Editors of a new anthology on friendship by women and queer folk explore the nuances and complexities underlying platonic bonds
Shilpa Phadke began as Nithila Kanagasabai’s supervisor for her MA dissertation, before they hit it off as friends. Pic/Pradeep Dhivar
Before they became friends, Shilpa Phadke and Nithila Kanagasabai shared a “working relationship”. The two met over a decade ago, “sitting across a desk in an academic office, where one of us was the interviewer and prospective teacher and the other the interviewee and potential student”.
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Phadke, dean of School of Media and Cultural Studies at TISS, who co-authored the critically-acclaimed and revelatory non-fiction, Why Loiter? Women and Risk on Mumbai Streets, was Kanagasabai’s supervisor for her Master’s dissertation. But the relationship evolved quickly, from talking about the MA dissertation “to my chasing her after she was done to publish [the dissertation], as she increasingly avoided me for that very reason, to being colleagues and friends,” shares Phadke, over an email interview. The duo first started collaborating on a research paper on feminist community media in 2019. “…friendship emerged as a major theme when we were looking at feminists indulging in activism online,” says Kanagasabai, currently assistant professor at TISS. “In many ways, pedagogic spaces are the kind of spaces where one has time. Time to chat. Time to just be. Time to drink endless cups of tea,” adds Phadke.
In the pandemic, confined to their homes, they continued their conversations, but on the phone. “She [Shilpa] checked in on me every single day and sent me home-cooked food when I was down with COVID,” recalls Kanagasabai.
On one such night, while the two friends were talking over a phone call that had already lasted a couple of hours, they had a “lightbulb moment”. “We were already thinking about friendship because of the paper we had done earlier, but also because the pandemic pushed us to think about these relationships in a whole new way,” shares Kanagasabai. The two spoke about how much they were depending on their friends to navigate the pandemic. “It made me pause and recalibrate my priorities in life. I think I became much more intentional about staying in touch with friends during and after the pandemic,” she adds.
One thing they were sure of—they wanted to share stories of friendship, which were usually not told. “Male friendships have taken centre-stage in popular culture, especially our films. We wanted to focus on women and genderqueer folk, because they are often left out of mainstream anthologies. These friendships have the potential to be subversive in a heteronormative patriarchal caste society that often tends to privilege family and kinship relationships.”
Their over year-long effort has yielded a one-of-its-kind book, Yaari: An Anthology on Friendship by Women and Queer Folx (Yoda Press), which brings together 95 disparate voices from across South Asia, who have contributed a mix of essays, poems, and artwork. The duo received over 250 contributions, before they started sieving, sorting and whittling the list down to less than a half. “To be honest, it was a bit of a mad task,” says Phadke, “But, as we read through the work, the themes began to suggest themselves. We wanted the themes to convey that friendship is as complicated and layered as any other relationship and that it bears all the nuances that romantic and familial relationships do.” Kanagasabai agrees. “We were not keen to simplistically celebrate friendship but acknowledge the fact that like most other relationships, this one too is fraught. We wanted the anthology to explore the fault lines and fractures that affect friendships.”
Phadke, for instance, has looked at how women and men connect with each other, and how “scripts of heteronormativity” sometimes prevent us from seeing such relationships as anything but romantic. She explains, “The demand is that we name not just our gender, but also our relationships. The anxiety with leaving things open ended is something that surrounds us. My essay speaks at one level to the joys of the particular relationships I speak of, and at another, to both the privileging of romance over friendship.” While there is a tendency to box relationships as either platonically friendly or romantic, the reality, she says, is far
more complicated.
An important aspect they explore is how the virtual world and technology have changed the nature of friendships. “There is the fear that people are becoming friends with their digital devices rather than them simply being the means of communication. There is also the claim that social media promotes an ideal of friendship that is glossy and fun, but never subversive,” says Kanagasabai. But simultaneously, she feels, online spaces have allowed us to connect with people we might never have connected with otherwise. “It has offered us different spaces of belonging, and spaces of belonging differently. It also demonstrates that fun is deeply political and can be subversive. I don’t know if technology has fundamentally altered how we see friendships, but it is pushing us to ask more/better questions and expand our visions of what constitutes a friendship,” she says.
Phadke points to scholar Wendy Chun, who says that social media, for instance, blurs the boundaries between different groups of people in our lives by flattening all relationships into “friends”. “[But] technology also enables some friendships that are otherwise nearly impossible. This anthology has many contributors from Pakistan. It is technology that allows these conversations and creates possibilities for collaboration across our disturbed borders,” she says.
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