Almost two-and-a-half decades went by without probing, prizing, queering and loving the self and the family until I came upon ancient Kannada feminist literature a couple of months ago. The sketches of me, my mother, my aunt and my grandmother are juxtaposed with hand-picked vacanas (oral poetry) of 12th-century saint-poet Akka Mahadevi. The vacanas have been picked from Vinaya Chaitanya’s translation work ‘Songs for Siva’.

Geetanjali is an independent journalist and social researcher with prior experience in reporting and writing on culture, governance, environment, and gender in urban India. You can find her published articles here and here. She has recently graduated with a Master’s degree in Peace and Conflict Studies from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Guwahati, and written a thesis on ‘Choice, Agency and Resistance: Lives of Sex Workers in Pune’s Budhwar Peth’.