The courtroom in New Delhi was packed, but quiet.
It took a few minutes for the meaning of the words to sink in. Judges were reading from dense legal paragraphs. Then it became clear: Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, a colonial-era law that had criminalised homosexuality for more than 160 years, was being struck down.
Danish Sheikh was inside that courtroom when the landmark judgment was delivered in September 2018. Outside, hundreds of journalists, activists and families were waiting. When the doors opened, people spilled out, rushing to share the news. Sheikh ran outside in his lawyer’s robes. His partner was there. They kissed, surrounded by other couples doing the same.
“It was freedom,” he recalls. “Pure jubilation.”
Today, Sheikh teaches law at Monash University in Melbourne. Alongside his academic work, he has long been involved in theatre, beginning in India. This February, he will step onto the stage solo for the first time at the Midsumma Festival, bringing to life the story of how law, love and resistance collided in one of India’s most significant human rights battles.
The solo, Much to Do with Law, But More to Do with Love, draws directly from his experience as a human rights lawyer involved in the successful challenge to Section 377. It is part legal history, part personal reckoning, and part meditation on how emotion belongs not just in art, but in the law itself.
Sheikh’s story begins far from India’s courtrooms. He grew up in the Middle East, in Oman, where his father worked. Like many children of Indian migrants in the Gulf, he lived between places.
He returned to India to study law, completing his undergraduate degree before moving to Bengaluru. There, he joined the Alternative Law Forum, a collective of human rights lawyers known for taking on politically and socially difficult cases. Later, he pursued postgraduate studies at the University of Michigan in the United States, before returning to India to teach law.
It was during law school that Sheikh first encountered Section 377 and understood what it meant for him personally.
“At the same time that I was figuring out who I was, I realised the law considered me a criminal,” he says.
The moment was confronting. He was training to become a lawyer, building a professional identity, while discovering that the law itself denied his right to exist fully. For a time, the tension between the personal and the professional felt unbearable.
Eventually, he found a way to bring the two together. Becoming a human rights lawyer allowed him to turn that conflict into purpose, not just for LGBTQ+ rights, but for marginalised communities more broadly. Law, once oppressive, became a tool.
But the cost was real.
During the hearings leading up to the 2013 Supreme Court judgment , when Section 377 was briefly reinstated, Sheikh sat in court listening to senior government lawyers describe gay people in dehumanising terms. There was constant “othering”, language that framed homosexuality as a disorder, and references to archaic judgments that called queer people “despicable specimens of humanity”.
What stayed with him was not just the cruelty of the language, but the emotional distance of the courtroom. Even when stories of violence were presented, including accounts of transgender women assaulted by police, judges often responded not with empathy, but scepticism.
“How do we know this happened?” one judge asked, after hearing a detailed account of abuse.
That question became a turning point.
Sheikh began to wonder what it would mean to bring those moments – unchanged – into a different space. To show audiences how power actually speaks. To challenge the idea that law is always neutral, rational and humane.
Theatre became that space.
He began by adapting Shakespeare in Bengaluru, using familiar stories to explore queer love. After the 2013 setback, he created Contempt, a play built entirely from courtroom transcripts. He did not soften the language or rewrite it. He simply edited it, letting the words speak for themselves.
After the 2018 victory, he wrote Pride, a play shaped around debates within the queer movement itself, who deserved credit, what freedom now meant, and what came next.
Much to Do with Law, But More to Do with Love grew out of his PhD, which he began after moving to Australia in 2019. The research asked a simple but radical question: why must the law be stripped of emotion?
“Law governs our most intimate lives,” says Sheikh. “Yet we’re trained to pretend feeling has no place in it.”
The show argues that love, grief, hope and anger are not weaknesses but are are sources of insight. By blending legal argument with storytelling and humour, Sheikh invites audiences to see the law not as a distant system, but as something that shapes everyday life.
Now based in Melbourne, Sheikh finds Australia a different kind of space. Within academia and theatre, he has experienced openness and support. Interestingly, he notes that within South Asian communities here, his queerness is often not the first thing people see.
“What connects us is being South Asian,” he says. “That matters more than difference.”
Audience reactions to his work have been intense. People are often shocked to learn that the harsh courtroom language they hear on stage is verbatim. There is anger, disbelief and laughter. Humour, he says, is essential. It opens the door. It stays with people.
What does he hope audiences take away? A sense of wonder, for one about how deeply law shapes the world around us. And an openness to emotion, to letting feeling inform thought rather than be dismissed.
“Law doesn’t have to be cold,” he says. “And neither do we.”
Much to Do with Law, But More to Do with Love will be performed from February 4 to 7 at Gasworks Main Theatre in Albert Park. For more details, click here.
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