Mira Brunner is an artist, archivist and writer, who works at the Queer Archive for Memory, Activism and Reflection. QAMRA is one of India’s only dedicated LGBTQ+ archives. Located on the campus of the National Law School of India University in Bengaluru, the archive houses video footage, oral history, and other records that mark important milestones in queer Indian history. This includes case proceedings from the landmark 2018 Supreme Court judgement that decriminalised same-sex relationships.
Mira is conducting an archiving workshop - 'Form and Function: Creative Approaches to Archiving' on July 19th and 20th, 2025 at G5A, Mumbai. To sign up please register here.
Edited excerpts from a conversation with Mira Brunner for Pride Month.
Based on your experience, what’s a good starting point for archives to be more accessible to researchers working on queer narratives? In our collection, we have [openly gay] artists like Bhupen Khakar but the paintings themselves don’t represent queer themes. In that case, how do we go about ‘queering the archive’?
“There are a few questions to ask before beginning to answer this, namely: What are you hoping to achieve and why is it important for you to queer the archives? What outcomes do you hope for when envisioning a queered archive? Why is access important to you?
“In my opinion, the best way to attempt queering the archive would be to ensure that there are queer people on staff (doing all kinds of jobs, from support staff to upper management) and that the environment is conducive to having those queer people be able to contribute intellectually at every step of the process, from archiving to acquisitions. If this is enacted, you will probably end up with more queer themes in your material and a greater sensitivity to queerness generally.
“To the second question, I would urge you to broaden your mind to the material you acquire and the material you already have. Let's say you have some material from an artist who deals with queer themes but you don't see that work as necessarily being about queerness. That sets up an opposition between queer material and non-queer material in which an artwork or archival object explicitly has to somehow be queer in order to be read as such. I think a broader interpretation of what could be relevant to queerness would behoove you.”
How would you recommend organisations or archives reach out to the community?
“It is important to look at access quite broadly. Queer people can be from anywhere and every walk of life. Therefore, by working towards making your archive accessible to a wider public, you also ensure more queer people have access. Some examples of how to do this could be: making metadata and other texts available in as many languages as possible in your catalog and on your website. If your archive is physical, you could make a website. If you are an online archive, you could think about how to become accessible to people with no or slow internet. Physical and digital archives should consider the accessibility needs of disabled people.
“I take issue with the use of the phrase “the community”. It is very widely used; we also use it at QAMRA sometimes. It's a euphemism used to avoid saying “LGBTQ+ people”, or “queer people”, or “gay people”, or “trans people”, which there is nothing wrong with saying. I think it can be a misleading phrase because there’s not really one queer community. LGBTQ+ people are not a monolith, and are as divided by class or caste or race or gender as anybody else.
“Being a little more specific in who you're trying to reach out to would help you to create connections more concretely. We at QAMRA are currently trying to continue to build and maintain relationships with members of the larger Bangalore LGBTQ community who are represented in our archives. This process requires long-term commitment and work. We need to build it into the budget!
“Another thing worth mentioning about QAMRA is how we think about balancing accessibility and privacy. Because of the sensitive nature of our material, there are a lot of privacy concerns we could run into. Putting all our material online is therefore not an option. When thinking about archives of the queer people and communities, there are some heightened privacy needs to consider.
“A great way to reach out to LGBTQ+ communities is to see that queer people are well represented in the end users of your organisation. Making clear to users of your archive that homophobia, queerphobia, transphobia is not tolerated and finding ways of enacting that helps to build lasting relationships.
“I see that Sarmaya hosts talks. Inviting people working on queer themes to speak throughout the year, not just during Pride Month, could be a good way to build relationships with individuals who then might connect you to their networks. I also think acquisitions is a really great place to build relationships; there are many queer artists who seek to be represented in and platformed by collections.”
According to you, which are some queer archives doing great work in India?
“This is by no means an exhaustive list, just the archives I know of. [Besides QAMRA] another queer archive in India is Queer Ink. As far as I know, they focus more on collecting histories in the present. It is wonderful to be building up a picture of queer life in India with them. Then there's the Counsel Club archives, which are available digitally. The Counsel Club is a queer support group founded in the 1990s in Kolkata, one of the earliest such groups in the country. Pawan Dhall, who also works with QAMRA, is their archivist (among many other things) and has been involved with them since the beginning. They published a periodical called Pravartak (later changed to Naya Pravartak), and have now put scanned versions of those publications online. Reading them gives an insight into queer life at that time.
“I love being a part of a group of people interested in preserving our queer histories. The struggles faced by small queer archives are manifold. Finding institutional backing can be difficult. QAMRA is fortunate to be housed at the National Law School of India University here in Bangalore. What I really love about all the efforts I have mentioned is that they're archiving things that can sometimes be a bit overlooked—zines, everyday photography, oral histories—and asserting their importance to history. This is much like our broader aim of making overlooked queer histories legible.”
