A queer artist sculpts a new world of hope

livemint.com:

Hazaro Saalon ka Sapna, or A Thousand Years of Dreaming, by Debashish Paul, which is being shown as part of his first solo—with the same title as the film—at Emami Art, Kolkata. The 30-year-old artist has constantly engaged with challenges of queer identity and desire situated within rigid societal diktats. Paul, who hails from Phulia village in West Bengal’s Nadia district, and now lives in Varanasi, has examined this complex subject from a deeply autobiographical lens.

“Though the film was made in May, I have been mulling over these thoughts for a long time. I come from a small village as does my partner, who hails from a gaon in Uttar Pradesh," elaborates Paul. “Both our families don’t understand queerness, and hence we have never been able to disclose our identities or relationship to them.

There is a constant pressure to get married." When the artist moved to Varanasi to pursue a master’s degree at Banaras Hindu University, he had no queer friends, and hence there was not much awareness about other lived queer experiences. During a residency at 1 Shanthi Road Studio, Bengaluru, in 2022, Paul got to know about dating apps and met other people, who identified as queer. “When I came back to Varanasi, I continued to make friends through the apps.

And a lot of them—who hailed from rural areas and had come to the city for education—mentioned the fear of disclosing their identity to family members. Some of them had resigned to the idea of getting married to girls. That, to me, seemed like a huge problem—something that would destroy the lives of the queer men, their partners, and the women they would get married to," he explains.