Nova: Welcome to the podcast. I'm Nova, and today we are diving into a book that takes the very idea of gender, cracks it open, and asks us to look inside. But we have to start with a correction. A lot of people searching for a book called Queer India by Alka Pande might be surprised to learn that title does not actually exist. What does exist, and what we are really talking about today, is something perhaps even more fascinating: a book called Ardhanarishvara the Androgyne: Probing the Gender Within, published in 2004 by the renowned Indian art historian Dr. Alka Pande.

Nova: : And I have to admit, Nova, I was one of those confused searchers. I kept seeing references to Alka Pande and queer India and thought, okay, where is this book? But the more I dug in, the more I realized her actual book is way more intriguing than the imaginary one. It is not just about being queer in India. It is about how Indian art, mythology, and culture have always had space for gender fluidity. Thousands of years of it.

Nova: Exactly. So here is the big question we are going to explore: what if the most radical ideas about gender and sexuality today are not new at all? What if they have been hiding in plain sight on ancient temple walls, in classical music, in Sanskrit poetry, and in the lived experience of communities like the hijras for centuries? That is what Alka Pande's work forces us to reckon with. And in a country where homosexuality was criminalized under British colonial law until 2018, her book, published way back in 2004, was genuinely ahead of its time.

Nova: : And she was not just some academic dabbling in gender theory. She is a heavyweight. A double MA in art history, a PhD, a postdoctoral fellow at Goldsmiths in London. A recipient of the French government's Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters, twice over. She curated exhibitions at the Pinacotheque in Paris. She has written over twenty books. And her major fields of interest, right there on her website, are gender identity and sexuality. So this is not a side hustle. This is her life's work.

Nova: So today we are going to explore Alka Pande's Ardhanarishvara the Androgyne — what it argues, why it matters, and how it connects ancient Indian wisdom to the most urgent conversations about queer identity today. Let us get into it.

Nova: So let us start with the woman herself. Alka Pande was born in 1956, trained as an art historian, taught Indian arts and aesthetics at Panjab University for over a decade. And here is something I found really striking. She has described her intellectual awakening almost like a crisis. When she went to Goldsmiths in London for her postdoc in the year 2000, she said she felt, and I quote, completely lost. She even lost her voice metaphorically, because she was suddenly immersed in Western critical theory, Deleuze and Guattari, semiotics, all of it. She felt illiterate.

Nova: : Wait, that is fascinating. So she went to one of the most avant-garde art schools in the world and felt silenced? Not empowered?

Nova: That is the irony. She said within three months she found her voice again, but the experience fundamentally shifted her. She came back to India and realized she had been looking at Indian art through a Western lens her entire career. She went to convent school, studied Shakespeare and Keats, not Kalidasa. And she decided, consciously, to turn her gaze inward. To study Indian aesthetics on their own terms. And that decision directly leads to Ardhanarishvara the Androgyne.

Nova: : So the book comes out of this homecoming, in a way. Not just a physical return to India, but an intellectual return to Indian ways of seeing.

Nova: Precisely. And think about what that means for queer studies. Western queer theory was exploding in the 1990s — Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, all of that. And here is Pande saying, wait, we have our own framework for thinking about gender beyond the binary, and it is thousands of years old. The Ardhanarishvara, the half-male, half-female form of Shiva and Parvati united in a single body, is not some niche footnote in Hindu mythology. It is a major deity with temples dedicated to it. There is even a famous one in Tiruchengode, Tamil Nadu.

Nova: : So she is not just translating Western queer theory into an Indian context. She is saying the Indian context already has its own deeply sophisticated understanding of gender fluidity. And she is going to use art history to prove it.

Nova: That is exactly right. And she was not shy about her ambition. Her publisher was Rupa and Company, a major Indian press. The book came out in a hardcover edition with lavish photographs. This was meant to be seen, to be displayed. It was a statement.

Nova: So what is actually inside this book? The subtitle tells you a lot: Probing the Gender Within. Pande traces the concept of the androgyne — the union of male and female in one being — across centuries of Indian art, from ancient temple sculpture to medieval miniature painting, from classical dance to Bollywood cinema. She looks at transvestism, transsexualism, homosexuality, and the hijra community, all through the lens of visual culture.

Nova: : So it is not just a book about a statue. It is using that statue as a key to unlock a whole world.

Nova: Exactly. The Goodreads reviews are really revealing. One reviewer said the photographs alone merit five stars. Dozens of images of Ardhanarishvara statues from different regions, medieval paintings, photos of dancers and hijras, cinema posters. And the reviewer said, by the time I was halfway through, I could recognize the symbolism of ancient Ardhanarishvara statues without needing to read the text. That is powerful. The book teaches you a visual language.

Nova: : But I also read some criticisms. Some readers found the academic language quite dense, even impenetrable at times. One reviewer said they had to re-read entire paragraphs multiple times and still were not sure what Pande meant.

Nova: That is a fair criticism. The book can veer into highly erudite, thesis-level prose. Pande was an academic, and it shows. But here is the thing. She covers so much ground. She discusses how the androgyne appears in Hindustani classical music. She writes about the Devanagari script itself as having an androgynous quality. She talks about tantra and yoga. She interviews and photographs members of the hijra community with genuine sympathy and respect. And this was in 2004, remember. This was years before the NALSA judgment that legally recognized the third gender in India.

Nova: : Let us talk about the hijras for a moment, because this is a huge part of the book. For listeners who might not know, hijras are a traditional third-gender community in South Asia that has existed for centuries. They have a recognized place in Indian society, but also face enormous discrimination. Pande does not treat them as exotic or pitiable. She places them within a continuous tradition that stretches back to the Ardhanarishvara itself.

Nova: And that continuity is her central argument. She is saying that alternate sexuality and gender variance were not imported into India. They were always there. In the Kamasutra, which she has also written extensively about, there are references to same-sex love. In temple sculpture, there are depictions of same-sex relations. In the Mughal courts, cross-dressing was fashionable. Wajid Ali Shah, the last Nawab of Awadh, famously liked to dress as a woman. It was the British who criminalized homosexuality in 1860 through Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code. Pande traces how colonialism imposed a rigid gender binary on a culture that had always been more fluid.

Nova: I think to really understand Ardhanarishvara the Androgyne, you have to see it as one chapter in a much longer intellectual project. After this book, Pande went on to write The New Age Kama Sutra for Women in 2006, and then a whole series of four books on the Kama tradition in Indian art, published by Speaking Tiger. Those books are called Al Fresco Kama, Yoga and Kama, The Nayika and Kama, and The Adulterer and Kama.

Nova: : I love those titles. They are so specific. She is not just writing about the Kamasutra as this monolithic ancient text. She is breaking it down: love under the open sky, the acrobatics of love, the woman who takes her pleasure, the seduction of illicit love. That is a whole philosophy of desire.

Nova: Right. And in interviews, she has been very clear about what the Kamasutra actually is. It is not just a sex manual with acrobatic positions. She calls it a Book of Life. In Indian philosophy, there are four purusharthas, four aims of life: dharma, righteous living; artha, creating wealth; kama, fulfilling desire; and moksha, liberation. Kama is not shameful. It is one of the four pillars. You cannot live a full life without it.

Nova: : And this directly connects back to her queer scholarship. Because if desire is sacred, then all forms of desire have a place. The Kamasutra, she points out, explicitly recognizes same-sex love. It is right there in the text.

Nova: And then just last year, in 2024, Pande released what might be her magnum opus: a set of fourteen collectible books called 108 Portraits of Indian Culture and Heritage. She chose the number 108 because it is sacred in Indian tradition — 108 energy points in the Shri Yantra, 108 beads in a mala. And across these fourteen volumes, she covers everything from Indian sculpture and architecture to textiles, photography, music, dance, and indigenous art.

Nova: : Fourteen books at once. That is almost intimidating. But it makes sense when you hear her explain it. She says these books are the rasa of her life. Everything she has learned, taught, and seen over thirty years. And gender and sexuality run through all of it.

Nova: What I find remarkable is her range. She has curated exhibitions at the Pinacotheque in Paris. She set up the Bihar Museum Biennale. She is the artistic director of a photography biennale. And yet her core concerns remain consistent. She said in one interview that patriarchy has played an enormous role in creating the prudishness that dominates Indian society today. She traces how ancient Indian women, who spent hours on shringara, beautifying themselves for their lovers, may actually have been freer in some ways than modern Indian women hedged in by endless rules of conduct.

Nova: : That is a bold claim. And probably controversial. But she backs it up with scholarship.

Nova: So let us bring this into the present. In 2018, the Indian Supreme Court finally struck down Section 377, decriminalizing homosexuality in a landmark judgment. That was fourteen years after Pande published Ardhanarishvara the Androgyne. The book was cited in academic papers about queer identity, about the hijra community, about gender in Indian art. It became part of the intellectual groundwork that made the case for queer liberation in India.

Nova: : And it is not just India. The book has been referenced in scholarly work around the world. I found citations in PhD dissertations from Canadian universities, in papers about gender and human rights, in studies of transgender communities. It has a global academic footprint.

Nova: There is a beautiful moment in the recent film Monkey Man, directed by and starring Dev Patel. The protagonist, beaten and broken, seeks refuge in a temple of Ardhanarishvara that is home to a community of hijras. He looks at the half-male, half-female statue and asks, What is that? The hijra leader answers: One half devotion. The other? Destruction. Male. Female. Neither. Both. Then he says: Some people find that strange. But we hijras understand it completely. That is Pande's argument, translated into cinema.

Nova: : And it resonates because it is not about tolerance or acceptance in that bland corporate diversity way. It is about recognition. These traditions are already ours. They were taken from us by colonialism. Reclaiming them is an act of decolonization.

Nova: Now, is the book perfect? No. The academic language can be a barrier. There is some repetition that better editing could have fixed. But as a reference work, as a visual archive, as an argument for the deep roots of gender plurality in Indian civilization, it is hard to overstate its importance. Pande herself has acknowledged the challenge of bridging Eastern and Western frameworks. She spent years struggling with it. And this book is the result of that struggle.

Nova: : What I also appreciate is that she does not just stay in the ancient past. She brings it into the contemporary. She writes about modern art, about cinema, about living hijra communities. She is not nostalgic for some golden age. She is showing continuity and rupture, tradition and transformation.

Nova: And she is still going. At nearly seventy years old, she just released fourteen books at once. She is curating, teaching, advising. She received the CIMA Lifetime Achievement Award in 2023. The French government upgraded her knighthood to Officier des Arts et des Lettres in 2025. This is someone whose life's work is being recognized on a global scale.

Nova: So if you came here looking for a book called Queer India by Alka Pande, I hope you are leaving with something even more valuable. You are leaving with the knowledge that the book you were actually looking for is called Ardhanarishvara the Androgyne: Probing the Gender Within. And that it is part of a decades-long intellectual project by one of India's most important art historians to show that gender fluidity, queer desire, and the third gender are not Western imports. They are woven into the very fabric of Indian civilization.

Nova: : And here is what I am taking away. Alka Pande's work teaches us that the question is not whether queer people belong in India. The question is: what happened to make us forget that they always did? The temples, the texts, the traditions — they have been telling us this for thousands of years. We just stopped listening.

Nova: If you want to explore this further, pick up Ardhanarishvara the Androgyne. Be prepared for some dense academic prose, but also for stunning visuals and a genuinely transformative argument. You could also explore her Kama series from Speaking Tiger Books, or her recent 108 Portraits series from Arthshila. And if you want a more accessible entry point, look up her podcast interviews. She did a wonderful one with Cineink called My Book, where she talks about the Kamasutra over cupcakes and coffee. It is delightful.

Nova: : What strikes me is that Pande's work sits at this incredible intersection. Art history, gender studies, postcolonial theory, queer activism. She is not just documenting the past. She is giving us tools to reimagine the future. And that is the highest calling of scholarship, is it not?

Nova: It absolutely is. This is Aibrary. Congratulations on your growth!