Growing up as a queer child in Jorhat, Assam, came with its own set of problems. While Rituparna Neog’s family was very supportive of her identity as a transwoman, they could not shield her from bullies.

“I did not know what to do when the bullying (in school) started. I started to push myself into a shell,” she recalls.

In that crucial moment, books came to her rescue. “I would just hide in my school’s libraries and make friends with books. I loved reading so much, and they transported me to a world where there were no bullies,” she says.

Rituparna grew up wanting to do something for queer children so they don’t have to suffer like she did. “I firmly believe that education is the key to reducing the bullying I faced. They were young children who did not know what queer means, and they made fun of it… How can we expect children to respect something they know nothing about?” she says.

After earning a degree in social sciences from Guwahati, she came back to her hometown to do something for the queer youth. Rituparna decided to bring queer education to her village and started an NGO called Akam Foundation.

Under her foundation, she initiated a project called ‘Kitape Katha Koi’, which translates to ‘books speak’, to make books available to every child in her village. The free community library helps nearly 100 children from nearby villages and tea estates access and read Assamese, Hindi, and English books.

The library has books on various subjects and themes such as gender, sexuality, mental health, climate justice, ability, feminism, and minority rights. It started with 600 books and has now grown to have a collection of over 2,000 books.

Additionally, Rituparna keeps hosting various pop-up libraries in spaces such as housing societies, colleges, university campuses, public parks etc.

“We have also been trying to mobilise communities to come together. Along the same lines, we did our very first Jorhat pride walk in April 2022. This was the first pride walk outside of Guwahati. In June 2022, Dibrugarh had its very first pride walk in which hundreds of people participated,” she says.

Rituparna also works with colleges to help them run gender-sensitisation programmes that have been mandated by the UGC.