: Anxiety and Intimacy (2019).