In collaboration with Product of Culture (@_productofculture_) and Babbu the Painter, I worked on illustrating 9 members of the South Asian lgbtq+ community, featuring Alok Menon, Amit Patel, Fawzia Mirza, D.Lo, Kumari Suraj, DJ Rekha, Sikh Knowledge, Sachin Bhatt, and Malinder Tooray.

Celebrating PRIDE is not just for June! We’re here to celebrate the South Asians who are pushing against the heteronormative codes within our culture.
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PRIDE represents LGBTQ culture, community, safety, activism, uprising, awareness, equality and being PROUD of who you are regardless of society’s constraints.

Still questioning the validity of LGBTQ rights or aren’t able to see past the monogamous man + woman relationship construct?

Decolonize your mind:

The Portuguese and British brought conservative Western ideologies to South Asia and rid us of societal acceptance of sexual fluidity. These Western concepts of heteronormativity and sexuality reinforced patriarchal structures and traditional gender roles already present within in the society.

Colonization was a direct attempt to ‘better’ South Asian culture by creating order in what was seen as a degenerate society with unacceptable social norms.

“In South Asia, British colonialism secured the legal permanence of conjugality and monogamous heteronormativity, and criminalized all other forms of attachment, embodiment, and livelihood. Above all, it was significant in objectifying gender and sexuality in dimorphic terms.” Such roles and concepts of normativity already contributed to a confusion and adjustment within South Asian society, and this confusion was only magnified when the diaspora from East to West occurred more rapidly in the 20th and 21st centuries.”

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We call this original series ‘Hum’ – a hindi and urdu word for the collective “We”, a pural of I (me), and denotes being part of a group.