Kaustav Bakshi

TOGETHER, ALONE
A drawing of a face with closed eyes. The face has been coloured with pink, blue, black, mustard, yellow and red crayons.

It wasn’t that she had never heard of homosexuality; but, in her imagination, gay men and women were an exotic species, not real people who could, perchance, be fellow passengers on a bus, fellow shoppers at a mall, or a fellow beginner in a meditation class.

By Kaustav Bakshi
November 2, 2020
TOGETHER, ALONE
CATAMITE
On a pick background, a photograph of a drop of water splashing.

On the other hand, in Abhay’s newly discovered wonderland, everything seemed to be awfully right. Soon, he began receiving proposals for sex-dates. Initially such proposals shocked him; for it took him a few months to get used to the fact that sex with men was only a click away.

By Kaustav Bakshi
October 5, 2020
CATAMITE
Challenges to right to life and wellness of being: queer lives in the COVID-19 pandemic in India 
Pic courtesy-Sourajit Saha

New losses, new challenges Elizabeth Bishop, the Pulitzer Prize winning American poet, whose love affair with Lota de Macedo Soares…

By Kaustav Bakshi
June 1, 2020
Challenges to right to life and wellness of being: queer lives in the COVID-19 pandemic in India 
The Good Boy with ‘Unspeakable’ Desires: The Queer Testimonio of ‘Nacher Chhele’

In Nacher Chhele, a 38 year old Avijit stands outside himself, takes a long look at his past, and writes an intense testimonio, which would resonate with many middle class Bengali queer men who grew up in the pre-global, pre-Internet city of Calcutta in the 80s and 90s.

By Kaustav Bakshi
August 1, 2018
The Good Boy with ‘Unspeakable’ Desires: The Queer Testimonio of ‘Nacher Chhele’
Brajabuli as a vehicle of queer desires: love songs in Rituparno Ghosh’s films
Still from the film: Arekti Premer Golpo, showing a man crossdressed as a woman, wearing a cotton sareer, red blouse, and gold jewellery

In my opinion, Ghosh was in search of a language of cinema which could be adequately expressive of queerness; he was slowly moving towards inventing that language, which would not be alienating to his conformist audiences, yet, would be intelligibly pleasurable to his (informed) queer viewers.

By Kaustav Bakshi
May 15, 2018
Brajabuli as a vehicle of queer desires: love songs in Rituparno Ghosh’s films
Friendship, Sexuality and the Auden Group
Friendship, Sexuality and the Auden Group

Friendship has always remained a thinly coded term for same-sex love within queer discourses, and early writings in favour of…

By Kaustav Bakshi
February 15, 2018
Friendship, Sexuality and the Auden Group
Same-sex love in the time of decolonisation: Historicising hidden sexual lives in Selvadurai’s Cinnamon Gardens
Cinnamon tree in a garden.

Cinnamon Gardens, looking back on the early twentieth century, reveals the trauma of queer lives, in a country where queerness, family and the state are still irreconcilable with each other.

By Kaustav Bakshi
November 1, 2017
Same-sex love in the time of decolonisation: Historicising hidden sexual lives in Selvadurai’s Cinnamon Gardens
Making women out of men: Mystifying queer desires, staging queerness in Siraj’s Māyā Mridanga
An abstract art of a spiral starting with fiery orange and yellow in the middle, with shades of blue on the outside.

Māyā Mridanga infinitely problematises the nature vs. nurture debate that is central to sexuality studies. The novel seems to suggest that a certain kind of male body – feminine, smooth, shapely – is the ideal raw material for making a chhokra out of a biological man. Ustaad Jhaksa, whose life the novel documents[2], repeatedly emphasises on this act of nurturing, moulding and pruning of a feminine male body for which he has fatherly affection as well as a lover’s lust.

By Kaustav Bakshi
September 1, 2017
Making women out of men: Mystifying queer desires, staging queerness in Siraj’s Māyā Mridanga