Course Description

This course builds on foundational legal principles taught at NLSIU by deepening students’ understanding of how law intersects with various socio-political and cultural frameworks, with a specific focus on the queer community in India. It specifically examines how legal systems both reflect and shape societal attitudes toward queer individuals, exploring the legal, cultural, political, and historical contexts that influence queer rights and activism in India.

This course, therefore, aligns with this interdisciplinary approach by situating questions of the law alongside critical perspectives from sociology, anthropology, history, gender studies, and queer theory. Specifically, the course takes original court judgments and places them in dialogue with texts from these disciplines to provide a comprehensive, “big picture”, understanding of queer politics in India.

This course also builds upon three electives previously offered at NLSIU, each of which has engaged, in distinct yet overlapping ways, with questions at the intersection of queerness, law, and society in India. The more recent of these is Mario da Penha’s Two Thousand Years of Queerness:

A Journey Through Indian History (July 2025), which traces the presence,  representation, and lived realities of people we might today recognize as “queer” across a long historical arc. While this course is primarily grounded in historical inquiry, my course builds on this foundation by not only engaging with these historical trajectories but also placing them in conversation with contemporary legal developments and more recent political formations.

The next is Kunal Ambasta’s Queerness and the Law (March 2024) which discusses how legal frameworks in India intersect with queer identity, rights, and movements.  Ambasta’s course focuses on the legal struggles faced by queer individuals and examines the state’s role in regulating sexual identities. My course builds on this by moving beyond a primarily doctrinal engagement with the law to situate how these legal developments are enmeshed within a wider socio-political and cultural context, with a specific focus on how the law is negotiated, contested, and reworked within contemporary queer political formations.

And finally, there is Arvind Narrain’s Preserving Memories: Law, Social Transformation, and the Queer Archive (November 2022) which stresses the importance of archiving queer history. My course advances Narrain’s work by extending the focus from questions of memory and archival recovery to the ways in which such histories are actively mobilized, contested, and reinterpreted within contemporary legal and political debates, while also examining how these engagements shape—and are shaped by—ongoing struggles over recognition, rights in the present.

In other words, this elective builds on the foundations laid by these prior courses by bringing the contemporary moment of queer rights in India to the forefront, while also encouraging students to think critically about the past and the future (hence, the title, “Legal Histories, Complex Challenges, and Transformative Futures”)

Furthermore, my course engages closely with recent socio-legal developments—such as the controversies surrounding the recent amendments to the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, 2019, and the pushback following the Supreme Court’s 2023 judgment on marriage equality to ensure that all such discussions remain both current and emergent, while also being academically rigorous and grounded in interdisciplinary scholarship.

By the end of this course, students will be equipped to critically engage with the various strands of queer politics in contemporary India, and understand how legal reforms and political ideologies are mediated through the queer rights discourse.