Neighbors Vol. 6: Queer Methodologies and Architectural Histories by Sonal Mithal / TPOD, THEMA, HITAM

The talk offers methods of using queer strategies to read the colonial archival and write erased, overlooked, and suppressed histories. The talk centers on the book, A Queer Reading of Nawabi Architecture and the Colonial Archives: Lucknow Queerscapes. Following nawab Asaf-ud-daula and nawab Wajid Ali Shah, the book provides a queer architectural history of Lucknow bookending the nawabi phase which lasted a mere eighty years. Asaf and Wajid were both subjected to colonial ridicule—one on the pretext of his homosexuality and the other on the pretext of being effeminate in mannerisms. To situate this ridicule, the book brings out words of disdain in the colonial archive that describe Lucknow architecture commissioned by the two nawabs. Reclaiming those words, it reveals the capacity of nawabi architecture to contest, discomfort, and disadvantage the colonial gaze. Nawabi architecture is presented as a form of drag embodied theatrically in the overlaps of the personal and the political ishq. Drawing upon embodied experience of the nawabs, nawabi architecture is redescribed using disorientation, position, proximity, direction, alignment, and non-alignment that disoriented the British visitor and recentered the agency and power of the nawabi state through its socio-sexual overlaps.