Gay Bombay: Globalization, Love and (Be)longing in Contemporary India (10 page)

(Kelemen, Mihaela and Smith, 2001).186 Raymond Williams (1985), tracing the etymology of this word notes that it is ‘the warmly persuasive word to describe an existing set of relationships; or the warmly persuasive word to describe an alternative set of relationships’ that ‘seems never to be used unfavourably and never to be given any positive opposing or distinguishing term’.187

Academically, the concept of community harks back to Ferdinand

Tonnies, who in 1887 distinguished between community or
Gemeinschalft
(typified by home and village, family, friends and neighbours, where everyone knows everyone and there are strong and multiple bonds between people, with largely face to face interactions) and society or association or
Gesellschaft
(where social relations are brought about by urbanization).

One’s
Gesellschaft
network is bigger than one’s
Gemeinschalft
, but its bonds are shallow and weak, as everyone is busy and the city is too big.

The multiple ways of defining community over the years either reinforced this divide between community and society (and within this reinforcement, privileged
Gemeinschalft
nostalgically) or questioned it Kelemen and Smith, 2001).188

64
Gay

Bombay

Ahmed and Fortier (2003) list some of the different contexts in which the word community has been used in contemporary times.

For some, community might be a word that embodies the promise of a universal togetherness that resists either liberal individualism or defensive nationalism—as a ‘we’ that remains open to others who are not of my kind (Agamben, 1993; Nussbaum, 1996) or ‘who have nothing in common with me’ (Lingis, 1994). For others, community might remain premised on ideas of commonality—either expressed in the language of kinship and blood relations or in a shared allegiance to systems of belief (Anderson, 1991; Parekh, 2000; Rorty, 1994), or community might be the promise of living together without ‘being as one’, as a community, in which ‘otherness’ or

‘difference’ can be a bond rather than a division (Blanchot, 1988; Diprose, 2002; Nancy, 1991). And for others still, community might represent a failed promise, insofar as the appeal to community assumes a way of relating to others that violates, rather than supports the ethical principle of alterity (Bauman, 2000; Young, 1990); that is, others matter only if they are either ‘with me’ or ‘like me’. Community enters into the debate about how to live with others and seems to be as crucial as a name for what we already do (or do not do), what we must do (or not do), or what we must retain (or give up).189

‘The present global context of flows and fluidity disturbs the temporal, spatial and emotive certainties of communities….’ (Ahmed and Fortier, 2003). With the emergence of the Internet in this context, there have been reams and reams of writing on the virtual community and the differences between
real life
and the
virtual
world—whether real community can be sustained without a face to face interaction, the respective advantages and drawbacks of either, and so on. As I have already noted earlier, I do not find this
virtual versus
real
debate useful or productive. People do not build silos around their online and offline experiences—these seep into each other seamlessly.

I am more inclined to agree with Anderson’s (1983) contention that

‘all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined’.190 Anderson concurs that communities only exist because people believe in them. Citing the example of the nation, he posits that the media and ceremonial symbols (like the national flag, national anthem, and so on) create a sense of time and space into which the national happenings and citizens can be Introduction
65

positioned as occurring together and with a set purpose in mind. I find this construct of imagined communities to be a useful way of thinking about Gay Bombay. I am also intrigued by Maffesoli’s (1996) conception of ‘neo-tribe’191 as a way of understanding the ‘complex, heterogeneous and contested nature of community’192 and by Oldenburg’s 1991 con-trivance of the term ‘third space’ (‘a place separate from the home and the workplace’).193

DANCING QUEENS

2003. The sky is pouring outside as I make my way to the Humsafar Centre.

I have known Ashok Row Kavi and company socially—we have had many
common friends—but I have always hesitated when invited to the Centre
and backed off citing some excuse or the other. This time, two months
before I leave for the US, there’s a big group of people I know going for a
special Sunday High meeting, so I decide to finally take the plunge. From the
outside, the building looks old and unimpressive—but inside, the atmosphere
is pure magic.

As I enter, two fabulous drag queens in saris sprinkle rose water on me,
fold their hands in a dramatic
‘namaste’
and hand me a
gajra
(bracelet)
made of small jasmine flowers strung together that I wear on my wrist in
total filmi style. The smell of incense is in the air. There are beautiful
diyas

(oil lamps) placed all round and soft pink curtains that cascade down the
walls. There are white mattresses placed alongside the walls with rose
petals scattered all over them. It is Indian style seating, arranged specially
for the mujra (courtesan dance) performance that is to be the highlight of
the evening. I sprawl on some cushions and exhale. Why was I so scared to
come here for all these years?

Needless to say, the dances are spectacular—they’re all my favourite
mujra songs—
‘Chalte Chalte’
from Pakeezah,
‘Maar Daala’
from Devdas
and
‘Hothon Pe Aisi Baat’
from
Guide
…. The crowd is going crazy, hoot-ing and whistling with every swirl of hips, every lowered glance, every lip
twitch.

I recognize the movements and mannerisms. Last year, I took some
business clients from out of town to the famous Topaz dance bar in central
66
Gay

Bombay

Bombay and witnessed a dreaded gangster type nonchalantly shower a
basketful of 500 rupee notes over the heads of the gorgeous fully clothed girls
on the floor, who were winking and coyly making and breaking eye contact
the same way as the drag queens at Humsafar are doing; except today,
there’s no money showering going on, only warmth and appreciation.

It is mesmerizing—the vocabulary of the erotic dance. I feel that I have
always known it—and I have, in a way, having grown up on Bollywood. I suddenly realize that this is my first real contact with Indian drag queens—

I have seen quite a few in the US while on vacation, but here, the connection is
much more immediate. These are my songs, my music, my people and I watch
the entire show with a foolish grin on my face. Maybe some day, I might
be able to perform like them.

A few months later and I am at another show with similarly dressed
dancing queens in Boston at a nightclub called Machine where the annual
South Asian queer festival is being organized by the local Massachusetts
Area South Asian Lambda Association (or MASALA). I’ve never been to a
party like this before. A Pakistani boy called Yakub is busy crooning old
Sridevi numbers on the nightclub stage and he is followed by a
choli
-clad
Raees from Bangladesh dancing lustily to
‘Choli Ke Peeche’
. The Indian
food ordered specially for the event has run out, so I munch on a loaf of
sourdough bread and nurse my Diet Coke. I still don’t have the balls to get
on stage. Maybe next time?

∗ ∗ ∗

A NOTE

[The identity of an object] is the retroactive act of naming itself; it is the name itself, the signifier, which supports the identity of an object (Zizek, 1989).194

Bombay was renamed Mumbai in November 1995 by the BJP-Shiv Sena coalition government in power. Gay Bombay was established three years later. However, the founders of Gay Bombay still chose to call themselves

‘Gay Bombay’—not ‘Gay Mumbai’, aligning themselves with the notion of the city that was ‘dynamic, intensely commercial, heterogeneous, chaotic, and yet spontaneously tolerant and open-minded…the Bombay of ethnic Introduction
67

and religious mixing, of opportunities, of-rags-to-riches success stories, of class solidarity, of artistic modernism and hybridized energies….’

(Hansen, 2001).195 This mixing and matching and appropriating a variety of foreign influences to make them one’s own is still the imagined inherent nature of
Bombay
and as I have observed during my study, of Gay Bombay as well. I have addressed the city as Bombay throughout this book to honour this vision of the city, even though I realize that it is and in fact, always was, quite frayed at its edges.

NOTES

1. U2 ‘Walk On’
All That You Can’t Leave Behind
(Santa Monica, USA: Interscope Records, 2000).

2. See—

(
a
) Between the Lines—festival website: http://mit.edu/cms/betweenthelines/

(
b
) Chavi Dublish, ‘South Asian Gays Find US Voice‘,
BBC News
, 13 April 2004. http://

news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/3620417.stm

(
c
) Susannah Mandel, ‘Between the Lines’, explores South Asian LGBT identity’,
Tech
Talk
, 31 March 2004.

(
d
) http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2004/arts-lines-0331.html 3. For reportage about
Freshlimesoda
and its online or offline activities, see—

(
a
) Lindsay Perreira, ‘Lime Lagao’,
Rediff.com
, 22 September 2001. http://www.rediff.

com/search/2001/sep/22fresh.htm

(
b
) Georgina Maddox, ‘Fresh and Tangy’,
Indian Express
, 26 August 2001.

(
c
) Varsha Shenoy, ‘Budding Poets Squeeze Life Between the Lines’,
Express Newsline:
Indian Express
, 4 August 2000.

(
d
) Tara Patel, ‘At Chauraha, They Have a Good thing Going’,
The Afternoon Despatch
and Courier
, 7 August 2000.

4. John Edward Campbell,
Getting It on Online: Cyberspace, Gay Male Sexuality, and Embodied
Identity
(New York: Harrington Park Press, 2004) p. 83.

5. David Silver, ‘Communication, Community, Consumption: An Ethnographic Exploration of an Online City’, in Beth Kolko (Ed.),
Virtual Publics: Policy and Community in an Electronic
Age
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), p. 347.

6. Thomas Blom Hansen (
Wages of Violence: Naming and Identity in Postcolonial Bombay
,

[Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001, p. 235; footnote three to ‘Introduction: The Proper Name’ notes that while there have been some recent studied of urban India (Kumar, 1992; Breckenridge, 1996), the study of contemporary urban life in India ‘is nowhere near the sophistication one finds in the study or urban practices in Latin America, for example, nor does it compare to the density of studies on rural India’.

7.
Time
magazine reported in March 2001 that in just five years, the Internet had done to Asia’s gay and lesbian communities what Stonewall had enabled in the West over the past 25 years. See ‘Boy’s Night Out: We’re Here. We’re Queer. Get Used to It. Can Singapore Accept its Gay Community?’, in
Time International
(Asia), 19 March 2001,
68
Gay

Bombay

as referred to in Chris Berry, Fran Martin and Audrey Yue (Eds),
Mobile Cultures: New
Media in Queer Asia
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 2.

8. For example—

(
a
) Jose Quiroga,
Tropics of Desire: Interventions from Queer Latin America
(New York: NYU Press, 2000).

(
b
) Neil Miller
, Out in the World: Gay and Lesbian Life from Buenos Aires to Bangkok
(New York: Random House, 1992).

(
c
) Cindy Patton and Benigno Sanchez-Eppler (Eds),
Queer Diasporas
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2000).

(
d
) Martin Manalansan IV,
Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2003).

(
e
) Ruth Vanita (Ed.),
Queering India: Same-sex Love and Eroticism in Indian Culture and
Society.
(New York: Routledge, 2002).

(
f
) Wah-Shan Chou,
Tongzhi: Politics of Same-Sex Eroticism in Chinese Societies
(New York: Haworth Press, 2000).

(
g
) Mark McLelland,
Male Homosexuality in Modern Japan: Cultural Myths and Social
Realities.
(Richmond; Surrey, UK: Curzon Press, 2000).

(
h
) Jeremy Seabrook,
Love in a Different Climate: Men Who Have Sex With Men in India
(New York/London: Verso, 1999).

(
i
) Peter A. Jackson and Gerard Sullivan (Eds),
Gay and Lesbian Asia: Culture, Identity,
Community
(New York: Harrington Park Press, 2000).

9. Peter Jackson, ‘Pre-Gay, Post-queer: Thai Perspectives on Proliferating Gender/Sex Diversity in Asia, in Peter A. Jackson and Gerard Sullivan (Eds),
Gay and Lesbian Asia:
Culture, Identity, Community
(New York: Harrington Park Press, 2000), pp. 1–2.

10. Jyoti Puri,
Woman Body Desire: Narratives on Gender and Sexuality in Post-colonial India
(New York: Routledge, 1999).

11. Brinda Bose (Ed.),
Translating Desire: The Politics of Gender and Culture in India
(New Delhi: Katha, 2005).

Brinda Bose and Subhabrata Bhattacharyya (Eds),
Phobic and the Erotic: The Politics
of Sexualities in Contemporary India
(London: Seagull Books, 2006).