Author, queer rights activist Kidwai dead
MUMBAI: Noted historian and queer rights activist based in Lucknow, Saleem Kidwai, passed away Monday morning after suffering a heart attack. He had recently turned 70.
Kidwai, born in 1951, is the author of Same-sex Love in India: Readings from Literature and History (2001) which he co-authored with Ruth Vanita, a professor at the University of Montana.
A copy of this book was given to the judges of the Constitution bench of the Supreme Court while it heard a clutch of petitions against Section 377, a colonial-era law that criminalised adult consensual same-sex relationships. The law was read down in 2018 after a historic legal battle.
Mario da Penha, a queer history scholar who co-founded the Jawaharlal Nehru University’s first queer students’ collective, Anjuman, in 2003, said the book came at a time when there was little representation of queer lives in literature. “It was the first attempt at tracing the long history of same-sex love in the subcontinent. It encompassed the academic, the activist and the literary world, and it did so with a seriousness and flair that was rare to find at the time,” he said.
Kidwai taught Indian medieval history at the University of Delhi’s Ramjas College and was associated with the gay rights movement helping establish support spaces for the Lesbian, Bisexual, Gay and Transgender (LGBT) community in Delhi.
In 1999, Chapal Mehra, now a public health consultant and writer, was involved in creating a queer space with Kidwai and a few others in New Delhi. Called Humraahi, it operated out of the office of the NGO Naz Foundation India Trust, which went on to file a petition against Section 377 in the Delhi high court. “A lot of the affirmative narratives we see in the media today trace their genesis to the work that groups like ours were doing at the time...saleem’s role was pivotal,” Mehra said.
Kidwai’s contribution to Urdu literature was equally immense, as he translated into English works of key Urdu writers and added to the scholarship on the lives of “singing ladies” and courtesans in Mughal India.
Kidwai was buried in his native village of Badagaon in Barabanki.