Love and Reparation

Description:




On 6 September 2018, a decades-long battle to decriminalise queer intimacy in India came to an end. The Supreme Court of India ruled that Section 377, the colonial anti-sodomy law, violated the country’s constitution. ‘LGBT persons,’ the Court said, ‘deserve to live a life unshackled from the shadow of being “unapprehended felons”.’ But how definitive was this end? How far does the law’s shadow fall? How clear is the line between the past and the future? What does it mean to live with full sexual citizenship?

In Love and Reparation, Danish Sheikh navigates these questions with a deft interweaving of the legal, the personal, and the poetic. The two plays in this volume leap across court transcripts, affidavits (real and imagined), archival research and personal memoir. Through his re-staging, Sheikh crafts a genre-bending exploration of a litigation battle, and a celebration of defiant love that burns bright in the shadow of the law.



Listen to a conversation between author Danish Sheikh and writer Sandip Roy about Love and Reparation, queer intimacy and the law on our Facebook page.

Read a conversation between author Danish Sheikh and Chintan Girish Modi about the publication of Love and Reparation in The Chakkar: ‘Love, Law, and Literature’

Listen to a conversation between Danish Sheikh and Saronik Bosu on New Books Network. Danish talks about his book Love and Reparation, his experience in courtrooms and the political theatre that influences him.

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