Chapter Five - Out of the Closet? Exploring the Infoscape of LGBTQ+ Fiction For/ About Youth in India

Summary

Introduction

This chapter provides a glimpse into contemporary English-language lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and other queer, including questioning, (LGBTQ+) fiction for/ about youth in India. The study of LGBTQ+ representatives in ‘best’ book lists for/ about youth in India and other sources analysed in this chapter presented a dismally limited collection containing very few works on LGBTQ+ and other non-conforming gender representations. Walter Dean Myers’ (2014) powerful opinion piece in response to a study by the Cooperative Children's Book Center at the University of Wisconsin finding merely 93 children's books about black people out of 3,200 published, primarily in the U.S., in 2013 reflects similar poignancy.

The dataset for the present study included titles that were retrieved by focusing specifically on young readers in India, such as by looking for Best Young Adult Fiction in India from the search engine available on goodreads.com (2018); reading articles such as ‘Food for Thought: What's Young India Reading, And Why?’ (Hazra 2013) in the Hindustan Times, the third most widely read daily English-language newspaper in India with a circulation of 993,645 copies January–July 2017 (Audit Bureau of Circulations 2017); and exploring ‘must’ reads for an average Indian teenager from Quora.com (Agarwal 2017); amongst others. A similar trend of limited inclusion of pertinent content was documented in works available on websites of Indian publishers such as Children's Book Trust (pioneer publisher of children's books in India) (2017), Amar Chitra Katha (one of India's largest selling comic book series) (2018), and others. Websites of some select Indian publishers studied in this research project are listed in Table 1. This chapter focuses on fiction works available in English for/ about LGBTQ+ youth in India and it showcases select examples, though implications are also relevant for non-English literature in the other 22 official languages listed in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution of India (Pandharipande 1997; Sarangi 2010). Based on analysis conducted for this chapter, it turns out that sadly none of these select books written originally in English were translated to and available in other non-English Indian languages (see more commentary in the Findings and Discussion sections).