My first week at Sangama, a gender and sexual minorities NGO in India, highlighted the importance of language as a tool for building community and as evidence of evolving norms.
I began by meeting with my supervisor and the executive director of Sangama to understand the history of the organization and issues that they currently need the most help with. Sangama prides itself on being a working class, Kannada speaking NGO that focuses on the wellbeing of gender and sexual minorities. Because they don’t believe that this can be achieved without also working towards the wellbeing of scheduled castes and religious minorities, they ground their work in intersectionality and coalition building.
As part of my orientation, I attended my first community advocacy meeting. This meeting, held on a Friday evening, took place in the Sangama “drop in center”, a small basement office in Malleshwaram. The back wall has a colorful mural of women in sarees playing and riding bikes, with the majority of the space being an open area for gatherings. Stacks of bright blue plastic chairs line the wall, with around twenty set up in a large circle for the meeting today. Aligned with the organization’s values, this meeting also brought together a diverse coalition of community members. Around the circle sat individuals who identify as transgender, cishet allies, legal experts, sex workers, filmmakers, the children of migrant workers, and part of dominant and scheduled castes.
We started by passing around plates of parle-g biscuits and small cups of chai before a round of introductions. The facilitator asked us to introduce ourselves with our gender and sexuality, which surprised me at first as the norm in spaces I’m more familiar with are usually just to share pronouns. Some of the older community members opened with a seemingly well-rehearsed script of their sex, gender identity, and sexuality. “Sex male. Gender identity man. Sexuality homosexual.” Afterwards, the facilitator noted that it was interesting how even though he had just asked for our gender and sexuality, people shared their sex as well. The older community members shared that a decade ago, they had been taught by NGOs to always present themselves with these three pieces of information, in this order. It was interesting to listen to their discourse around how the norms about identity-language has changed in LGBTQ NGOs over time. I also found it interesting that these were some of the only words that often remained in English. Although some of the older community members used the Kannada words for these identity labels, many of us, especially the younger members, used English.
One of their icebreakers asked if individuals identify as activists, which also led to many interesting stories about experiences with caste, religion, and student activism. Though I speak Kannada fluently, my family will often slip in words in English instead of using the proper Kannada vocabulary. Yet, one of Sangama’s central tenets is to be a Kannada speaking group to remain accessible to working class people, and as a result, I ended up not knowing around 30% of the words that were used and learned a lot of new vocabulary (like the word for activist!). As the facilitator emphasized the importance of speaking in Kannada throughout the meeting, I wondered if this linguistic policy not only helped make the community accessible, but also served as a reminder of our shared identity as Kannadigas across our diverging identities and experiences.
This week, I also set my initial goals for my LiA with my supervisor and the executive director. I’m excited to see how they will evolve over the course of my time here.
- Support efforts to reinstate defunded health services at Sangama through the creation of an impact report using clinic data and stakeholder interviews.
- Create a mobile health van program proposal including a literature review of previous interventions, a GIS visualization mapping target communities across Karnataka, a cost breakdown, and a needs assessment using past clinic data and stakeholder interviews.