Facing the Mirror

For decades, most lesbians in India had little idea how many others like them there were. Networks barely existed, and love for another woman was a shameful secret to be kept buried. Ashwini Sukthankar gathered the hidden, forgotten, distorted and triumphant stories of women across the country and brought them together for the first time, showing how rich and varied lesbian experience in India really is.

The collection reaches back to the 1960s and mixes fiction, poetry, essays and personal history. Together these pieces map a trajectory that had never been charted before.

This twentieth-anniversary edition, with a foreword by author and activist Shals Mahajan, celebrates the Supreme Court's reading down of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code. It presents a history of the queer movement in India that includes both pain and beauty. The anger and passion in these writings still burn, and they speak openly of the courage, sensuality, humour and vulnerability of being a lesbian.