The popular imagination of big cities is often shaped by dominant caste narratives. Writing that talks about the shame that caste-marginalised people often carry disrupts these narratives.  This is precisely what the recently published zine, Across the Nala—A Queer Dalit Bahujan Zine of Stories from Delhi, sets out to do. 

The zine invites readers into the lives of ten Dalit-Bahujan queer individuals, who share deeply personal stories of the city—its messy makings, unmakings, and everything in between. 

The zine is an attempt at remapping Delhi through the twin lenses of caste and queerness. “If you look at the map of Delhi, it doesn’t label the river Sahibi—a tributary of the Yamuna—as a nala. But we know it essentially is one,” said Dhiren Borisa, Dalit-queer activist and Associate Professor at O.P. Jindal Global University. “It carries untreated sewage and runs through overcrowded neighbourhoods. This nala is associated with messiness. It’s associated with poor people, class-marked, caste-marked communities, tribes who are denotified, criminalised, still living in the shadows of the law.” Dhiren is also the principal instigator behind the zine. 

While some stories in the zine delve into the literal experience of living “across the nala,” others use it as a slow, unfolding metaphor—revealing what it means to carry the history of untouchability, and the humanity denied not only by people but also by the very cities they build.  The nala becomes more than a physical entity, it becomes a moving embodiment. "We carry the nala wherever we go, even the poshest neighborhood in Delhi,” the zine says. 

The desire to access queerness with respectability in cities like Delhi requires caste-oppressed people to withhold truths about themselves—about where they come from and how they’ve come to be. This constant withholding sometimes causes shame to seep in, quietly and mysteriously. 

Shame and desire, then, don’t exist as trivial attributes for us. They construct so much of our doing: shaping how we present ourselves to the world, the dreams we dare to share (and those we don't), the food we eat, the English we speak, the queer events we attend, and the ways we dress. 

Often, in spaces that don’t feel so welcoming, we hold our anxieties under our skin as though we are hiding deep truths of our unbelonging. 

How much do we say through what we don't? 

In 2015, three dalit-queer people, Dhiren, Akhil Kang, a doctoral researcher at Cornell University, and Dhrubo Jyoti, a journalist and collaborator on this zine, went to the Delhi Pride Walk. Together, they proclaimed the first-ever Dalit-Queer Manifesto from the stage.

Nearly a decade later, Dhiren, now 38, recalled that November day vividly. “I still remember how scared I was to get up on the stage,” he told me. “When we went to the stage, whatever we had achieved was the result of a long fight. But what we also felt at that moment was that these aren’t the only stories of Dalit-queer people. There are so many different ways in which caste and queerness come together for all of us—it creates messy geographies, and messy lives. And those stories need to populate every narrative, not just five minutes on a Pride stage.” For Dhiren, the zine is also an honest attempt to tell those stories. 

While each story featured in the zine is rooted in individuality and the heterogeneity that queerness is—caste and queerness flow quietly through them all, drawing out a shared sentiment: vulnerability. Language can do very little justice to what these experiences attempt to express. 

“You feel vulnerable when you are alone. You don’t feel that kind of vulnerability in a collective—whether it’s in a movement, or a collection like this zine,” said Aishwarya, a Bahujan queer writer and journalist, whose story, Cactus, is part of the zine. Although she now lives in her hometown of Bhagalpur in Bihar, Aishwarya spent many years in Delhi’s Vijay Nagar—across the nala. For her, the storytelling workshop held in December 2024—where the zine was born—became a sanctuary, a space where memories got shaped into stories.

The workshop and the zine were supported by the Urban Studies Foundation, a Scottish charity, through its Knowledge Mobilisation Award, in collaboration with Dhrubo Jyoti, Prateek Draik, a Dalit, non-binary architect, artist, and urban designer, and Project Mukti, which works with Dalit, Bahujan, Adivasi women and children to bring positive and sustainable change in their lives. 

In a city where there are so few spaces for Dalit-Bahujan queer people to find one another—let alone spaces where their stories can be heard—this workshop accomplished something far more meaningful than just zine-making. Everyone I interviewed for this article told me that it created a space of belonging.

This achievement was not coincidental. It was a direct outcome of how the workshop was designed, drawing from the lived experiences of the facilitators. “We took a map of Delhi,” Dhrubo said, “and asked each person to tell us about a place of comfort or safety—however they interpreted those words—and a place of aspiration or ambition—a place they wanted to be. The reason we chose these two is because for so many of us, especially those who aren’t from here but came because of work or other needs—like myself—we often oscillate between these two spaces.”

For us—caste-oppressed queer folks—queerness is so much about navigating the messiness of this in-between, the never-ending oscillation between our realities and our aspirations.

For 24-year-old Khushwant, a Dalit-queer person who recently completed a masters in Geography from the Delhi School of Economics, queerness and caste are inseparable from geography. In his story, City Limits, he reflects on what it means to come from a village in Delhi when popular narratives often equate the city only with its urban core. 

“When we talk about Delhi, it’s always about the urban space. It’s about how queer people are interacting in that space,” he told me over a call. To reach his village, he travels to the last metro station on the Grey Line—Dhansa—and then takes a 30-minute bus ride. His village is home to three main caste groups: Jaat, Chuhra-Valmiki, and Chamar.  The latter two are Dalit castes. 

Khushwant, who is a Chamar, writes about how caste manifests in the village not just structurally, but in moments of casual inhumanity. He hopes that his family—especially his younger cousins, nieces, and nephews—will read his story. Though it is written in English, he plans to translate it for them. “I’m the only one in my family who reads and writes in English,” he said, “but this story is for them.”

Reading the personal narratives of these young Dalit-Bahujan queer writers feels refreshing because they are rendered in simple, unpretentious English. “Why must we clean our language—make it swachh—just to be palatable to you? We wanted to keep it honest, as it flowed from the workshop, without doing the kind of violence that grammar Nazis—and even many well-intentioned queer spaces—so often do,” Dhiren said, explaining how keeping the language honest was a deliberate and perhaps also a political choice. 

Inked in Ambedkarite blue and bubblegum pink, and interspersed with generous stretches of white, the zine is a visually delicious experience. Rishabh Arora’ engaging illustrations often end up saying as much as the words do.

All of these careful, intentional choices come together to make a zine that is light, yet layered. It invites the reader not just to consume what's said, but to take back all that remains unspoken, about our imaginations and disillusionments about the cities we inhabit.

Queerness may not mean a nightclub, but might mean a Nala

“When you think of queerness in Delhi,” said Dhrubo, “you think of Jamali Kamali. You think of Queer Pride. You think of Qutub Minar, or people lounging in Lodhi Garden. But it was the honesty—and the sheer brilliance—of the participants in this zine that made us look elsewhere. They made us see that this tributary of the Yamuna, the Sahibi, can also be reimagined as a note of queerness in the city.”

Dhrubo explains how Delhi can be inhospitable, vile, even cruel—but also, unexpectedly, caring. In this constant dichotomy, we long for places that feel safe and comforting. For some, that’s family or friends. For others, it’s a bar, a spa, or a public park. But the common thread is that we seek spaces where we can be seen, be loved, be successful, feel popular, or simply be, said Dhrubo. 

The creation of this zine is an attempt to create such a space. This act of knowledge-making is also an act of archiving memory—one that challenges dominant histories and reclaims what counts as evidence.

“The larger queer community only occasionally—and conditionally—allows our voices to be heard, in the name of broader queer solidarity,” said Dhiren. “This zine is trying to rupture that: to question how knowledge is produced, and who decides what counts as knowledge or merit. It becomes a conversation, a dialogue against dominant lenses—thinking through the nala, being the nala, carrying the nala with us wherever we go, even in how we speak.”

For Aishwarya, this rupture is both personal and political—a reckoning with the harm Brahminism inflicts on our bodies and minds. In her story in the zine, she writes about how people like her are rendered invisible in the city—“like cactuses.” And unlike the Amaltas, “the trees standing in Delhi aesthetic reels as pretty ones.”

In her story, Aishwarya also invokes the imagination of Begumpura—the casteless, classless city envisioned by Bhakti saint Ravidas. “When we build community with people from different knowledge systems and lived experiences, what binds us is not sameness, but a shared critique of the Brahminical order,” she said. “When I speak of Begumpura, I’m referring to all those symbolic anti-dominant traditions and radical imaginations where discrimination—whether by caste, class, or gender—ceases to exist.” 

It is hard to say if Delhi will ever become Begumpura, especially when it’s so desperately trying to become the next London, Shanghai—more glamorous, more developed, more surveilled. But this zine feels like a calming reminder that no matter what the city becomes, nothing can erase Dalit-Bahujan queer existence. It is a reassuring declaration that we have always been here—desiring, dreaming, and daring to belong.