Ten years ago, we lost Priya Thangarajah — an aspiring young lawyer and activist who had worked both in India and her native Sri Lanka on issues of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, violence and human rights — when she took her life. Priya was a graduate of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi, the National Law School of India University (NLSIU), Bengaluru, and Georgetown University, Washington DC, where she was also a Fulbright scholar.

To commemorate her life and work, this Human Rights Day, the Queer Archive for Memory, Reflection and Activism (QAMRA) at NLSIU will revisit three reports Priya authored during her lifetime. Specialists will offer contemporary reflections on the themes they cover, to create a festschrift, a selection of deliberations on her legacy as a scholar.

These themes are:

• Queer couples and Habeas Corpus in India (co-authored with Ponni Arasu);
• Tamil – Muslim relations in Sri Lanka (co-authored with Mirak Raheem);
• Legal protections for queer persons in Sri Lanka

In addition, the panel will also cover a fourth theme, i.e. d. Queerness and mental health, with a focus on suicide.

Panellists

Our distinguished panel of specialists, which will reflect on Priya’s life and work, includes:

• RUMI HARISH is a musician, and a social justice and human rights activist. He identifies as a queer transmasculine person. Rumi has written four play scripts and has worked as a music director for various documentary films and theatre productions. He is a regular columnist for different media outlets, including previous columns in Kannada Prabha and Agni Patrika. His biography was recently written by Dadapeer Jyman, a young writer and theatre director. In 2023, Rumi received the Karnataka State Sahitya Academy Award, Sahityasree.
• MANAVI ATRI is a human rights lawyer and researcher working at Alternative Law Forum, Bengaluru, India. She works with the LGBTQIA+ community on issues of self-identification, harassment and the realization of the community’s fundamental rights. Her co-authored work includes Asserting Dignity in Times of COVID, Right to Love, Wages of Hate: Journalism in Dark Times, and Criminalizing the Practice of Faith, and From Communal Policing to Hate Crimes, a report on Dakshina Kannada.
• SHREEN SAROOR is a Sri Lankan peace and women’s rights activist. She founded the Mannar Women’s Development Federation (MWDF) to support women affected by the Sri Lankan Civil War, which MWDF assisted women experiencing war-related gender issues such as widowing, wartime rape and child soldier recruitment. After the War ended, she formed Women’s Action Network (WAN) in 2010 to advocate for women’s issues throughout Sri Lanka, including through law reform and legal assistance. Her work also includes micro-credit loan programs, domestic violence advocacy and support, and reconciliation between Sri Lanka’s ethnic and religious groups. She also advocates for reforms to Sri Lanka’s Muslim laws, campaigns for the rights of female workers, and fights against Islamophobia.
• SARALA EMMANUEL is a feminist activist, researcher and experimental filmmaker based in Batticaloa, Sri Lanka. She is an integral part of diverse movements, including farmer and fisherwomen’s groups, women living with disabilities, grassroots queer collectives, autonomous peace movements, and trade unions. She is also part of regional networks such as Asia Pacific Forum on Women Law and Development, SANGAT South Asia, and DAWN. She is a founder member of the Feminist Collective for Economic Justice and currently acts on the Sub Committee on Gender and SOGI of the Human Rights Commission Sri Lanka.
• ERMIZA TEGAL is a senior Attorney at Law in Sri Lanka leading a chamber in public law and family law. Her practice works closely with victims of torture and domestic violence. Her work involves law reform and human rights advocacy, including protection for victims of torture and gender-based violence, family law reform,  plantation workers’ rights, and a feminist perspective on economic justice for Sri Lanka in the context of the economic crisis. She has served as a legal expert on State advisory committees on law reform. She holds a Masters in Law from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London. She was the lead Counsel for several mental health professionals and experts who intervened in the decriminalization case heard by the Supreme Court of Sri Lanka in 2023.
• PASAN JAYASINGHE is a queer researcher, writer and activist from Colombo, Sri Lanka. In these capacities, he has worked as a policy advisor, legal researcher and election monitor in the past. He is currently completing a PhD in Political Science at University College London.
• VINAY CHANDRAN is Executive Director of Swabhava Trust, established in 1999, an NGO in Bengaluru, India, offering support services to LGBTQIA+ people. He is also a peer counsellor, a trainer on gender, sexuality and sexual health issues, as well as a researcher. He has written extensively on the mental health concerns of queer people and is co-editor of the book, Nothing to Fix: Medicalisation of Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity, and author of several articles at the intersection of sexuality, medicine and mental health.
• KAUSHIKI RAO trained in Bengaluru, India, as a mental health counsellor in 2017 and has been practicing since. She recently completed further training at the Toronto Institute for Relational Psychotherapy and currently practices as a psychotherapist in Toronto, Canada.  She primarily works from an intersubjective and self-psychology lens. She is particularly interested in how relational (social) structures such as caste, gender, race, class generate and inform intrapsychic dynamics.

Introduced by: Siddharth Narrain | Moderated by: Mario da Penha

This will be a hybrid event, with the in-person component at the NLSIU campus, and a virtual arm on Zoom ( Join here)