Rainbow Voices

How a Telugu podcast is forging a vocabulary of queer assertion

- TANISHA SAXENA

When the queer activist Vishnu Teja was approached by Patruni Chidananda Sastry, a Hyderabad-based drag artist, for Rangula Rattnam, he realised this was the right opportunity to speak about his lived experiences of being gay. “Unfortunately, there is not much information or queer content in Telugu,” Teja, who works at the Visakhapatnam based Liberty Rebellion Organisation, which works for the rights of sexual minorities, told me. “And, being a gay man based out of Telangana, I strongly feel that there should be vocalisation about the rights of the community in the Telugu language. This podcast is something that will surely bridge the gap.”

Rangula Rattnam—Colourful Carousel—is India’s first queer-centric podcast in Telugu. Each monthly episode features a queer individual and aims to explore narratives from across the queer community. In June last year, Sastry was first approached by Forbidden Verses, an Instagram page that was curating stories about queer experience in regional languages. They soon realised that there is a dearth of queer-friendly content in Telugu—and the seeds of Rangula Rattnam were sown.