When Kalki Subramaniam was a teenager in Tamil Nadu, she watched her friend Manju, a transwoman, get raped. She watched another transgender friend hide in fear after her own brother tried to throw kerosene on her and burn her alive. She watched others flee their homes for Mumbai and bigger cities, only to end up begging or doing sex work to survive. These were not distant news stories. These were her people.
That fury did not break Kalki. It built her. Artist, writer, activist, and entrepreneur, Kalki Subramaniam is the founder of Sahodari Foundation, one of India’s most significant organisations working for transgender rights and dignity.
She has been part of the movement that contributed to the landmark 2014 Supreme Court recognition of transgender rights. She has used theatre, poetry, visual art, and sustainable livelihood projects to fight for a community that has long been pushed to the margins. And she has done all of it while remaining, at her core, a storyteller.
Knowing Who You Are
Kalki traces her sense of self far back, to a childhood defined by curiosity and creativity. “I was different and pursuing creativity always right from my childhood,” she told The Logical Indian. “I was interested to explore colours, nature, the universal wonders and beyond. I was so sure of who I was and had this urgency to put myself creatively as an artist and a writer, that is where I found my identity.”
That certainty was not something she had to build over time. It was simply there. And importantly, it held steady even when criticism came. She was never put down by it. She knew her purpose.
This grounded sense of self would later become the foundation for everything she built.
The Moment Awareness Became Anger
Growing up in Tamil Nadu, the reality of what structural marginalisation looked like was not abstract for Kalki. It had faces and names. Manju’s rape as a teenager was the turning point that sharpened everything into focus. The horror of that moment, combined with witnessing how her transgender friends were treated by their own families and where they ended up, made something very clear to her.
“Their destiny and how society treated them, bringing them to the bottom, made me angry,” she said. “Those flames gave me the awareness that I need to be the change.”
Crucially, she says there was no single defining moment that made her choose public advocacy over private struggle. It was a string of moments. Each incident added weight to a resolve that had been forming since her teenage years. By the time she was ready to act, she already knew exactly what she was fighting for: dignity, respect, and the right to exist without fear.
Building Sahodari: From Void to Voice
In 2008, Kalki founded Sahodari Foundation. She describes the landscape she saw then with striking clarity. “There was a vast, silent void between the transgender community and the rest of society. We were visible only as caricatures or ‘problems,’ but we had no platform to tell our own stories.”
She had seen what happened to trans women like her friend Seema, who was denied education, forced into sex work or begging, and faced brutal violence with no legal recourse whatsoever. Sahodari was built to close that gap, to move, as Kalki puts it, “from being spoken about to speaking for ourselves,” with a focus on dignity, economic independence, and the power of storytelling.
The institutional barriers in those early years were severe. “The biggest barrier was the wall of dehumanization,” she told The Logical Indian. “Socially, we were outcasts; families discarded us, and movies mocked us. Institutionally, we didn’t exist in the eyes of the law.” When Manju was raped, the police refused to even take her complaint, because they viewed her existence itself as a deviation. “We had to fight just to prove that we were human beings worthy of protection.”
The 2014 Victory and Its Limits
Kalki was part of the movement that led to the 2014 Supreme Court ruling recognising transgender rights, including the right to self-identify. She calls it “a historic sunrise.” But she is also clear-eyed about what followed.
Legal change, she says, is not always social change. While ID cards and some welfare schemes followed the ruling, the grassroots reality remained marked by violence. She is particularly critical of the Transgender Persons Protection Act, which she argues actually dilutes the 2014 victory.
It mandates medical screenings and, significantly, offers lighter sentences to those who assault transgender persons compared to those who assault cisgender women. “The law changed,” she said, “but the heart of the system is still catching up.”
Art as Resistance, Art as Healing
What makes Kalki’s approach distinct is her insistence on art as a vehicle for both resistance and healing. Two of Sahodari’s most notable projects reflect this.
The Red Wall Project documents stories of sexual violence, written by the survivors themselves. The testimonies are rendered in red. “When people see these red-stained testimonies, they can no longer look away,” Kalki explained. “For the survivor, painting or performing is a way to ‘sever the pain’ (Vali Aruthen). It turns a traumatic memory into a powerful piece of resistance.”
Thoorikai, another Sahodari initiative, similarly uses performance and art as tools for both resistance and healing. Kalki’s broader philosophy across both projects is that “art bypasses the intellect and goes straight to the soul.” It reaches people in ways that policy papers and press releases cannot.
Livelihood and Long-Term Change
Kalki is equally practical about the fact that advocacy alone cannot feed people. She defines empowerment not as charity but as agency. “Empowerment is the transition from survival to thrivability,” she told The Logical Indian. A one-time donation, she says, is not empowerment. What matters is whether a person has control over their own life and livelihood.
Sahodari’s COCOFRIENDS project trains transgender women to craft luxury products from coconut shells. It is, on one level, a livelihood initiative. But Kalki reads it as something much larger. “When a trans woman from Pollachi learns to craft a luxury tea set from a coconut shell through our COCOFRIENDS project, she isn’t just earning a livelihood. She is reclaiming her dignity and proving she is a creator, an artisan, and an entrepreneur.”
Her framing on the balance between immediate needs and long-term change is direct: “You cannot talk to a hungry person about constitutional rights.” Sahodari addresses food and safety today, while simultaneously using its platform to lobby the government and challenge regressive laws in court. “Livelihood keeps the body alive; activism ensures the future is worth living in.”
A Writer, An Actor, An Entrepreneur
Kalki’s identity as a storyteller is not confined to activism alone. She has published four books. Her first, a collection of Tamil poems titled “Kuri Aruthean,” was published in 2015 by Vikatan Publications and consisted of 25 poems accompanied by her own line-drawings. In 2021, she published “We Are Not The Others,” a collection of English poems, monologues, essays, and art, which has since been incorporated into the library of Harvard Kennedy School. In January 2024, she released “Oru Thirunangaiyin Diary Kuripu,” a Tamil work comprising diary-style entries, poems, short stories, essays, and illustrations documenting raw aspects of transgender life. Her latest, “We Will Not Be Erased,” released in 2025, is a collection of poetry, short stories, and snippets, continuing her tradition of using literature as both witness and resistance.
On screen, she made history with “Narthaki,” becoming the first transgender actor in India to play a lead role in a major motion picture. The film traces the journey of a transgender woman in search of love, identity, and dignity, and its existence was itself a form of activism, proof that transgender stories deserved to be told from the inside.
Beyond Sahodari, Kalki is also the CEO of UpGenius Innovations LLP, a luxury brand producing unique limited edition clothing. It reflects her belief that economic agency and creative enterprise are inseparable from the larger fight for equality.
On Corporate Inclusion
Kalki is sceptical of the version of inclusion that has become fashionable in corporate India. She distinguishes between changing a logo to a rainbow for one month and what meaningful inclusion actually requires. The latter, she says, means hiring trans people at all levels rather than as “diversity tokens.” It means gender-neutral restrooms, inclusive insurance, and, most importantly, a culture where a trans person can work without being “the office of curiosity” and where they feel they belong.
If she could change one thing structurally in India right now, it would be to equalise punishment for crimes against transgender persons. “The law suggests that a trans life is ‘worth less’ by providing shorter sentences for our attackers,” she said. “Structural equality begins with the principle that every body is equally sacred under the law.”
What Keeps Her Going
Activism is exhausting work, and Kalki does not pretend otherwise. On the hardest days, she said, she returns to the memory of those who were lost, including Manju, who died without justice. She also looks at the younger generation of trans activists, those who are bold, educated, and fearless. “Knowing that the ‘Red Wall’ of silence is finally cracking keeps me standing.”
The state of the community today, she says, is one of “contradictory progress.” There are transgender doctors and pilots. There are also thousands living in extreme poverty. The biggest remaining gap, in her view, is educational and political inclusion. “We are still spoken for by others. Until trans people are in the rooms where laws are written and budgets are passed, the ‘protection’ offered will always be insufficient.”
The Future She Is Building
Looking ahead, Kalki wants to expand Sahodari’s artisanal projects globally, putting what she calls “Trans Hands” behind “Timeless Crafts” on the world map. She wants to create a permanent archive of transgender history through art, so that no future trans person ever feels they do not belong anywhere.
Her vision of dignity is specific and human. “Dignity is a world where a trans child can grow up in their own home, attend their local school, and pursue their dreams without having to ‘sever’ their ties to their family or their past to survive.”
And her definition of purpose, shared with The Logical Indian, is perhaps the most complete summary of everything she has built her life around: “Purpose is the act of turning my personal scars into a map for others to find their way out of the dark. It is the unwavering belief that through art, poetry, theatre, music and love, we can rewrite history.”
The Logical Indian’s Perspective
Kalki Subramaniam’s journey is not just one person’s story. It is a mirror held up to a society that has long looked away. When a law meant to protect a community instead demands that they prove who they are through medical checks, something is fundamentally broken. India has made progress, but progress that does not reach the most vulnerable is incomplete. True inclusion means trans people in classrooms, courtrooms, and cabinet rooms, not just in welfare schemes. As Kalki says, every body is equally sacred under the law. It is time our systems reflected that. Do you think India is doing enough for its transgender community?
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