Review of On the Brink of Belief: Queer Writing from South Asia

The Hindu

4 hours ago

One of the central lacunae in Indian queer writing is its sheer lack of rich regional voices. Not only does queer literature still remain largely Anglicised, but the parameters of its criticism are also dictated by Eurocentric notions, thereby gatekeeping local expressions and experiences.
To then read On the Brink of Belief: Queer Writing from South Asia is in fact to engage in a suspension of disbelief, as 24 freshly minted writers, standing at the intersection of their marginalised identities, narrate their stories of love and loss, longing and belonging, and the liminal, chaotic spaces that exist in between.
The idea for this anthology emerged after the successful conclusion of two editions of The Queer Writers' Room in 2023-2024, a joint initiative by The Queer Muslim Project and The International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. Steered by Kazim Ali (also the editor of this anthology), among others, the week-long writing residency with two queer and trans writers each from India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh and Pakistan, has become a space for creative nurturing, quiet transformation, and critical interrogation.
The stories in this collection remain obsessed with djinns, shaitans, and shakchunnis — the ethereal, metaphysical, and perhaps queer beings in Islamic mythography that linger between faith and fact.
In her moving essay 'A Fever, a Djinn and the Collectibles of Grief,' Sara Haque draws parallels between herself and the 'rootless, bereaving djinn', after her dadi, 'shrunk and shrunk' till she vanished one fine day.
In Ipsa's flash fiction 'On This Afternoon, Like Every Other', the female lover becomes a shakchunni (spirit of a married woman), and the act of lovemaking becomes the 'cloying honey of kolke phool, being sucked like a fish bone' — the very things that repulse human beings. This coalescence of the divine and the devil finds resonance in another short essay, 'Even Shaitan Showers' by Begum Taara Shakar, where the bathroom, a place of shame, transforms into a place of security. Later, the protagonist wonders: 'I always thought God was in love with Shaitan. Did no one notice that a whole world was created to prove Shaitan wrong?'
Promising voices
This contradiction, this uncertainty, this perpetual state of questioning, for me, is the central tenet of good writing. With queer writing, this rift between being and non-being is accentuated, as the real world offers no refuge.
The beauty of queer writing, then, lies in its refusal to flatten difference and in its power to imagine radical, alternative futures.
The anthology also reinforces the fact that queerness is not constrained to the choice of a partner, but extends to include political engagement, modes of kinship, and everyday resistances. The shifting world order, the metallic claws of capitalism, and the ghettoisation of communities remain overarching themes in stories such as 'Keithal da Eramkhi' by Mesak Takhelmayum, 'Silver' by Kahless Jaden Hameed and Tanisha Tekriwal's 'American Embassy, 2046', where the city is 'lit [not] by the moon but by oil refineries, their silver chimneys keeping the dark a half-dark'.
While the anthology introduces some new, promising voices, it unfortunately delivers more misses than hits. 'Dog Days', 'Darling', 'The Beauty and Complexity of Being Queer and Muslim', 'Darjeeling and Desires', and 'Your Birthmark in My Memories' are among the many stories and poems that start on an interesting note but lose steam halfway through. Many of the stories could have been salvaged by skilful editing. These writers are trying hard to cut a new path. Time will tell where it leads them.
The reviewer is the author of the Hindi short story collection 'Yeh Dil Hai Ki Chor Darwaja'.