Interview: Creating new vocabularies and ways of being non-binary

For activist Don Hasar, experience precedes words: words come much later when trying to describe an experience, says Hasar. This has also been the driving force behind Hasar’s grassroots activism on queerness and non-binary ways of being that is embedded in local vocabularies and contexts.

Hasar’s own formative years, too, were spent in search of a vocabulary of sorts that would capture their sense of self. “I must have been around four or five years old when I knew that I was not a boy,” Hasar said in an interview. “Our society does not teach young children to look beyond binaries.”

Hasar dressing up in their mother and grandmother’s clothes was laughed off as long as they were a child, but that soon gave way to anger, abuse and violence to force conformity.

“I was also growing up with immense learning disabilities and ADHD [attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder],” said Hasar. “Like many other families who did not have access to any vocabulary about these issues, mine used punishments in different forms to ‘treat’ these symptoms.”

A search for “vocabulary” is also what informed Hasar’s and their partner’s efforts to build up the Himachal Queer Collective, now the Himachal Queer Foundation. “Conversations around gender in most urban spaces I was in were limited to English and among certain privileged groups,” said Hasar. “These spaces hardly accepted me.” Hasar said this pushed them to research why and how there was a need for such discussions, discourses and support to be made accessible, especially in regional languages.

The politics of language is crucial in any movement space, notes Hasar.

At the Himachal Queer Foundation, Hasar points out that they use “storytelling, songs and theatre to talk about queer-trans* and intersex communities in the mountains, using a whole lot of references and regional context”. “This helps people to reimagine our identities in their own way and not necessarily depend on English words,” said Hasar.

But while vocabularies are empowering, they also limiting. “If I start seeing every person through words, definitions and labels, it will restrict me from knowing them in the way they tend to express themselves,” said Hasar.

As Hasar notes, it is important to live one’s truth. For Hasar, this has come full circle. “Being able to express my non-binariness makes me feel aligned in the same way that I used to feel aligned in those afternoons, alone in my parent’s room, draped in my mother’s clothes,” said Hasar.

Wearing a “saree with a daari – beard” for Hasar represents the possibilities of identity. “Draping my non-binary ness is an act of personal love for me as well as a highly political one, since it creates dialogues everywhere I go,” said Hasar.

Excerpts:

What challenges did you face in your journey of queerness, as in how did you engage with the world around you starting from home?

I think I have blocked out a huge part of my growing up years. Life really started for me way later when I began living on my own terms. Everything before then seems like some distant nightmare.

I grew up in a city for the first two decades of my life. However, cities don’t always mean greater acceptance and accessibility to vocabulary or information about one’s identities. I come from an extremely orthodox, conservative, and patriarchal home, where I never had access to words that described me, or people like me.

I must have been around four or five years old when I knew that I was not a boy. Our society does not teach young children to look beyond binaries. Naturally, I found more relatability with the women in my life and know that they were my tribe.

Dressing up in my mother’s and grandmother’s clothes as a young kid brought a lot of smiles and admiration from my near and dear ones. For me, it meant alignment to who I was. Kids that are young do not know what gender is or how to perform roles based on norms that the assigned boxes come with.

Things surely changed by the time I turned six, when all of this admiration started shifting to shame, violence, anger, and abuse. My natal family chose all of these in different ways to try and fix or convert me into a boy.

Schools are and were not sacred spaces of learning for children who are different. I do not mean to point just towards gender here. Anybody who is different faces a lot of discrimination at school, due to various identities, abilities, and contexts. I was also growing up with immense learning disabilities and ADHD [attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder]. I still live with a lot of these and deal with them every day. I have been successful in masking all of these, like a lot of other people, to fit in.

Like many other families who did not have access to any vocabulary about these issues, mine used punishments in different forms to “treat” these symptoms. I remember a huge part of my childhood wanting to change myself and be better – based on my parent’s version of the perfect child.

I failed miserably every time. I tried again. What does a boy look like? How do they walk? How do they behave? Suddenly, I had to find answers to these questions and I had nowhere to start.

The boys in my school and locality did not want me to be a part of their “circles”. My best option was to watch, observe, learn and perform! I failed miserably. But like any other skill, I managed to fit in for the many hours in a day when I had to interact with the outside world and most members in my natal family.

My entire childhood has been an intense and overwhelming period of acting and performing training programmes where I self-taught how to use my body, my voice, its modulations and costumes to fit in and survive. There would be a “shame” ceremony every now and then to congratulate me on my failed efforts to be a super-achieving boy. If there was a positive about my efforts to perform and fit in, it is that I now use theatre, acting, music and other forms of performing arts and expression heavily in the work that I do as an activist.

My safe space was my grandmother. She never asked me why I was the way I was. We never felt the need to speak about gender or my performance. She would accept me for who I was. I remember spending a lot of time with her while combing her hair, listening to stories, listening to the radio and hearing about her childhood and her dreams. I have lived with my partner for the last many years and we have built a family of our own with our two cats, one dog, fish and the mountains.

While a lot of individuals ask us to reconcile with our natal family members and although I understand that all their violence is in a way structural, I often think, “which person willingly moves away from their natal family and home, the space which is supposed to be their safe space as a child?”

Did the reading down of Section 377 have any positive impact in your area of living?

I was around 23 years old when Section 377 was read down. The reading down of this section was and continues to be a huge milestone in the LGBTQIAP+ history of my country.

Yet, there is little that such events contribute to on-ground lived experiences, due to lack of socio-cultural awareness or measures. We need awareness campaigns led by administrations in place to make way for acceptance, supported by informative local media reportage.

In the region where I work and live in Himachal Pradesh, the Supreme Court verdict did not make lives easier. Himachal Pradesh is a state where more than 90% of the population lives in rural conditions. Naturally, the LGBTQIAP+ or Queer Vocabulary [in English] does not exist here.

But people exist here with lifestyles. Desires exist here, realisation, actualisation, and practice of desires exist here as well, that have very less to do with English terms that always have a very colonial approach of using boxes to contain expansive and limitless expressions of queerness, trans*ness, desires and practices.

We work with a lot of cases of violence with people who do not identify with boxes of assigned gender and sexuality. While I live and work in a highly patriarchal and conservative space, Himachal Pradesh is also a place with tribal and indigenous communities that have very fluidic and open cultures and practices. Polyamory and many other concepts are not anything new to people here.

While my partner and I do not practice it as a couple, we understand that people have the right to choose, express and practice love in the way they want to. We face more difficult and unnecessary questions and inquisitiveness from urban people who visit here or are settled here. This is because of an innate sense of urban conditioning that tries to assign everything that isn’t meant to be contained into boxes, with labels and definitions.

Section 377 and other milestone news does not impact lives on a socio-cultural level, since we are also quite disconnected from a certain kind of urban functioning that happens in the plains, in English.

How many people think of Himachal as anything beyond a travel destination? This exotic urban gaze from the plains not only dehumanises our lives but continues to project the state as some perfect and picturesque dreamland, made for consumption. I am hinting at two different realities here: our national capital is merely 10 hours away, but it took so many years for us to start working around queer-trans* equity and justice, while a lot of work has been happening there already.

We are still at a very rudimentary stage where we are trying to foster a safe environment as we simultaneously have these crucial conversations.

You and your partner identify as non-binary, living under the same roof. How have people around you or elsewhere responded to your relationship?

I would like to respond to this question by asking the reader to try and rethink what they imagine as community. We live in the rural Himalayas. People in urban spaces have the privilege to meet LGBGTQIAP+ community members through weekend gatherings and parties by using specific public transport if and when they wish to.

For us, the village we live in makes up our community and does not depend on whether someone is queer or trans* or identifying as part of the LGBTQIAP+. Living in the mountains, with harsh weather, limited resources and lack of mobility changes the way one sees community. People like us live, work and survive by understanding the importance of allyship in our lives and work. Patience, solidarity, and intersectionality are very crucial terms for us to function, in spite of not having access to these terms in English most of the time.

Both me and my partner spend a lot of time interacting with everyone else in our surroundings, and we put a lot of time into community building. We get asked a lot of questions that could be triggering for a lot of us. But we do not have the privilege to react to it and cancel people out. We live and practice allyship to survive and sustain ourselves and the queer-trans*movement that we have started in the mountains.

People see multiple aspects of who we are, as human beings have very pluralistic attributes about themselves. Even if they fail to understand our trans*ness, they acknowledge the other qualities we have as persons, like being helpful, being amazing cooks, and seeing our work with the local state government around laws and policies which is clearly visible on social media. This could always be a starting point for other conversations. Acceptance for us has taken a lot of time and it is still a work in progress.

The key to this is also not canceling people out because of differences. There is limited space that is occupied by everyone. We cannot create new space for LGBTQIAP+ community. Our best bet is to work with people and identify allyship in them and reclaim spaces for Queer-Trans* and intersex communities with our allies.

A prime example to illustrate this idea: The nearest town is 20 km away from where we stay. In mountains, having to travel every kilometre means a lot of extra effort and resources. There are very few shops in and around our village that sell some of the items one might need in their daily lives.

Both me and my partner are bound to visit these shops, even if we do not agree with the shopkeeper’s ideology about some things. He/she/they is/are also bound to sell it to us or else there will be no customers for this establishment. Canceling him/her/them over any differences also leads us to lose a potential ally with whom we could have dialogue about queer-trans* identities and other discourses of intersectionality.

In a space where we have limited resources, we try to accept each other with our differences, since we form a community. This is my context. I am in no way suggesting individuals have to go through trauma (if triggered). This is particularly my context and practice, that forms an integral part of my values, ethics, politics and feminism.

This being said, we cannot deny our caste privilege and our privilege to have found our voices, vocabulary, discourses, laws and legalities which gives us an advantage to present ourselves in the way we do. Had we not done this, would we be accepted in the same way? Would our efforts on community building have been as productive as it is? I wonder.

Both of you have been instrumental in creating the Himachal Queer Foundation. Why did you do so and how has the organisation helped others?

Himachal Queer Foundation began with two stories and pathways (mine and my partner’s) that converged to make space for a shared dream. It started with both of us asking this question, “How do we create safe spaces for queer-trans* individuals in rural Himalayas?” We had no probability of ever meeting, but yet we did. And when such things happen, sparks flow, energies fuse and it creates magic. I had been working with an organisation based in Calcutta around trans* persons who were sex workers and supporting this space as they built a labour history archive around our community’s livelihood.

Conversations around gender in most urban spaces I was in, were limited to English and among certain privileged groups. These spaces hardly accepted me, and I had started working by myself and researching on why and how we need to make such discussions, discourses and support accessible to ones who do not have any access to such things, particularly in vernacular.

I used apps like Grindr and other apps to provide peer counselling to anyone who did not know what to do. More than often, many of my dates ended up becoming sessions around gender and sexuality. This also gave me an idea about the lack of safe spaces among existing queer circles and the rampant transphobia, casteist and classist ideologies that existed here.

Himachal Queer Foundation started off as Himachal Queer Collective. My partner Shashank was the one behind it. This started as a friends-network of Queer individuals and allies in Himachal Pradesh who felt a keen need to have support.

Like me, Shashank had been providing peer support and counseling to individuals through various dating apps. In January 2021, the Himachal Queer Collective made its online presence known and became a space for people to start talking about queer identities and rights online and a helpline as well.

The initiative also used dating applications like Tinder and Grindr to start a dialogue. A lot of people were not comfortable to speak openly about their identities. HQC [Himachal Queer Collective] even conducted two workshops on mental healthcare support and LGBTQIAP+ identities through its Instagram handle in 2021.

I met Shashank at a transfeminism workshop in September 2021. We met and felt this instant connection,attraction and respect for each other. More than anything, we sensed an alignment with regard to how we approach queer politics. All of this together felt like a rare opportunity to both of us.

I had started my work around a vernacular queer vocabulary, and I was quite disappointed in the lack of inclusivity in urban circles, where only certain kinds of individuals had access to queer-vocabulary and to English. There was no space for queer narratives of people who did not speak English and belonged to other marginalised identities or ones who did not stay in cities.

Even though HQC was functional online, there were not many individuals who could put in active work-hours due to their professional preoccupations. For Shashank and I, this was work entwined with our lives and most importantly, our soul. We dived full time into this work. As Shashank’s mother says, 1+1= 11 and we became a living embodiment of this thought. It was both of our dreams to work on this and till date we feel very grateful to be able to live this dream.

Hosting Palampur Pride [Himachal Pradesh’s first Pride Walk] was a milestone in our journey, where we received love from all over the country in the form of small donations, badges, flags and other necessities. Youth, allies, and other Pahari people travelled by buses for hours to attend this in our tiny Palampur. All our slogans, songs and placards were in Pahari/Kangri dialect to be able to engage with all locals. This led Shashank and I to go ahead and register HQC as an organisation.

I don’t think words can describe the impact we have had on people here. We work with youth from all over the country, particularly ones who do not have access to English. More so, Himachali youth have a safe space for the first time in their lives.

We also actively work in neighboring states, where there has been very less dialogue or awareness around LGBTQIAP+. We keep on speaking about intersectionality and decolonising discourses in conference spaces but fail to practice it. HQF is our way of practicing everything that we say or claim that our feminism stands for.

We have started working with government spaces on a district and state level as well, which is a very big deal for Himachal Pradesh. We hope to take this forward to all remote spaces in our home state, where people are facing violence every day and do not have access to vocabulary, information, discourses or laws and legalities. We get calls from Pahari youth every day, who thank us for doing what we do. A lot of them tell us this, “We thought we were the only one in Himachal Pradesh”.

We actively work towards making vocabulary, movies, literature, songs, plays and other resources in Hindi and a variety of local dialects that work around queer-trans* inclusion, gender, caste and other identities. We do not feel the need to turn to English discourses around these.

You have spoken and been involved in various platforms across the country. If you were to compare and contrast the village you live in, the movement there and the places you've been to?

Every space has its own challenges and privileges. I would never use any simplistic lens to rank this in any manner. That being said, I have no shame in saying that I have always found more acceptability within Pahari rural communities than I have ever found in many progressive platforms or urban spaces with queer-trans* groups. This is possibly because of an inherent culture where we live with very less resources in harsh climate and geography.

By acceptability, I am referring to a sense of people with different ideologies, affiliations, expressions and practice co-existing in a space with limited resources. There is a certain amount of gatekeeping that I face in most urban circles, with petty markers starting from the language one speaks to outward appearances or ways of expression. I usually speak in Hindi, Bangla and Pahari when I am working with communities, since I believe that it is an imperative to use vernacular dialects and tongues, if we want to implement change on a grassroots level.

I use English when and where it is needed in my work. In spite of thoroughly enjoying speaking in English, I prefer using Hindi or other languages in important platforms, since this is a highly political stance for me. I have worked hard to learn to write and speak in English, as I went to a school where quite a few English classes were conducted in a vernacular language. I do not face such discrimination in the village where I stay. A lot of progressive feminist spaces in the country are yet to make space for LGBTQIAP+ identities. While I do agree that this is a work in progress, it feels quite exclusionary in many instances.

As a young, trans*-led organisation, we could do much more with a lot of more support from such established spaces. I am also associated with a few spaces that work on a global level, where I do feel that people are interested in making space. I recently had the opportunity, privilege and honor to present my work at a conference at Harvard University where a lot of young individuals turned up to listen to how we work in rural mountainous Himalayas. This being said, I feel that we need more rural narratives at a global level. I am currently working on this and intend to take this to the rest of the world soon.

There are a lot of challenges in the spaces where we stay and work, but that being said, this is home. And I feel more welcome here than anywhere else in the world.

Language is linked with culture and identity. There are so many words used in English that give various sexualities an identity and a sense of belonging. How does that playout in Himachali given your own sexuality too?

The politics of language is very crucial in any movement space. Experience precedes words and words always come way later when we try to describe any experience. For example, the word transgender was coined very recently in 1965. But communities have been living in different parts of the world with their ownways of referring to themselves. Hijra, Nupi Manbi, Faʻafafine, two-spirit are just some of the examples of communities using regional context to describe themselves. In Pahari, we are working on this, and we explore and find new words every day.

Something as queer is seen as “ajeeb” (with a negative connotation). We use the term “hatke” [different] which sheds light on uniqueness. We use storytelling, songs and theatre to talk about Queer-Trans* and intersex communities in the mountains, using a whole lot of references and regional context. This helps people to reimagine our identities in their own way and not necessarily depend on English words.

For example, in Himachal’s first Pride walk, all our placards, slogans and songs were in Pahari. What this does is establish a sense of familiarity or more relatability for people. What begins as discomfort changes to this: “Oh! They are singing in Pahari. These are our children, let's listen to what they want to say”. A lot of our work with regard to awareness is filled with storytelling, theatre and songs which are not in English. We use Pahari context to make sure that our work/message impacts people deeply.

The entire world cannot operate based on a single template that defines queerness and trans*ness. This leads to losing a sense of specificity for something as crucial and individual as gender, queerness, sexuality or trans*ness. So many individuals get in touch with us every day because they find themselves in our work, where they do not need to feel ashamed of not being able to converse in English and be accepted as a queer-trans* individual.

I use a very interesting reverse mechanism in my work in Himachal Pradesh and other spaces, where we operate around acceptance of individuals for who they are and understanding this acceptance through constitutional rights, using a lens of equity, justice and intersectionality. Definitions are great, but they also tend to limit experiences and it is very easy to fall into these pitfalls.

For example, people like us who have had lived realities but very late access to vocabulary, it has been an explosive and rapid growth as soon as I found the words. However, if I start seeing every person through words, definitions and labels, it will restrict me from knowing them in the way they tend to express themselves. Understanding people through definitions also limit humanness to one single template, which is something I do not believe in.

You literally drape yourself with your “non-binaryness”. What would you tell others like you to do to both be safe and yet be who they are?

It is very important to live one’s truth. But being able to do so is a privilege and there is no other way to speak about it. I consider myself being privileged enough to be able to go through all my difficulties – some of which I still endure – and live my truth.

Being able to express my non-binariness makes me feel aligned in the same way that I used to feel aligned in those afternoons, alone in my parent’s room, draped in my mother’s clothes. For me, it is important to be able to see more representation of non-binaryness in important spaces, be it in government mechanisms or in any socio-cultural space that affects the lives of all individuals who do not fit into assigned boxes of gender and sexuality.

Our National Council of Transpersons has no representation of non-binary individuals, nor that of any trans*masculine identity. When people see me in a saree with daari [beard] it represents possibilities. Such representation is important to be able to normalise how we see gender. I see this in government offices or healthcare facilities or educational institutes or in our training with Police or Pradhans or Anganwadi or ASHA workers, where such steps for the first time have led to difficult conversations for the first time. Hence, draping my non-binary ness is an act of personal love for me as well as a highly political one, since it creates dialogues everywhere I go.

A huge part of my work is with people who do not have access to these terms or affordability to be able to purchase any item that might help them to showcase non-binary ness as seen in many urban spaces. I do not believe that one needs to express their non-binary ness through outward attributes. No one should have to forcibly perform any kind of non-binaryness.

Non-binaryness indicates a blatant disregard for boxes and definitions to me and many other folks that I work with in Himachal Pradesh and with youth from all over the country. I am saying this from my experience of the exclusion and discrimination I have faced in queer-trans* circles for not expressing myself in certain ways or not having access to certain communication skills, language or vocabulary.

All of this being said, there is no one way of being non-binary. The entire point is to step out of boxes and express the possibilities of experiencing gender. Hence, no one should be forced to express their non-binaryness in any certain way. That is the beauty of diversity.

My message to young individuals like me: Find your safe space first. Safe space entails a roof over your head,a place where people you live and work with support you and love you. It also entails financial independence. You need to protect yourself and nurture your dreams first. If needed, hide it from the rest of the world for some time and wait till you are independent.

If you are not feeling safe, please contact us at Himachal Queer Foundation. We will try and create that space for you to the best of our abilities, be it access to mental healthcare support or any other support or intervention that you need. Live your truth once you get here, because it empowers you. Your non-binaryness is true, in whatever way it makes sense to you, with or without outward expressions.

While you are waiting, do not feel despair thinking that the grass is greener on the other side. Please remember that the grass is green where you water it. I am there with you and for you, forever.

Lastly, I urge people from the queer-trans* and intersex communities to start feeling and practicing more empathy, love and sensitivity for ones who come from other marginalisation through their socio-cultural and economic locations.

Intersectionality and solidarity are not just words that we put on our Instagram bios or paper proposals. Practice them every day. Make space for ones who need it more. And let them speak in their own voice. Maybe it will give us yet more ways of seeing non-binaryness than what we can imagine.

Sharif Rangnekar is the author of Straight to Normal and Queersapien. He is also the director of the Rainbow Literature Festival.

This article is part of the Queer & Inclusive series.