What happens if we eschew a hermeneutics of capture, rendition and circulation? What happens if sexuality is a gathering, a provocation of genres and spaces and tongues, of multilingual encounters and spiritual forays? To transact the geopolitical then is to enter the everywhere mehfil, a quotidian coupling of place and pleasure, of form and friction, of call and response. A mehfil, after all, is a Hindustani term that summons publics into lives of conversation and proximity, at once a place of frenzied engagement and quiet meditation. From its early invocations as a space of courtly performance, to its more recent iterations as assembly, celebration, forum, the mehfil has always been a terrain of paradoxical potentiality: infused with secrecy and sexuality, yet decidedly public and performative.
Advertisement
