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In Lawful Repair, Danish Sheikh asks what happens when queer people, confronted by a law that criminalizes their intimate lives, work creatively within its own forms to enact the law they need in the here and now. Drawing on queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's account of reparative reading and on the work of legal humanists Patricia Williams, Robert Cover, and James Boyd White, Sheikh examines the work of dissenters against Section 377, India’s colonial-era sodomy law. Through playful and generative experiments with contracts, affidavits, and rewritten judgments, these dissenters turn the law’s constraints into resources for hopeful legal futures. Combining memoir, critical theory, and theater, Sheikh interweaves practices of dissent with his own lived experience of repair work, showing how queer people extract sustenance from a culture whose avowed desire has often been to harm them. Sheikh demonstrates that law remains too vital a resource to cede and that the creative forces of queer dissent can keep law's imaginative possibilities alive.

Two plays about the legal battle to decriminalize homosexuality in India. 

On September 6, 2018, a decades-long battle to decriminalize queer intimacy in India came to an end. The Supreme Court of India ruled that Section 377, the colonial anti-sodomy law, violated the country’s constitution. “LGBT persons,” the Court said, “deserve to live a life unshackled from the shadow of being ‘unapprehended felons.’” But how definitive was this end? How far does the law’s shadow fall? How clear is the line between the past and the future? What does it mean to live with full sexual citizenship?

In Love and Reparation, Danish Sheikh navigates these questions with a deft interweaving of the legal, the personal, and the poetic. The two plays in this volume leap across court transcripts, affidavits (real and imagined), archival research, and personal memoir. Through his re-staging, Sheikh crafts a  genre-bending exploration of a litigation battle, and a celebration of defiant love that burns bright in the shadow of the law.