Queering utopia: Pride walks in modernist Chandigarh

Introduction

‘Let this be a new town unfettered by the traditions of the past, a step into the future’,

Designed by Le Corbusier and his team in the 1950s, Chandigarh was meant symbolically and materially to propel India and its citizens into modernity. ¹ It was designed as an ordered, exemplary town for independent, secular, socialist India (Shaw, 2009). This concrete utopia was created with the imposition of a brut modernist architecture and strict planning regulations that emphasised ‘discipline over people and space through classification and hierarchy’ (Wakeman, 2016: 127). Despite its goal to achieve an egalitarian social order (Shaw, 2009), Chandigarh is very much an elite city, as evident by its highest per capita car ownership in the country (Singh and Singh, 2014). Class hierarchy is literally fixed into the Chandigarh landscape with sector sizes decreasing and urban density increasing as one moves from the northern sectors into the southern ones. The urban poor, queer, transgender people and the migrants do not quite fit into the vision of Chandigarh, ‘the City Beautiful’, and are often hidden from view using infrastructural elements such as walls, embankments and/or trees.

Being the capital city for the States of Punjab and Haryana while also being a Union Territory has resulted in many more government offices in the city compared to other Indian cities. Planning, bureaucracy and surveillance are central to how residents view and experience Chandigarh. This paper looks at the socio-spatial relations that shape the experiences of the queer community in Chandigarh. In particular, it traces the Queer Pride parade, initiated in the year 2013 through to the most recent one in 2022, to understand how different groups challenge and subvert the heteronormative planning of Chandigarh and urge it towards becoming the socially inclusive ‘utopia’ that it promised to be. We argue that it is through the parade that the queer community challenges the prescribed order and heteronormativity of the planned city (see Oswin, 2010). The symbolic meanings of the city that are firmly situated within heteronormative planning principles are altered by the flamboyant, albeit momentary, celebration of alternative sexualities.

Our engagement with the concept of utopia is in line with several other critical urbanists who, following from Lefebvre, have insisted on holding onto the promise of an emancipatory future (see Pinder, 2015). This is an understanding of utopia that does not lose sight of the ‘real’. It operates in the realm of possibilities that acknowledges contradictions in the present and sets its eyes on the future. Lefebvre (1970) would probably critique the ‘technical utopianism’ of Chandigarh as an exercise in State-led urban planning that ‘blocks a view of the horizon’ (p.160). The city for Lefebvre was a place for encounter, an oeuvre. An ephemeral conception of space is mobilised in the Lefebvrian (1970) understanding of utopia – that which is ‘becoming’ and ‘polyvalent’ and ‘where groups take control for expressive actions and constructions, which are soon destroyed’ (pp.130–131). In this ephemeral, dialectical (Lefebvre, 1970) sense of utopia there is a view to the horizon, a futurity (Muñoz, 2019). It is this ‘not-yet-here’ (Muñoz, 2019) queer world-making in the imagined utopian conception of Chandigarh that is the focus of our investigation in this paper.

We intersperse our observations and participant narratives describing the 4th and the 10th pride walk in Chandigarh (2016 and 2022) to show how for one day the city’s streets are taken over by a celebration of queerness. We show how this colourful spectacle upends the grey, monotonous and controlled planning of the city to envisage an equitable city and rework its ‘straight lines’. Technocratic solutions proposed as part of grand urban planning imaginations can never take us closer to utopia. Instead, we argue, it is through disruptions caused by events like pride parades that we slowly inch towards utopia.

Starting from the 1970s, urban spaces around the world have hosted pride walks and parades. Pride is a public performance put forth as a form of expression and as dissent against the heteronormative establishments of gender, sexuality and space (Johnston, 2005). The presence of queer bodies on roads is an active exercise to reconstruct the meaning of public spaces and to redefine their relationship with normative powers (Butler, 2015). The first such gathering happened across a few cities in the United States in July 1970 to commemorate the Stonewall riots of 1969. Around the same time, Los Angeles organised a parallel event in West Hollywood to celebrate gay identity. These two celebratory marches have eventually set the stage for bolder activism to claim space for LGBTQ+ people (Bruce, 2016). Pride in India has also been an urban phenomenon. In 1992, the first signs of gay activism were visible outside Delhi Police headquarters when members of AIDS Bhedbhav Virodhi Andolan (ABVA) protested against police atrocities against gay men (Suresh, 2019). In 1999, gay men in Kolkata took to a march that is now fondly remembered as ‘the friendship walk’. It was organised by a group of 15 men who walked the city wearing yellow t-shirts with ‘LGBT-India’ and ‘Walk on the rainbow’ printed on them. Soon pride walks became a form of urban activism across major metros, including Delhi, Bengaluru and Mumbai, Bhubaneswar, Chennai, Thrissur, Pune and Patna. Chandigarh’s first pride walk was in 2013.

The term Queer has class-based connotations in India. ‘Queer’ has been adopted largely by English-speaking urban Indians. For many others, more local terms are preferred (Dutta, 2012a) and these reflect the diversity of gender and sexual identities in India (Cohen, 1995; Jenkins, 2004; Morris, 1994; Nanda, 1990). Identities like Jankhasm, Zenanas, Kothi, Panthi, Giriya are shaped by specific preferences of gender expression and sexual partners. There are other divisions inside the communities. For example, members of the Hijra ² community affirm that Zenanas are only for ‘Dhanda’ (where ‘Dhanda’ refers to sex work and the Hijra community labels the Zenana community based on their work) (Naqvi and Hasan, 1997: 265). Studies have located Kothis ³ in North India as living stigmatised lives in a highly urban and patriarchal scenarios. Lower class Kothi men do not fit the ideal of citizen-consumer in the neoliberal order of the city and instead inhabit the periphery, where they find a community and feel safe (Boyce and Dasgupta, 2017). In this paper, we chose to use ‘queer’ even though we are aware of the multiplicity of terms used by non-normative identities in India. This is to emphasise the urban context of our study and to build upon the ‘radical potentiality’, the idea of fluidness and the challenge to normativity associated with queerness. In their own way, each one of these pride walks, momentary and flickering, is a disruptive moment that contributes to a transformation in the meanings, aesthetics and memories associated with the urban spaces that it occupies. In making the above argument, this paper pushes the boundaries of both queer theory and urban utopian imaginations.

We conducted ethnographic work in Chandigarh from 2015 to 2022 to understand the experiences of Kothi persons in the city. The study involved participating in queer events in and outside Chandigarh (which involved travelling with the community to other Indians cities for pride walks), as well as participation in LGBTQ+ WhatsApp groups and workshops. In addition we conducted over 35 in-depth interviews with the organisers and participants of pride walks. Kothi persons use words from a coded language they refer to as farsi.

One of us became familiar with some bits of farsi and this enabled her to navigate the ‘insider/outsider’ position to some extent. Our paper builds on her connections and takes that ethnographic study further by delving deeper into the Chandigarh Queer Pride walk. We had planned for our campus to be the starting point for the celebrations for pride week in March 2020 but all gatherings were cancelled due to COVID. More recently, we all participated in the 2022 walk in Chandigarh. This paper is an outcome of several discussions surrounding the planning of pride events in the city, in which we were all involved. We conducted 10 additional interviews in early 2022, to understand the experience and emotions of those who participated in the pride walks in Chandigarh. Our interviewees were university students and faculty members who participated in the parade, Kothi men, Hijras and transwomen ⁴ (some of them from nearby towns) who sang, danced and chanted the slogans, policemen that followed the parade as well as onlookers. Relevant documents, newspaper articles, photographs and Facebook posts were analysed. In addition, our embodied experience of participating in pride walks and inhabiting the peripheries of Chandigarh, along with the several conversations that followed, form part of our data for this paper.

Queering urban space

The radical potential of the queer project is evident in its quest to move beyond a focus on gay and lesbian identities and to dismantle all binaries. The idea is to move towards a more fluid conception of space and sexualities. Several queer theorists suggest that ‘queer space’ might be a more inclusive conceptual alternative to the heteronormativity of urban spaces (Bell and Valentine, 1995; Bell et al., 1994; Betsky, 1997; Ingram et al., 1997). Queerness thus has signalled a ‘radical potentiality’ that presents an oppositional force to normalisation and conformity (Dean, 2003). This forward-looking idea of queerness is central to our understanding of its utopian potential. Intrinsic to the idea of queerness and utopia is the imagination of an emancipatory future (Doderer, 2011) that is rather elusive and yet highly anticipated.

Doan (2007) avers that cities have not lived up to expectations of inclusivity and that genderqueer people are generally only visible during occasions like Halloween or D*ke Marches and Pride Parades. While queer politics calls for the fluidity of sexual identities, it ignores privileges of class and the political culture of individualism that allows such fluidity. Gays and lesbians of colour or those with few material resources have few options to exercise this fluidity (Cohen, 2005). Queer politics needs to embrace contestations along the lines of caste, gender, class, race and so on to be truly open to radical possibilities.

‘Queer’ subjects are multiple, and heteronormativity has differential relationships with them based on their gender, class and caste identities. Such a conceptualisation pushes queer thinking to go beyond a self-definition in alternate sexualities towards more inclusivity that recognises and values all differences.

Moreover, queer literature has a ‘metronormative casting’ and needs to expand focus into the queer politics practised in smaller cities (Bain and Podmore, 2021) . Certainly, LGBTQ+ activisms are embedded in global urban networks that shape models of practice, but such activisms are locally contingent in terms of responses, strategies and outcomes (Andrucki, 2021; Knopp and Brown, 2003). In the smaller cities of India, such as Patna, Dehradun and Imphal for example, regional queer politics has to be seen in its particular socio-political and geographical contexts. Through the narratives of queer youth from the state of Manipur, Pundir (2019) explains how they feel doubly jeopardised on account of being born into a conflict-ridden, military controlled state, on top of being marginalised for their sexuality. In Dehradun, the authorities did not grant permission for the 2017 pride parade. In the case of Chandigarh, we discuss the layered negotiations that ultimately made the first pride walk in 2013 possible.

Pride parades, where alternative sexualities are hypervisibilised in large numbers, can be read as deconstructive spatial tactics that create a ‘spectacle of queer bodies’ (Johnston, 2002: 77). By claiming space, non-normative sexual identities subvert the naturalised order of that space and can be seen as a ‘politics of dislocation’ (Munt, 1995: 124). In this context, Bruce (2016) argues that pride walks should be understood as a kind of protest that is very different from conventional social demonstrations. Pride walks offer a space where queer stigma and normative notions of respectability give way to the aesthetics of pleasure and joy (Horton, 2020). Bell et al. (1994) argue that by performing their sexuality in a heteronormative space both the ‘skinhead gays’ and the ‘lipstick lesbians’ ⁵ parody heterosexuality. The parody also enables them to negotiate their sexualities even as it both challenges and reproduces normative gendered expressions (Lloyd, 1999). Puar (2007) urges us to think of queerer modalities of thought that are creative and expressive, that allow us to imagine a future without scripting it. Pride parades in their festive exuberance can potentially show the way for such modalities and expressions.

Chandigarh: A planned utopian imagination

Utopian visions are ‘unrealistic’ by definition. Yet, as Lefebvre reminds us, without utopian ideas, theory does not go too far. ‘In order to extend the possible, it is necessary to proclaim and desire the impossible. Action and strategy consist in making possible tomorrow what is impossible today’ (Lefebvre, 1976: 36). Pinder (2015) notes that urban utopias are to be achieved through social movements. Through such movements, people create ‘the potentialities for more socially just, democratic and emancipatory urban spaces and ways of living’ (Pinder, 2015: 30). We take a hopeful view of urban utopias as we build upon this statement to investigate the role of pride walks in queering the urban utopian imagination of Chandigarh.

Chandigarh was an attempt at decolonisation – city that would offer equality of opportunity and space for all social groups (Chalana, 2015; Fitting, 2002; Hall, 1988; Kalia, 1988, 1999; Mallot, 2012; Perera, 2004; Prakash, 2002; Singh et al., 2019; Wattas and Gandhi, 2017). Singh et al. (2019) posit that in every speech Nehru proclaimed it to be a ‘city of hope’ (p.1233), ‘a project of collective recovery’ (Mallot, 2012, quoted in Singh et al., 2019: 1232) (from the partition of India) and a symbol of ‘progress and modernity’. Through such proclamations, Nehru expressed that Chandigarh would be a modern utopia that would set an example for other Indian cities. How such a utopia was to address entrenched issues of gender, caste, religion and class remained unclear and the city plan has in fact solidified existing hierarchies, particularly those of social class (Sarin, 2021[1982]).

Inhabitants of Chandigarh have striven towards this ever-elusive utopia through social movements, marches, memorandums to the city government, etc. Recent examples in the city are the night walk organised by feminist groups Bekhauf Azaadi March (Fearless Freedom March in 2017) and protest marches by a group of concerned citizens led by the NGO Ghar Adhikar Sangharsh Morcha (Right to Housing movement, 2014) against slum demolitions. These events disrupt and challenge the dominant patriarchal and elitist culture of the city. In the pride walk too, a group of queer people – many belonging to lower-class positions – students and other city residents joyously take on the streets. Their presence allows an alternative imagination of how urban space may be inhabited and by whom. This is particularly significant at a time when non-regulated occupants of the street are being regularly removed by the city administration.

Chandigarh was planned in the context of the feudal political economy of agrarian Punjab defined by agricultural hierarchies of the landowning communities (Jats) and agricultural workers (Dalits and lower-caste groups). These dominant social relations are replicated in Chandigarh and its popular culture alike, reflecting this emphasis on upper-caste masculinity and femininity. Songs such as ‘Putt Jatt de’ (Sons of the Jats) or ‘Yaari Chandigarh waliye’ (Friendship with a Chandigarh girl) glorify the sons of Jats and their masculine pride. The celebration of macho-masculinity evident in the Punjabi songs does not lend any space to effeminate or gay men.

Corbusier’s grid-based city plan also had explicit masculine overtones, and his planning was based on the dimensions of the ‘modular man’ (see Constant, 2012; Imrie, 2003; Kalia, 1988, 1999). He is known to have made bizarre statements like ‘Man walks in a straight line because he has a goal and knows where he is going’ (cited in Kalia, 1999: 89). According to him, only ‘donkeys’ meandered and followed zigzag patterns (Kalia, 1999: 89). Such a conceptualisation of the city reflects that Corbusier was not making any space for deviance from his ‘perfect, straight man’, implying that there was no space for ‘queerness’ or what he calls ‘walking zigzag’ in this utopian vision for the city. Corbusier’s plan for residential sectors referred to as ‘container of family life’ (Kalia, 1999: 107) implied a heteronormative family. Each sector in Chandigarh is bound in by the fast-traffic roads surrounding it, and entry into the sectors is limited. Public transport is almost nonexistent, and ownership of a family car is the norm in the city. Much of the queer community in the city which belongs to the lower-middle class cannot afford to live inside this planned grid of Chandigarh.

The open-hand monument that symbolised openness and inclusivity remains merely a token. Fitting (2002: 82) astutely explains that the buildings of Le Corbusier’s capitol complex and, in particular, the structure of the Open Hand, stand as monuments to a utopian world, one which has not yet been realised; a reminder, then, of those dreams and of the understanding that the utopian city can only be achieved in the context of a larger social transformation.

In the year of writing this article (2022) the starting point of the pride parade was moved to the open hand monument (Figure 1). Such a move has immense symbolic and political significance since it reasserts the gesture of inclusion for which the open hand stands. We asked the organisers of the parade why the venue was shifted from the heart of the city to the northern part of the city (the Open-Hand monument to the Sukhna Lake). To which they replied that they are trying to spread awareness by taking the walk to every part of the city. This move is politically strategic since it reclaims the monument that symbolises the vision of Chandigarh as a utopian city. The culmination of the walk at the lake on a Sunday where hetero families come for weekend picnics was also impactful as it helps normalise the presence of queer bodies in city.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Glimpses of the 2022 parade that began at the open hand monument and culminated at the lake. One can see the Open Hand monument, children’s play area, preparations for the parade and onlookers.

Sharma (2018) argues that the urban villages that did not form a part of the planned grid offer Kothis and Panthis the space to express and practice their sexuality. It is these villages that absorb most of the diversity and represent spaces of inclusion by accommodating migrants from rural areas, people with alternative sexualities and the service providers for the planned city. Kothi men who live in the periphery cruise and hang-out in spaces that the city’s elite do not frequent; examples of such spaces are the bus-stands in Sectors 17 and 43, the corners of big parks and the back-corridors of city markets.

The next section details the pride events in Chandigarh and goes on to show that despite challenges and contradictions these events provide hope for a better urban future (Jones, 2013).

Walking the pride: Chandigarh’s utopian moments

Being in the pride walk is a mixed experience. It is hard to decipher whether one is participating in festivities or is part of a protest march. I never imagined a parade like this in Chandigarh.

Queer bodies do not quite fit into the normalised public spaces in the city and are usually thought of as a threat to the public order (Johnston, 2002; Nagle, 2022). This section looks at the consultations, compromises and celebrations that surround the pride walk in Chandigarh. We pay attention, not just to the actual event but the months-long planning and permissions that go into organising the parade and to the socio-spatial transformations that follow.

We argue that the pride parade needs to be understood not just as a moment but considered along with the sequence of events leading up to the actual day. Through the narratives below, we show that the organisational manoeuvres required to navigate and negotiate with the various bureaucratic and ideological power structures slowly widen the cracks in discursive and spatial hypermasculine hegemonies. We also discuss how the organising strategy of the first pride walk in Chandigarh, in making space for an ‘unusual’ event, reproduces discourses of ‘morality’ and ‘discipline’ that are meant to keep everything under ‘control’. With all its contradictions, we explore the pride walk as an event that not only redefines urban space during the ‘event’, but spreads ripples in the social order long before it has actually happens and lasting for a long time after it has ended. Moreover, the incremental shifts in the bureaucratic and societal attitudes towards non-normative occupation of space signal towards a queering in progress.

The first pride walk in 2013 was noticeably different from the later ones, each subsequent one being much more expressive and exuberant. This is evident in numerous ways, such as the exponential increase in the numbers of participants, the difficulty/ease with which permissions were sought and given, and the shifts in the dressing styles of participants. As Bruce (2016: 28) puts it, ‘local cultural climate’ and ‘community’ are most crucial in deciding the strength with which the message of the pride walk is sent across. Chandigarh’s planned grid is heavily surveilled, its buildings have strict facade controls, and a bureaucratic culture dominates urban interactions in the city. The permission letter for the first pride walk was addressed to the District Magistrate in which there was a mention of the term ‘LGBT+ pride walk,’ but respondents tell us that ‘no one in the headquarters could understand what that means.’

Dhananjay (our key informant and a queer activist in the city) recollects the reaction of city constables when approached about the permissions for the parade:

Those men who are called launda ⁷ in the village, who do laundebaazi. What rights do laundas want, if they want to do sex, they can do it.

This does not happen in our culture. What are you talking about?

Finally, only after evoking non-binary figures from Hindu mythology like Shiva, Arjuna, etc., Dhananjay was able to get access to officials. She also needed to keep articulating queerness by relying on the gender category of Hijra that is culturally comprehensible in North Indian culture. In addition, the event was portrayed as one that stems out of and in support of the HIV/AIDS projects that were run by the government. Hence, conversations to acknowledge non-normativity had to be supported by what was acceptable in the then Chandigarh cultural context. LGBTQ+ was new in the vocabulary of government offices, and letters had to be framed using familiar terms often glossing over the diversity inherent in queerness. It took six months of back and forth to get the final permits, including the use of loudspeakers and approval of the route. This too after a written undertaking was given that read: ‘Participants will do nothing wrong in the parade’. ‘With wrong, they meant nudity, kissing, etc. There were hundreds of things running in their mind as to what the participants would do!’ explained Dhananjay.

We see that even as pride events present a picture of a liberatory space, there is immense bargaining with the State, internal conflicts and everyday struggles that remain hidden to the casual participant (Binnie, 2004). Moreover, even as pride walks are an unashamed public declaration of one’s sexual identity, they negotiate heteronormative and patriarchal ideals of acceptability.

One day before the event, Dhananjay posted on her Facebook page:

We must show that we are not prostitutes. We are not criminals just becoz of different orientation. I request you to all! discipline, discipline, discipline, discipline, only……. no vulgarity.

This message holds several contradictions. Dhananjay, as an organiser of the event here, is talking to the participants of the pride walk on her Facebook page. A collective identity is formed by referring to the marchers as ‘we’. Who is she referring to as ‘we’ in the message? On one side it is a call for an event that is meant to break or queer the existing social homogeneity, but at the same time, it asked for ‘discipline’, ‘no vulgarity’ and emphasises the act of self-moral policing to prove the group’s, or participant’s, moral values. To fit into the norms, the organisers delegitimise prostitutes as criminals, even when many of the participants are sex workers.

Negotiations with the city government were followed by those at the administrative level in the university as the pride walk was to start from the student centre in Panjab University. One day before the event, the team received a notice from the university administration saying, ‘such kind of activity should not be allowed in an educational institution’. This led to another round of parlaying, and eventually, the organisers managed to convince the administration that the university is merely a starting point for the parade. Lallan, a professor at Punjab University recalls being one of the very few people in his university to support the first Queer Pride parade. When the Dean of Students Welfare refused to allow the pride walk to start from the student centre, Lallan argued that ‘such activities should be encouraged on campuses as they facilitate a dialogue among the faculty and students’. From struggling for official permissions in 2013, the organisers of the 2022 pride event now see official permissions as basic entitlements of the community. In the run-up to the 2022 parade Dhananjay forcefully averred that ‘they dare not refuse us the permission for the pride-event’, exuding a confidence that reflects her decade long negotiations with the administrators of Chandigarh.

In the year 2016, on the day of the pride walk, when the stage was being set in Sector 17 plaza, policemen came and stalled the process. After many requests, the Commissioner agreed but on the understanding that the event would be at ‘very low volume’, and ‘no fight should happen’. Also, a big banner with LGBT pride walk written on it had to be lowered with half of it behind the stage, to lessen the visibility. Several apprehensions and fear of disruption appeared to have clouded the rainbow event. However, on the actual day, a diverse group took charge and participated joyously in seductive swaying, Bollywood-style dancing, flirtation and fabulousness (Horton, 2020: 300). Many boundaries that were thrust upon the community were broken and the burden of acceptance lay on the onlookers (Dutta, 2012b). Amidst the thikri claps of the Hijras, mujras and folk dances of the Kothis and political slogans held up on banners and sung, the pride became a ‘moment of emergence that marks unrealised potentials’ (Berlandt, 1997: 222) reconfiguring modes of inhabiting public space. Ordinary challenges and prohibitions of bodily gestures and other performative excesses were laid aside to hijack space and reinvent aesthetic modes of queer representations. Erasure was confronted with an animated presence (Horton, 2020: 303). The culmination of the pride walk in Sector 17 denoted a special moment for the queer community as it signified reaching what is known as the ‘heart of the city’.

Sector 17 represents the cultural hub of the city where people across social classes gather to eat, play, perform, shop, celebrate, resist and hang-out. The participants in the first pride walk consisted of mainly working-class gay men, trans people, students and supporters. Dhananjay herself comes from a lower-middle class family who also participated in the pride walk. Dhananjay explains:

They (working class) do not have ‘izzat or sharam’ (respect or shame) system. Media does not affect them. They come from illiterate families. If their picture comes, they will be happy that their kid’s picture has come in the newspaper. They don’t know what is written in it.

The first pride walk in Chandigarh witnessed enthusiastic participation by the local Hijra community. Kajal, who self-identifies as a Hijra, ⁸ explains her participation as a leader in the parade:

Trans people do not need to hide their faces with masks. We can cross-dress, wear seven layers of makeup, and are unrecognizable. Most trans people do not live with families or in their hometowns. We are either attached to hijra deras or live as paying guests. Therefore there is front line participation by us.

Many middle-class queers on the other hand wore elaborate masks to shield themselves from the media. The difference in the nature of participation by residents of Chandigarh reveals the fractures of class and sexuality even within an event meant to celebrate inclusivity. Do these moments/contradictions display any real potential to challenge heteronormativity in the long term?

How do these annual breaks in the ‘regular’ urban scene show the possibility for a different future? While we are committed to the promise of pride walks to bring about long-term shifts, we also conducted interviews with the queer participants to understand what the parade means to them. Some of the responses are below:

Here we are with our real family, you know. Violence in the family is a serious issue. So the question should be how we gain the confidence to live with our families. Walking in the pride walk is the easiest and most fun thing for me.

Chandigarh, with its modernist architecture, has an image of being a progressive city in the northern part of India. However, structures of caste, class and gender continue to shape urban life in Chandigarh. While Corbusier’s plan for Chandigarh consisted of streets that were scaled to prevent ‘animated street scenes from developing’ (Scott, 1998: 131), the pride walk challenges Corbusier’s planning to claim these very streetscapes. The pride walk is seen by many participants as a ‘big deal’– something that is unheard of in the Chandigarh context, a disruption. However, as the narratives above reveal, the disruptions required to push towards a more inclusive society are not limited to urban public space. These disruptions happen at several scales from the most intimate and embodied to the urban and global. The pride walk then is a sort of culmination of the thousands of mini-revolutions that have constituted the lives of non-normative participants. Yet, the combined effect of satirical, playful and embodied gestures and often unruly seductive moves that bring in ‘grammars of fun’ (Horton, 2020: 303; Khubchandani, 2020) present a serious challenge to the aesthetics of this disciplined planned city.

These disruptions are situated both within and outside the structures of neoliberal capitalism, patriarchy and Hindu nationalism that define contemporary India. Several queer scholars have pointed out the homonationalism or the appropriation of the queer groups by their respective governments to push a nationalist agenda (see Puar, 2013; Sircar, 2017; Upadhyay, 2020). The pride event in Chandigarh too has a Hindu majority as its participants, although we also met several who were from the Sikh, Muslim and Dalit backgrounds. A queer gathering in Sector 17 (on June 27, 2020) held amidst the coronavirus pandemic and border clashes with China, had the participants shouting slogans such as ‘hail the Indian soldiers’ and ‘Hail India’. These nationalist slogans in the recent gathering may appear to be a cop-out but can also be seen as a claim to belonging, a right to equal citizenship – to celebrate, mourn and act as equal members of the national community. This belonging to the national community and the claim to urban public space are not merely physical material acts. As Simran’s narrative below reveals, true belonging also comes with a right to critique and question.

We know that at this time, no democratic country can speak against LGBT people. Yeh bikta hai (this sells). There is a huge economy that depends on LGBT people. There is a tourism industry, makeup industry, textile, shoes, etc. that are exclusively for the community people. Governments are nothing but greedy. They want money, and we give it to them. They know if they do anything to us in Pride, it will become international news. And so we know that we are safe.

Alluding to the global scale, Simran shows how the queer movement moves across scales to negotiate with several institutions in order to organise the parades. In the process, they are often co-opted into the corporate agenda becoming complicit in what scholars have called homocapitalism (Rao, 2020; Strey, 2017). Big corporate houses sponsor upper and middle-class queer events in the hope of targeting the queer consumer-citizen and earning ‘pink’ rupees (Strey, 2017). Chandigarh’s Queer Pride however, is led by a working-class trans-woman who does not fit into the neoliberal consumer-citizen category. She is not suave, nor English-speaking and she has been pushing the ‘education for trans peoples’ agenda forward. This mundane agenda did not initially attract sponsors. Over the years, this has changed and it was interesting to see that the sponsors listed on the 2022 pride poster included the Family Planning Association of India and The Lalit (an upscale hotel chain).

What the narratives show us is that while the pride walk challenges the heteronormativity of urban space, the organisational processes surrounding a pride walk pose challenges to institutional structures and the taken for granted protocols at multiple levels. We see the pride walk, not as a pure space free of contradictions but as the expression of an aspiration. A possibility.

Conclusions: Queering urban theory

The paper discussed that the utopian vision for Chandigarh left much to be desired. The imagination of Chandigarh as a utopia that is built on order, surveillance and control leaves little space for non-normative subjectivities. Against this background the pride walks emerge as one of the events that negotiate with and rewrite Chandigarh’s social, aesthetic and spatial landscape. They offer the queer community a space to express their sexuality, create the potential of a sexual utopia and enable them to ‘come out of the closet’ with less inhibition than before.

We argue that Pride needs to be seen as bringing about ‘incremental’ shifts – it needs to be seen as transformative action over space and time. The planning, permissions and participation in pride walks enable conversations about sexuality to infiltrate bureaucratic circuits and procedural technologies – new vocabularies are created as much as new forms of public space uses are imagined and enacted. Spaces acquire meaning through social action. We see that the pride walk has transformed forever the imagination of the student centre in Punjab University. The student centre has always been a space where student protests unfolded. In this case, the shift is not just symbolic but very material. The awareness brought about by the pride walk has also led to several administrative shifts such that the transgender students are now able to register for university programmes and are offered tuition waivers. In the student centre, toilets for transgender students stand beside those for cis-gendered students. Chandigarh, we argue has been significantly queered through the open celebration of the queer identity which has altered both the symbolic and material space of the city.

While many argue that neoliberal and capitalist structures have co-opted pride walks for their own marketing strategies, the organisers of the parade see this as perhaps the only way for themselves to be visible when capitalism is all pervasive. Let us not forget that queer politics also makes a dent in capitalist imaginations however small and minute it may appear. Our respondents spoke about the many conversations they had with potential corporate sponsors. While not all agreed to fund the pride, the conversation itself made a difference in the corporate offices in Chandigarh and potentially helped them redefine diversity and inclusivity within their organisations.

It is important to revisit Chandigarh as utopia at this juncture. For more than seven decades, Chandigarh has served as the icon for independent India’s first planned city. Several other cities around the country have been modelled on Chandigarh (Karnal, Mohali, Panchkula etc.) Chandigarh too has seen a transformation from a ‘socialist’ city to one most suited to neoliberalism. High end malls, hotels and cinemas now dot the Chandigarh landscape. Tightly planned with sectors and grid roads, there is not much space in the city for expansion and so real estate is at a premium. In this scenario, claiming space is an immensely political act. Pride walks become even more about claiming space, reworking the Chandigarh aesthetic and posing a flamboyant critique to the planned orderliness of the city. As Sara Ahmed notes ‘Queer futurity is not so much about crafting prescriptions for a utopian society – in which everyone is happy and life is ideal – but by making life more bearable in the present because in doing so we create the potential for a better future’ (Ahmed quoted in Jones, 2013: 2). Indeed, the pride event in Chandigarh makes the lives of queer groups more bearable in the neoliberal, heteropatriarchal city by reclaiming urban space on their own terms, visiblising themselves and expressing their sexual aspirations in the public sphere. In the documentary ‘Admitted’, Dhananjay expresses her desire for the queer community to get space in the Republic Day parade and claim their rights as citizens involved in the nation-building process; participating in the national parade represents a utopian aspiration for her. The pride walk in Chandigarh has at the very least opened up a space for discussion, giving the city a new vocabulary through which diverse identities can be expressed. As we speak, a transgender student sits in public protest at the university demanding student housing; 11 students at another nearby institute have come out as openly queer and are claiming space in cultural events and student government. Persistent activism by the transcommunity in the city has led to the visiblisation of issues of their safety, violence and discrimination in the city. It has invited the attention of international agencies, opened up a space for debates on alternative sexualities and put the queer activism in Chandigarh on the global map. Alliance Francaise, for example, held a dialogue on the theme ‘City for All’ in April, 2022 in which Dhananjay was invited as a distinguished guest. Dressed in a light pink saree with a big red bindi adorning her forehead, Dhananjay awed the audience as she expressed the desire to see ‘a transgender person as a Prime Minister or a President in India within her life span’. The audience, that comprised a diverse group, cheered and clapped to this proposition indicating their desire to see her ‘utopian vision’ fulfilled.

In an edited volume on queer utopias, Jones (2013) rightly points out that the achievement of ‘perfect utopia’ is a myth and instead utopia should be read as spaces that are suggestive of the potentiality for the future; they give hope. In continuation to Jones’ argument, our paper reads the pride event as a space of hope that promises a better future for the sexual minorities and other marginal groups in the city of Chandigarh. In a similar vein Chatterton and Pickerill (2010) argue that ‘political change seldom comes wholesale; instead victories often come subtly and in increments’ (quoted in Brain and Podmore, 2021: 1314). Every little step that moves towards the realisation of the utopian dream that was the original vision for forming the city of Chandigarh therefore must be celebrated. Bikramjit Kohli (quoted in Pundir, 2019) notes:

Yes, we are a tier-2 city, but in terms of exposure and perception, we have now reached a point in which we approach the people in power and society and talk about sensitisation. As we speak, more and more people are now wearing fewer masks. When we started, people were not comfortable with being identified. Now they are asking organisers to speak on public microphones. This, right here, is change.

This change, we argue however small and slow, must be celebrated for its emancipatory potential.