Love and Reparation

On 6 September 2018, a decades-long battle to decriminalise 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.

‘The text nurtures the reader’s meandering by creating large, subtly interconnected spaces, opening multiple pathways for us to travel. I loved the journey it took me on, loved the writing, loved how it connected the very intimate with the political and legal. As wonderful as it would be to watch this play staged, it fully stands as a piece of writing in and of itself.’ — Klaus Mueller, Founder and Chair, Salzburg Global LGBT Forum

ISBN: 9780857427502 | Published: 1 February 2022 | Paperback | pages