Description: Two plays about the legal battle to decriminalize homosexuality in India.
On September 6, 2018, a decades-long battle to decriminalize queer intimacy in India came to an end. The Supreme Court of India ruled that Section 377, the colonial anti-sodomy law, violated the country's constitution. "LGBT persons," the Court said, "deserve to live a life unshackled from the shadow of being 'unapprehended felons.'" But how definitive was this end? How far does the law's shadow fall? How clear is the line between the past and the future? What does it mean to live with full sexual citizenship? In Love and Reparation, Danish Sheikh navigates these questions with a deft interweaving of the legal, the personal, and the poetic. The two plays in this volume leap across court transcripts, affidavits (real and imagined), archival research, and personal memoir. Through his re-staging, Sheikh crafts a genre-bending exploration of a litigation battle, and a celebration of defiant love that burns bright in the shadow of the law.Brief description: Danish Sheikh is a playwright and activist-lawyer currently engaged in doctoral research at the Melbourne Law School. His writing has been cited by the Supreme Court of India in 2018, shortlisted for the Jan Michalski Award in 2017, and won the Publishing Next Award in the same year.
Review Quotes: "Danish Sheikh's work shows that it is possible to think law, literature, and love together -- and to do so with vulnerability, compassion, and intelligence. These plays bring together incredibly disparate philosophical questions, political movements, and popular culture, anchored by a commitment to justice. In the world of Love and Reparation, the courtroom becomes a place of more than confession and prosecution - it becomes a site of storytelling and the imagination of alternative possibilities for justice."--Daniel Elam, Assistant Professor, Comparative Literature, University of Hong Kong