The Joys and Dangers in the Queer Community of Delhi

Delhi: Communities of Belonging, by Sunil Gupta and Charan Singh, is one of a series of photo books published by The New Press focusing on LGBTQ communities around the world. 

Research into the history and literature of Delhi and the Indian subcontinent has revealed that there was always a presence of same-sex love in the city. Beginning in the 13th-century, as urbanization fostered a more open, more cosmopolitan culture in Delhi, accounts of the city frequently mentioned its boys.

A visible, queer community has emerged in Delhi over the past two decades. What was silent and private has emerged into the public sphere. 

Delhi offers a stunning series of more than 150 full-color documentary photographs and companion first-person texts, which together offer an unprecedented portrait of LGBTQ people’s lives in India today. Focusing on Delhi, noted photographers Sunil Gupta and Charan Singh chronicle the halting emergence of networks of men and women living under the shadow of stigma and criminalized behavior — in a country where anti-sodomy laws dating back to the British Empire were recently struck down, only to be reaffirmed in a surging wave of homophobia.

The photographs reflect the photographers’ celebrated capacity for entering into lives rarely seen. In Delhi, we are invited into the daily routines, work, homes, and intimate lives of subjects from different backgrounds — from urban professionals to day laborers. A visually arresting document in its own right, Delhi presents American readers with a starting point for understanding the profound struggles for recognition by India’s LGBTQ community at a time when legal rights of the LGBT communities in America are now in question once again.