# Desh Pardesh

Desh Pardesh was an annual arts festival in Toronto that focused on queer and South Asian culture. It ran from 1988 to 2001. Desh Pardesh's mandate was queer-positive, feminist, anti-racist, anti-imperialist, and anti caste/classist.

## History

"Desh Pardesh" translates to "home away from home" or "at home abroad". Its goals were to bring visibility and voice to marginalized groups while breaking down the boundaries separating identities, like race and sexual orientation. At the centre of the Desh Pardesh festival was a drive for social change. It was initially a single-day event with around 200 attendees. As its popularity increased, Desh became an annual festival spanning the course of 5 days, hosting over 5000 attendees with a budget of $150,000. The festival consisted of film screenings, workshops, seminars, readings of literary work, performance art, as well as music and dance performances. These programs were typically followed by question & answer sessions with the presenting artists. Desh also hosted discussion groups, exhibitions, workshops, networking sessions, receptions, and dance parties. One out of the five evenings at the festival would be used to exclusively showcase queer programming.

### Salaam Toronto (1988–1989)

The precursor to Desh Pardesh was the one-day event Salaam Toronto which took place in 1988. Salaam Toronto was organized by Khush: South Asian Gay Men of Toronto, a queer activist collective for South Asian people in Canada. The initial idea came from director Ian Iqbal Rashid of Khush. The founders were inspired by Caravan, a multicultural festival that started in Toronto in 1969 that celebrated the contributions of immigrants to Canada.
Similarly, for Salaam Toronto the queer community dressed in costumes and drag to celebrate and stimulate discussion surrounding queer culture. The festival became an intersection of politics, culture, and activism that aimed to battle stereotypes of lesbians and gays within the South Asian community and to undo North American assumptions about South Asians.

### Desh Pardesh (1990)

Salaam Toronto was officially renamed Desh Pardesh in 1990. While the first festival aimed to celebrate diversity in many forms, some attendees felt that the festival needed to expand beyond a gathering of individuals in drag. This reinvention of the event was also influenced by the lack of gender diversity at Salaam Toronto. The emergence of Desh can also be attributed to the lack of visibility of people of color in the arts community. One of its goals was to bring information about the South Asian and gay communities to the public so that they might become educated on the intersection of these identities.
Held at the Euclid Cinema, the second festival expanded towards creating a space for South Asian arts in Canada, deviating from the first festival’s focus on the queer community. According to Punam Khosla, an event organizer and attendee, “there was one queer project that was featured out of the whole day. Everyone else, all the other artists that were featured were straight.” There were readings of South Asian writers that focused key social issues of the South Asian community such as the inequality in social perceptions towards South Asian women and men.

### Desh Pardesh (1991–1995)

As Desh Pardesh drew in a wider audience within and outside of the South Asian community, there were concerns that the festival deviated from its original purpose of giving voice to the South Asian queer community. However, many artists appreciated the intergenerationality of the festival. Because the festival had become more of a stable platform for cultural artists to penetrate into the mainstream, many artists participated in the festival in multifaceted ways, as artists, organizers, producers, and recruiters.
The 1991 Desh Pardesh program formed the core content for the first issue of Rungh Magazine, launched in April 1992, which included some transcriptions from the presenters at Desh Pardesh 1991, as well as other new content which responded to the 1991 Desh Pardesh program.
Furthermore, while previous festivals focused primarily on social discourse, presentations, and performance art, Desh Pardesh 1993-1994 began to include visual art as an integral part of the festival.

### Desh Pardesh (1996–1999)

Premier of Ontario Mike Harris's funding cuts affected Desh Pardesh and began to cause organizational issues for the festival.
There were conflicts between event leaders on who to invite based on their political agendas. Voices counter to the beliefs of the organizers were effectively silenced, tarnishing the credibility of the organizers and the event.

### Desh Pardesh (2000–2001)

The demise of Desh Pardesh was largely a result of financial shortfalls. Fatima Amarshi, the executive director at the time, estimated that $10,000 was the needed operating costs for three months, and $50,000 in the long term. Despite attracting around 4,000 attendees each year, the not-for-profit festival received little in terms of private sponsorships and grants from the government. Plans to reach out to corporations for donations, which were viewed as taboo by the festival community, ultimately failed to raise adequate capital, and the festival was discontinued starting 2001.

## Programs
### Film showcases

Showcases were of non-commercially produced films that focus on experiences of the South Asian queer community.
Workshops included instructor-led activities, group discussions, and performance-based expressions that centered on facilitating dialogue between members of the South Asian community and with the broader community.

### Live theatre

Live performances that were presented included Raj, Raj, Against the Dying of the Light (1990), which was performed at Euclid Theatre and focused on the empowerment of the South Asian community.
At the 8th annual Desh Pardesh was where Peeling the Banana's first international performance occurred.

### Public readings

Desh Pardesh hosted reading of works that explored race, religion, sexual orientation, communalism, fundamentalism, discrimination, and more from South Asian writers.