Ankit Khadgi is a Nepali curator, journalist, and editor based in Chicago. After beginning as an arts and culture journalist with The Kathmandu Post, he moved to Chicago to pursue a master’s degree in visual and critical studies at the School of the Art Institute (SAIC). He soon developed a passion for documenting the history of the South Asian queer community in Chicago. Khadgi’s first curatorial project in the United States, People Who Came Before Us, opened at the South Asia Institute last month.
The Weekly spoke with Khadgi about the importance of understanding one’s history, his experience researching a widely erased community, and his thoughts on South Asian American queer life in Chicago today.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
South Side Weekly:How did you get started thinking about South Asian queer history in Chicago?
Ankit: I started doing research before I moved to Chicago. I did my own research because I was curating queer spaces back home in Nepal. So I was like, I should do similar kinds of things [in Chicago] because that gives joy to me. So I started doing my research and I came across this name, Ifti Nasim. [Editor’s note: Nasim was a gay Pakistani poet who moved to Chicago in the 1960s and later founded Sangat/Chicago, a community for queer South Asian people that was disbanded in the late 2000s.] And then, in the spring of 2023, I was part of the LGBTQ+ Intergenerational Dialogue Project. It was started by professors from the University of Chicago, SAIC, and UIC. These were professors from LGBTQ backgrounds, and they felt the need to create a space where queer people from different generations can come together and form relationships, because they couldn’t see that anywhere. It was part of a credit course for my degree. When I took that course, there were people from different backgrounds, but there was not even a single person of South Asian descent. Which was surprising for me, because there must be older people who are South Asian and gay, right? And they did try their best to actually find people. They’re still looking for South Asians to include in the project, but said that they’ve always struggled. So that stuck with me.
I knew if Ifti Nasim existed, he must have had friends, right? So I started research and I had to write my thesis as well. So I was like, “Why don’t I research this for my thesis?” Then I came across Kareem Khubchandani. He is a professor of performance studies, dance, and theater at Tufts University. He wrote about Sangat in Chicago, and I found a lot of other groups that existed. Through SAADA [the South Asian Association for Digital Archives], I found that Khuli Zaban existed. I started interviewing people. You know, it was like, I interviewed one person, they were like, oh, you should talk to this person. And then I interviewed them and got to meet so many people. They were doing amazing work in the ’80s, ’90s, and early 2000s, but why aren’t people talking about it? So, that’s how the exhibition started.
Mrittika: I’ve found that people can be so generous with their time and connections if you have a personal interest.
Yes, though it was very difficult for them to find time for me to go through the archives. And, you know, and most of them, they did save the archives but they never had intentions of sharing them. It’s very tough to actually donate your stuff from then, because these are highly personal memories. You’ve been keeping them for years and you have this personal attachment to those physical bodies. Finding people who wanted to donate was difficult.
These people are now mostly not activists in the organizing scene, which makes sense because you cannot make a career out of it. So for bread and butter, it’s totally understandable that when you’re so busy, you don’t have time for other stuff. Just finding them took some time, but, yeah, some were really generous. I interviewed people who are not even living in Chicago now. Like, they’ve moved to other states, other cities, but they still shared and they appreciated what I was doing with the project.
And you were already working at SAI [South Asia Institute] the whole time?
Yes, as the communications officer. I pitched my idea and they said yes. Also, Ifti was friends with Shireen and Afzal [Shireen and Afzal Ahmed, the founders of the South Asian Institute]. At first I thought I’d just give everything to Gerber/Hart [library and archives] because they have almost nothing about this. But I was like, okay, even if I do that, people who come across this archive would be people already interested in this research, but the general public will never see it. So I thought, an exhibition makes sense.
The design of this exhibition is so unique. Could you share a bit about your process in coming up with it?
That space has all the elements of white cube gallery, and you can’t do a lot with that, because I mostly had archives that are text-heavy. These are not paintings that I can hang on the wall where one can spend hours and hours looking at it, complimenting its brush strokes or colors. I kept on thinking, what should I do? And the commonality that I could find in all of these organizations was they were creating spaces. And the spaces would look different. Sangat created a space for people to come together to party and more for merry-making, Khuli Zaban [an organization centered around queer women that dissolved in the late 2000s] did more political meetings about intersectional activism and social realities. So I thought, why don’t I create spaces where people can come and sit and then learn about these people? And I wanted people to spend time with these archives because there’s a lot to process, you just can’t glance at it and then leave. So that’s how the exhibition design started.
The first was I imagined the living room of Ifti Nasim. People used to mostly meet in Ifti’s living room, which also acted as a party house, sometimes a hostel for people who lived there for weeks. Another space was a little stage, because they started doing Jai Ho parties or Bollywood drag shows, they did them at Big Chicks in Uptown. The space is very small, but they did so much.
Have you found that in doing this work, you developed thoughts about continuity generationally among the South Asian queer community in Chicago?
Our previous generations were doing a lot. And at a time when being gay and South Asian was very difficult, too. Especially in the ’80s, the AIDS crisis, and then the ’90s, the kind of struggle this country’s queer people were going through. It also comes with a lot of risk, especially if you’re an immigrant. You know, there’s always this issue of a visa. They might deport you. And a lot of people left their homes because they wanted to be gay. Or here, at least in America, they thought that they could escape from their parents. So they carried a lot of risk with them. But yet people, there were people who were doing amazing work. They understood that the struggles of every community are interconnected, and you just can’t talk about your problem, but not talk about racial justice and about misogyny within queer circles. So they were addressing those real issues and the issues that we are still struggling with.
These South Asian organizations like Trikone, Sangat, and Khuli Zaban were not only focused on one kind of activism. They had those difficult conversations. They were not just doing activism on streets, they were also doing activism in living rooms by organizing potlucks or poetry sessions and doing all that stuff. I think we have to learn a lot from them. And I think this project made me realize that there’s so many things that we can learn from them. And we can replicate what they did, what worked for them. [As for] what didn’t work for them, we can try our best not to repeat that.
Where are the archives going after this?
A lot of it was from people’s personal collections. If someone wants to donate, I’ll send their archive to the Gerber/Hart Library. I want them to start a South Asian archive. I don’t want this to be mixed with Asian American archives.
Can you say more about why you think they need a separate archive?
Yeah, sure. Because “Asian American,” I mean, the population is huge. That doesn’t mean we’re not Asians. We are Asians. We’re very Asian. “Asian American” is a very diasporic identity, and I think South Asian is a distinct identity. In Nepal, I was never a “South Asian,” I was Nepali. We never identified that way. But here, we all have to be grouped together because of various reasons, very political, social reasons.
But these people were also specifically working for South Asian people. I mean, they were doing a lot of other stuff, but their target and community was always South Asian people. I think it’s high time for libraries and archives to have their own South Asian sections. Another reason that I’m worried is that if this is included within broad Asian American archives, this archive will get lost.
Some of the conversations that were happening about balancing our identities in personal relationships, being in the diaspora, negotiating South Asian gender norms, are sort of the same ones that many are having today in queer communities decades later. Did you find that their archives resonated with your experience in Chicago?
I think what we need to understand is we come from a culture, especially South Asian people, where we’ve always worshiped our ancestors. I don’t know how it is in other countries, but especially Nepal, we’ve always worshiped our ancestors and considered them as gods and goddesses and acknowledged what they have done for us. So I think the current generation of young queer folks also need to understand that. Whatever rights, whatever forms of liberation that we have achieved, it’s because of them. The government just didn’t start giving us rights. I hope with this project, people will think about their own ancestors and try to find, dig [for] their own history. Hopefully we’ll be able to tell their stories or archive their stories more. I think there’s a reason why people want to ban books, which is happening here in this country. They are specifically targeting queer books because these are histories. And if you erase history, you’ll always struggle to understand your own identity.
So yeah, I hope someone gets inspiration to do something like this in their own communities and in their own spaces.
Mrittika Ghosh (she/her) is a reader, writer, and arts journalist living in Chicago.