Decolonizing Lutyens Delhi by Queering Connaught Place

The project looks at the commercial hub of Lutyens’ Delhi, Connaught Place (C.P.), built in 1933, as a space for queer cruising, space for dissent for the queer community and a space that offers anonymity to queer bodies. There is an emerging queering that is taking place in Connaught Place that needs to be looked at to understand decolonizing as an ongoing process of deactivation, appropriation and reorientation as Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti put it. Connaught Place is looked at as a colonial entity that still echoes colonial undercurrents and one that enfolds and translates the social hierarchies into spatial hierarchies. The time period that I’m looking at is from the 1990's to present. There is a centrality to Connaught Place that is allowing for marginalized to come and make themselves visible. The centrality comes from the fact that it is the commercial hub of Lutyens’ Delhi which makes it central to the public life of people in Lutyens’ Delhi.