Urvashi Vaid became the first woman of color to lead a national gay and lesbian organization in the United States. Her story starts in India, in a family shaped by one of the great upheavals of the twentieth century.
A refugee and a writer
Her father, Krishna Baldev Vaid, was born in 1927 in Dinga, a town in the Punjab that is now in Pakistan. In 1947, when British India was partitioned into India and Pakistan, his family fled as refugees. Years later he wrote about living through that violence in his novel Guzara Hua Zamana, translated into English as The Broken Mirror.
He studied at Panjab University and then at Harvard, where he earned a doctorate with a dissertation on Henry James, published by Harvard University Press in 1964. He became a Hindi novelist, story writer and playwright, known for his experimental and iconoclastic style. His books include Uska Bachpan, which he translated himself as Steps in Darkness. In 1968 he made the first Hindi translations of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot and Endgame.
Her mother, Champa Vaid, was a poet and painter.
New Delhi
Urvashi Vaid was born in New Delhi on October 8, 1958, one of three daughters. While her parents studied in the United States, she lived with her grandparents in India.
Potsdam, New York
In 1966, when she was eight, her father took a post teaching English at the State University of New York at Potsdam, in the far north of New York State, and the family settled there. It was a long way from New Delhi. Vaid was political early: as a teenager she wrote letters to President Richard Nixon in support of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, joined marches against the Vietnam War, and gave speeches for George McGovern's 1972 presidential campaign. She finished high school in Potsdam and went on to Vassar College (her biography).
Two countries
Krishna Baldev Vaid retired from SUNY Potsdam in 1985 and went back to live in India for more than twenty years, still writing, before returning to the United States in 2010. He died in 2020, two years before his daughter.
The family's work carried on. Urvashi's sister Jyotsna Vaid, a professor in the United States, co-edited the 2025 collection of Urvashi's writing, The Dream of a Common Movement. The performance artist Alok Vaid-Menon is Krishna Baldev Vaid's grandson.
Sources
- Wikipedia, "Krishna Baldev Vaid" and "Urvashi Vaid," and the sources they cite.
- Duke University Press, The Dream of a Common Movement (2025), edited by Jyotsna Vaid and Amy Hoffman.
