The willingness of the group members to articulate complexity — that drove me all throughout. They were willing to work on their narratives. They were willing to learn how to write a narrative. They were willing to learn about social movements, history, about legal rights. The openness with which they have written the narratives — these are difficult experiences and I think that drove me all throughout. Seeing the first draft, hearing from, even I was one of the mentors, and hearing from my mentees the kind of narratives they want to write, was, it gave me hope. It gave me strength that we are doing something meaningful. Bhanu Priya Gupta, Creator 2023
Bhanu Priya – She is a non-binary Bahujan queer feminist, and a person with psychosocial disabilities and chronic pain. She has also been a writer for In Plainspeak, Mad in Asia, Velivada, Criminal No More, and Gaysi Family. She has completed her M.Phil. in Women’s and Gender Studies from Ambedkar University, Delhi. Her areas of research and advocacy are gender, caste, disability, and sexuality. She was a PhD candidate in Disability Studies in the US and had to leave the PhD program because of lack of mental health support in the university.
Bhanu is the founder of the Crossroads Collective, which is solely for and by Dalit-Bahujan-Adivasi people with disabilities, chronic conditions and caregivers, and queer-trans persons within these communities. In her role, Bhanu engages in movement-building at the intersections of gender, disability, caste, and sexuality.
Exploring story-telling at the intersections of sexuality, disability, and caste, Bhanu published an anthology of personal narratives that tell the varied experiences of Dalit-Bahujan-Adivasi individuals living with disabilities and chronic illnesses. These first-hand stories are based off of a network established by Bhanu called the Crossroads Collective that is maintained by and for Dalit-Bahujan people with disabilities.
Bhanu led a series of training, workshops, narrative writing sessions, and groundbreaking discussions around caste, disability, and queer spaces with the Collective to elicit and understand the range of experiences. These collective efforts enabled open discussion, with art and writing facilitating the sharing of difficult experiences and emotions. It is with recognition that there remains too little conversation around the themes of disability, sexuality, and caste.
I believe that this anthology can serve as an example of how to write intersectional experiences. At the cusp of these narratives lies a way to articulate the self as a being standing at crossroads with multiple identities. Bhanu Priya Gupta, Creator 2023
Bhanu and her collective are also open for collaborations and/or requests to host this resource in alternative spaces.
pdf (English) word (english)