3rd December 2024, New Delhi: The Rainbow Lit Fest – Queer and Inclusive returns this December 7 & 8 to Delhi’s Gulmohar Park Club with a line of speakers and performers hailing from Imphal in the Indian northeastern state of Manipur to Vancouver in Canada.
The two-day event features 44 sessions across dual stages, delivering over 27 hours of discussions, performances, and cultural programmes. This year, the festival will delve into themes like identity, gender, sexuality, feminism, desire, equality, cinema, mental health, public policy, power constructs and law, among others. A key highlight is a session exploring the unique perspectives of queer parents—the first of its kind in the subcontinent—offering a transformative lens on parenting. At the same time, the audience will get a chance to interact with parents who have lovingly accepted their children.
As part of the Festival’s series – Spotlight On History – there will be discussions with people who lived in a pre-Section 377 era, without any digital world. The series will also see a conversation between Justice S Murlidhar, Anjali Gopalan of Naz Foundation and Eric Chopra of Itihasology on the journey towards the scripting of the 2009 Delhi High Court order that first decriminalized homosexuality.
The festival opens with a Spotlight Talk titled The Quiet Rebellion with the celebrated filmmaker Hansal Mehta, known for acclaimed works like Aligarh, Shahid, Scoop and The Buckingham Murders,On Day Two, T M Krishna will speak about The Power Hierarchies.
In its long line up, the Festival has the gay lawyer and author, Saurabh Kirpal; the first transgender woman to have played a lead role in a Hindi feature film (LSD 2), Bonita Rajpurohit; the award-winning filmmaker, Faraz Ansari; the popular gay couple known for their podcasts, Yogi & Kabeer; the founder of Sappho For Equality, Minakshi Sanyal; the national spokesperson for the NCP (Sharad Pawar) and gay man, Anish Gawande; the Queer Feminist and the founder of The Kinky Project, Jaya Sharma; the hotelier, Kesahv Suri and the flmmaker, writer and founder of Agents of Ishq, Paromita Vohra
The Festival will also showcase the Queer Caravan which is is a collaborative residency program led by the Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan, the French Institute in India, and The Queer Muslim Project, with support from the German-French Cultural Fund. This initiative brings together queer storytellers and artists from France, Germany, and India to amplify underrepresented LGBTQIA+ voices and foster cross-cultural dialogue.
Seven films will also be screened during the festival, including “Holy Curse,” which recently qualified for Oscar 2026, and “Sheer Qorma,” featuring Shabana Azmi, Divya Dutta, and Swara Bhasker. The directors of both these films, Snigdha Kapoor and Faraz Ansari, respectively, will be present at the Festival. The cultural program includes performances by drag artist, Krystal Koko, expressionist dancer Patruni Chidananda Sastry, trans-man musician and activist, Sarvagya, the critically acclaimed multi-nation band, Bollyjazz, the gay stand-up, Navin Noronha; the music duo of Sagar & Srijan and the specially created dance troupe, Footloose, led by its transwoman lawyer, Raghavi.
The Festival has a dedicated space of 12 stalls run by queer people coming from the north eastern part of India to the north, providing these entrepreneurs a space to showcase their enterprise and hopefully create a market for themselves.
Festival Director and Founder, Sharif D Rangnekar, reflects on the festival’s evolution: “While we certainly struggle for funds to keep the Festival alive, it is the desire of so many to have a safe space to speak on issues that are rarely spoken about or heard, that keeps us going. It is those sheer numbers that have grown from when we started out or even last year, that is indicative of our growth and the want to have such a Festival. What it does is create a good problem where our audience would have to make a choice between the programming happening parallely on two stages!”
The Festival will also host the Rainbow Awards for Literature & Journalism, 2024. After close to 100 submissions, an eight-member jury decided on a shortlist and the winners. There are four competitive categories of Fiction, Non-Fiction, Op-Ed, and Features. A Lifetime Achievement Award will also be announced on that day. The Awards are supported by the queer-friendly Kunzum chain of bookstores. They are also the bookstore partner for the Festival.
The festival enjoys support from key organizations including the Keshav Suri Foundation, LGBTQ Centre Delhi, Naz Foundation, Nazariya – QFRG, Official Humans of Queer, The Pink List, The Q-knit, Queering in Chandigarh, Sweekar – The Rainbow Parents, and Yes We Exist.
Here is a link to buy tickets to the festival. The festival schedule is available here
