ON LOVE, QUEERNESS, & RETURN
BY VIGNESH SANKAR:
Right before the pandemic, I stopped going to South India every year. Growing up, those trips had been a constant in my life. My parents moved to the UK in their mid-twenties, leaving behind their families, friends and everything familiar, so returning each year was never really considered a holiday; it was simply part of how we stayed connected.
Choosing not to go was a very personal decision. At the time, I felt like the intersections of my queerness and my Tamizh identity were at odds with one another, and being in India only heightened those feelings. Navigating a conservative Tamizh family when you're queer is no easy feat. Instead of feeling closer to the place, I often found myself feeling further away from it.
Last year, for the first time in six years, I went back.
A lot had changed. India felt different, but so did I. I found myself noticing a new generation of artists, designers and creatives, and seeing conversations happening that I don't remember encountering when I was younger. I realised I'd spent years holding onto an image of India that had quietly frozen in time, while the country itself had kept moving.
I think my relationship with the homeland is still incredibly complicated, though. Recently, I heard someone explain why they were leaving London by saying, "I love London, but I don't know if London loves me back." That sentence has stayed with me ever since.
In many ways, that's exactly how I feel about India.
I love it deeply. I feel connected to it in ways I struggle to explain. In one way or another, who I am today has been shaped by its landscapes, languages and countless cultures. There have been so many moments where I've imagined moving there one day, building a life there, convincing myself that perhaps that's where I'm supposed to be. But at the same time, I don't always know if I'm meant to be loved by it in return.
Maybe that's just part of being diasporic. You're constantly negotiating different versions of home, never fully belonging to one place or another. Rather than trying to resolve that tension, I'm slowly learning to accept it. My relationship with India doesn't have to be simple for it to be meaningful. Sometimes love and uncertainty can exist together, and perhaps that's enough.
For more RECS like this one, check out the rest of vol. 009:
