Siddharth Dube: An Indefinite Sentence

On June 7, 2019, we welcomed Siddharth Dube, an author and activist born in Calcutta, India, for a conversation. Dube released his most recent book earlier this year. An Indefinite Sentence: A Personal History of Outlawed Love and Sex is a memoir that takes on issues of love, sexuality, and oppression through Dube's personal and political journey as a gay man.

An audio recording of the event is available above.

From his time as a child in 1960s India, Siddharth Dube knew that he was different. Reckoning with his femininity and sexuality—and his intellect—would send him on a lifelong journey of discovery: from Harvard classrooms to unsafe cruising sites; from ivory-tower think-tanks to shantytowns; from halls of power at the UN and World Bank to jail cells where sexual outcasts are brutalized.

Coming of age in the earliest days of AIDS, Dube was at the frontlines when that disease made rights for gay men and for sex workers a matter of basic survival, pushing to decriminalize same-sex relations and sex work in India, both similarly outlawed under laws dating back to British colonial rule. He became a trenchant critic of the United States’ imposition of its cruel anti-prostitution policies on developing countries—an effort legitimized by leading American feminists and would-be do-gooders—warning that this was a 21st century replay of the moralistic Victorian-era campaigns that had spawned endless persecution of countless women, men, and trans individuals the world over.

Profound, ferocious, and luminously written, An Indefinite Sentence is both a personal and political journey, weaving Dube’s own quest for love and self-respect with unforgettable portrayals of the struggles of some of the world’s most oppressed people, those reviled and cast out for their sexuality. Informed by a lifetime of scholarship and introspection, it is essential reading on the global debates over sexuality, gender expression, and of securing human rights and social justice in a world distorted by inequality and right-wing ascendancy.

"[A] heart-stopping memoir of being gay in India and the world. . . . [A]lthough this is a personal memoir, it is also a memoir of work. Work helped Dube find himself. And work allowed him to live a life he could be proud of. . . . Dube gives his readers the substantial gift of hope. The sentiment is, in fact, the spine of his memoir." - New York Times Book Review

"A frank personal memoir of a sex life hedged round with stigma and legal constraint — in both India and the U. S. — Siddharth Dube's An Indefinite Sentence is also a much larger book: an outraged story of how law and culture interfere with, but can potentially support, human lives....Eloquent, fascinating, and profoundly moving." - Martha C. Nussbaum

His books include No One Else: A personal history of outlawed love and sex; In the Land of Poverty: Memoirs of an Impoverished Indian Family, 1947-1997; Sex, Lies and AIDS; and the central essay to photographer Sebastião Salgado's The End of Polio. In 2020, Viking Penguin India will publish In the Land of Poverty: A Family, A Village, A Nation, 1947-2019.

Dube was born in Calcutta in 1961. He studied at Tufts University, the University of Minnesota's School of Journalism, and the Harvard School of Public Health, where he completed his MSc in 1991. He has since been scholar-in-residence at Yale University's Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS, and a long-term visiting fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi. Currently, he is a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute in New York City, a contributing editor to The Caravan, and a columnist on 'Justice for All' for the Asian Age and Deccan Chronicle.

Siddharth Dube has worked and consulted for the World Bank, UNICEF, WHO and other international organizations, most recently as senior adviser to the Executive Director of UNAIDS, the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS. In 2009, he was a member of the UNAIDS Leadership Transition Working Group. He has been awarded research grants by the Ford Foundation, IDRC, and the US Institute of Peace. 

An activist on diverse fronts, in 2006, Siddharth Dube, the writer Vikram Seth and the historian Saleem Kidwai initiated a campaign urging the Indian government and the judiciary to decriminalize same-sex relations. Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen joined the campaign with a complementary open letter, writing, "It is surprising that independent India has not yet been able to rescind the colonial era monstrosity in the shape of Section 377, dating from 1861."

In 2013, Swami Agnivesh, Justice VR Krishna Iyer, Dube and others launched a campaign urging fair and timely trial for the thousands of adivasis in Central India who remain imprisoned as under-trials, often many years after being arrested, accused of ‘Naxalite/ Maoist’ offences. One of Dube's main causes is the decriminalization of consensual, adult sex work, a matter that is discussed in depth in his new book on outlawed love and sex.

Read more about Siddharth Dube at www.siddharthdube.com.