Description
In June 1999, when homosexuality was still criminalized under Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, Sappho—Eastern India’s first support network for lesbian, bisexual and trans people—was founded in Calcutta. It subsequently formalised itself and became a crucial actor in shaping the contours of queer politics in India. This paper reconstructs the political and affective history of Sappho to explore how its members negotiated the meanings of welfare, belonging, and citizenship for queer people within conditions where the postcolonial democratic state was largely indifferent and often hostile towards queerness. Drawing on archival materials, oral histories, and witness circle discussions with founding members, the study reveals how Sappho redefined welfare citizenship not as a state-sanctioned entitlement but as a collective, feminist, and affective practice rooted in the ethico-politics of friendship and care. Further, at a time when queer communities in the Global North were mobilised to further the imperialist goals of ‘war on terror’, founding members of one of India’s earliest queer organisations were resolute in their interrogation of the ethnonationalist petrification of India’s religious ‘minority’.
The analysis identifies three features that shaped Sappho’s political trajectory. First, its praxis of ‘friendship-as-sacrifice’ became an informal welfare infrastructure, sustaining those excluded from patriarchal families and heteronormative welfare regimes focused on reproductive health. Second, its complex alliances with left-wing women’s groups and gay male activists—marked by moments of solidarity, betrayal, and humiliation—led to a distinctive feminist framing of queer welfare politics. Third, Sappho’s move from identity-based to standpoint-based politics reimagined welfare citizenship as a site of collective self-making rather than mere state recognition. In the process, the paper charts the various lessons that international studies on queer political praxis can learn from non-state collectivities in the Global South who have historically expanded the very grammar of welfare citizenship through affect, care and feminist solidarity.
