Whistling in The Dark- R. Raja Rao,Dibyajyoti Sarma

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About the Book: Whistling in the Dark: Twenty-five Queer Interviews

‘Not just a dry-as-dust series of interviews, these are real-life stories of real people, living all around us, yet feeling separate from the mainstream… This book gives them a voice.—The Tribune.

The twenty-six interviewees in Whistling in the Dark represent a cross-section of Indias LGBTQI+ community—poets, artists, professors, students, activists, clerks and auto-rickshaw drivers; family men, gay couples, unmarried people and divorcees. The probing and incisive questions put to the respondents tease out narratives that go beyond the conventional and provide rare insight into the private lives of queer people in urban and small town India..

Conducted at various times over more than two decades, the interviews show how little has changed despite legal victories for gay rights. Countless men remain trapped in marriages of convenience, though some, like college lecturer Sushil Patil, uphold the very heteronormative ideas, like monogamy, that oppress them. Revealing ones identity is still a traumatic experience, when even mainstream psychiatrists make gay men and women feel like ‘exotic animals in a cage, as K. Vaishali puts it. Hijras find it hard, as Aishwarya Pandav tells us, to even find admission in colleges. And gay-bashing and extortion continue unabated, as we see in the interview of Mustakeem Momin, whose partner, Aligarh University professor Srinivas Siras, was publicly shamed at a time when Section 377 of the IPC was not in force…….

Whistling in the Dark is a landmark book in the struggle for gay rights in India. This revised and updated edition, with four new interviews, remains a powerful and unsettling reminder of injustice and inequality.

About the Author: R Raj Rao, Dibyajyoti Sarma

R. Raj Rao is the author of six novels, including The Boyfriend and Mahmud and Ayaz, six collections of widely anthologized poetry, two collections of short stories, two collections of plays, two books on queer studies, a train memoir, a biography of the poet Nissim Ezekiel, and a co-translation of Laxmi Narayan Tripathis hijra autobiography……..

Writer and editor Dibyajyoti Sarma has published three volumes of poetry, four books of translations, and two academic books, besides numerous short stories and articles in journals. His translation of five novellas by Indira Goswami was shortlisted for the Sahitya Akademi Award for Translation into English 2023.