PVLF 2025

Rainbow Lit Fest 2023: The Inaugural Rainbow Awards for Literature and Journalism have been Revealed

Explore the vibrant world of Rainbow Lit Fest 2023, celebrating LGBTQIA+ voices, awarding literary excellence, and honoring Hoshang Merchant's lifetime achievement. Dive into inclusive literary celebrations!
on Dec 12, 2023

Hoshang Merchant, a poet from Hyderabad, was honoured with the Lifetime Achievement award for his significant contribution to gay literature.

Dwijen Dinanath Arts Foundation (DDAF) hosted and funded the third Rainbow Lit Fest — Queer and Inclusive this weekend. Founded by Sharif D Rangnekar, a former journalist, communications strategist, and writer, the festival this year also instituted a list of awards to platform and celebrate LGBTQIA+ voices: the Rainbow Awards for Literature and Journalism (RALJ).

A jury of nine members, including journalist Adrija Bose, art historian and writer Dr Alka Pande, writer and translator Anish Gawande, artist and country director, Gender at Work India, Jyotsna Siddharth, writer and transgender rights activist Kalki Subramaniam, writer Parvati Sharma, writer and translator Poonam Saxena, author and researcher Sindhu Rajasekaran, and author and LGBTQIA+ inclusion activist Parmesh Shah

RALJ announced the shortlists for all categories on their social media on November 11. The Woman Who Climbed Trees (HarperCollins, 2023) by Nepali-Indian author Smriti Ravindra, Tell Me How to Be (Hamish Hamilton, an imprint of Penguin Random House, 2022) by Indian-American author Neel Patel, and Entering the Maze: Queer Fiction of Krishnagopal Mallick (Thornbird, an imprint of Niyogi Books, 2023), translated from the Bengali by Niladri R Chatterjee, made it to the Fiction shortlist.

The Nonfiction finalists were Onir with Irene Dhar Malik's I Am Onir and I Am Gay (Viking, an imprint of Penguin Random House, 2022), Maya Sharma's Footprints of a Queer History: Life-stories from Gujarat (Yoda Press, 2022), and K Vaishali's Homeless: Growing Up Lesbian and Dyslexic in India (Yoda Press x Simon & Schuster, 2023).

The Woman Who Climbed Trees (HarperCollins, 2023) by Nepali-Indian author Smriti Ravindra, Tell Me How to Be (Hamish Hamilton, an imprint of Penguin Random House, 2022) by Indian-American author Neel Patel, and Entering the Maze: Queer Fiction of Krishnagopal Mallick (Thornbird, an imprint of Niyogi Books, 2023), translated from the Bengali by Niladri R Chatterjee, made it to the Fiction shortlist.

Chatterjee's outstanding translation of Krishnagopal Mallick's one-of-a-kind literary investigation of same-sex desire and unrestrained documentation of the personal Entering the Maze is Maya Sharma's chronicle of unprivileged lesbians and transmen's quest for safe and secure queer futures in Gujarat, a rigorously caste-heteropatriarchal culture. Footprints of a Queer History was named the winner in each category.

Interestingly, both volumes stress the evolution of vocabulary for expressing queerness. For example, while Mallick's life-writing is unapologetically about bisexuality, the map of queerness and activities he covers in his writing about Kolkata would not appeal to "contemporary socio-political sensibility," as Chatterjee puts it in his introduction to the book. Similarly, in an earlier interview with Moneycontrol, Sharma mentioned how women she met while working on the book "used the word 'Saheli' for [identifying] their relationships" and vociferously stated that the "words we use [aren't] an exact fit of our realities and identities."

It should be noted that both of these narratives are published by indie presses, demonstrating that, while big publishing houses prefer to bet on stories based on "numbers" and market penetration, independent presses are often motivated by a desire to make visible what is not mainstream.

Rangnekar, on the other hand, noticed how this has altered. He described his experience planning the festival and awards as "incredible" over the phone.

"We had close to a hundred submissions across categories," he explains. Previously, huge publishing houses did not aggressively respond to publishing LGBT voices. Keeping that in mind, I was pleasantly delighted to see that nearly every publishing house had a book in the gender and sexuality [category]. Yoda Press and Zubaan have always done this work, but everyone is now interested and worried. I'm also grateful to communities like the Mumbai Press Club for amplifying and supporting us. We were taken seriously when it came to something new. Our robust and varied jury also had a significant part in this. We definitely have room to expand."

Only a few venues in journalism give space to LGBT perspectives, however it's encouraging to see blogs like queerbeat entering the field and doing fantastic work. RALJ also launched Features and Op-Ed awards in an effort to showcase the achievements of queer journalists.

Shortlisted features included Akhil Kang for "Brahmin Men Who Love to Eat A**," Riddhi Dastidar for "Seen-Unseen," and Nolina Minj for "The Horrors of Queer Conversion Therapy in India," while "Queering Translation: Locating Queerness in Indian Languages" by Chittajit Mitra, "Why Saurabh Kirpal Needs to Be Appointed as Judge" by Kinshuk Gupt

Kang won for their incisive piece in which they sought to understand why a "entire caste of community which religiously abides by purity, anything but dirt and pollution, and [queer men] from that community enjoying, quite literally, a site of dirt and pollution" provided "an exciting opportunity for [them], a Dalit-queer thinker, trying to push thinking around caste through queerness."

Mitra's op-ed, which includes comments from a range of translators and gay authors, attempts to emphasise the importance of LGBT individuals telling their own stories. While it attempts to convey the point that lived experiences make for a compelling narrative, the main message is the urgency for LGBT people to own and take up enough space to share their perspectives and problems.

There was one more non-competitive category. Hoshang Merchant, a poet from Hyderabad, was honoured with the Lifetime Achievement award for his significant contribution to gay literature. Merchant has published over 20 poetry collections and numerous academic essays on desire, sexuality, and queerness. He curated the first major anthology of gay writing, Yaraana: Gay Writing from India (Penguin, 1999). However, in its new edition published in 2011, the book's focus was expanded to include South Asia. The poet attended the festival, surrounded and loved by queer people of all ages.

While the confluence of letters, love, and language finished yesterday, it is a much-needed initiative that one would like to see every year, since it not only fills an enormous void in literary circles but also celebrates oft-forgotten and under-advertised LGBT people/voices.