This piece is part of the Mehfil folio, which features original art by Jasjyot Singh Hans.

Derived from the Arabic مَحْفِل (“mahfil”), meaning “a gathering for entertainment or praise,” the Urdu “mehfil” was a soiree where North Indian and Pakistani audiences came to enjoy stirring performances by poets, singers, and musicians. Originating in the Mughal court before moving to the homes of eighteenth-century connoisseurs and eventually evolving into public concerts, these receptions were occasions for sophistication, experimentation, and community to spread; the tradition was integral to the flourishing of Urdu literature and to the spread of a hybrid, cosmopolitan language across the subcontinent for centuries.

Mehfil, a folio from The Margins—and the second installment of the I Want Sky series—celebrates a spirit of play and performance within the queer South Asian experience, both within the subcontinent and across the diaspora. The first issue of I Want Sky honored Sarah Hegazy’s one irreplaceable life and the lives of all LGBTQ+ Arabs and people of the SWANA region and its diaspora; AAWW’s The Margins and Mizna published it online and in print. Mehfil celebrates the queer South Asian body across time, honoring the nuanced experiences of artists who write across borders of genre, form, and language—even across the boundary between life and death.

I encountered the world of mehfils through the stylized depictions of them that decorated Bollywood period films, scenes recognizable through a particular visual language—candlelit evenings, noblemen assembled shoulder to shoulder, moments saturated with dramatic tension or anticipation. As characters gazed in awe at a performer who came alive on-screen, those guests taught filmgoers how, in turn, to act, how to apprehend the spectacle unfolding before them. And while these performances served to cultivate artistic appreciation in twentieth-century audiences, the films that paid tribute to this particular South Asian artistic tradition reconstructed a rather narrow picture of the past. Mehfil, the folio in your hands, aims to imagine another kind of world. It turns its gaze toward nurturing an intimate awareness of other kinds of yearning beyond just reverence: Whose desires can be uttered in these rooms? What other stories can be heard within these walls?

The twelve artists gathered here sit alongside one another in a kind of mehfil. Each piece of writing, be it poetry, prose, or play, is accompanied by one of Jasjyot Hans Singh’s poignant illustrations. What emerges is a collection that conjures the themes of love, longing, and loss invoked by literature of the past, mingled with the daring to move language, form, and voice into new imaginings of freedom and possibility. This folio announces a coterie of voices who invite us to experience the very mehfils contained within themselves.