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Q:Kumam, having worked with queer-trans people from Manipur largely, and working on this book that covers stories from other states also in north-east India, are there factors that make their challenges and traits in mental well-being  unique? What needs to be understood here? 

Kumam: One of the things the book does not directly address is unpacking the category of "northeast." TCHP’s earlier podcast series as part of Reframe Genderalities fellowship, explored the problematic nature of categorising all northeast people as a homogenising community, and also expanded the understanding of what it means to be queer-trans in this region.

The book contains eight chapters, each representing one of the eight states in India’s northeastern region. The taboo, cultural and governmental censorship, and stressors faced by queer-trans people vary across these states. In my understanding, discussions related to queer-trans issues are extremely challenging in Mizoram and Nagaland. In Manipur and Assam, these discussions are more visible but can become very intense. Assam has a history of communal and armed conflict. Manipur is a battleground of various conflicts. In Assam and Manipur, censorship takes different forms. There, queer-trans lives intersect with ongoing conflicts, and there is collateral damage to marginalised communities. Queer-trans people often become scapegoats in these conflicts. So, given these circumstances, how can we address mental health?

In many parts of northeastern India, particularly in Manipur where I come from, there are cultural vanguards who dictate what is culturally appropriate. We also have armed separatist groups whose mandates extend beyond state and territorial integrity to include the preservation of their culture and community. These powerful entities create norms and rules that jeopardise queer-trans people's mobility and freedom of expression.

In Manipur, many queer-trans people run beauty parlours and salons, and many are active in performance arts. However, the cultural vanguards and armed separatist groups often view such professions and activities as immoral or culturally inappropriate.

Any form of cultural, social, or political expression that doesn't align with conformist beliefs could result in punishment. This creates an arbitrary power that is self-justified and enforced through the threat of violence and often also gun power. They have imposed rules such as banning public gatherings or prohibiting Bollywood songs on loudspeakers. When armed conflict rises, scrutiny, intolerance, and moral policing become more rampant. This has been especially evident in the past year and a half in Manipur.

Queer-trans people often can't gather in public spaces due to these protocols, which is crucial for our sustenance since community support is vital. Many queer-trans individuals in the region live independently, separated from their natal families and other social supports, leading to constant anxiety, unlike cis-het people who have safety nets. 

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Q: How do you navigate such situations to access community support and healing? 

‍Kumam: Honestly, this is something we're still learning because there's no one-size-fits-all formula for us. I’ve worked with several groups and networks in Manipur, and partly in Arunachal Pradesh and Assam, focusing on mental health. It was crucial for me to understand the language, approach, and protocols they use to navigate mental health issues. 

Every district has a mental health program through which the district hospital offers services via psychiatrists and psychologists. However, these services are rarely queer-trans affirmative and can even be unsafe for us to access. This lack of institutional support means that queer-trans mental health in this region is slow to develop. Therefore, we are independently creating community-based mental health interventions and strategies. 

We started WhatsApp support groups for queer folks. Discretion, privacy, and maintaining confidentiality are essential practices in our WhatsApp group. Much of our work happens in closed, discreet, and private circles. Firstly, we prioritise finding safe spaces where we feel secure and can't be easily traced or accessed by unfriendly forces. We also leverage safe spaces within our network and community. If someone needs to disappear temporarily, we mobilise resources, book tickets, and find safe places for them in cities like Delhi or Kolkata. To do all that we need community networks.

These strategies, developed informally, have become integral to our queer-trans mobilisation and community-building efforts. For mental health and psychosocial support, we primarily provide peer support due to the difficulty of accessing professional queer-trans affirmative mental health care. We've assessed and identified reliable psychologists through  mental health organisations, such as MHI, Sangath, and Blue Dawn, which has queer-trans affirmative mental health practitioner lists, inhouse psychologists and also recommendations. 

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Q: The book often positions lived experience as expertise. Shruthi, in larger contexts, do you believe that lived experiences are recognised as valid expertise? For instance, do policymakers, medical professionals, researchers, and other key stakeholders in the mental health community place significant value on lived experiences expertise? 

‍Shruthi: As much as we would like lived experience to be fully integrated, the work remains, which is why this book is so important. It adds to the existing body of lived experience research and underscores its credibility and importance.

At MHI, we have consistently found that mental health initiatives involving people with lived experience in every stage—from strategising and planning to implementation—tend to achieve significant impact across our advocacy, capacity building, grant-making, and innovative collaborations. By involving community members in these roles, these initiatives build trust within the communities they serve.  

Take suicide prevention, for instance. We cannot have a one-size-fits-all approach to mental health and suicide prevention in India, where the stressors and realities of communities are so diverse. Their stories should shape how services are provided and how mental health is discussed.

Often, the solutions are already within the communities themselves. 

For example, one of our partners is an organisation called The Listening Station, based in Nagaland. During the COVID-19 lockdown in 2020, many migrant workers had to return to their home states, including Nagaland. These returning workers faced significant mental health distress due to the loss of income and the challenges of migration. Additionally, upon their return, they encountered stigma and isolation as they were perceived to be at a higher risk of transmitting the virus.

In response, a volunteer group of counsellors from the Nagaland community began providing telephone counselling services to these migrants. This initiative quickly expanded to offer accessible mental health services across the state. All these volunteers formed the organisation, The Listening Station. While many mental health services in urban areas are available only in English or Hindi, The Listening Station makes counselling available in the languages spoken in Nagaland, ensuring both linguistic and cultural accessibility.

These counsellors understand the cultural contexts and lived experiences of the people they serve, which enhances the effectiveness of their support. Lived experience includes not only dealing with specific mental health issues but also navigating the everyday realities and stressors of life within a particular community. This deep understanding allows the counsellors to offer more relevant and empathetic support.

Another organisation we have funded and collaborated with for several years is Ya_All, which operates a helpline and community centre focused on LGBTQIA+ youth and adolescents in Manipur. This youth-led, queer-led organisation provides services to their own communities, bringing an intimate understanding of the intersectional marginalisation faced by queer individuals in the region. Their helpline is staffed by both peer support counsellors and professionals from the region, addressing the unique mental health challenges and root causes of distress faced by the people they serve.

Kumam: Queer feminist trans movements have come a long way in establishing testimony and lived experiences as legit and valid expertise. A lot of literature and research written and published today are informed, shaped or are simply testimonies. In the larger activism, movement, legal and policy formations, testimony are taken into account. But when it comes to mental health, and I can speak better in the context of the region the book dwells on, I think there is very little or no significant attempts at taking lived experiences as valid expertise.

We have only begun to talk about mental health in general and there is still a long road ahead before we see queer trans affirmative medical and mental health professionals in the region. Besides the lack of infrastructure, training, community based engagements, there is very little space where community experts are able to lay down personal stories and testimonies as valid expertise.

The medical and mental health fraternity must consult queer trans folks, experts and leaders so that their approach and services become queer trans affirmative. This hasn't happened yet significantly. 

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Q: The stories contain  nuance and diversity in terms of indigenous identity, queerness and experiences. What central theme stood out to you the most in the book?

‍Kumam- Perhaps it's impossible to pinpoint one recurring theme, but yes, there are a few. In most stories, there is a profound sense of solitude, loneliness, isolation, and a pervasive silence. There's a lack of hope, uncertainty about our direction; all we can do is keep fighting, striving, surviving, yet perhaps there's no certainty.

Most stories that are in this anthology elucidate the difficulty of finding a place to call home. In my experience, I’ve seen many who grow up in Northeast India are raised with a sense of home that is rooted in their physical location - whether state or locality - and their ethnic identity. In Assam and Tripura, questions of who deserves citizenship and who deserves space remain central to notions of identity and home. In Arunachal Pradesh, people are constantly threatened by border incursions and threats of war. In Manipur, people feel anxiety due to Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), militants and state violence. Socio-cultural taboo and religious conservatism can also be traumatic. Transgender women in Meghalaya’s matrilineal homes often find no room for themselves and contain many unheard stories of fear and abandonment in a society that claims to value women’s lives - transgender lives blatantly not included. 

In Mizoram and Nagaland, the influence of the Christian church seeps into everyday life, perpetuating patriarchal and heteronormative roles that often conflict with desires and identities that people want to explore or embody. While Sikkim is a tourist’s dream, it is scarred by nightmares of high rates of depression and suicide that mark the lack of infrastructure for mental health support in the state.

More often than not, young queer and transgender people in many of these states also seek to build new homes in larger cities as an escape. In the book there is a story from Assam which follows the protagonist, Aparajita whose grandparents, Partition refugees from Comilla (now in Bangladesh), settled in Maligaon, Guwahati, where she still resides. The Partition, remembered with unease, left trauma and bloodshed embedded in memories, affecting successive generations. She moved to Guwahati to explore her sexuality and find her people. But she often felt alienated because of her history. She was often told she’s not a “real” Assamese. 

In another story from Mizoram, Ruth left Aizawl’s suffocating streets for Delhi as she thought she could make her own. To her chagrin, she learned that she would never quite be accepted in the city as a ‘chinki’, radical, Northeastern woman - even within the LGBTQ+ community. 

Donna Marwein grew up dreaming of wearing dresses and shiny jewellery in her small village in Meghalaya. She moved to Shillong to escape her judgmental family and village, only to discover that the city offered her little refuge. She had to continually summon resilience in the face of hate and disapproval. In all the stories, this loneliness persists. 

We bring a lot of these experiences out through the wonderful photographers and visual artists who collaborated with us. Their pictures and artworks really reflect the sense of forced solitude that is often found in queer-trans stories from the regions we’ve covered. 

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Q: How would you argue the assertion that sharing the lived experiences of marginalised individuals through storytelling is an effective strategy for advocating for their rights?

‍Shruthi: Mental health is not only intersectional but also intersectoral. 

Lived experience storytelling by marginalised individuals is essential for developing culturally relevant mental health services. At MHI, we include lived experience wisdom across our verticals from grantmaking to training and collaborations. For example, our courses, like the Queer Affirmative Counseling Practice (QACP) and the Suicide Prevention Action (SPAC)  training, regularly feature speakers with lived experience. We also prioritise facilitators from impacted communities. These voices are vital for effective training, services, and advocacy initiatives. 

The potential of storytelling lies in its ability to connect the storyteller with the listener. It empowers marginalised people to reclaim their narratives, fostering a deep relational connection that can erase many traditional barriers to understanding the experiences of marginalised communities. 

One of our recent collaborations has been with an organisation called Payana, based in Bangalore, Karnataka. This organization is led and run by transpersons from marginalized backgrounds and caste locations, many of whom are economically disadvantaged and engage in sex work and other marginalised professions. Payana created the ‘Truth Dream’ exhibition, featuring photography and performance by transgender community members of Payana to highlight trans joy and euphoria, often overlooked in discussions about multiple marginalised transgender communities. They also published a book, "Kannadi," detailing the event's concept and their own experiences. The first iteration took place in various Bangalore venues. The exhibition provided a powerful platform for the community to share their stories, challenging traditional barriers and empowering both storytellers and the audience.

Kumam: We have grown up reading many stories and watching many stories on TV and screens. But how often do we hear stories of our own? How often do we hear a story from Nagaland, for instance? How often do we tell our own stories? There is power in telling your own stories; it helps destabilise the dominant world [order] a little.

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Q: I am  curious about the editing process of a publication that highly centres community knowledge and expertise. How do you ensure that the editing process retains the authenticity of the writing and involves the community in the process?

‍Kumam: Editing is the best part about this book. In the beginning, we formed eight different teams in eight different states in the region. Each team included a photographer or an artist, or a visual artist, a writer, and a translator.

We were intentional about not making the book read like an academic publication, so we kept the language simple and comprehensible for a larger audience. We finished the English version of the stories first, knowing that once they were translated, it would be nearly impossible for all of us to read every story in every language as none of us were proficient in all eight languages. Therefore, we spent a lot of time working on the English version to ensure clarity and coherence.

‍Shruthi: This approach of not having a ‘professional editor’ or an ‘expert’ from outside the community, who might have editorial skills but not lived experience breaks down the traditional notion of who is an expert. In this project, we emphasised that the people who are part of the community are the real experts. Their lived experiences give them the authority to shape their own narratives. This collaborative model ensures that the stories are told authentically and respectfully. 

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Q: One can’t really miss the fact that from each region, a story has been translated into that region's native language. How did you all arrive at the decision to make this book multilingual?

‍Kumam: One of the questions we have been grappling with is how these efforts truly benefit the people out there. By making the book multilingual, we are giving back to the community from where the stories come. Imagine translating each story into the language that originates from their own archives, their own narratives. This could enable these stories to transcend into classrooms, libraries, and other diverse spaces. In doing so, the community would truly possess and own these narratives. This book is the community's work and our offering to the community. It is community-building work and a piece of queer-trans history writing.

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