by Meera Sethi, November 2021
“Let us know that we are different, let us recognize that we are different, let us not be lumped together or co-opted. I will not be a party to any co-opting of my race into the formation of groups that will only pay lip service to the priorities that face us. We have a different agenda. We will not allow anyone to use that agenda to co-opt us or decide that it makes good political sense to fund us if we tow the line. We can be unified if we respect each other and respect that differences that exist between us.” — an unnamed attendee in the documentary Voice of Our Own
I was brown, 23, and was just coming out to myself and a few mostly white friends when I first encountered Desh Pardesh from posters up in the halls of York University. I lived in the suburbs with a car, but was an urban newbie. As I navigated parts of the city that I knew so little of, I found myself moving from Buddies in Bad Times in the east to a now-defunct club on the edges of Parkdale well before gentrification to get myself to festival venues. It was in these varying spaces that my identity began finding its people. It was heady and exciting, sharp, politicized, hot, and queer South Asian all around.
The space created by Desh between white institutional racism and diasporic South Asian conservatism ran deep. It allowed those on the cultural South Asian left such as myself to take up physical and philosophic space where little had publicly existed before.
Desh as it came to be known, was a yearly multidisciplinary queer-adjacent diasporic South Asian arts festival held in Toronto between 1988–2001. Over its 13 years of existence, Desh created a unique space for multiple generations of politicized South Asians and Indo-Caribbeans to engage in conversation through visual art, music, dance, film and video, performance, spoken word, literature, talks, panels, and parties. Intersectional analysis ranged between feminism, class, sexuality, race, gender, caste, labour, disability, imperialism, and capitalism. The festival became globally recognized for its prioritizing of critical thought, intergenerational dialogue, queer politics, and became a significant site of connection for young diasporic and queer South Asians underrepresented and marginalized within white supremacy and their home communities.
Desh emerged at the intersection of a variety of broad influences specific to the late 80s including the LGBTQ and AIDS movement, Marxist feminist and Black feminist dialogue, an emerging identity politics, and anti-communal and anti-corporate commitments in South Asia and beyond.
Specifically, Desh grew out of the work of local Toronto gay rights organizations like Khush and Salaam Toronto. This meant that from the start, Desh was unapologetically radical and queer at a time when same-sex desire within the diasporic South Asian community was largely closeted and homosexuality in South Asia was far from being protected by law. As an eventual five-day festival, one day was exclusively dedicated to queer South Asians creating what may have been the first safe space for those double-marginalized.
The wider context in South Asia and its diasporas at the time greatly contributed to the need for a place to gather across regional, linguistic, and religious lines. India, the mammoth nation at the centre of South Asian identity was quickly shedding its post-colonial, Nehruvian liberalism for increasing communalism. Operation Bluestar and the 1984 assassination of then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi precipitated anti-Sikh riots and pogroms in north India. The following year saw the devastating terrorist bombing of Air India Flight 182 over the Atlantic Ocean mid-route between Montreal and London on its journey to India. In Canada, the racist, bungled investigation that followed added to the tense situation and the feeling of confusion, mistrust, and grief that ensued. A little closer to the equator and Sri Lanka was also seeing its own political upheaval with the mass exodus of Tamil refugees out of the country following Black July, many of whom found their way to Canada.
Desh was a reaction to these and other events. Its strength was in providing a space that addressed these fractures from an explicitly diasporic perspective rather than a single national identity. It celebrated “South Asian” as a term that allowed for a multiplicity of perspectives within a common condition of unity.
As formative as Desh was to a city like Toronto and a global diaspora, it has received little institutional attention. Perhaps understanding this and celebrating 20 years since Desh ended, this year’s Reel Asian Film Festival shone a spotlight on the festival. In a program titled Absence/Presence, attendees encountered an online program of short film screenings, panels, and workshops.
Included in this program was a panel discussion with people closely familiar with Desh. Shelly Bahl, Sudarshan Durayappah, Anju Gogia, and Amita Handa each recounted the impact Desh had on their emerging careers and personal life trajectories. The conversation was steeped in oral history of a legendary festival and made clear the ways in which Desh paved the way for today’s politics of being brown in the diaspora.
Anju, an activist, community bookseller and former co-owner of the infamous Toronto Women’s Bookstore shared her beginning in the book trade through operating festival book tables for 12-hour days; Amita, a DJ and party-host spoke about the establishment of Masala Mix, a South Asian community radio show hosted on CKLN from cassette tapes purchased on Gerrard Street after a festival encounter with DJ Ritu from London; Shelly narrated her central role as the first Director of SAVAC formed as an offshoot of Desh from a project grant to an organization that continues today.
Collectively, the panel outlined a constellation of individuals, organizations, and movements that gave Desh the political scaffolding it needed to push boundaries both within the South Asian community and against white, multicultural Canada. Conversations between Black lesbians, gay brown men, and diasporic South Asian Marxist feminists were the intellectual building blocks of the festival as were entities like Fireweed, Sister Vision Press, Rungh Magazine, ASAAP, and others.
The Absence/Presence panel made clear to me the value of tracing formative moments across a timescale of twenty years. I can look back and see just how life-changing arts, culture, and politics can be. It reminds me that as politicized and radical South Asians and Indo-Caribbeans, we need to consider what we co-create with a long view to the future. This ripple effect that ran through the Desh generation continues to form ever wider circles of care that nourish, challenge, and shape us.
Jumping forward twenty years, as middle-class, caste-privileged (savarna) South Asians and Indo-Caribbeans, I see how times have changed. As expressed in the panel, broad cultural and political representation has been widely attempted and many times achieved. South Asians are on New York Times bestseller lists, run late-night talk shows, head national political parties, are large city mayors, walk the red carpet, receive industry awards, operate the largest corporate structures in the world, and top lists of the uber-wealthy.
However, outside this hyper-capitalist, hyper-visible, model minority, others continue to experience discrimination, injustice, poverty, overwork, housing shortages, job insecurity, healthcare, non-status, caste and race-based discrimination, and deskilling as they struggle to find a location to stand on and take a little rest. Many continue to feel unsafe and unseen, ignored, disposed, and devalued, still grasping for that place to exist in the full joy of life.
Through these parallel and sometimes interwoven registers of economic, social, cultural, and political disempowerment, we must critically examine where we are, how we got here, and where we plan to go. To begin addressing this, I asked the panel the following question: If Desh was to be remounted today as a festival in Toronto, what would you say it’s priorities should be? What questions would it be asking? How would it look different, how would it look the same?
In response, the panel suggested that if presented today, Desh would address caste discrimination, settler-Indigenous relations, anti-Blackness, fascism, and communalism, all pressing concerns in the progressive South Asian and Indo-Caribbean diasporas. While this surely answered the question of what Desh’s priorities would be, what remains unanswered is the how. How has the vacuum of Desh been filled?
To answer this, we must consider the complexities and contradictions of our time.
In a 1975 speech to a group of Harvard students, Muhammed Ali penned the shortest poem ever: me, we. In 2007, artist Glenn Ligon in a sculpture titled “Give Us a Poem” placed these words, “ME” above “WE”, in flickering neon light that alternates between the two. The juxtaposition of these words profoundly encapsulates the contradictions of our moment: a time-space where identity echoes between self and other, personal care and collective justice.
Absence/Presence also presented a program of seven short films that took up issues of collective organizing, gender and sexual identity as they intersect with family and religion, self-love and body intimacy, fat pride, and relationship dynamics. Some works screened decades ago at Desh, while others were contemporary. The program alternated between a current film and an older work creating a generative tension between the past and present that mimicked the awkward balance created in Ligon’s sculpture. It gestured to a generational shift we see between a politics of solidarity and a politics of naming, both along the axis of visibility.
In Voice of Our Own (1989), directors Premika Ratnam and Ali Kazimi document a multi-day conference of 350 women gathered together in Winnipeg to form an organization representing the needs of immigrant and visible minority women, terms common to the era. Black, South Asian, East Asian, and immigrant women spoke of strategies to counter experiences of systemic oppression they faced as racialized and immigrant communities and ways to resist co-optation by the Canadian state.
Their powerful words captured an important era of community building that called for direct political and institutional change. This was the work of feminist social service that benefitted countless women and families marginalized by the Canadian welfare state of the 80s and early 90s.
As the longest film in the Absence/Presence shorts program (25 min), Voice of Our Own was not about the vulnerability of self, but about the fragility of collective organizing. It functioned as a counterpoint to the other works in the program which each featured personal journeys of acceptance, affirmation, and self-discovery.
With Love From Munera (2020) by director Yazmeen Kanji is a tender portrait of a queer, non-binary Muslim youth who finds liberation in self-made ritual, body adornment, and chosen family. In Call Me Krishna (2020) directed by Rojelio Palacios, a young trans man searches for belonging in the city and with family after trying on a binder and packer for the first time. Her Sweetness Lingers (1994) directed by Shani Mootoo and Beyond/Body/Memory (1993) directed by Neesha Meminger both seductively express lesbian bodies corporeally and intellectually lusting after each other. Nectar (2020) directed by Nakita Sunar brings together two friends who share the complexities of queerness and fatness experienced during the pandemic. And in Snowbird (2020) directed by Sadiah Rahman, we see the challenges of relationship between two queers encountering home and family.
The juxtaposition of these films suggests the multiple and urgent need for representation and safety that continue to go unmet for queer, trans, and non-binary diasporic South Asians and Indo-Caribbeans. The challenge lies in the ease with which corporate interests take these stories and fold them into a spectacle and a representational politics that is sold back to us. One moment we name ourselves, the next, we are algorithmically identified, tracked, and positioned. Neoliberal market forces control the tools and increasingly the narrative of affirmation and resistance.
Astronomical corporate structures have offered us hard-fought representation and simultaneously commercialized the language of identity politics. Regressive governments are rewriting history in order to position themselves as victims and not aggressors. Identity is parcelled into ever-smaller units through a type of digital divide and rule.
We see the atomization of self through three-inch squares and 280 characters where community is more imagined than real. “Overthrow corporate capitalism!”, “Save yourself”, scream astrologers over corporate-owned media that enable their inflated livelihoods.
These are some of the ways that the vacuum of Desh has been filled. But we need to be wary of these contradictions and vulnerabilities. Desh in its Marxist and anti-corporate commitment would have resisted the push solely towards an identity politics that averted its gaze away from the hard questions of strategy and collective justice. In the late 90s, we needed representation and systemic change. Today, most still need systemic change, fewer still need representation.
The uniqueness of Desh was that it managed to bring the “me” and “we” together at a time when each of us needed both. Instead of dividing us along a vertical axis of identity, Desh flipped the equation along a horizontal axis where the me and we support each other.
This is where those who were familiar with Desh and those who have heard about it through legend must engage. The spirit of intergenerational dialogue that Desh fostered can help guide us towards action that subverts the capitalist and institutional imperative for new while sharing the stories that matter the most to us. It is when these come together that we are at our most powerful as a community of progressive thinkers, doers, and makers variously corralled together through differing identities.
